What are ads?
Over on Conversation Agent, Fast Company's Valeria Maltoni touches on something worth noting.
She discusses the controversial Motrin ad, an online video promoting a pain medication product that sparked uproar last month.
Maltoni connects the outburst to anguish Americans who've lost their savings, jobs, and homes are feeling this holiday season:
"The Motrin ad became the catalyst for these sentiments, the social object for people to come together and talk about how badly they felt."
Bingo.
The most disruptive social objects articulate something masses of people urgently feel, but lack a way to express.
The Motrin ad became symbolic. Like making salt, shoe throwing, and un-pimping autos.
Unfortunately, in Motrin's case the feelings were fear, anger and despair. The ad was pulled, along with an apologetic email from the company.
Ads are not about products. They're social objects in themselves.
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December 19, 2008
Social objects, power, stickiness, and love
Yesterday the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium ran a session on social objects. It was chaired by Tom Coates and included great talks by Matt Webb (Schulze & Webb), Kati London (Botanicalls), and Rob Faludi (ITP).
I talked about some less explored aspects of objects, about which social theory has interesting things to say.
First, how entrepreneurs build power relationships by turning their object into an obligatory point of passage. This is a way to deconstruct what sustains an existing service and what changes could possibly disrupt it.
Second, how objects make us come back to them, and how this cycle is based on incompleteness and wanting. This is a more philosophical take on what Web developers mean when they talk about stickiness.
Third, how meaningful human relationships are built around a renewing of oneself and the object, and how standardization can step in the way by limiting richness of expression across the board. This links to challenges services have sustaining growth and providing value to users over extended periods of time.
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October 15, 2008
Nodal points video from Reboot 10
Reboot has now published the video of my talk on social objects, social peripheral vision, and nodal points. I gave a slightly developed, much condensed version of the same at PICNIC08 last week. Below's the blurb from the Reboot site. The length of the video is 33 minutes.
Activity streams are turning social services into a flow of updates, filtered through people. Mobility is introducing new types of social objects that change the nature of the update streams both into something more frequent and more ambient, but also more vulnerable to noise. In this world the capability to aggregate updates from across the Web and and filter out noise becomes a key problem. I'll demonstrate how the concepts of social objects and social peripheral vision can be applied to make sense of this shift in the locus of innovation on the social Web, and share some personal war stories along the way.
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September 29, 2008
Nodal points video
Here's a video of the social objects & nodal points keynote from The Web and Beyond: Mobility conference:
The busy folks at SPRXMobile also published a video of the talk on their site today. The audio isn't quite as good in that version but the slides are easier to read.
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August 3, 2008
Reboot 10 talk on Nodal Points
Copenhagen's Reboot is one of a few conferences I would not miss.
This year was the 10th anniversary of the event, and true to the spirit of its theme 'free' it ended with a self-organized beer-sharing huddle on the street in front of the afterparty venue.
The town being Copenhagen, and the crowd being Rebooters, the huddle swelled into a full-scale street party that didn't stop until the police arrived on the scene. (Here's a video from when it was still relatively early in the night).
In my talk I discussed how activity streams are turning social services into a flow of updates, filtered through people, and tried to show how the concepts of social objects and social peripheral vision can be applied to make sense of this shift.
Reboot is reportedly going to post a video of the talk online some time soon. In the meanwhile, here are the slides:
As usual, the conference was packed with interesting speakers and I didn't get to listen to half of the people I would have liked to hear. Some highlights included David Weinberger on Babbage, Chris Messina on 'Free to migrate' and Eric Wahlforss and Alex Ljung on their startup Soundcloud.
Also, the talks from Reboot 9 were recently posted online - here's mine about microblogging and tiny social objects.
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July 10, 2008
What makes a good social object
I woke up this morning and felt like blogging. It's been a long time :)
We've had Reboot, FOO Camp, and a bunch of other opportunities for rewarding conversations and so it feels like I could write posts for a week about all the new or further developed thoughts and ideas that are crowding my head. I've touched on some of those in recent talks (here's video&slides from one), but I haven't gotten around to blogging about them yet.
