Cesar Brea's Weblog

Our KM Cluster panel on technology for social networks at IBM Research three weeks ago was well-received.  Then Bill Ives asked me to recap some of the points.  Here goes:

The question on the table was, “what makes good technology for social networking applications?”  To answer this, the logical thing is to ask first, “What makes a good social networking application?”

In summary, you have to have something valuable to exchange, and not lose it in a thicket of other junk.  Second, you have to group users into tight “affinity groups” within which they are likely to share.  Finally, third, you have to make both contributing and consuming information really easy.  To illustrate these points, at great professional risk, I re-told the (true, I swear) Tale Of The Binge-o-Matic.

So then you ask yourself the following questions about technology:

1. at what cost can I modify it to focus the feature set only on the one or two things that are most valuable to exchange?

2. does its scheme for defining and managing groups and permissions  support the affinity group structure I think will maximize sharing?

3. at what cost can I modify it to support the simplest possible structured contribution and consumption of what’s shared?

Generally speaking, the first and third of these are easy if you’re custom-building a web app. Any good package should also make them easy. 

The second is hard.  The right way to do it is with abstractions that support inheritance of group properties and permissions.  But abstractions can be seriously slow if not done well.  (Getting this right is part of what makes OpenACS/.LRN really special.)

Thanks again to Bill, and to Kate Ehrlich for hosting us.