The Social Wave Blog by Sheldon Chang

You Don't Know Me, but... Social Capital & Social Software

If you're new to the world of online communities and social networks and you'd like a a succinct summary of the leading thoughts on the factors that drive online social interactions between people, a recent paper from iSociety titled You Don't Know Me, but... Social Capital & Social Software will give you all the hot, hyped, and derided viewpoints of the past ten years. If you're no stranger to understanding the psychological and sociological side of social software, then this 61 page paper will take you on a Cliff Notes retrospective that'll take you on a trip starting from Clifford Stoll and ending at Lawrence Lessig.

I've spend much of my free time in the past twelve years reading books about the Internet's effects on society and have gotten used to the fact that even the well written ones are often visionary rants that stretch from cover to cover. Seldom have I found anything so balanced and down to earth as this paper by William Davies. This is a paper that I wish I had written because I agree with nearly every single letter of it. I'm especially pleased about his suggestion that social networking technologies may have more practical value when applied within a local framework rather than a global one.

As I mentioned in my last entry, much has been celebrated about the Internet as a medium that renders distance meaningless. Social networks especially seem to thrive in a spaceless environment because the weak ties that leads to the generation of much social capital are more accessible. Perhaps we'd all choose to live in Cyberspace if it weren't for the fact that man can't live on weak ties alone.

CNN.com - Hospitals embrace SMS technology - Aug 12, 2004

As an ex-physical therapist and healthcare technology evangelist, this news article about Hospitals embracing SMS technology strikes me with two dramatic thoughts. 1) My, things have changed! 2) What an ingenious way to use SMS!

It has been about six years since I practiced as a physical therapist. When I left the clinic, I left behind a name I was making for myself as an evangelist of using information technology to improve patient care. I released a white paper online in 1995 titled, "Do Healthcare Providers Need the Internet" in which I presented my opinion that IT presents us with our best chance to make healthcare humane again. The response I got to this self-motivated effort was hardly encouraging. My attempts to promote my views were either met with indifference or even flame mail. An orthopedic surgeon was so irritated with my paper that he even went so far as to make fun of my name. Using the Internet was regarded as anything from foolish to reckless.

Given that I started preaching healthcare technology when the field resembled a playground brawl, this piece of news is a pleasant surprise. It also strikes me as an ideal way of helping patients keep their appointments. In most clinics and hospitals, when the patient doesn't show up, money is lost and time is wasted. Reminding a patient via SMS a day before and an hour before his/her appointment seems to be an ideal way to keep patients mindful without taking up valuable clinician or staff time to make phone calls.

Some people may argue that a phone call is just as good as an SMS reminder, but I doubt that patients would respond too warmly to someone calling with a reminder to be on time one hour before an appointment. SMS is not as invasive as a phone call.

I only question if it's possible to maintain the efficacy of using SMS to remind patients of their appointments. Getting people to remember their appointments and on schedule is not a healthcare only problem though today's cost-squeezed and high pressure healthcare workplace has a lot more riding on a tight schedule than say your auto-mechanic or a hair salon. If SMS is shown to be very effective in keeping people on time to their medical appointments, how soon will it be before auto-mechanics and hair salons get with the act and flood everyone's SMS with so many reminders that they start to tune out?

As recent as 2002, online dating was still a bit of a socially closeted activity, but thanks to a tremendous advertising efforts, it did a full 180 and became "the thing to do." Shortly after, success stories of friends who said they had friends who met online and had gotten married began percolating through our social circles. This buzz helped create a dramatic turnaround in the public acceptance of online dating, but the change was largely an engineered one instead of one that happened through a steady change in societal attitudes.

An article in the Dec. 12th, 2004 edition of the New York Times reports that the growth of online dating as an industry has hit a plateau. With some 800 legitimate online dating services out there and a growing number of disillusioned ex-members, some of whom have published books about their bad dating experiences, one of the lone exceptions to the "dot-com" bust is not looking like the golden child it once was.

Oh, online dating is not going bust by any means, but its flaws are becoming as inherently obvious as the lies and half truths liberally scattered throughout their member profiles. These are serious problems in the data-driven methodology of most online dating services that are not going to be fixed anytime soon. Anyone who works with data knows that databases don't handle nuances well. The integrity of your data is out the window until you can establish a standardized definition of "single, married, etc."

