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Sep 14, 05:25 am: [Future of Web Apps]Social change on the web

Key to so much of what we do and wehre we’re going online is understanding the implications of social activity on the web

(live blogging with all the attendant misspellings, mistakes and missed contexts)

Presenter:
Tom Coates, Yahoo!

• How people can interact w/ one another to make something collectively that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
• You can’t look at the individual pieces; you have to step back to look at the trends and sum of the parts.
• Social software is the latest in a long line of technologies that help w/ collaboration and allow people to do things together that are greater than they can do alone.
• Doing more together than we could apart.
• using software to enhance our social and collaborative abilities through structured mediation. The social software can help to make social engagement together or help them collaborate.
• How you can use social software to create aggregate value
• Social software works like this:
  • an individual should get value form their contributions
  • these contribution should provide value to their peers as well
  • the organizastions that hosts the service should derive aggrate value and be able to expose this back to the users
• two models: consensus (wikipedia) v. polyphony (flickr)
• wikipedia has survived becfause of the enormous political organization around it; this makes it very hard, if not impossible, to replicate unless you have a strong and clearly communicated goal
• You have sites like: flickr, last.fm, amazon that are all about users creating something of value to them and the site is about making sense of it. So it can support infinite communicates.
• Peter Kollack The Economies of Online Cooperation
  • Anticipated reciprocity
  • reputation
  • ‘sense of efficacy’
  • identification w/ a group
• rather than asking what motivates people to contribute we should be asking who and in what context
• contexts: (from more individual to more social/public)
  • sharing w/o really knowing it (how search engines work) – personal utility
  • saving for personal use but you save in public (del.icio.us) – personal utility
  • sharing with friends
  • sharing with interest communities
  • self-expression/showing off
  • altruism/good of the world
• Money, points & cpmpetition may not be incentives that work well. They may not be rewarding the right behavior.
  • this is different in places that are markets (like amazon and eBay) where $ is a part of the point
• Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: people Who Suit MUDs Richard Bartle
• providing communicative and social context (build and maintain relationships)
• allow users to see the aggregate information and then let them build on it.
• how do you open up social value to people:
  • expose every axis of data you can
  • give people a place to represent themselves
  • allow them to associate, connect and form relationships w/ one another
  • help them annotate, rate and comment
  • look for ways to exspose this data back onto the site
• problems
  • difference between private or public—true up the users expectations with the reality of the service
  • there’s a tension between evidencing the value the community finds and encouraging diversity of users
• business value
  • finding different ways of making money than owning data
  • attention and advertising, premium accounts, building services around the data, using user-generated annotations and contributions to improve your other services

tagged: tomcoates, yahoo, futureofwebapps-sf06, conferences, liveblogging, social, community