Love how blogging works! Today, Jonathan Melhuish left a comment on my Climate Camp post. I clicked on his name, and landed on his personal blog. Then noticed his professional blog. There, I discovered Jon’s latest post on Bodder, his new mobile social network. Stopped on his Wikipedia link on ‘network effect’ and really got into this part:
A more natural strategy is to build a system that has enough value without network effects – underlined by me –, at least to early adopters. Then, as the number of users increases, the system becomes even more valuable and is able to attract a wider user base. Joshua Schachter has explained that he built Del.icio.us along these lines – he built an online system where he could keep bookmarks for himself, such that even if no other user joined, it would still be valuable to him.[2] It was relatively easy to build up a user base from zero because early adopters found enough value in the system outside of the network aspects.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? On line, I am not social just for the sake of being social. There needs to be something in it for me. Videos on YouTube, insiders’ info on Twitter, objective book reviews on Amazon, a place to show my stuff on Facebook, bookmark storage on del.icio.us, interesting stories on diggs, etc. In other words, there needs to be something worthwhile spreading in order for the network effect to take place.
Also digged this comment at the bottom of the post, from other Bodder‘s co-founder, Simon Hammond:
The main lesson for me was probably that the technical engineering is relatively straightforward compared to the social engineering – underlined by me – In other words, it’s not enough to merely provide a nice platform and interface. You have to account for social factors – underlined by me – as well. Few people will try something completely off their own bat – they need to be personally introduced to it. At heart, we are still apes and we learn by copying. Getting the visible endorsement of the group leaders is probably essential to getting group adoption. Think Scoble/TechCrunch and Twitter.
Embedded in Simon’s comment are two very important points. First is the need to not just push a technology, but also to take into account the psychological aspect of ‘the user’ and also the community. I have noticed lots of social networks get started by developers with no understanding or appreciation of that essential dimension of any social venture. Second is the need for the nascent network to receive the validation of one or several recognized or credible leaders. I know I always look for the personal story behind any new network. Who started it? What are thought leaders saying on Twitter? When cuil came out a few weeks ago, it only took a few negative tweets from the few social media gurus I follow, and a quick, unsatisfactory trial, for me to ban it from my toolbox. We are very much like cockroaches in that respect!
Thanks Jonathan, thanks Simon, for teaching me a few things about social networks . . .
La Marguerite 
I think we’ve been touching on this subject very much in the past on this blog, but it’s a delight to see all this wisdom packed into one post.
What I would want to add on top of this, is that I think the term “social media” should be taken very literally. Each site is a medium. The first challenge is to make the medium as invisible as air, to just let the conversation happen. The second challenge is to make the medium better than air, which means not letting the previous converation fleet away into nothingness, and providing a way to find parts of the conversation through multiple dimensions – be it tagging, full-text search or explicit hyperlinking – as to increase the value of each interaction and to foster the forming of new relationships based on (even perhaps temporary) common interests.
Reminds me of a post by Jon Udell:
http://blog.jonudell.net/2007/07/02/data-finds-data-then-people-find-people/
Love that air and better than air metaphor! Regarding your better than air point, I am reminded of MIT Collaboratorium’s intention:
https://lamarguerite.wordpress.com/2008/04/29/mit-collaboratorium-wants-to-organize-the-climate-change-debate/
My interest in collective intelligence has been revived recently. I now finally have some sense on what it might look like. The CI people at MIT probably have a good grasp of the theory, but they are not really in touch with social media reality (or at least, I haven’t seen any indications otherwise).
I think technology enabling collective intelligence will look very much like Delicious or Digg, but then with slightly different (and possibly slightly more elaborate) data structures. Delicious with its tags is way more advanced than Digg of course, but I think people who are comfortable with using Delicious could manage something more. The biggest difference will be in how the data is processed though. I think that computer scientists could easily think up ten entirely new views for the data on Delicious, if they had full access to their database and abundant computing resources.
But still, it will be a very usable tool, and the most important thing will be that it will enable self expression, cause that is what people seek on the web (or in that kind of tools at least).
Wikipedia is not a good model I think, because it lacks the social aspect, and doesn’t have really granular data.
I expect very exciting times when the CI thoughts get mixed in with the DNA of the social media specialists. There’s a huge site just waiting to happen. Or else you must try to defend the idea that Delicious is somehow the best we can do in terms of letting everyday people produce structured data.
Also, one of the things that I expect from collective intelligence tools is the notion of multiple truths. The tool itself will not be able to recognize the validity of base observations, so depending on your viewpoint, you will see a different truth. Very much like reality is build. The further away, the more disagreement (or something).
oh – what’s your username on delicious? mine is the same – jennconspiracy …
I agree that the social network needs to have some intrinsic value – I find Facebook to be a sort of combination of LinkedIn meets social network these days – all my high school classmates are joining up and I can chat more casually with former coworkers.
I just wish the whole web 2.0 thing would make it easier to incorporate my movie reviews from Netflix with my book reviews on Amazon and my other social network apps… it’s too tiring to maintain so many userids.