The problem isn't that people lie. The problem is that depending on your perspective, just about everyone is lying whether willingly or unwittingly and not all lies are equal. Some lies may have more truth to them in practical reality than the unforgiving stereotypes that the lies are trying to avoid.

Background checks and rigorous interviewing by trained professionals would be one way of fixing these flaws, but would also create a whole host of new problems. Besides, if the recent hard fortunes of the expertly moderated dating service, True.com is any indication, introducing a rigorous initiation process isn't going to restart the hypergrowth of online dating.

Speaking of businesses like True.com, aren't we starting to see online dating services that bear more and more resemblance to traditional matchmaking and video dating services? Then there's the trend of "speed dating", which is basically like online dating manifested in face to face reality. I'm sure the market for it is steady and growing, but don't expect an explosive trend. It was around before online dating. You'd think that it'd have taken off by now if it was such a great answer to singlehood.

Now before I come off as a sneering someone who's too good for online dating, let me say that I met my girlfriend and almost certain future wife through Match.com after over four years on and off of online dating through various services. The first day I tried Match.com was in 1998 and I was able to sift through their entire database of the San Jose area in one sitting. There were about 100 men and 3 women.

An artificially engineered change in societal attitudes helped online dating take off. The online dating industry is hitting a saturation point and is beginning to plateau. Advertising budgets will certainly shrink. What will this mean to the online dating industry and all the similar services that were spawned in its wake?

E-Dating Bubble Springs a Leak (NYTimes)

I'm finding that many people in Silicon Valley seem to equate the words "online community" or "community-network" to Craigslist. This is been a minor problem for Social Wave because it's hard to explain what Social Wave is to the general public without being interrupted with questions like, "Is this another Craigslist?" When Social Wave members submit feedback and make suggestions about what they want to see, some of the feedback could be summarized as requests to copy Craigslist.

Any developer of community-networks would be pleased to have his project mentioned in the same breath as Craigslist and I'm no different, but the problem is that Social Wave is fundamentally different from Craigslist and any moves to make it more like Craigslist will essentially signal the end of what I set out to do when I drew the plans for Social Wave.

Craig Newmark cites Usenet and the WELL as philosophical sources for what eventually became Craigslist. From what I can tell, Craigslist appears to have aligned itself more toward Usenet than the WELL and it does such an incredible job of doing what Usenet did well without its associated downsides that I stopped dreaming of having the Usenet of the late 90's back again. Craigslist to me is the Usenet for the rest of us, but it is not the WELL for the rest of us, except perhaps in its spirit of wanting to help locals connect with other locals.

The WELL for the rest of us is still a hole that sorely needs to be filled in the digital community landscapes and Social Wave was launched as an attempt at doing just that, but the people who make up "the rest of us" have no idea what the WELL was (nor do they know Usenet either) and inevitably I find myself having to explain why I'm not just the latest opportunist trying to copy Craigslist. That part isn't very hard to do.

The hard part is getting people to stop trying to use it like Craigslist. I'm finding that for much of the general public, Craigslist is less of a community that they want to engage in more so than it is where they go to address a specific need like buying or selling something. I've also had people say that they're looking for more entertaining things to read like they get on Craigslist. On the other end, there are people who just post and never read. The online social ethic of giving and taking as things that should be done together doesn't appear to be very strong with most people who tell me that they access Craigslist all the time.

Now to be fair, it's not Craigslist's fault that people don't follow the mostly obsolete rules of netiquette anymore. The golden ethics of online social interaction that formed around the glory days of Usenet and local dial-up BBS culture have been slowly eroded by patterns of usage influenced by advanced search engines, improvements in network technology, mass adoption, and the emergence of real-time messaging services among other things.

The only reason why I'm discussing this in the context of Craigslist is because one of my goals with Social Wave is to engage people who aren't already well engaged in any sort of online connection to the community. With these people even using Craigslist can be a challenge and getting them to imagine something beyond Craigslist is very difficult.

I have nothing but admiration and praise for Craigslist, but with its average level of engagement diluted by its now massive size and it's massive activity recently reported at 2 billion page views and 5 million posts per month [source], maybe it's time to find something other than "online community" as a label for Craigslist.

Craigslist is a wonderful resource that helps communities connect, but it no longer seems like the sort of place that is ideal toward fostering a community of its own and I don't think anyone who's fiercely loyal to Craigslist should feel insulted by this view. If Craigslist embraces its evolution toward being some sort of network layer for the general community, it'll far exceed its potential as a community itself and in the process will continue to help projects like my Social Wave project.

