theregoesdave

This afternoon I had a chance to listen to a talk by Thomas Vander Wal, the innovator that coined the term folksonomy circa 1994. He speaks on social media and two of the key factors that he looks at are folksonomy and circles of sociability and does workshops diving in depth on a particular service or platforms. Thomas does a really good job of breaking down the components of any social media site, whether a social network, bookmarking service or social news. The most fundamental concept of social media is what he calls ‘object oriented sociality.’ That is the concept that media sites are really about people and some sort of object whether it’s a link, a profile or other media.

One of the exercises that he’ll do in evaluating a social service is look at the difference user perspectives and levels of engagement. It’s important to evaluate your service from the perspective of the casual user and the contributor, the newbie and the third-party developer to see how usable your service is to these different communities. The level of engagement comes down to turning newbies into casual users and casual users into contributors.

Another valuable concept that social sites are wrestling with today is what he calls circles of sociality. Most sites take a one size fits all approach to defining a friend, when in reality that is the furthest thing from the truth. In fact, we may feel more or less inclined to share media or information with different strata of friend. To make this problem even more complex, we might only be interested in listening or receiving things about specific topics from the various layers of friends or a particular friend. The services out there today primarily allow you to define what you listen to by person or topic, and do a poor job of filtering across both.

In my mind, the most valuable thing from his talk actually came as an insight on the industry at large. He talked about the things that social networks do well such as identity, presence and reputation which lead to conversation. Tagging sites are very object oriented in the social sense, but they do a poor job of building the presence and reputation aspects of a site. These fundamentals executed together are how a site can build true collaboration.

The lack of collaboration on social media sites speaks volumes of the maturity and potential of the social media industry. One of the core reasons that this is challenging is because it’s difficult to discern and even harder to aggregate the actual goals of social media users. Often the goal of tagging is very selfish. Tagging something allows us to find it again, but the aggregation of tags helps to find a common definition and make information easier to access for everyone.

So how do we aggregate intent and encourage users to collaborate to a particular goal? To do so we need a framework with all of the basic components that we’ve been talking about, that’s also portable, usable and sensitive to privacy and social circles. That’s really a problem worth working on and somehow makes Facebook and Myspace look just a little less daunting.

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