Last year I organized a symposium on the topic of Social Architecture with the help of a number of people, including David Weinberger, Mary Hodder, Kevin Marks, Kaliya Hamlin, JD Lasica, and others too numerous to mention. One of the first and on-going questions was “what is social architecture?”
I was trying to apply the term “social architecture” to what I perceived to be the complementary and mutually reinforcing spheres of three entities:
- those authors creating original writing (to the extent that anything is original),
- those active readers that increase the value and richness of the original writing by ‘gestures’ (such as tagging, bookmarking, linking, and just the act of traveling to the original pieces in the first place), and
- the ‘engines of meaning’ — the search solutions — that winnow sense from the gestural trails that active readers leave behind.
This ‘engines of meaning” is lifted from Bruce Sterling:
Ultimately no human brain, no planet full of human brains, can possibly catalog the dark, expanding ocean of data we spew. In a future of information auto-organized by folksonomy, we may not even have words for the kinds of sorting that will be going on; like mathematical proofs with 30,000 steps, they may be beyond comprehension. But they’ll enable searches that are vast and eerily powerful. We won’t be surfing with search engines any more. We’ll be trawling with engines of meaning.
At any rate, while I think my handwave at social architecture — the attempt to understand the lines of force in the new interlinked ecologies of the Internet — was evocative and ultimately useful, it was not enough to understand what is happening outside of the world of blogs. And since I have been spending more time grappling with the larger issues of Web 2.0 apps, I have come to rethink social architecture in a broader context.
A Revolution Among The Revolutionaries
I won’t attempt to recapitulate the arguments about Web 2.0 as a term of art: is it real, made up, useful, divisive? For the moment, let us grant the point that something at least innovative is happening out there, and sometimes that has been dubbed Web 2.0.
I want to pull a few of those threads of innovation out, and outline a model for thinking about these newish apps. And, yes, I believe that the model — like all models — is a lie, a hopeless overgeneralization, but what matters, in the final analysis, is its utility.
In particular, I have been trying to apply the model to the development of useful, innovative applications, particularly with regard to their business cases. Put another way, web app developers would like to figure out if their planned app is likely to make money, and here is a way to at least channel the thought and discussion around that question, and perhaps come up with practical answers to that question, or course corrections if the app seems off track.
An App is a Collection of Functions, Right? Wrong.
Many developers approach the design process for apps by defining a bunch of functions that the app will have to support, and then trying to implement them. Sounds simple. That can lead to an understanding of the app that is something like that in fig 1, below:
figure 1 Functional View
But looking at this simplistic strawman, there seems to be no handle that will help you decide is those functions are actually the right ones, or if in their entirety they actually do something useful. All that context — where the meat of the discussion with my web developing clients actually takes place — is hanging in space, outside of the tangible list of functions. And even the introduction of the newly crowned darling of web developers, “user experience”, is inadequate for the goal of predicting future business viability.
Consider a specific application’s ‘domain architecture’: for example, a wine review application, where the domain is the world of wine, and the domain schema is based on notions like vintage, grape, region, label, and so on. But is it enough to build an app that manipulates the data elements of a domain schema? We know that it is not.
What is missing is a critical and invisible dimension, which, when added to the mix, restructures the application’s context explicitly, and which ultimately answers the question: are these the right functions to implement?
Functionality Is Secondary: The Social Dimension
What was missing in the first figure is the social dimension, and by social I mean a three tier spectrum of social context, going from the individual, to social groups or networks, and last, to markets. As we take the same collection of functions and spread them out across the axis of this dimension, as shown in fig 2, we see that functions can be aggregated by the realm of the social dimension that they are intended to support.
figure 2 The Social Architecture
The function, F1, is now broken into three discrete parts, intended to serve different purposes in different contexts.
First Individuals, Then Communities
As an example, an individual, Jane, may go through the effort of signing up for the Last.fm music service because of the solitary desire to discover new music. However, the implementation of providing such recommendations is based on a social network of other users, whose musical tastes are analyzed, ultimately being aggregrated into ‘neighborhoods’ of likeminded music lovers. Jane is provided her ‘results’ through a highly socialized context: browsing through others’ music, listening to snippets, and reading their comments.
This model is at variance with the Web 1.0 approach to user experience where everything seemed to be a giant catalog, like Amazon, or online dating sites that would take your preferences — “brunette, athletic, sleazy” as Arnold Swartzenegger said in Total Recall — and would display long lists of database output — or in the Total Recall case, implant the right memories. Very sterile and socially empty.
Jane gains the added benefits of participation in the social network of music lovers supported by last.fm, and the network as a whole is augmented by Jane’s participation as well. After all, she is bringing her playlists into the network, too. She is not a parasite. And as with other social network based solutions, there are a host of secondary opportunities for actual involvement with people: Jane may directly ask specific people about music, not simply relying on the intermediation of the solution. The now-expected capabilities to allow users in social apps to interact, to comment on each other’s reveiws or profiles, and the possibilities of other “user generated content”, such as tags, links, ratings and reviews, these form the middle ground in the three tier social architecture. I have come to believe that these patterns of socialized community involvement will reappear in all applications that meet real-world needs.
