TheyBlinked

12/28/2004 01:17:00 PM

December 28th: The Fourth Day of Christmas
Compatriots

Friends have all things in common
-Plato, Phaedrus

Social Software can be a daunting label that means very little. The social in "social software" just means that your friends are involved. In actual fact the software is the junior partner in the whole social software thing.

Community is the human killer app. We survive, reproduce and thrive in communities. We create and distribute actual social software ("culture") through communities. We cannot know ourselves outside of the communal narratives that are the raw materials we use to individuate ourselves.

I am in community therefore I am.

Friends are the substrate that make up larger communities. Social software is about optimizing, whenever digital facilitation is deemed useful, what already occurs between friends.

Social software is designed around the user doing something. This is why I do not invite my grandfather into Friendster or my mother into LinkedIn. They don't fit into the pre-fabricated doing-something role that these services provide. There is no value judgment in this observation; only a recognition that these programmed patterns of action are not useful to these people.

I wanted SmartCommons to be the social software that you could invite your mom to. The service that your rabbi and your love interest might both find useful at some point. With this in mind I began thinking about the things that such a diverse lot of people have in common. This actually, literally, made me think of an old story from a late first century Christian text, "...and all that believed were together, and had all things in common" (The Acts of the Apostles, 2).

We all own and, at least in tight circles of our choosing, we all share.

SmartCommons can be, if you find it useful, a way to have some of your things/ideas/events in common with the different communities you are in.

Laying these rambling introductory thoughts aside for a moment: since 90% of social software is the people that make up the "social" part of the name it stands to reason that getting the right people into your commons is an important first step. I don't have this as easy as it should be quite yet, but the mechanism is pretty straight forward:

Searching for friends - Click on the Friends tab and, once you are logged in, proceed to the bottom right corner of the screen where you can search for people you know and, if they are located, tap the "Add as friend" button to add them to your commons (the other person has to agree of course).

Inviting friends by email is an easy way to include your family and friends in your commons. Again, you simply click on the Friends tab and, once you are logged in, proceed to the bottom left corner of the screen where you can enter a friend's first name and email address. A short email will be sent off to them and, should they accept your invitation, they will be added to you Friends list automatically.

Importing friends - With great care (!) you can take your Yahoo! address book, Orkut friends or any CSV file (FirstName,LastName,EMail) and import it into SmartCommons. The system will not spam your friends unless you tell it to. You will be shown a screen that allows you to choose whom you would like to invite into your commons. The choice is yours. Just tap the "Import/Export Friends" button at the bottom of your Friends page.

That's it for this the fourth day of Christmas. Thanks to all of you who are trying out this little piece of code. Your comments, feedback and blog posts mean a lot. With Emily Dickinson I say, "My friends are my estate." Thank you my friends!

Peace and hope for the new year.

::what others are saying about smartcommons:

"I like the basic premise that social software is clearly useful when it's helping us with communities we're already in..."

-david weinberger

"Smart Commons isn't about racing to see who can have the most friends, it certainly isn't about who has the most stuff. Quality over quantity. Yeah baby."

-daniel miller