The Architecture Of Cooperation

The world of business is being re-contoured by the new realities, like ubiquitous connectivity, genius phones, Air/iPad, and the rethinking of ‘offices’.

Alison Arieff, Rethinking the Office Workspace, Part Two

Herman Miller is still selling cubicles, to be sure, but can also read the writing on the wall (or on the dry-erase board, as the case may be). While they’re not quitting the desk and chair business anytime soon, the company has recognized that the work we do and the spaces we conduct it in have shifted radically — and we all need to adapt at every level. As Ben Watson, the executive creative director of Herman Miller, explains, “Ten years ago, 80 to 90 percent of an organization’s budget would be spent on individual workspaces. Now, it’s 65 to 70 percent and is scaling down to 50 percent real fast.”

Watson continues, “Today, 70 percent of work in North America happens with two or more people. It’s no longer about the individual worker. So we need to understand the way collaborative work happens, we need to create microenvironments — a mix of them, in fact, so you want to be at your office more than you want to be at home or at Starbucks.”

Herman Miller employs a proprietary technology that can track, on a smartphone, actual usage of existing office space. At the end of a determined period, software reveals to a company that, say, the boardroom was used for only eight hours one week, the CEO’s office sat idle for all but one day as she was traveling, and the conference rooms were all overbooked. This information allows for better planning but, as Watson stresses, “There’s no panacea. It’s more about diversity than one great new idea. You need a multitude of different work settings, you need very few boardrooms for 16. [We’re focusing on creating] products to create collaborative spaces.”

Campbell McKellar takes this line of thinking even further. She’s the founder of Loosecubes, a business predicated in part on the belief that the traditional office is on the path to extinction. The evidence is there to support her business plan: According to The Freelancers Union, there are 42 million freelancers and contract workers in the United States. In fact, by the end of the decade, it’s predicted that 40 percent of the U.S. workforce will be on contract. Already, over 60 percent of American companies allow their employees to work remotely some of the time. Implicit in this are changing expectations of job security and company loyalty but also a far greater amount of autonomy.

McKellar knows that tradeoff well. After a stint at Goldman Sachs (“The opposite of freedom. No working remotely. You don’t leave”), she hit on the idea for Loosecubes, sort of an Air BnB for desks, a little over a year ago. The company is now the world’s largest community marketplace for shared workspace, with almost 1,700 spaces in 350 cities and 47 countries around the globe.

Here’s how it works: you’re a freelancer, or a business traveler, or a small startup, and you’re tired of working in your basement. Loosecubes’ site will connect you to business owners who have an extra desk or conference room (or couch) to rent by the day or month, whichever is most convenient. Many companies even offer desks for free, so keen are they on the idea that collaboration breeds creativity and innovation.

A woman after my own heart, McKellar was inspired by hours spent at the library, and the varied work environments it allowed for. “One of the things that was so important was that I could change my work environment depending on what I needed to do,” she says. There was a tiny carrel for deep concentration, a light-filled room for reading, a lounge for socializing. So she was surprised that “when you leave college and enter the workforce where you’re expected to do a much broader group of tasks you’re expected to do them all in this one homogenous working environment. You have no control.”

As McKellar sees it, the people poised for success are those most capable of forging their own path. “The office is necessary but it’s up to the individual to choose their right environment,” she says. “Competitive advantage comes from individuals and it comes from individuals connected in some way. We meet some randomly who tell us about their life experience and then … who knows?”

McKellar is talking about the architecture of cooperation that underlies the new world of work.

The now old architecture of work was based on process-centric, collaborative work: I mean that all the people involved in some business process — for example, new customer acquisition for a consumer products company — would work exclusively on that process, and everyone’s work was defined by the process. In principle, each member of the consumer acquisition team would spend 100% of their time on that process, and all the members would be co-located (in cubicles or offices) so that the process could be as efficient as possible. Considerations of what would be best for the individual would be deemed irrelevant. Collaboration was the byword, and web tools were designed around symmetrical projects, where members derive their rights by being ‘invited’ — assigned — to project-based work contexts.

The new architecture of work is now emerging, after decades of transition. White collar work became knowledge work which has now become creative work. The transition from process to networks is not just a recasting, not just a different style of communication. The work is styled as information sharing through social relationships, and where ‘following’ takes the place of ‘invitation’. People coordinate efforts, but work on a wide variety of activities, which are not necessarily co-aligned with others’ work, and which are not necessarily even known in a general way. A new degree of privacy and autonomy animates cooperative work, in comparison to collaborative work. Individuals cooperating hand off information or take on tasks in a fashion that is like businesses cooperating: they see the benefit in cooperating, and don’t have to share a common core set of strategic goals to do so: they don’t need the alignment of goals that defines old style business employment.

Today’s work media tools support a spectrum from tight collaboration to loose cooperation, with broad architectural features, with the most conservative being those marketed to large corporations, in general. In these, the more social characteristics — like following and activity streams — sometimes seem like an afterthought, grafted onto an old school ‘knowledge work’ collaboration model of project contexts, tasks, and documents. The more liberal are built on activity streams and social connections (like following), and bottom-up contexts, like tag-based ‘groupings’ of people.

A grouping is, for example, all the folks that follow a particular tag within a hypothetical social app, like all the people in a music-oriented business that are following the ‘dubstep’ tag. It may seem to be equivalent to defining a group called ‘dubstep’ and inviting people to join it, and participate ‘there’. But the differences between the two are stark in practice. Anyone can follow the tag, no invitations are needed, and chance interaction is increased (so long as the tool allows members of the grouping to discover each other).

