"Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender."
A great article by Maciej over on the Pinboard blog.
I think the reason it’s so difficult (if not impossible) to easily define the nature of a social connection is that it’s just a product of its environment and circumstance. He compares the Facebook of today to the AOL of yesteryear. I think a better analogy is Yahoo!’s attempt to create a top-down, managed ontology of the Internet. The reason Google worked so well is that they realized that it isn’t useful to think about the web this way.
The structure of the web implicitly is the set of interconnections that defines it. I think our social web is the same, except that even the “links” are defined implicitly.
All of our social connections are defined by our actions.
How long until our devices are more aware of how we act and interact? That’ll be much more useful than the awkwardly-binary “friend”.
Source: blog.pinboard.in-
whltexbread liked this
-
texburgher liked this
-
soniaharris liked this
-
drcairns posted this
