[LINK] Re: Social computing for government and business

[Eric Scheid]

On 31/7/07 3:25 PM, "Roger Clarke" <Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au> wrote:

>> The new trendy area of the web is social networking ...
> 
> I think I now know where this belongs.  It's another form of 'content
> syndication' (people gift to the operator personal data about other
> people).  And it tends in the direction of 'identity syndication', in
> the sense of 'you are defined by your web of contacts' (just ask
> Haneef ...).

Not just identity data though ... I'm currently looking at facebook which
has the connecting-people aspect of course, but also has a application/
plugin architecture, and what makes facebook tres interesting is that
dissemination of applications is done in a viral manner. I could install a
application/plugin for showing a slide show, and by doing so it (optionally)
then adds an entry to my activity log which lets my circle of connections
know I've done so, and in that notice there is a link for any of my
connections to also install the same application.

Furthermore, some applications go one step further and they exist only to
propagate. The Vampires/Werewolf applications for example: I could install
the Vampires application, and then "bite" any of my contacts, which is in
effect an offer for them to also install the same application and thence
have the facility to "bite" others.

This social propagation aspect of application dissemination is curiously
intriguing and I'll be watching more. We've always had social propagation of
course, what's interesting is the support built into the application
architecture for this.


I'm glad to see this direction being taken: I've long griped that many of
the early social-networking environments started off with a
web-of-connections approach but then devolved to a dump-everyone-
in-the-same-room environment for discussion forums and such. (The
power-linkers of LinkedIN are currently ticking me off in the same way in
that they are subverting the web-of-connections aspect).

/rant

e.