Notes on the Building Social Applications Workshop

During LIFT I attended Stowe Boyd’s LIFT workshop on Building Social Applications (pdf here).

In 1999 Stowe Boyd started talking about Social Tools and since then he has been analyzing and evolving his view on how these tools will eventually change the world.

These are the key ideas on Social Tools that I brought from the workshop:

  • Social = Me First: people start using tools because they solve their needs in some way. It’s all about what each person’s passions.
  • The Buddylist Is The Center Of The Universe: everything is about connections with other people. Maintaining a buddy list is part of the process of using a social application.
  • Social Architecture is the structural representation of a social application and is composed by 3 functional domains: Me, Mine, and Market.
  • Profiles should be dynamic and represent a flow of information. Besides it should link to the world and not keep everything closed.
  • Reputation is important: Stowe’s calls it Swarmth - a measure of social network value based on the collective judgment of your peers
  • Discovery is a primary motivator and should be available as a built in capability.
  • Groupings are ad hoc assemblages of people with similar interests. These type of dynamic groups, group people around a topics (things, places, etc) on the fly without any obstacle to it’s creation. The fact that’s these are not pre-determined leads to much more creative (and inexpected) groupings.

It was a workshop full of value and interesting ideas, some of which I’ve been working on at Adegga.

If you’re looking for more information on this workshop, Stephanie Booth wrote a very good set of notes.

February 27, 2007 | Tags: , , , ,  

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