« Music and breakfast | Home | I’ve been working on the railroad »
For the love of God, don’t call it Tagster
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 12:15 pm on 3/17/2005
Warning: this post is beyond buzzword compliant. We are doing COLD BUZZWORD FUSION here. So watch out. (And I’ve kept it approachable - so, the risk here is mere buzzword toxicity, not actual confusion. If you don’t mind that, read on.)
Buzzword #1 is social networking services. We’ve discussed them here before, but most recently in a spot where some of you likely missed it. To sum up, the current opinion is that social networking is the suck. Friendster and its nine million clones have failed to deliver on their promise to describe and augment human social connections, and they aren’t even that great at finding you people to hook up with.
Buzzword #2 is folksonomy - the currently-trendy notion that, rather than try and think up a taxonomy for how to arrange the world’s objects to cover your every user’s every need, you should just let your users make up labels for their own use and aggregate the results. Kind of a wisdom-of-crowds thing. Folksonomy is more commonly known as tagging, and it has replaced live chat as the most exciting and beautiful thing about Flickr. (There’s also this thing del.icio.us which combines tags with aggressive simplicity to become the first external bookmark server actually worth using. It’s still highly geeky, because it reflects its userbase so far, but it is indeed cool. Check it.)
So, put them together and what have you got? A social network mapper that can actually map the unforgivingly complex real thing. Draw yourself and the people you know as nodes, then draw little arrows between yourself and them. Those arrows don’t say “friend,” they don’t mean “co-worker” necessarily, they don’t give you a little menu of “crush,” “sweetheart,” and “friend with benefits” to choose from or anything like that. They are simply blank, one-way assertions of connection. But they let you tag them. Got a wife sitting around? Add her to the system, then point multiple arrows at her, tagging them with “wife,” “love of my life,” “blonde I have a crush on,” and “foe of my seekrit plans for Ken’s bachelor party,” respectively. (You might want to set that last one to “hidden.”)
On that note, there’s just one more thing to mix in. (Oh God, and I was already thinking that “remix” is the most overused word of 2005. Ah well: as I always say, if you’re not part of the problem, you’re part of some other problem.) The missing element here is friend filters. Every individual connection that you draw from yourself to someone else should be hideable, or in LiveJournal parlance “friend-locked,” not just depending on whether someone is on your list of friends but on an arbitrary subset or superset that you name. This needs to be per connection. So, you know, Kristine from accounting is linked to you as “co-worker” and everyone can see that, but that other “blonde I have a crush on” arrow you pointed at her really ought to be hidden from your, um, wife, and probably everyone else. And there will be more subtle situations too.
(Back at When.com we used to have an unofficial saying/design pattern: “we will not clean up your life for you.” We’d invoke this whenever it was pointed out that some feature we were cooking up might result in users getting conflicting appointments when they subscribed to too many calendars, or getting into some other awkward social scrape. We basically just decided that we weren’t in the business of preventing or solving social problems; we were a tool, not a butler. This kind of hands-off approach can lead to deeply worrisome phenomena, but I think LiveJournal shows us that, if you’re going to have social software that’s socially useful, you have to adopt it.)
You’ll note that, so far, it really doesn’t matter whether this is all centralized or de-. With the right tools, it could use all that tricky stuff developed by the FOAF people and the RDF people and whatever. Some of it relies on logins, which implies centralization, but we have a couple of options for that these days, and as I’ve written, social networking itself may eventually provide one. The key to adoption, though, is the user experience. People won’t buy into yet another social networking anything if it doesn’t get the real world any better than the competition does.
Computers, and their programmers, often don’t get the real world. Analysts of social networking services have told us this over and over. So let’s step out of the way and let the humans get the real world for us.
So: tell me why this idea sucks, or else I might build it. And nobody wants that.
March 18th, 2005 at 12:39 am
oh my jesus god, misuba
that’s new
MAKE IT
March 18th, 2005 at 11:52 am
I… can’t tell if you’re kidding or not.
March 18th, 2005 at 12:08 pm
“I’d hit it.”
nice synthesis of the two ideas. but what does one DO with it after their social web is uploaded to the demographic map?
March 18th, 2005 at 5:30 pm
Why would I want to use this? I use d.i.u because I like to share cool links with people and see what they have to think, and because I use many browsers on many computers.
I use livejournal because I want to keep in touch with friends.
I might use flickr to upload photos, but probably not because I would want the cool flickr Pro thing, and I am unsure that I really want to be paying flickr money for the rest of my natural life to keep hold of all of my pictures for me. Although that might be really nice.
What fun thing could I do with this tagged edge system? Friendster and Orkut and all the others all basically ended up with people (read: me) going “okay… now what?”, and ceasing to use them. I still use Orkut if I need a friend’s phone # and I don’t have it. But a distributed rolodex doesn’t need anything more complicated than “this person is in my rolodex”.
So, why do I want to tag the edges? What can I do with all this? If I were an asshole VC I’d ask “what’s the user value proposition?” right before getting shot in the head by someone who overheard me using all those words in a sentence.
(PS. A valid answer must be more than simply “online dating” - perhaps calendar event scheduling, or blog posting permissions (a la typekey) or something like that. But think bigger.)
March 22nd, 2005 at 6:20 pm
The key thing that will make people want to use a service like this (which I seem to have mentally nicknamed DramaChow for some reason) is the fact that it will be open. It will deliberately limit its own utility (besides the sheer micro-ethnographic fun of building out your network, which seems to be enough for some… I would want the option to have an entirely private account, in which you get to play with your graph but not share it with anyone). But it will have an API for other app developers. That way, you get emergent uses you couldn’t have predicted.
Oh crap, I forgot: that’s a third buzzword. Open APIs, open APIs!
Yeah, it’d probably be good to think of a token use, just to draw people in to begin with. But that means I would have to think of a compelling web application, and that’s hard.
July 5th, 2005 at 4:40 pm
So, I’ve been having conversations about this lately actually. Mostly because I keep finding out that the people I know are connected with other people I know in ways I never knew. Goodness. But you know what I mean.
And the thing I see in my head is based on that (showtime?) show “The L Word”. this one chick starts drawing a network of nodes and arrows of who has slept with who in their social circle on a white board. Then it grows and she ends up posting it on the net, and people start adding their own connections and it turns into some big crazy thing. It’s kind of amusing but scary.
I’m not sure I’d actually like this to be built. It might make my head explode. But that could be cool for the rest of you.