Products Are People Too
I found the conversations about social software in 2004 – driven primarily by Clay Shirky – incredibly inspirational. In the excitement of making web applications, we’d forgotten that people aren’t computers. We’d forgotten that, well,
- Groups behave different at different sizes and at different points in their lifecycle. We heard about Robin Dunbar’s Magic Numbers yesterday—groups of 8 are very different from groups of 150, or a thousand. A new group and a middle-aged group, maybe a mailing list, have very different qualities too [A note of caution: I think Dunbar’s number and research has been taken on more prescriptively than ever intended. In my view, the research is a useful spotlight, but shouldn’t be used as a foundation as individual situations are always more complicated than the average.]
- There is a variety of individuals, of relationships, and discussions, with different qualities and capacities, that need to be designed for differently. There is a lot of work into the different types of game players you get.
- It doesn’t make sense to rationally model people. Psychology means that things like politeness or trust are incredibly important
And rather than defining a computer system where people use a website as if it’s a tool, the reality of the universe includes additional mechanisms which are as real as levers or sitemaps, like:
- Identity, persistent or not persistent
- Presence, knowing somebody is nearby, at public, social, personal and intimate distances
- Relationships—well, we know how important friendships and social networks are
- Conversations let people learn about one another subtly and build trust
- Groups have weight
- Reputation exists for people as really as colour does
- Sharing and gifting are how people build a lot of the above
[The above is repeated from our 2004 work on social software.]
And all of these are fine-grained and deserve their own discussions…