6 posts tagged “community”
Twitter should track airport codes (e.g. SFO, JFK, etc.) to allow mutual followers to see when they're in the same city as one another. It'd be a lightweight Dopplr (which should be a feature, not a product, imho).
Use case: I land in San Francisco and twitter, "In San Francisco for a couple of days. Who wants beer? SFO" At the Twitter website, "SFO" will automatically be linked to a page that dynamically pulls a list of my friends who are also near SFO. The list would include people who have home cities near SFO and people who are in San Francisco that week and have twittered in a message with "SFO".
That would be super freakin' handy. And airport codes are perfect! They're unique, very short, ubiquitous, referenced everywhere, and provide the right level of location granularity for this sort of coordination.
Bonus points: let me send a message to Twitter that says "who SFO" and get a message back with names of friends currently in the area. More bonus points: let me send a message to Twitter that says "where SFO" to change my location without sending a message to my friends.
I think I just passed along a freakin' stellar idea, and would love to see the Twitter guys do it and get richer for my brilliance. ;-)
This is a half-baked thought that I am recording quickly. It deserves further consideration. If you have additional thoughts, I welcome them.
Just this past weekend, I read Clay Shirky's essay from 2003 titled "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy", and part way through I got to thinking about Facebook. Facebook really isn't social software in the way that a BBS or a forum is social software. At least it isn't any more.
When Facebook started out at Harvard, it probably was that sort of group software. There was this group of students, and they had certain things in common, and this software supported some of their activities. They could share their identities, discover classmates, and flirt. That's the kind of group that Shirky's essay seems to address.
And, perhaps, when it spread to other college campuses, it still worked in a similar way. Despite the fact that there were many, many users, the users were still relatively homogeneous, and the groups still had similar needs. Identity, discovery, and flirting are still important, but the way it gets done at Harvard is likely to be different than the way it gets done at the University of Florida. Maybe not when viewed at a distance, but certainly when you get up close (and that's where it matters). And, as soon as the students at Florida can contact the students at Harvard, that creates a new dynamic also.
So, now that Facebook is open to the entire web, there is even less common ground between the users. It's no longer a group, it's millions of individuals. Some of these users are still part of groups, but Facebook certainly isn't the group. So, Facebook can't really keep being software for a group. At its scale, it only works if it can successfully transform itself into a platform that helps serve many groups.
In this context, its shift towards expanded identity control and communication and platform approach to functionality development makes perfect sense. The Facebook developers recognize that they can't build all the software that's going to make all the different groups happy. What they seem to be building is the web that substitutes people for pages. Facebook appears to have the best organized connection functionality and user identity tools of any of the large social networking companies.
What is everyone going to do? Share their identities, discover others, and flirt, primarily. But the key for Facebook is that each different group of users will be able to do it however they like.
Facebook may not be able to pull this off – it will be very tricky to do this well – but it's important to recognize that this is a fundamentally different task than trying to create community.
Note: Thanks to Joel Spolsky for pointing me to Shirky's essay in the first place.
"These services elicit mixed feelings in the technology-savvy people who have been their early adopters. Fans say they are a good way to keep in touch with busy friends. But some users are starting to feel "too" connected, as they grapple with check-in messages at odd hours, higher cellphone bills and the need to tell acquaintances to stop announcing what they're having for dinner."
Link to the article at the WSJ if you want the full story.
From a post at The New York Times DealBook:
UBS analyst Ben Schachter wanted to know how Craigslist plans to maximize revenue. It doesn’t, Mr. Buckmaster replied (perhaps wondering how Mr. Schachter could possibly not already know this). “That definitely is not part of the equation,” he said, according to MediaPost. “It’s not part of the goal.”
How totally awesome. That's not a hard exchange for me to picture, as I have spent a fair bit of time seeking out both perspectives. What's particularly fun about this exchange is that Jim Buckmaster gets to have this conversation over and over and over, and even better, he now gets to explain his values from a position of success, sustainability, and safety. Bah to monetization. It's good to hear that some are still not focused on turning everything into money.Following the meeting, Mr. Schachter wrote a research note, flagged by Tech Trader Daily, which suggests that he still doesn’t quite get the concept of serving customers first, and worrying about revenues later, if at all (and nevermind profits). Craigslist, the analyst wrote, “does not fully monetize its traffic or services.”
Cameron invited Kelly and I to join him at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts last night for a special screening of the film "Crossing Arizona" (official site, trailer, imdb, and a review from Sundance). The film is a documentary that sets out to examine most of the major perspectives on illegal border crossings and immigration from Mexico to Arizona, and in that regard, the film is a success. The film is not a stylized, sensationalized, sweeping, Michael Moore-type editorial -- it is a sensitive and very human documentary that follows people, usually one by one, around southern Arizona as they do the things they do. Perhaps most importantly, the film does not seek to solve the problem or end the debate, but instead to offer perspective and encourage dialog. I encourage you all to see the film.
At the end of the film, one of the directors, the producer, and one of the people featured in the film, Mike Wilson of the Tohono O’odham Nation, all shared their time and fielded some questions from the audience. It was a very different sort of Wednesday evening for me, and I enjoyed the time to think about what is a complex, troubling and difficult issue.
