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Follow-up to this post: Brian Eno has contacted Matt Jones. I admit that I'm impressed, although they haven't actually had the sit-down chat yet, and until they do I'm not convinced that the project has been successful. (My interest in the project is strictly to see how well a data-exchanging network can provide an experiential pleasure: one that is not exclusively data-oriented. Having Brian Eno post a comment on your blog is undoubtedly pleasurable, but it's a data pleasure, only one order of magnitude above the sorts of pleasures that the Web already excels at delivering. (If one is prone to thinking of all experience as being data, processed by the mind, then one could possibly argue that all experiential pleasures are also data pleasures, but I'll argue for the distinction, given that the data involved in an experience like an actual sit-down face-to-face conversation is massively richer than the data involved in a blog exchange.))
Other tidbits: Crystal sends along a Memepool link to an interesting essaylet about the social networking technology used by French dove breeders of the 17th century, complete with karma mechanisms and fake profiles.
The "state of the state of social software" posts on this blog and elsewhere have mostly been occasioned by the launch of Orkut. I've been fooling around with Orkut for the course of the past week, and I've made some observations:
On the plus side, Orkut does one thing well: it provides me with the meaningful-blurb-under-the-photo that Friendster doesn't give me (This is the third of the three "things I want to do that Friendster won't let me do." Orkut doesn't allow me to do the first two, but at least they're managing one out of three.)
On the drawback side, Orkut has what strikes me as a truly useless friend-ranking mechanism, where you can rate friends as "sexy," "very sexy," or "super sexy." (Also cool / very cool / super cool and trustworthy / very trustworthy / super trustworthy.)
First off, this mechanism bizarrely makes ranking someone as merely "sexy" into kind of an insult... my guess is that this will lead to the kind of inflation known to characterize EBay's feedback reports, where people are unusually free with the perfect scores, because anything less seems critical. (Orkut attempts to minimize this problem by making the rankings anonymous, but, still, I find it difficult to visualize myself giving my friends anything less than the highest rankings.) If everyone in the system ends up being 90% cool (even typing out such a stupid phrase makes me gnash my teeth) then the listing that indicates a person's "coolness level" is meaningless, noise in the signal.
There's the germ of a good idea here, though: in order to provide meaningful data, social networking websites need to allow you to rank the people you're connected to. But rating them in terms of coolness or sexiness is absolutely the wrong way to go about this (not least because of the vagueness: what's the difference between "very trustworthy" and "super trustworthy" anyway?).
What would actually be useful is to be able to rate my friends in terms of the intensity of the bond between us. There are eight people currently listed as my friends in Orkut. I am, indeed, fond of them all. But two of them I've never met. Two more I've only met on one occasion. One is a casual acquaintance who I haven't had contact with since he moved away from Chicago six months (or so) ago. Two are people who I enjoy some degree of intimacy with, people who I could call on the phone just to say "how are you?," people who I have had dinner with (once or twice) within the past year. And one is a guy who's been my friend for fifteen years. This information has obvious relevance to anyone who's trying to make a meaningful use of my network, but to Orkut (or Friendster or Tribe) all of the bonds are of equal intensity, creating a picture of me and my network of friends which is weirdly distorted to the point where it is practically a fiction.
</grouchy>
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
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