Strategies for Social Network Toolmaking
danah says:
When you are focused on building social networks just to build them, you make very different design decisions than when you are trying to design a tool the utilizes social networks as a concept employed to solve a task problem.
This is the point I was trying to make about LOAF: it utilizes existing networks to (attempt to) solve the problem of spam, rather than “building” a network just for the hell of it ala Friendster, Orkut, etc.
On the other hand, I think danah’s blanket condemnation of the solution-seeking approach to innovation (inventing something first, then looking for solutions it can provide) is a bit off. It would be ideal if we could always work from problems to solutions, but for whatever reasons, humans don’t seem to innovate well that way. The Economist has an interesting article about this. A study of where innovative ideas come from and how their origins determined the success of the ensuing invention showed that solution-seeking was a more successful strategy than need-spotting (actively looking for answers to known problems). It seems that we make hammers and look for nails because it’s a strategy that has proven successful.
On the other hand, the study showed that most successful innovations result from serendipitous random events. This is interesting, and something that I think ties back to the idea of what social networking tools might be good for: increasing the probability of serendipitous encounters with potentially significant consequences. Imagine a tool which didn’t present you with social conundrums caused by people trying to actively utilize the network but promised to passively create opportunities for finding out that you’re sitting in a cafe with a good friend’s friend, halfway around the world from home. Sounds pretty good to me.
March 22nd, 2004 at 5:35 pm
I definitely agree that some of the coolest inventions emerge outside of the problem solving approach. I guess my concern is that when the focus is to create a cool tool that affects people, there’s little consideration for what it does to those people. Cool tools for sociability are going to result in some pretty unexpected behaviors and consequences, not necessarily well-designed for future problem solving scenarios.
March 23rd, 2004 at 7:54 am
While I agree with zephoria’s comment above, I also don’t think that there is a perfect way to catch all potential unexpected behaviours and consequences in the design phase of tools like social networking sites.
I’m sure that with the amount of money being poured into these ventures, there is a large amount of thinking going into issues like these, and also probably talked about over a lot longer span of time than it has been blogged about. I think that inevitably, there’s a point where software companies just have to stop trying to predict the future, go ahead and do it, and see what falls out.
I’m guessing that the results are not all that suprising to the designers of tribe, friendster, myspace, etc., with the occasional “whoops…we didn’t think *that* would happen” moments, which then get logged as “bugs”. And I’ll go even one step further to guess that if the unexpected behaviour/consequences of using SN sites were to alienate or otherwise turn the user *away* from those sites…those are the issues that VC funded companies think of first, not last.