Social Wave and I owe a debt of gratitude to Craigslist for helping us attract some great members to build our foundation on, but in the course of reflecting upon how much it has helped my efforts, I came to challenge an idea I always held as fact. "Is Craigslist really a community?"

Although Social Wave is far behind where I had hoped it would be at this point, I have to admit that it has enjoyed some mild success. A few emails that I got recently were indirect signs that the public perception about Social Wave's presence as a community network had grown. They came in the form of complaints that were submitted like filed grievances.

I've been through this rite of passage once before as a student leader. As an undergraduate at Boston University, it took two years of very active involvement in campus life before some people stopped addressing me as a person and started addressing me as someone who might be able to do something with their grievances. I'm older and wiser now and it looks like I've managed to halve the amount of time that some people have decided to stop addressing me as another human being.

There are other parallels between what happened to me as a student leader in 1994 and what is happening to me as the developer and founder of a growing community network dedicated to making Silicon Valley a more familiar place to live. Unfortunately, it's also an unpleasant one. As a student leader, around the time that I stopped being a person to some people, I started losing friends. They started judging me far more critically than they had judged me when I was unknown, mostly harmless, and amusing in my drive. I stop getting away with having personal faults.

I'll need a team of psychologists to understand why I've had to go through the problem of friends becoming hypercritical and unforgiving once my work has begun to succeed, but my intent with this entry isn't to talk about me. It's to point out an unusual issue that probably faces almost any project that's powered by a personality.

The precursor to the Social Wave program was 100% me and when I started to convert that program into today's Social Wave, I made myself as anonymous as possible on the site. After three months of distancing myself from my creation, Social Wave was a mess. Nobody showed to events and nobody visited the website.

After I got some feedback from people who said they liked it better when I acted a "lot less corporate" in how I managed the site, I started putting my name on things again and engaged with people on the site as myself and not some anonymous admin. Things turned around, but now the problem is the opposite. To some people I am now synonymous with Social Wave and any personal judgement they make against me is automatically being applied to Social Wave.

In success as well as in failure, you find out who your friends are. I have no problem with these difficult revelations, but for the sake of my work, I'd rather be able to keep my illusions of camaderie intact until Social Wave has one or two more prominent personalities who can share the spotlight.

The lesson learned here is to make every effort possible to weave at least two or three high profile personalities into a community site while the site is still flying under the radar. This is generally accepted as no-brainer kind of advice under the rationale that you need some engaging people to "seed" the activity while things are slow, but I'm pointing out that having more people in the main spotlight is even more important when the site is succeeding. One person can make a site interesting without help if that person is driven enough, but one person alone cannot prevent perceptions about him from being translated into a general spite for the entire community.

Several of Social Wave's online groups have used other social and community networking type of sites to spread the word about their existence by cross posting events to those networks with a link back to their Social Wave content. We've had mixed results. On two sites (which will be unnamed), the result was somewhat hostile. The posts were deleted. Understandably, on these sites, the users may have perceived these posts by Social Wave group owners as spam and potential leaks to their network.

We also tried out Evite's public announcements feature and Craigslist's Activity Partners postings and their Events Calendar postings as a way of extending our membership and the reach of our network. Users were encouraged to cross-post to these two websites and provided with tools to make it easy to generate good looking content that they could just paste right into another site's online forms.

Evite was a complete non-factor every time we tried it. In one particularly interesting case, we advertised Social Wave's anniversary party on Evite's public events and got fewer than five page views in over three weeks. Meantime, we racked up over 50 RSVPs on our own site and wound up with 100+ people in attendance.

The most common postings to Craigslist were for a movie outings group and a volleyball group. Both experienced similar response patterns. When events were first cross-posted to Craigslist, we saw a spike in guest users and new member sign-ups. At the very beginning, we'd get between three and six new registered users a day from these cross-posts. After two weeks, the numbers would plummet down to 2 to 4 new users a week. After about a month, we might get one new member a week for a cross post.

We were very surprised at how quickly the Craigslist visitors tapered off in providing us with new members. The cross posts were still generating a lot of views, but no new members which suggests that either the visitors were already Social Wave registered users or that Craigslist users actually continued to be interested in the cross-posted events, but just didn't want to register. There has been some evidence that the latter is at least partially true. We've had people who signed up for new member accounts and listed Craigslist as the referring source months after we stopped cross-posting events to Craigslist.

