People Aggregator: Social Feng Shui Issues
We have all heard about Feng Shui, the ancient Chinese philosophy about spatial relations and the placement of buildings, furniture, plants, and other objects in such a way to allow the flow of energy to have the most beneficial effects. It can be considered an adjunct to the study of architecture or esthetics, and is sometimes called geomancy, which is a cool word. The name Feng Shui comes from the Mandarin words for wind and water. Leaving aside for the moment whether you buy into Feng Shui, consider the metaphor in social tools and the architectural elements within them.
I coined the term social architecture early in 2005 to try to establish some principles that govern the likely success or failure of social applications being created. So adding on the principle of Feng Shui seems logical, as well.
I took a look at Marc Canter's People Aggregator, and my first reaction ( apparently like Pete Cashmore's) was "Ouch! This makes my head hurt!" It's a surprisingly ugly interface, given how much time has gone into it, and very cluttered. PA seems to be a compendium of every possible thing you might want to thrown into a social networking solution: aggregation of Flickr and Del.icio.us content, personal and professional profiles, a complete messaging center, groups you can join, networks you can create, and the ability to upload all sorts of media and to create your own blog.
It's a real kitchen sink.
In Feng Shui terms, it's a cluttered house, with too many closets and cupboards, too many cul-de-sacs, stairways going nowhere, and no sense of a central design. In social architecture terms, it has put information ahead of people, and as a result, it feels more like a phone book or a catalog than a place.
How do social tools attract us? Usually they are focused on making some sort of communication between people easier that other alternatives: they are a better form of social glue. Users are implicitly, if not explicitly, comparing and contrasting the use of some new social tool with other means of accomplishing similar communications. For example, I chose to use instant messaging when it became avaialble because it had benefits when compared with email or telephone calls. And I find that Flickr, Upcoming.org, and Last.fm offer large benefits over alternative ways to share and communicate about photos, events, and music.
But People Aggregator fails the social glue test. There is no one thing that it does better: it's just a grab bag of things.
The spread of social tools is a function of how people begin to invite others in, to share in whatever activities the solution accelerates. Like in Upcoming.org, it is natural to invite contects to events, which leads to viral growth of the solution, as well as a growing network effect: the more people are in the network, the better it is for everyone.
But People Aggregator is unlikely to spread, because there is no obvious reason to join in the first place.
I applaud the longer term goals that Canter has espoused -- having an open platform for social identity that can be shared across a variety of social tools -- but People Aggregator does not look to me to be a viable social network app, because it is unfocused and does not appear to solve the social problems of some real-world community.
Expect the Orkut effect: a whole bunch of people with sign up to test it, make a bunch of "friends", write a single blog post, and then never return.
Software Feng Shui is just like that for buildings: things have to have a purpose, and their design should support that purpose elegantly. You can't simply have a generic structure that can be used as a home, a warehouse, or a barn. Social tools have to be organized around helping some specific kinds of people do something. It's fine to say that groups are self-organizing, and they can find out how to manage their own activities, but places are different: if you want an office building with a huge atrium and dozens of workplaces, you need to build with that as the goal, keeping the needs of that sort of community in mind. It's not like building an elementary school, or a cabin in the woods.
To prove the ideas that underlie his his long range vision, Canter should instead build a small number of extremely focused and interoperating social applications that leverage the identity platform he has devised, and drop this white elephant. It's just not going to take off, and it will detract from the bigger vision.
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