As first exemplified by Friendster, there emerged the concept of a social network where the fundamental goal was to connect with as many (pseudo) 'friends' as possible.
This, in turn, gave rise to contact networks like Plaxo and professional networks like LinkedIn, where the purpose was more explicit; namely to exchange specific information or facilitate qualified introductions.
MySpace and Facebook further extended these models by allowing people to build personal pages, exchange rich media (and virally spread it), interface with like minds via well-defined services, and create sub-networks where membership is bounded by affinity, affiliation, geography and the like.
The latest trend is to 'platform-enable' these networks, mostly so that third party applications can plug into and extend these environments, but also to enable content, conversations and contexts that are created within these spaces to be syndicated and/or virally distributed out to other web sites and web services.
Twitter, which is best described as a short message service built around answering the question, “What am I doing right now?” has generated 10X the traffic it receives on the actual Twitter.com site via third party services that plug into the Twitter API.
Which brings me to an interesting service that I stumbled upon the other day which seems to push the model forward. It is called Spock, and it has some noteworthy attributes. One is that by leveraging the power of algorithmic search, the Spock service automatically builds a personal profile of you (based solely on public web data).
You can “claim your page,” and the service makes it very easy to validate or invalidate information about you. It also makes it simple to further customize your profile in ways that are meaningful enough that as a user, you might habitually tend to your profile (on a daily or weekly basis) in the same way that some people manicure and water their gardens.
Similarly, friends of yours can discover your unclaimed profile and use this stumble upon moment as the trigger event to initiate contact with you, invite you into their network and/or encourage you to claim your profile page. Moreover, they can put their vote in about the accuracy or inaccuracy of a specific item of data on your profile, a sort of 'wisdom of crowds' informational amplifier and error-checking mechanism.
There are some implications of this approach that are interesting, to say the least. One is that privacy advocates will have alarms galore going off. The premise of a service aggregating your identity to a single page is troubling, inasmuch as it lowers the bar to someone stealing or compromising your identity.
The idea that a third party can theoretically claim your page by falsely claiming to be you is troubling. The concept that a third party can chime in and validate or invalidate information about you on your profile implies a loss of control, which is unsettling for some.
At the same time, the premise of a profiling and networking model that leverages both outside-in (algorithmically-generated data sourcing, categorization and linkage; crowd wisdom functions; discover/claim mechanisms) and inside-out functions (user-defined customization of content, context and connections; invitations to trusted sources; privacy controls), while making everything search-able feels like the right approach.
Moreover, the service introduces the concept of a Spock Power score, which is a rudimentary transparency mechanism that spotlights the level of engagement and participation that a given individual has made within the service vis-a-vis activities like customization, invitation, validation and the like.
Personally, I think that there is a gap in the market for reputation systems that provide an individual’s 'score' in areas like trust, knowledge, accuracy and activity levels, ala the Whuffie score concept in Cory Doctorow's sci-fi novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," and to be clear, the Spock Power score does not deliver that, but it is a start down a promising path.
In addition, the service does provide a Developer API, presaging a day when users can enable the rich data in their profile to be plugged into third-party services for things like:
- Personalized recommendation services that automatically present content, products, services or people likely to be interesting to you (see: Interestingness), spotlight related content or identify non-obvious connections.
- User-defined in boxes and filtration mechanisms for solicitation of marketing offers.
- Market aggregation services that enable like minds to harness the economy of scale goodness of buying cooperatives.
- Assimilation of experts, advocates and interest groups into 'knowledge networks.'
- Local event planning tools that reconcile the faux intimacy of virtual, online spaces with the realness of offline, physical ones, sort of the 2.0 version of Meetup meets Evite.
Needless to say, there are already services in many of these areas, suggesting the potential to extend existing services (versus re-creating the wheel yet again) in a manner that does not require the individual to be locked into any one service.
To be clear, while Spock passed the initial sniff test for me personally, it is too early to tell if it will overcome the '1.0/3.0 Paradox' and solve enough problems in its 1.0 youth to build the needed audience and business required to survive and grow into maturity, robustness and ubiquity in its 3.0 stage of life (as Google did).
I would suggest that one path for Spock to add value is by providing greater transparency mechanisms in terms of what is new, popular, recently viewed or relevant on the network. Another is by the service playing the part of the Oracle and perennially asking questions of 'the network,' and then spotlighting popular responses or identifying forks in types of responses.
Lastly, I wonder if there is a game or marketplace concept that can be overlayed on top of the service that rewards users for levels of participation, either by giving them actual monetary consideration, formal recognition and/or greater access to governance controls within the network.
So many potential paths of interest, but obviously a tradeoff between near-term tactical focus and long-term strategic vision.
I would be remiss if I did not close by speaking a bit more about the topic of privacy and the very real and reasonable fears that we all have whenever the words ‘privacy’ and ‘online’ are interleaved in the same sentence.
Privacy is a paradox. One the one hand, there is no sugar-coating the fact that there are bad people out there that will do bad things if they have access to your personal data, and the easier it is for them to get their hands on that data, the more likely bad stuff will happen.
The counter to that reality is that the cow has left the barn already, and it ‘aint coming back so the best alternative is to embrace transparency. This logic is based on the premise that if we all have access to the same set of public data, better tools can be built to manage it, better laws can be crafted that legislate acceptable use and tougher penalties can be put on the books for criminal offenders.
After all, does anyone feel safer knowing that access to and control of this data is almost exclusively in the hands of credit card companies, governmental authorities, insurers and the like? I know that I don’t, being a believer that you can only protect and improve what you can track and measure, whereas today we are at the mercy of self-interested parties that are self-policing themselves.
A great primer on the topic privacy is, “The Transparent Society” by David Brin. In this day and age, it should be a must-read.