I'll start by jotting down a few notes on questions that might be useful to ask when evaluating the potential of something to be turned into an online social object. As a disclaimer I guess I should say this may not make much sense unless you're familiar with the previous posts on the subject (a number of people have suggested I revamp this blog to make it easier to navigate the material - I'll eventually get around to doing that).
- How well does the potential object yield itself to breaking it down to structured data? For instance trips can be pretty easily structured, as on Dopplr. Dopplr trips have only three key data points: a start date, end date, and a destination. Each one is expressed as a discrete. It got too complex with free text entry for destinations, so they decided to use cities with over 80,000 inhabitants as a proxy (so when I travel to San Sebastian in spain, I need to pick Bilbao on dopplr).
- What data points to pick? You want to pick the data points that are sensible definitions of the object and give you the most interesting handles for generating sociographs. This is tricky because the more data points you introduce, the more fine-grained sociographs you can generate, but the more complext the system becomes. Events (as on Upcoming) are already more complicated than trips because you want a title, start and end date & time, location, and some kind of invitation policy. It's a bigger usability hurdle but the tradeoff is reasonable if the assumption is it appeals to a broader population of users. Like on Upcoming vs. Dopplr, more of us go to events even if we don't travel that much; events are more interesting than just who's traveling where.
- How often do people generate new instances of the object? This question should replace the "who's your target customer?" question because your main target are probably the same people who generate lots of instances of the object. If a lot of people generate new objects often, ads+subscriptions probably make sense. If they don't use it that often but the social networking adds a lot of value (as when looking for a book, car, real estate), then you need higher-value ads and/or transactions. If it's the sort of object that few people create, but those who do do it lots, you're probably talking about a hobbyist or professional audience (e.g. Dogster for petlovers) and might be able to tap into its special channels to figure out a business model
- How much social gravitational pull does the object have? Complex social objects offer a lot of handles for discussion. A movie, for instance, has a cast, a plot, special effects, and plenty of other conversation points that people can talk about. Simple social objects like microblog posts don't have as many such handles. On microblogs like Jaiku it's typically someone just asserting something, to which you might or might not be inclined to reply. Big social objects have more social gravity. Movies attract viewers and conversation like stars and big planets attract matter from space. Tiny social objects are more like a meteor shower; each one has very little gravitational pull as such, but when you add up all the tiny particles in space, they embody more total matter than the big constellations.
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August 13, 2007
Video of Stockholm MSN talk
MSN has posted a short video interview about my talk on designing services around social objects, recorded at their Innovate event in Stockholm in December.
A video and MP3 of the full talk are up on the Innovate site.
Swedish blogger Fredrik Wass has also uploaded a clip on YouTube that includes my answer to a question from the audience on what's going to happen next in the social networking service space.
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January 10, 2007
Speaking on object-centered sociality at Reboot (updated with slides)
A quick shout from Reboot 7 in Copenhagen: it's the first time I've made it to Reboot, and this has got to be the coolest social software-related event at these latitudes. It's a lot bigger than I had expected and everything is still really laid-back. Tomorrow morning I'm going to do a little talk on object-centered sociality, and flesh out the main points of the original blog post. I'd already agreed to speak about a different topic, but those of you who've been commenting the post here and on your blogs, convinced me to switch. It's awesome that there's now a growing discussion around objects in the social software world!
Update: For a summary of the talk, see
David Weinberger's blog
Bohellz blog
Another update! Here are the slides. The PowerPoint version includes my speaker notes.
PowerPoint (about 5.1 megs)
PDF (about 5.2 megs)
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June 10, 2005
Why some social network services work and others don't — Or: the case for object-centered sociality
A while ago I wondered how our relationship to social networking services will change when instead of adding new contacts, we begin to feel like we'd be better off cutting the links to the people who we actually don't know, stopped liking, or no longer want to be associated with for whatever other reason. I was reminded of this on reading that Russel Beattie has now decided to link out of LinkedIn. He explains:
Yes, I thought about just deleting the people I didn't know, but each deletion of a contact requires an individual request to customer service (it's not just a check box and submit operation) so I finally just decided to cancel the whole thing. I think in general, people who would want to use this service are pretty contactable without using this system, no? ... And if you're a hard to reach person, you're most likely not using this sort of thing anyways. Anyone can contact anyone in five hops, so what real use is it?
