Social network capitalism

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?

Comments

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