I really did not expect to hit such a hard ceiling with Craigslist. There are so many people using that website and it seems to be the first and last word in community networking that I wasn't expecting to see the results of leveraging it plateau so quickly and dramatically.

When Google Base was announced, everyone immediately speculated about the future of eBay and Craigslist. The emergence of a noteworthy challenger to eBay or Craiglist was inevitable and I think the more meaningful question is what a jolt to the security of eBay and Craigslist is going to produce for the online world. We could be seeing the start of the post-bubble era's equivalent of the browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft. There's more to an ad than just the ability to have an ad and lots of ads, though admittedly critical mass is key. We may see accelerated innovation from eBay or Craiglist to keep their core value propositions from becoming commodotized.

If Google Base is what it appears to be from our limited knowledge of it, it stands to be potential paradigm shift in the viability of regionally based online communities because it could allow small marketplaces to become viable. I'm saying this under the assumption that they would eventually publish an API that would allow third-parties to leverage their classifieds service to produce value added services like a regionally based online classifieds service that's designed to serve a region, a city or even a neighborhood. Another possibility is that someone else will be the first to tap into a third-party network to widen their classifieds distribution channels.

Commerce is an integral part of any community online or off and the growth of a community is often planned side by side with the growth of its economy. In online communities, classified ads have long been suggested as a way of driving up the user base, but there are a couple of problems with this assumption. The first is that few organizations have the resources to sustain a viable online marketplace in the presence of long established heavyweights like eBay or Craigslist. The second is that using commerce to drive an online community often comes at the cost of having a real community. It tends to be an all or nothing affair. There aren't many online equivalents of real life small downtowns where a cozy blend of commerce and people create a core to develop a community around.

As the developer of Social Wave, I've received many requests and a lot of advice to put more attention into developing online ads, but with the limited resources and time that I have, there's just no way Social Wave would be able to sustain an online marketplace unless I made the marketplace the defining element of the way the site and its user interface was designed. Improved classifieds ads is one of our most common requests and to address this demand, I've been looking for a reliable classifieds brokerage service that would allow Social Wave to both publish and receive regionally based classifieds content without having to become a classifieds site itself. So far anything that resembles such a service has so far left me unimpressed.

Could Google Base or an innovation from eBay or Craigslist be the classifieds information backbone that a community focused site like Social Wave needs to produce the online equivalent of the small business downtown strip that helps make real communities possible?

For screenshots and more Speculation on Googlebase, check out the following blogs:
Google Blogoscope and New Google Blog.

CNN.com - Journal: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica - Dec 15, 2005

Is Encyclopedia Brittanica about to lose its shorts for the second time in a decade? A recent article in the Journal Nature suggests that this is certainly in the realm of possibility. The article compared scientific entries in Wikipedia against matching entries in Brittanica and found that Brittanica's advantage was minimal.

In the book, Blown to Bits, authors Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster write about how Brittanica mistakenly believed that their status as the gold standard of reference books would make them untouchable for years to come. This assumption would prove costly when the real reason for their sales was disrupted by technology. The average Brittanica customer wasn't buying their volumes because they had a keen understanding of Brittanica's quality standards. They were buying it out of a perceived need to provide an extensive reference source for their children.

Parental guilt about not providing enough for their children was a key part of the purchasing decision of many of Brittanica's customers and Microsoft Encarta negated their most powerful selling point. It wasn't because Encarta was a great product. It didn't even compare against Brittanica. It was actually a digital reprint of the laughable Funk & Wagnall's Encyclopedia on CD-ROM, but it provided enough of a resource to keep the fourth graders of the world pumping out one page history reports so that many parents didn't even get a chance to feel guilty.

Quite suddenly, Brittanica found itself in financial trouble and flat footed even before the greatest disruptive technology of the modern era would come into full bloom. We weren't even in the Internet age when this happened. This was the mid-nineties and it was the CD-ROM format rather than Microsoft or the Encarta product that dethroned Britannica. They learned the valuable lesson that availability can trump quality.

Not long later, Time-Warner would be guilty of the same arrogance and ignorance when America Online played the part of their Encarta by disrupting their power hold on the magazine industry. No respectable magazine or paper wanted to put their content online in those days, so AOL had to settle for second rate publishers who were willing to gamble. The results were similar. Once people had access to information, most don't seem to notice or care that it's not the best information they could have gotten. Most of the time you just need to know the basics and a lengthy volume could even be a hindrance.

