Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in Ticket Giveaway for O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns East

Re: Ticket Giveaway for O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns East

Ray — Sat, 31 May 2008 14:35:56 -0000

Great question! Easy to miss the subtlety -- not â€˜Which is your favorite platform?â€™ prompting a lot of â€˜I [heart] MySpace â€˜cuz . . .â€™ responses -- but â€˜which type?â€™ I do have a favorite type -- but since the thing I donâ€™t like about most social application platforms was the reason I started a company to offer the type I do like (more on that below), Iâ€™ll start my answer with a rancorous discourse -- OK, not too rancorous -- on my least favorite type.

MMOGs (or MMOs, or MMORPGs or MUDs). They all sound like good names for when you throw up into your mouth a little bit. (Sorry.) What irks me is the implication that thereâ€™s a world in the machine thatâ€™s a better place to be than the physical world. Really! It must be so, because a lot of people spend more waking hours in front of their computer living in alternate realities than doing physical things in the actual world. (Unfortunately for some, it may be true . . . a sad fact.)

That notion first occurred to me when I had kids. I think itâ€™s why we never bought a single console game. (OK, before you call the child-abuse hotline, they did get to play video games at friendsâ€™ houses . . . heck, we even broke down and got them GameBoys -- but only for vacation, kind of a bonus for long car and plane trips. Most of the time, in fact, they read. Books!)

Do you remember the first MUDs that pre-dated graphical programs? A screen full of text! I had friends who spent hours each night on them . . . and sometimes Friday night to Monday morning. Without showering, eating bowls of cereal for two days straight, in their underwear. So I knew there was a fascination (an addiction, really). But I never â€˜got themâ€™ (or they never got me). Though Iâ€™ve always been a computer geek, to me it was a cool tool, something of great utility -- more like a car. OK, a car I loved, worked on, accessorized, knew what was under the hood. Iâ€™ll never forget my first Mac . Kind of the way I feel about my iPhone . . .

But I digress. Back to social application as â€˜gateway to another world.â€™ The problem with platforms like MMOGs (and their recent incarnations, Second Life, Habbo, the virtual worlds -- and especially the WeeWorlds and other kid-targeted online equivalents of HFCS) is that their primary purpose is the online activity itself. Far from the notion of computer as utility, helping you â€˜organize your tasks to provide more free time,â€™ these social applications suck up your free time. (Facebook et al. seem like sinkholes for now . . . but Iâ€™ll reserve judgment!) Youâ€™ll definitely think harder about it if and when you have kids. Would you really want them spending most of the 16 hours theyâ€™re awake each day at a keyboard and screen? (Yeah, I -- and probably most of you reading this -- do, but then Iâ€™m running an internet start-up. Funny, neither of my kids opted for a tech career . . . probably because growing up, they saw how the evil machines robbed them of â€˜qualityâ€™ time with dad.)

So, my favorite type of social platform? Ah! Those that help you manage or organize your offline activity (again, that utility thing) -- or even better, that are devoted to offline activity. On the fringe of this might be, say, Flickr -- sure, it offers a time-saver in organizing photos, but it also gets bonus points for showing people in the real world doing real things (all you Flickr trolls, go hang out at YouTube). Then thereâ€™s Twitter, which I, like many, thought was a ridiculous â€˜get-a-lifeâ€™ time waster -- until I got it. I donâ€™t tweet much (some hyper-twitterers give cause for concern). But thereâ€™s something encouraging and oddly motivating about seeing people doing stuff. Physical things. And taking a moment between activities to tell you about it doesnâ€™t seem so bad.

Still, more to my liking are sites like Sportsvite (for organizing pick-up games), and the competition-makers, like IBeatYou. Now weâ€™re getting somewhere! Social applications need to encourage true social behavior -- interaction among people in the real world -- we need more of that, and less screen-love. Which is exactly why I started CHALLENJ (not launched yet . . . stay tuned!) -- to contribute something online that would encourage more activity offline.

Now stop reading, go outside and play with your friends!

Re: Ticket Giveaway for O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns East

Umut — Thu, 22 May 2008 16:39:02 -0000

Classic but Facebook for me. Because everyone is there.

Re: Ticket Giveaway for O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns East

Michael Daehn — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:12:18 -0000

My favorite is the post due to it's ability to transcend time. It is applicable in many social platforms for example:

-Comments
-Tweets
-Walls
-Forums
-Online Classroom discussions

Because people can interact on their schedule they can participate in conversations regardless of what time it is in their geographic location.

The ability to post has allowed me to interact with, teach and be taught by people around the globe. It has also opened the door to folks that would not normally be able to participate in these conversations.

The asynchronous nature of leaving posts has given power to social application platforms.

