9/08/2004 10:25:00 PM

Of Typewriters, Telephones and Social Software: random musings hidden in run on sentences...

The challenge with the various first generation social software value propositions is that there is not a tipping-point inducing collection of compelling needs that drive them. OK, the need to connect, sure, but the early social networking services have yet to show themselves to be a more sticky means of connecting than the manners in which we've become accustomed without the binary layer. Like using the telephone for the first time a hundred plus years ago there is an intuitive leap that takes place when one first signs up on a social networking site. What is lacking is a clearly delineated series of compelling reasons to continue interacting within the system after the initial intuitive glow has dissipated.

I take this current lack to be much like the typewriter and the word processor. The typewriter manually formed letters into phonemes into words through a series of ordered strikes of metal against ribbon against paper against platen. The word processor replaced this series of manually coordinated, intricate dependencies with a new, arguably more fragile, system of dependencies. This transition only occurred though when the aggregate value of just in time editing without White Out, total document visualization prior to printing through an added layer of abstraction (the screen) and the archival capabilities of persistent digital storage together undermined the old system. There will be a time when social software overwhelms the manual coordination of time, assets and persons, but the path to this place is not clearly demarcated nor the journey's length easy to calculate.

Today, most people use social software to do three things: have conversations around common interests (topical affinity), look more connected than they are ("networking") and find sex (FOAF copulation). All of these are rather blunt, literal transferals of meatspace activities into a less malleable, less nuanced, less meaningfully constructed digital space. Interestingly, they also happen to be largely about interacting with people one does not really know.

When the novelty of a new technological capability wears off one seldom finds the wider population using new tools in the manner in which early adopters did. Early adopter patterns of use dissipate as the network grows. Calling strangers on the telephone to chat about how great this new voice communication thing is stops being the primary use the telephone is put to when everyone you know has a phone. This pattern shifting happened with POTS, with cellular and with email and is happening now with IM and voice over IP. Something similar will be underway shortly with social software.

I believe that many of the central benefits to be derived from social software are the building second-order effects that find form in the emergent patterns in social software's use over a significant period of time in the company of people one already has reason to trust because they inhabit the spaces of offline community that make up normal life. This is the future of social software.

Or maybe not. We'll have to see.