I want to use Russell's question about the 'real use' of LinkedIn as a window into what I think is a profound confusion about the nature of sociality, which was partly brought about by recent use of the term 'social network' by Albert Laszlo-Barabasi and Mark Buchanan in the popular science world, and Clay Shirky and others in the social software world. These authors build on the definition of the social network as 'a map of the relationships between individuals.' Basically I'm defending an alternative approach to social networks here, which I call 'object centered sociality' following the sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina. I'll try to articulate the conceptual difference between the two approaches and briefly demonstrate that object-centered sociality helps us to understand better why some social networking services succeed while others don't.
Russell's disappointment in LinkedIn implies that the term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network.' The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They're not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. That's why many sociologists, especially activity theorists, actor-network theorists and post-ANT people prefer to talk about 'socio-material networks', or just 'activities' or 'practices' (as I do) instead of social networks.
Sometimes the 'social just means people' fallacy gets built into technology, like in the case of FOAF, which is unworkable because it provides a format for representing people and links, but no way to represent the objects that connect people together. The social networking services that really work are the ones that are built around objects. And, in my experience, their developers intuitively 'get' the object-centered sociality way of thinking about social life. Flickr, for example, has turned photos into objects of sociality. On del.icio.us the objects are the URLs. EVDB, Upcoming.org, and evnt focus on events as objects. LinkedIn, however, is becoming the victim of its own cunning: it started off thinking it could benefit by playing up the 'social just means people' misunderstanding. As Russell put it,
That was the "game" right? He who has the most contacts wins. At first you were even listed by the number of contacts you had, remember?
Reid Hoffman's choice (however unintentional it might have been, I don't know) to encourage the use of LinkedIn as a game is what activity theorist Frank Blackler would call the introduction a 'surrogate object.' The surrogate object is actually not sustained by the economic, technical, and cultural arrangement that the activity relies on to sustain itself. Playing 'Who has the most connections wins' might have been fun to some people for a while, but it was not very valuable to the users and developers as a collective in the long run. Now LinkedIn is trying to change the object of sociality that it offers, and persuade people to re-orient their networks around their actual jobs. (Don't get me wrong—I'm the first to support Reid and his team on their endeavour to make LinkedIn more useful as a medium for job-centered sociality!)
Last but not least, we can use the object-centered sociality theory to identify new objects that are potentially suitable for social networking services. Take the notion of place, for example. Annotating places is a new practice for which there is clearly a need, but for which there is no successful service at the moment because the technology for capturing one's location is not quite yet cheap enough, reliable enough, and easy enough to use. In other words, to get a 'Flickr for maps' we first need a 'digital camera for location.' Approaching sociality as object-centered is to suggest that when it becomes easy to create digital instances of the object, the online services for networking on, through, and around that object will emerge too. Social network theory fails to recognise such real-world dynamics because its notion of sociality is limited to just people.
For a much more elaborate academic argument about object-centered sociality, see the chapter on 'Objectual Practice' by Karin Knorr Cetina in The practice turn in contemporary theory, edited by Theodor R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny (London 2001: Routledge.)
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April 13, 2005
The state of social software
For a while, Alex has had something to say about the current state of social software. Now he has summarized the four main points of the argument:
1) For an independent consumer brand to rise out of the currently bubbling social software stew, consolidation of existing services may be the requisite next step
2) However, the business model of some of the ’small pieces’ out there appears to be a quick exit through acquisition by an existing big player
3) The blogosphere is very US-centric and this is hindering its economic growth
4) Most importantly: to break into the mass market, blogging needs to become less cool. This is, in my opinion, the most interesting challenge because it requires a transformation of the user experience into something that diehard bloggers might no longer recognize as 'blogging.' Posts need to incorporate simple objects that require less effort to create and manipulate than freeform text. Moblogs, reading lists, FOAF listings and such are interesting steps in this direction.
Perhaps in the future, blogging could become a convention for expressing object-centered sociality, to borrow a term from the sociologist Karin Knorr-Cetina.
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March 3, 2004
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