I haven't been following the fortunes of Brittanica, but I assume that they figured out a way of maintaining their relevance even if they lost the power position they once held so tightly. These days, I barely hear their name and I only started hearing about them again since Wikipedia has been in the news. Apparently forgetting what their dismissal of Encarta brought them over a decade ago, Brittanica was on the airwaves on NPR a few weeks ago. A representative from the company was berating Wikipedia as a poor alternative of a reference source. Other publishers were also taking shots at Wikipedia.

Some of the criticisms thrown at Wikipedia recently are justified, especially in light of the John Seigenthaler as a phony Kennedy assasin scandal, but critics need to be careful about downplaying the potential of collaborative sources like Wikipedia. Anyone basing their criticisms on Wikipedia's methodology rather than the state of its overall quality needs to take a crash course in recent history. It may be ready to repeat itself even before it had a chance to be written and Brittanica could be one of the key victims again.

I hope I don't sound like I'm getting carried away because the study that compared Brittanica articles to Wikipedia was by no means an exhaustive study and nobody in their right mind will tell you that Wikipedia can even be compared to Brittanica when the entire range of subject matter is considered. The article in the Journal Nature is just one article and the ONLY one that I know of so far, but it certainly suggests that the methodology that produces the articles on Wikipedia may be more relevant than any publishing power wants to admit.

Wikipedia's success is no pop culture fluke. It has a long way to go, but if their methodology works, we may be a technological innovation or two away from unlocking the full potential of Wikipedia and other collaborative information sources.

Before I end this entry, I want to back away from all this praise I'm putting on Wikipedia and say that a lot of forces had to come together for Wikipedia to enjoy it's run of fame and infamy recently. Wikipedia did not invent online collaboration nor did they invent the wiki and five years from now, Wikipedia itself could be just a stepping stone to a more evolved open source encyclopedia.

The next big disruption in media may not be too far around the corner and current untouchables like reference sources and scholarly journals may want to take notice sooner rather than later.

The year is almost half over and I haven't had the time to make a blog entry yet. Sorry for the long absence. I've been insanely busy this year and still am, but I attended Online Community Camp 2006 a "mash up conference" a week ago that I felt I should write a little about since I had a rare opportunity to compare notes with a large number of people in the online community world.

The format of this one day conference used audience participation to define the day's agenda. The topics that would be discussed in nine sessions (split into three times of three concurrent sessions). The day started with introductions and then everyone had a chance to propose topics for the group to vote on. I was surprised when online/offline integration of online community spaces was a key area of interest.

This marks a sea change in general perception of online communities for me. There seems to be more and more people who are asking the question of how do we break from the mantra of using the Internet as a space for ideas to a space for real life where geography is as real a factor as gravity in the limits of possibility.

I attended the session for online/offline integration and left it a little disappointed, but I have to admit that I was probably expecting too much. It seemed very clear to me from the hesitant nature of the discussion that while there's more and more interest in information services that are hybrid integrations of online and offline services, there are few real success stories to learn from aside from online dating.

Aside from online dating, most of the suggestions for successful models of online/offline services were events & activity promotion type of services, but the group didn't think that an online service whose primary goal was to help people find out what they could be doing in person as a genuine model of a hybrid online/offline service.

For more than two years, I've been running and promoting Social Wave, a project that I engineered from the ground up to be a hybrid online/offline service. I should have had a lot to say and a lot of insight to share, but I came up mostly empty when someone asked if anyone could cite a true online/offline online community business model that wasn't an online dating site. Of course, such a question would seem almost staged as a way for me to introduce my project, but I held back because during the session, I came to realize the online/offline model of Social Wave had some short circuits that are tempering the successes we've had with it.

Some of these short circuits are well within our control and many of them will get addressed in the next release due out soon. The rest may be in the hands of fate. These negative factors don't just affect Social Wave, but any service aiming to be a true online/offline model of service. I've identified three key factors. The first is technological and the other two are social.

1. Insufficient Wi-Fi Access: Anyone who owns a cell phone will probably complain about spotty coverage and they're complaining about a technology that has already "arrived." Needless to say, the availability of public access Wi-Fi is nowhere near that of cell phone coverage. By definition, a hybrid online/offline service would be meant to be used as a part of daily life and your ideal online/offline user is not likely to be someone who spends daily life online all the time.


