Building sites around social objects

Jyri Engeströmzengestrom.com

$580M

Why do so many social Web services fail?

Social network theory is good atrepresenting links between people

- But it doesnʼt explain what connects thoseparticular people and not others

Another tradition of theorizing offers anexplanation of why so many YASNS

ultimately fail

Pierre BourdieuSociologist1930-2002

Yrjö EngeströmActivity theorist

1948-

Bruno LatourActor-network theorist

1947-

Karin Knorr-CetinaSociologist

1944-

Lev VygotskyPsychologist

1896-1934

People donʼt just connect to each other.They connect through a shared object.

From John Thackara: “In the Bubble. Designing in a Complex World.” Used with permission.

From John Thackara: “In the Bubble. Designing in a Complex World.” Used with permission.

When a service fails to offer the usersa way to create new objects of sociality,

they turn the connecting itself into an object

Good servicesallow people to create social objects

that add value

Flickr did it to photosDel.icio.us did it to bookmarks

YouTube did it to video

5 Principles for building object-centered social sites:

1. Define your object

2. Define your verbs

3. Make the objects shareable

4. Turn invitations into gifts

5. Charge the publishers not the spectators

5. Are you charging the publishers or the spectators?

1. What is your object?

2. What are your verbs?

3. How can people share the objects?

4. What is the gift in the invitation?

Quick checklist:

What if all that brainpower was spent on the objects

Travel

Dopplr

On Dopplr the trip itself is the social object

Tripit automated the generation of this object

Travel - comparison

Music

Last. fm turns music tracks into social objects using their audio fingerprint

Soundcloud turns the waveform itself into a social object

Ebay & Amazon turned products into social objects

Thinglink turns the individual item into a social object

Our actions leave traces on the Web

- Some actions we type ourselves- Others are auto-generated

Social peripheral vision

No awareness of other peopleʼs intentions

=Inability to make plans

Sites that publish what people have been doing

Imagine a physical world where we have as much peripheral information at our disposal as in WoW

From Joi Ito http://joi.ito.com

Terminator 2

The Daemon

Marauderʼs map

People transmit updates, kind of like pulsars in space

At Jaiku it felt like we were hacking together a transmitter/receiver

Aggregation at massive scale

Pattern recognition

Detecting nodal points

What should I be aware of thatʼs happening around me?

Was what just happened significant to someone on the network?

What?

Who?

Where?

Just-in-time delivery

Discovery is becoming social

Pagerank “Facerank”?Who links to it? Social proximity (friends

in common)Physical proximity

Shared tasteShared objects

...

Identity OpenIDAuthorization OAuth

Interoperability OpenSocial

Own it, port it, share it

Ok.

1. What is your object?2. What are your verbs?

3. What are your nodal points?

Quick checklist :

Facebook in Realityhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrlSkU0TFLs