9/03/2004 10:13:00 AM

{Open musings on the state of social software}

Unless you live in a commune mere proximity is irrelevant. You simply do not know those who, through the lottery of commuter living, have chosen to live in the same geographic area you have.

In all but passing conversation ("Have you seen my dog?" "Wow, what lawn fertilizer are you using?") these relationships are silent co-existence on a street with the same name. Perhaps when our communication and travel infrastructures go through a radical devolution this will change. Until then unfiltered proximity is no more useful than disembodied affinity. Which is to say, somewhat interesting, but profoundly lacking.

There is more than mere proximity, though. Places that you frequent can be an interesting point of connection. Places you really, really like (or are looking for) may be as well. Services like Judy's Book or Plazes live somewhere within the broad nexus of proximity and affinity and are, as a result, more compelling than the more generic, first-generation social tools that do not.

I remember my first days on Compuserve. The far-flung global affinity afforded by the charged-by-the-minute forums and chat rooms was tantalizing and formative, but with time the distance overshadowed the affinity and I stopped investing so much of myself into these exclusively-digitally-mediated relationships. I have found this to be similar to my experience with Orkut. The affinity was exciting, but the interaction was not sustainable.

Dwelling within physical community presupposes dwelling within difference. Difference brings with it a certain laborious negotiation. This is one of the draws of disembodied affinity: there is a lubricant of common interest and a truncated relational negotiation that makes the interaction more exciting because of the limited friction. It also makes it short-lived or, at best, topically episodic. We don't just do this online. We limit friction in our neighborhoods through a civil disengagement that smiles and waves and goes about its business. Limiting friction is a protective mechanism that, at the micro-level, helps us deal with encountering hundreds or thousands of different people each week and, at a macro-level, shields us from the unmanageable complexities in which we exist.

There are physical communities in which we choose to affiliate and negotiate the laborious differences that make them up: our immediate families, our synagogues, our working groups, our pubs, our dorms and the like. It is in these spaces that affinity and proximity are negotiated with intention and nuance sustainably over some period of time. It is within these spaces of chosen proximity and affinity that social software can be most usefully engaged on a day-to-day basis. The disembodied nature of digital affinity demands an embodied relational superstructure to sustain it.

This is why I have been tooling around with software that presupposes a certain embodiment to sustain it. SmartCommons began as a way for me to share myself with a wide array of people that I have very different reasons to affiliate with. In real life I engage each of these people or networks with a certain nuance or selective disclosure that is appropriate for the relationship. Online this has been more difficult to accomplish with the available tools. SmartCommons was my first stab at solving my own problem.

Proximity and affinity mean more to me than just living relatively close and liking the same things. There are values that I privilege in the proximity and affinity that I chose. Sharing is a big one. I love the idealism of the commons. There is a certain nostalgia to it, but at bottom we get along as a species by sharing. I love what Adbusters tried to do with the tool shed idea. It didn't pan out, but there are communities that took up the cause in their own area and have started initiatives to share useful, but expensive or seldom used physical resources among local residents. SmartCommons is like a Tool Shed for whatever you are willing to share with your friends. You can add you movies or your lawn mower, your Segway or your hamster: whatever you have that you want to put into circulation within the private commons of your various networks can be shared using SmartCommons. Beyond your things I want SmartCommons to become a way to share anything (ideas, events, Flickr feeds) with anyone in a more nuanced, digitally-mediated way.

Esther Dyson said at Supernova this year, "Social networking companies need to lose their buzz, and people need to focus on their genuine social network of friends." I agree. I started tooling around with SmartCommons because I believed that it would be even better if social software companies began from the presumption that they were resourcing genuine networks of friends. For some time we have been stuck between the pseudo-networking of LinkedIn and the indiscriminate community of Friendster. We try to make due with LiveJournal, eDonkey and IM (or Blogger, iTunes and email if you are older), but it sure would be nice to see more integration that has nuanced affinity as an architectural presupposition.

SC is not perfect. There are lots of issues that I might eventually iron out, but it is a start.