Zengestrom (a bloody great blog discovery via Stephen!) has some fascinating thoughts about why social networking services just haven’t kicked off.
I wrote a few paragraphs on this in Centered Communication and still feel like there’s some validity in them in that without effective consistent and subvertable presentation (a la blogs) there’s little networking that can happen… but one thing I missed out on / brushed over was that effective networks do form around particular ‘objects’ (be they causes, hobbies or material items), such as Wikipedia & the plane stuff I was talking about the other day.
In fact, we can represent ourselves as well as we want, but without objects (edutech, beliefs, conferences etc.) there isn’t really anything to form around.
For example, being a FOAF is not an object, that’s just a relationship, it’s not a network. Sharing the same interests / job / neighbourhood / concerns / pub… that is a network though.
To quote from the article:
“The social networking services that really work are the ones that are built around objects. And, in my experience, their developers intuitively ‘get’ the object-centered sociality way of thinking about social life.”
I’m having a mind expanding morning!!!
[...] And here’s where I stick my neck out and say that I think EDUCAUSE and Eduforge don’t really get it. Importantly this is in a way that I have frequently have not got it too so don’t think for one minute that I’m saying that there’s a problem there… just that they’re barking up the wrong community tree. These organisations / associations can, of course, have communities but I don’t think that they should be ones that are developed around blogs. They have important object orientated sociality perspectives to offer and could support great groups of people getting together and talking but blogs, that’s too big a call. [...]