Re: Ticket Giveaway for O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns East

mike mcgrath — Wed, 21 May 2008 23:54:04 -0000

I've got to put my vote in for Flickr. Because I started my foray into social networking through photography with Flickr it has a fond place in my heart. I'm in touch with friends from all over the world and the immediacy of photography spares them the effort of crafting prose. Just give me a photo and I'm seeing the world through your eyes.

A second reason I'm backing Flickr on this is that I was cleaning out some old file cabinets a couple of years ago. I unearthed Caterina Fake's resume. She sent it to me looking for $12/hr photoshop work at my web agency. Didn't hire her...My mistake!

Re: Ticket Giveaway for O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns East

Laura Hale — Wed, 21 May 2008 22:15:45 -0000

My favorite social application is LiveJournal. It offers a number of features that are specific to my interest and needs:

1. Easy to promote my projects in a cost effective (re:Free) way where I can improve my search engine optimization and gain a fair amount of traffic if I post to the right community. Both of these are things that MySpace, FaceBook, bebo, orkut and twitter don't really offer.

2. It caters to my interests. I can find CSI news, science fiction authors, communities for home brew and have that information appear along side other content or filter it out to chose what streams I want. I don't have to go to specifically taylored communities like other social networking sites and tools.

3. The ability to make my LiveJournal friends list into an RSS feed reader. Mashable, blogherald, I can add those RSS feeds to it, filter them and chose to read them how I want. I can check them all on one page.

4. Customization. That's one of the things I don't like about FaceBook and some new applications I've seen. I can't customize the look and feel of that space, nor really change things on MySpace. (Or I'm stuck viewing other people's customized pages to read their content in a way that doesn't appeal to me.) LiveJournal allows that customization for the look and it can carry over to other people's profiles.

5. Integrated subscription service. If there is a good post, I can subscribe to it and have those comments sent to my e-mail.

6. Third party search tools. I spend a lot of time looking around communities on Quizilla, FaceBook, orkut, MySpace. They have a lot of interactive content but the top level message boards aren't searchable in a way that means I can track references to my own projects. (MySpace picks up on paid ads in their searches which means I'm finding content that I may not want.) LJSearch's third party application, the presence of many feeds on various RSS search aggregators thus makes it appealing and easy to track my interests.

7. Finding like minded people and then being able to access their relevant content. For FaceBook, I have to deal with a lot of non-relevant content that isn't easy to filter out. (I don't want to read about who you added to your friends.) For Wordpress, you can read other people's content but it doesn't always feel as natural and fluid as LiveJournal makes its.

8. LJ-Toys, a tracking service for LiveJournal. Sort of like feedburner but it makes it easy to really see who is reading you and how many times.

9. Willingness of LiveJournal/SixApart/SUP to help integrate new technologies into posting. YouTube, Flickr, you get a popular application and LiveJournal makes sure that you can have it integrated on your site.

10. Limiting your readership through FLocks and filter. It is nice to have a feeling of control over who reads your content.

There are more reasons why I love this social networking platform. Those reasons and the ones listed above are why I continue to stick with it, even as things have changed.

Re: Ticket Giveaway for O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns East

tamar — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:47:43 -0000

Justin, we often coordinate ticket giveaways with O'Reilly as part of our media sponsorship agreement. It's definitely not due to lack of interest, because if that was the case, we'd just be giving you a larger discount :)

Re: Ticket Giveaway for O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns East

Justin Stauffer — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:44:46 -0000

Are any readers of this blog going to be attending this? Kindly raise your hand.

Should we be concerned that mashable is giving away discounts to this event? Hopefully it's not because of lack of interest.

Re: Ticket Giveaway for O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns East

Jesper — Wed, 21 May 2008 20:13:18 -0000

My favorite social application platform is beer.

Beer is a highly social interactive platform that brings users together in real space, and facilitates social interactions by lowering the barriers to discussions with new individuals by reducing fears of rejection and increasing the probability of forgetting bad social interactions afterwards.

Unlike other social application platforms, beer has shown itself to be highly scalable, and resistant to catastrophic failure. Beer crashes are quickly replaced by a redundant bottle of beer, and can be served in parallel, if one so wishes.

Beer is also available from a distributed set of vendors, meaning Marc Cantor can relax about Beer's ultimate scalability in the mainstream. These vendors compete through open standard of the 12 ounch bottle and feature single sign "driver's license" based authentication protocol. What's not to like.

But it beer a social application platform?

Of course, beer has created a large number of viral applications built around beer, ranging from pub trivia, to beer pong to flip cup. These applications are wide spread, and played in public and private forums.

Playing these with beer, is beneficial for both the application provider, as beer makes these games more fun, but also beer platform, because beer is consumed by these games.

I myself enjoy all forms of beer games, even more so than that scrabulous thing. I've blocked all invitations for flip cup, however. That game seems spammy.