2. Online/Offline Hybrid Communities Are Different: The things that has amazed me the most with my adventures with Social Wave is how much harder it has been for me to get activity going on it. I've been in online communities since 1986 and I'm no stranger to the techniques for stimulating participation in an online forum, but everything that I've worked to success before in the past has failed to perform as expected.


3. A Different Digital Divide:
Arguably, the culture of self-promotion is an integral part of social technologies as they exist today. There are a lot of people who are fluent with using computers who don't have the kind of digital attitude of marketing yourself and your ideas. It may be because they simply don't get it or it might simply be because they don't have time or see the value in putting in the effort to create the kind of online profile that will get them, their organizations, or their work noticed. I notice this the most when I work with small businesses, almost all of which are deficient in marketing attitude.

The technological issue will probably take care of itself with due time, but it's going to be anyone's guess how we address the two social problems. The answers to them, I don't expect to see anytime soon, but I'm glad to see that people are starting to focus attention on bringing some of the virtual world back into the physical world.

I just returned from the ForumOne Online Community Unconference on June 6th, 2007 in Mountain View, CA at the History of Computing Museum. The feel of this year's conference was notably different from last years. First, the venue was a far better suited environment for this kind of conference. Attendance was also higher this year and there were more experienced practitioners among the attendees. There was also a more even split between people who were there for business and non-profit interests. Whereas last year's conference felt like a guerilla meet-up, this year's conference (aside from the unconventional Unconference format) had a more "conventional" feel to it (pun intended). Instead of a lot of philosophizing about how Web 2.0 will affect online communities, there were vendors and technology specialists there presenting specific Web 2.0 type platforms.

The day was divided into five breakout sessions, lunch, and an hour of what's called "speed-geek" presentations. It's basically speed dating and instead of talking about yourself, you court an audience of five or fewer people every few minutes with talk about your project, product, or work. I gave "speed-geeking" a try. It's the first time I've run into it and had no idea what to expect. SocialWave.net is not something that lends itself well to quick explanations because the discussion I need to have to explain what I'm doing starts with a sociological conversation, not a technological one. I'll write more about what I learned from speed-geeking Social Wave later.

One of the key concepts of the "Unconference" conference is that everyone has something to contribute and anyone can lead and everyone shares the responsibility of making a session productive. True to nature, the breakout sessions were divided into nine groups with each being started and moderated by the person who proposed the group. You didn't have to be an expert to propose and moderate a session, nor were you expected to be. If you wanted to propose a topic, you just had to get the discussion started. The sessions taken together as a whole was equal parts support group, focus group, seminar, and office meeting.

Online Community Camp 2007 being my second "Unconference," I can definitely say that it's not for everyone. I'd say that it's best suited for people who are not there to seek answers, but to seek ideas that they can use to form their own answers. Speaking for myself, as someone who has an extensive history and background in online communities, but has since become removed from the core of the movement, it was a day well spent getting familiar with the current industry lingo and the latest buzz.

An "Unconference" is sometimes a chaotic environment where it's impossible to know from what context different attendees are coming from. Different people had different ideas of what online community was, a sentiment echoed in one of the sessions I attended. Some attendees knew that they were only looking at a small slice of the pie. Some appeared to have difficulty imagining online community as anything other than blogging, chat, forums, and so forth. You have to take every suggestion with a grain of salt, but this sort of disconnect is to be expected. It happens in all industries and it should be no surprise encounter in a knowledge space like online communities where it's possible to separate a blog from a forum purely by the way a technology is used and how it's perceived.

Although the structural differences between a blog and a forum (or something else) is sometimes trivial, the practical consequences can be quite significant. Social dynamics can change markedly because of the ways people perceive how they're supposed to use a specific type of technology. For example, you're more likely to see someone continue to post in a blog even if there is no noticeable interest in what that person is writing. You rarely see anyone continue to post in a discussion forum if nobody replies back to his or her postings.

I wrote last year with a bit of personal exuberance that the online community industry was finally beginning to emerge as a mainstream player in the IT world. Similarly, the conference last year had a feel of people who were just happy to be there. If this year's Unconference is any reflection, the industry has matured tremendously in only one more year. The conversations that I had a chance to be in on this year were more directed, professional, and insightful. It was still a good time though. Howard Rheingold made an appearance wearing very fun clothes. It was a good time, but it was also time well spent if you prefer a day-long brainstorming session over extended slideshow presentations in darkened rooms.

ocu2007

This is actually old news, but the number of times that I heard people at the ForumOne Online Community Unconference refer to younger people as being more gifted in using technology reminded me that I hadn't blogged about a study I heard about in the news over two years ago.