Online Markets, and An Example: x:post
Just because an application may meet real of some well-defined constituency does not mean that it will be a blockbuster: the groups involved may be small, the need may be satisfied by alternatives, or the benefit, while real, may be so modest that it is difficult to charge anyone in the value chain any material amount of money. This is the realm of the third tier of the model: markets.
The exercise in this case is determining what is at the market’s core: what critical resources are being exchanged, and what is being made more liquid, in the economic sense, by the market.
figure 3 Three Tiers, Again
Here I am representing the three tiers graphically: users as circles, social networks that pull individuals into communities, and markets, whose dynamics support the buying and selling within those communities.
To explore the application of the markets viewpoint, consider an actual case study. I am a close friend and confidant to Greg Narain, CEO of SyncPeople. A few weeks ago, he was reviewing some of the features of the upcoming beta of the SyncPeople application, which provides comprehensive support for a richer, more social conference experience. [Full disclosure: I am an advisor to the company, and have a financial interest in its future. I am not providing an independent assessment of the company’s prospects. Results may vary. Wipe excess goo from hands after applying. If a rash develops, discontinue use.]
During the run down with Greg, one feature caught my attention. Greg was proposing a capability of the SyncPeople solution that would assist conference managers with getting bloggers to provide content that could be repurposed in conferennce blogs. They want to get content, but they want it to be cheap, and they don’t know where to find it. Greg was suggesting that SyncPeople, the company, would act as an intermediary between the bloggers and the conference managers, automating much of the aggregation and reblogging, as well as handling the financial transactions.
I suggested to Greg that we should explore the subject in more depth, because it seemed to me that this capability might satisfy needs of a much larger community: all sorts of people who would like to have high quality blog posts on all manner of topics at a modest price. And of course, the bloggers who would like to make a nickel for their sweat.
In the final analysis, I convinced Greg to consider breaking out this capability as a separate product, perhaps even as a distinct company, because of the size of the market involved. This is the origin of what is now being called x:post, which is going to be a revolutionary marketplace for writers and publishers to create and use, respectively, blog writing in exchange for publishing fees.
I will be able, soon, to register at x:post, create a profile, associate the feed from my blog, and establish my financial parameters. I am, let’s say, willing to let others republish my blog posts non-exclusively for $15 each, and for the exclusive rights (aside from my own use at my blog) for $50. I tag my posts extensively, perhaps even using tag ‘beacons’ — tags that have been recommended by eager buyers — so that posts can be easily found. x:post manages the aggregation and supports reblogging for publishers either through manual or automated means. The financial backoffice debitting and creditting of accounts is managed, again, by x:post.
I was struck by the opportunity for x:post to become a market maker: to make more liquid the critical resource desired by buyers by providing an agora where the negotiations and transactions can take place. And charge a small fee on every deal.
Of course, supporting the social dimension is part of it all. In particular, it is in the interests of all involved that good record-keeping underlie the reputation of all involved: whose posts are most widely read, and referenced? Which publishers pay most quickly?
Likewise, x:post could begin to offer related services to writers, such as insurance or legal services, or accounting assistance, as a direct consequence of their involvement in the market-maker role.
So, I hold up x:post as an example of a glimmering of an idea that was dragged through the social architecture model, and turned into a potentially viable, perhaps even great, company. I have attempted to quantify these opportunities, but we were satisfied because it seemed that what was envisioned made sense at all three tiers of the model:
- The individuals — the writers and the publishers — had well-defined, personal needs that would lead them to join the system.
- The social network — there is real difficulty for the buyers to connect with bloggers that might be willing to license their posts for money, and the reverse is perhaps even worse of a problem: hungry writers can’t find outlets.
- The market — there is no marketplace for blog content to be bid for or offered at a fixed price, even though there may be many potential buyers and sellers if such an agora existed. It there are indeed many small transactions that could be supported — perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands per year — its reasonable to imagine x:post could make serious bank, just from a small taste of each transaction. And if other fees are introduced, like eBays special placement and formatting fees, more revenue is possible
At any rate, I hope that the example at least motivates the dynamics of the model. [By the way, anyone interested in signing up for the x:post beta, which is a few weeks off, please send email to greg -AT syncpeople.com.]
The Revolution Will Be Socialized
So (and with a nod to the Last Poets) the revolution will be socialized!
- The social architecture I have handwaved at here will come to underlie all the successful applications of our day, and the earlier apps will rapidly adapt to this model or be eclipsed by other apps that do.
- In the near future, all ecommerce will be socialized: where a user’s transaction will feel as if it is taking place in the context of some social interaction — like reading a review at a blog about a camera, or a vacation — rather than the online catalog or classified experience supported by Amazon and eBay.
- All truly significant applications will span all three tiers of the social architecture model, and will demonstrate their worth directly by the creation of a market that brings buyers and sellers of some critical resource together in a new way.
As I tell entrepreneurs in my advisory capital work, if your business idea doesn’t create — or subvert — a market worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, why build it? There are so many underserved niches, so many walks of life, so many needs and wants, why build another social bookmarking tool, or another blog metrics system, or yet another RSS reader? But this approach allows you to gauge — at least conceptually — whether some new idea is worth the trouble, whether you will ever make a business from it, and if so, how.
