Social Software is Bigger than Search

"Social Software is Bigger than Search" is something we say around the office a lot when discussing Tendenci.  So I really liked this quote sourced from  Bubble Generation (via Eric "Mr. Snarky" Rice)

Web 2.0 cannot live up to its (enormous) potential to create value that’s
structurally disruptive until and unless technologists understand consumer
dynamics.

Web 2.0 can’t live up to its game-changing potential until and
unless the geeks step outside and think outside their own box of geekery.

and later in the post

…why are these issues so difficult for the geeks to grapple with?

My
answer: because for geeks, marketing, branding, advertising, etc are eeeeevil.

A long time ago I met with a VC on a different project and everything went great.  Until the question of "how are you going to market the product" and my answer was (seriously) "I am going to hire a marketing manager."  Straight faced.  I said that.  For the record – that is officially the WRONG ANSWER.

So ironically if you read the bubble generation post, it was a question by a VC that led me to focus on marketing first.  To obsess on the client’s success.  Using technology yes, but the tech serves the marketing and the sociology.  And the truth is after a while programming isn’t so tough and humans remain interestingly complex creatures worthy of study. So it all works. Sort of.

Bradley Horowitz on Authorship – 10%?

Via this post on apophenia, she points us to Bradley Horowitz on authorship.  Technically it is on stages of participation. The point that jumps out at me is:

The levels in the pyramid represent phases of value creation.  As an example take Yahoo! Groups.

• 1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)
• 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress
• 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)

It goes on to point out:

Mostly this is just an observation, and a simple statement:  social software sites don’t require 100% active participation to generate great value.

And I agree with him that 100% participation is not a realistic goal, and even our focus on distributed authoring is perhaps pie in the sky.  Facts for us don’t point to 10% real authorship so far.  It would be interesting to see the real data from Yahoo! Groups!

The Dumpster interactive online visualization

The Dumpster, a blatant repost from Doc, yet still must at a minimum be in my collection of back links.  From the site:

The Dumpster is an interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers. … The project’s graphical tools reveal the astonishing similarities, unique differences, and underlying patterns of these failed relationships, providing both peculiarly analytic and sympathetically intimate perspectives onto the diversity of global romantic pain.

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From a visualization and ethnography perspective it is worthy of recording.  It would be like if Flash had never experienced Joshua Davis as a leader.  Yet like much of Joshua’s work, there is something missing. It is cool, but what did we LEARN?  Is it in any way predictive?  Interfaces are great, but can we load up our friendly neighborhood neural net and get cranking away on what the opportunties are for the team next week!?!

NetSquared San Francisco Trip

Walked into the NetSquared meeting in San Francisco with Katie (I work with Katie) last Wednesday and two of the first people we met were Marnie Webb and Billy Bickett of Compumentor.  This after being greeted by Britt Bravo and several interesting conversations with Rachel Weidinger. Great first impression of NetSquared. 

It is very unusual for me to talk about social factors and technology together and not have people immediately glaze over (I guess I am just that exciting).  And here we have 50 plus people actually INTERESTED in the technology and organizations!  The west coast really is weird. <grin>

The one funny part was everyone kept asking "you flew all the way out here for this?!?" (the answer is YES)

The first Netsquared presentor was Mena Trott of Six Apart.  Mena made some interesting points on the state of social software from experiences at Six Apart.  The progression from Publishing to Communication to Community in particular I liked.

Another interesting point from Mena is the observation that the average person on LiveJournal has six (6) friends (see "The Magic Number is 6 by Marnie).  I find six people to a group surprising.  Much of our focus on distributed authoring is based on the theoretical limit of 150 close friends.  Dunbar’s Number is explained on wikipedia as:

In a 1993 article, Dunbar used the correlation observed for non-human primates to predict a social group size for humans. Using a regression equation on data for 36 primate genera, Dunbar predicted a human "mean group size" of 147.8 (casually represented as 150), a result he considered exploratory due to the large error measure (a 95% confidence interval of 100 to 230).

Very interesting…. so much for the monkeysphere.  OK, I’m still not sold that 150 isn’t relevant, but the number 6 as the number of friends in a group is very interesting and worthy of much thought.

Seth Mazow of Interplast talked about the challenges of starting the Interplast blog.  From organizational limitations (no marketing budget!) to communication challenges and ease of use (reverse chronological vs chronological).  Hopefully someone recorded his comments. 

You can’t look at the images on the Interplast blog and not feel for those folks.  Hopefully I will find a way to help through link love from our medical web design clients.

Back to NetSquared.  There are a ton of organizations on the web trying to help non-profit organizations.  From software companies focusing just on donation software or big software companies offering academic and non-profit pricing.  Yet I know Tendenci with our realistic non-profit pricing is relevant and different.  We do not offer it for free.  We can’t until Dell donates all of their servers and all of our employees start working for free.  Nor does Compumentor pay their 100 plus employees with just good wishes.  So the NetSquared group strikes me as pragmatic folk, but realistic.  I like that. 

So after talking to Gina Cardazone I took the plunge and started the Houston Netsquared Meetup Group.  Now to get some help!  Gina – if you are reading this expect a phone call on Monday!

NetSquared Meetup in San Francisco with Mena Trott and Seth Mazow

Headed to San Francisco for the NetSquared Meetup tomorrow evening with Mena Trott of Typepad and Seth Mazow of Interplast blogs.

From the Netsquared site:

Today, we recognize a turning point in nonprofit technology adoption. Through the immense possibilities of the Internet, nonprofits can turn hundreds of supporters into thousands, access new reserves of volunteerism, and give their constituencies tools to take charge of change.

This site is the online home of our effort to highlight projects around the world that succeed at the intersection of pervasive access, new tools, and new audiences. (more)

OK, so it reads a bit fluffy and Web 2.0 ish, but given the number of non-profit organizations and associations who use Tendenci (our software), the NetSquared group is definitely something I am interested in learning from.  Hopefully I will encounter a group of like minded people, although perhaps a bit less obsessed with visualization and PR.