In this Nielsen study, they found that teenagers were less successful at completing given tasks on a set of websites that they were asked to visit. It took them longer and they failed to complete the task more often than the parental group.

Teens were found to have poor reading skills, unsophisticated research strategies and a "dramatically" lower patience level, according to the study.

I didn't get my hands on the full study and I have no idea how rigorous its scientific design was, but nonetheless, it's a good foil for conversation. It doesn't take a psychologist to understand that a person's level of confidence does not have a direct correlation with their actual ability to perform a skill. I also remember another study that pitted kids vs. parents in performing tasks in Photoshop that came to the same conclusion as the Nielsen study mentioned above. If you know of which study I'm trying to recall, please comment or send me an email.

My socialwave.net project has given me a lot of anecdotal evidence to present to this discussion. Over the course of trying to bring social networking to the unconverted in my neighborhood and my region, I've given tutorials and demos to adults of all ages. The only people who were hopeless were the ones who had some other mental block over computers that were not related to their capacity to learn. One had decided that the Internet was evil and that I was a bad person for trying to get the unconverted to try it. Another was convinced that all of her personal data would instantly get siphoned up by criminals the second she plugged in her modem. Characters who exhibited these sorts of phobias did tend to be older, but I also met one person in her 20's who had a severe distrust of technology.

Last week on NPR's Marketplace radio program, a guest commentator gave a one minute opinion that Social Networking is going to grow and grow and be the next big technology. I believe he said it'll be the next "email." The specifics of what was said and who it was aren't important. As all the people who missed the fuss over MySpace have now become engrossed in their new Facebook lives, there is a growing sentiment that Social Networking will eventually be significant part of everyone's life.

By the way, your refrigerator will also be smart enough to realize that the RFID milk container in your refrigerator is running low and will either put another gallon on order for you or tell your PDA to remind you to pick some up without you clumsily trying to fat finger it in. So, what else is new? We've heard this before.

No, I'm not pooh poohing the importance and relevance of social networking technologies to the modern world as we know it. It definitely will grow. It certainly will have a significant impact on life as we know it--some of it will be good. Some of it won't. I draw the line on saying that it will be the next big thing--a killer app on the level of email.

By the way, the first time I heard that social networks were the next killer app was in 2003. Each year, it was a different champion that was supposed to lead us to the promised land. Each year, we've moved forward, but I'm not holding my breath for a promised land anytime soon for one reason. I'm not waiting for the right technology. I'm waiting for fatigue.

I've enjoyed online communities since 1986. I still enjoy them, but it's not the thrill it once was. It's gotten old hat. My enthusiasm for these many to many networking technologies have waned and risen again through the years, oftentimes coinciding with a new group of people I liked to "hang with" online, but it's no accident that I don't have a MySpace page and I'm not swept up by Facebook mania (BTW, please stop Super Poking me people. I get too many email notifications as it is).

We will not know the true extent of how pervasive social networking (as we know it) will be in the future until the majority of people out there say the same thing I say to myself whenever I see the latest thing: "I've seen this before somewhere. This one is better looking and has a lot more features, but it reminds me of something I used 10 years ago."

Enthusiasm drives the social networking craze of today. Another word that begins with the same letter will be just as important in driving the social networking industry of tomorrow. The word is "endurance" as in the endurance of the social network user to continue to keep in touch with everyone online when it is no longer the thing he or she is looking forward to every day. Anyone can get to feel small fame in a social network, but there comes a day when you tire of never getting any fan mail or you start to see answering fan mail as a responsibility rather than a thrill.

As the popularity of Yelp grows in the San Francisco Bay Area, I'm meeting a growing number of people who have a bit of bile for the popular reviews site that has become a social network as well. To a certain degree, it's to be expected that as your popularity grows, so will your notoriety, but the way you earn your notoriety can be more surprising than the fact that it exists.

I would have thought the big issue people had with Yelp would be whether the reviews were useful or not. That is certainly one of the issues, but it's not the one that's surprising to me. Some people seem to have an emotional love or hate relationship with Yelp. If these people were all business owners, then it would be understandable. If people slam your business then, "Yelp sucks." If you're getting Yelp love, then "you love Yelp!"

