Jyri
Engeström borrows from sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina's concept of
"object-centered sociality" to explain the successes of certain social
network communities and the failures of others to capture our imagination. He
proposes that many of the first generation social networking websites (the
previous version of Linked In is provided as an example) assumed incorrectly that
people would maintain interest for the social ties themselves.
Expanding
on his perceptive blog entry, one might argue that the more useful communities
provide an "object incentive", whether it be a job (a revamped Linked
In), photo (flickr), hookup (friendster, to some degree), event (tribe), destination (urls for del.icio.us; spaces for dodgeball) or even a creative
fix with the added incentive of cold cash (second life).
People
orient their online affiliations inline with their wants. I suppose that's a
wide spectrum - although for some people, their desire may simply be who-knows-who popularity. Pioneering
sites like friendster will find success with that limited audience, but the
rest of us, who are looking for a more focused fix, likely fall in the "last
login early 2003" category. To be fair, the allure of popularity can be
very lucrative for some demographics - for instance, South Korea's (Cyworld is a
commercial success with virtually every 20 something spending real currency to
buy "acorns" to fill their virtual rooms (mini room) on their
homepages (mini-hompies) with furniture and art.
Jyri
suggests that by identifying new objects that society finds useful, we can
predict other valuable social networks that full the social networking spectrum. In the spirit of this particular blog space, he
mentions spatial annotations, while describing the technological limitations
(limited GPS capable cameras) which will force us to wait awhile for services
that will provide useful spatial context. Similarly, Jyri comments that people
might find “proximity announcements” to be useful as NFC-esque (near field
communication) tags become more easily discoverable.
Credibility
may be another object which fills a void and around which communities form. For
instance, eBay allows people to rate sellers, while other sites rate medical
practitioners. Is street credibility truly the object which fills the void and
provides incentive for a social network, or is it a proxy to the final product
- the auctioned item or good health in the aforementioned examples?