However, it's more complicated than that. Many of the people who are having an emotional reaction to Yelp are active online users. For one reason or another, they judge the site as either fun or obnoxious based on what its users are saying.

Now, Yelp is surely not the first site where people publish biased or ridiculously exaggerated reviews. Go surf some products on Amazon.com and you'll easily see some even more offensive reviews, especially if you dare browse books on social commentary or political issues, yet I don't see anyone holding the presence of those reviews against Amazon.com as a company. Plenty of websites are mostly blather, but peple don't seem to develop a reaction to that site's name.

I think part of the problem that Yelp faces is that it has succeeded just as much by being a social network as it has succeeded as a reviews site. This dual success is a blessing and a curse. The CEO of the defunct Judy's Book reviews site was reported to have admitted that one of the reasons why Yelp beat them was because Yelp was able to make its users feel more important. Leveraging social networking and other viral technologies as part of their growth strategy has worked terrifically for Yelp in the San Francisco Bay Area, but the social networking aspect may also be debasing the value of its reviews or the image of the company.

Yelp encourages you to be the first to review something, review often, and be entertaining when you review. This sometimes leads to shallow, exaggerated, or potentially fabricated reviews. Whether online or in RL, there are storytellers amongst us who won't let the truth get in the way of being entertaining. It's nothing new.

People naturally like to share who they are and tell their personal stories when they start to find affinity with a group of other people online. If the incidence of people interjecting irrelevant slice of my life details in Yelp reviews is any indication, there are a lot of people who have begun to feel a social connection to Yelp or a group of Yelpers. I'm also noticing that people are reviewing businesses based on their first impressions of a business. In a drive to have something to say to their audience, community, or whoever they feel they are communicating with, they go into stores, look around, and write a review based on the short experience they had there. This is not necessarily wrong, but they're just not reviews. They're posts.

These behaviors are the Yelp version of the age old problem of the off-topic post that sidetracks a discussion thread away from the intended purpose of the thread's starter. As people in an online community become more and more familiar with each other, the likelihood of them bringing up tangents and following tangents increase. For a traditional online community, this is a good sign even if it is a minor problem sometimes, but for any site like Yelp that's using social networking as a strategy to grow, it can be a viral strategy that causes unintended secondary infections.

The embellishments, personal stories and non-review reviews are good for the online community, but as a whole they don't make the reviews more worthwhile. A more strict editorial policy could help repair the damage, but would such policies end up alienating the very users responsible for them becoming the latest in the string of Silicon Valley dot-com darlings? A lot of reviews would surely get shot down. Some of the ones that would get deleted may even be good stimulants for more rational reviews as a community reaction. Would editorial control stiffle creativity and kill what makes the site so entertaining for a lot of people?

Reviews sites featuring community published opinions and locally based anything (outside of Craigslist) have had a troublesome history as sustainable businesses. Yelp is both and it looked like a game changer to me until I noticed recently that their most valuable assets were also liabilities.They still may end up being a game changer, but there are some problems with their formula that need to be fixed first. Going the way they're going now, I don't doubt that Yelp could become a profitable entity, I just don't see them as game changers.

By the way, earlier I said "perceived in-crowd" because it's ludicrous to lump all the dedicated Yelpers into a single social group. It's unfair, but it's a real problem nonetheless. Rightfully so or not, to a growing minority of people, "Yelper" is a social demographic that they have negative stereotypes about.

Poor Facebook. Everyone's piling on it this week in light of the report that their Beacon application will broadcast your online purchasing habits to your network of online friends and wilt that big wall of privacy that everyone seems to expect to own in front of their virtual party complexes. Even Syria is casting blame on Facebook for allowing Israeli intelligence to infiltrate their online social networks.

By the way, I'm being partially sarcastic. Also, for the record, I'm not a Facebook hater.

This whole Beacon incident will blow over, but it is another strike against Facebook that will make people think twice about hyping it as the future of social networking or identity on the Internet. You can get away with blunders like this when you're a garage shop operation still experimenting with novel and potentially risky ideas looking for a tech breakthrough, but when you've been rechristened as the Internet's $15 billion dollar gorilla before you've grown up, you may unpleasantly discover that half of your leash has suddenly been yanked away.

Breakthroughs are made by people and organizations that are allowed to experiment and exercise their creativity without boundaries. Facebook is not yet a breakthrough and their premature fame may ultimately stunt the real potential of the company.