In a similar way, the world of freelancing and coworking is different in a similar way from these sorts of association in different flavors of social tools. The physical architecture of work space for free lancers is the reuse of other spaces — like coffee shops and living rooms — which are not purpose built like offices and cubicles. Coworking spaces can be like study halls, or hotel lobbies, or any of a dozen other physical motifs, repurposed.

Obviously, some groups of people are going to be collaborators: working exclusively on one thing with others that are similarly 100% committed. But this is increasingly a boundary case that fewer people will be defined by, and therefore, it will cease to be the dominant motif of physical and social architecture going forward.

And, by the way, libraries may be headed for a dramatic repurposing, too, as coworking spaces. As libraries begin to add digital books as replacements for the physical ones, they will require less space for the ‘stacks’. Communities might benefit by dedicating more space to low-cost coworking in their libraries, in order to keep them relevant in a new era, and not as just a pattern for coworking spaces to reuse.

Stowe Boyd: Building Social Applications

It is a day for presentations, it seems. Laurent Haug pinged me this morning, letting me know that the video of my presentation from the Lift conference in Geneva is up. He had some kind words to say about the presentation, Social = Me First, and the workshop that I had given there, Building Social Applications.

I thought that I had written a “Social= Me First” post, but I haven’t per se. Here’s one that touches on the theme.

I’ve uploaded the Social = Me First presentation:

Here’s the video:

The core takeaway:

People are online for discovery. It looks like its about things, but its not. They go to ‘places’, but really to find people. And below it all, they are involved with people to discover themselves.

This is not a high-minded philosophy pitch: it just practical. If you are trying to build social apps you have to understand that, even if the people using the apps think that they are merely trying to find new music, or better shoes, or the best extreme karaking trip in Hawaii.

As more of the web moves toward this model, more power moves to the edge. Users want control, they want to make the rules, choose their terms, friends, networks. Only the players that understand this will succeed. People will find meaning from relationship with others, not by membership in organizations or groups.

There was no video of the workshop, alas, but I have uploaded the presentation:

First Look: Critical Path’s Contact-Centric Messaging

I stumbled across a press release [pointer from Christopher at Social Infrastructure, a new voice] about Critical Path’s New Memova Messaging Solutions for Service Providers that are contact-centric, rather than messaging-centric:

[from the Press Release]

Critical Path’s contact-centric approach puts contacts — rather than the email or messaging application — at the center of the consumer experience. This makes messaging services easier to use, enables consumers to share content amongst their preferred community, and provides complete control over which messages they receive. Leveraging the proven Memova Messaging platform, Universal Contacts and Digital Life help service providers to not only enhance the consumer experience, but also deliver new revenue-generating, value-added services. For example:

— Universal Contacts — With the Universal Contacts solution,

consumers can create safe online communities and communicate

more easily from any device or application. The user’s contact

list is centrally stored on the service provider’s network

server and can be integrated with any or all of their

applications, including email, instant messaging, text

messaging, VoIP, etc. The centralized contact list is also

universally accessible from any device, including PCs, mobile

phones and PDAs. Address books in all applications/devices are

automatically synchronized whenever new contacts are added or

updated. In an effort to eliminate spam and/or provide greater

parental controls, integrated anti-abuse technology enables

users to allow or block senders who are not in their universal

contact list. Users can create closed, safe online communities

by setting up “white lists” and “black lists” that control who

can contact them via Internet or mobile messaging.

— Digital Life — With the Digital Life solution, consumers can

easily exchange photos, videos, music and other multimedia

content with members of their online community. The multimedia

content is stored on the service provider’s network server and

is tied to the user’s universal contact list. The contact list

denotes which members of the list have access to what content.

Subscribers can easily publish content to their personal

blogs, Web sites or RSS feeds and share it with their online

community through email and other mobile messaging

applications. The Digital Life solution allows service

providers to grow online communities by taking advantage of

the growing trends in user-generated content, while enabling

consumers to reap the benefits of high-speed Internet

connectivity through interaction with rich media.

“In the past when subscribers had just one device — a PC — and one form of Internet communication — email — it made sense for the email application to be at the heart of it all. Today, however, messaging services need to be centered around the people subscribers want to communicate with — not the application,” said Donald Dew, CTO, Critical Path. “Already, we’re working with leading service providers in the U.S., Spain and Switzerland to implement contact-centric solutions, helping them to address important issues, such as spam and security, while providing a seamless user experience and reducing infrastructure costs.”

This is an example of the Web 2.0 social architecture beginning to bleed into messaging architecture. People are the center of the universe, not functions like email. The buddylist will slowly emerge as the central metaphor for human interaction, and the various forms of interaction that connect us together will be seen as secondary variations on the themes of communication (email, IM), coordination (to dos, calendars, project planning), and collaboration (shared documents, project blogging).

I have had some hints from folks inside of AOL that the upcoming releases of what has been called AIMSpace might incorporate some of this sort of buddylist-centric architecting of the user experience, but they aren’t saying much, yet.

First Take: PageBites

Trying to create a new player in the crowded job marketplace, PageBites allows job seekers or employers to post a link to their existing bios and job descriptions, or to post them at PageBites.

I did a search for “AJAX” in jobs with 50 miles of Reston VA as a prep for the DC 2.0 State of Web 2.0 get-together tonight — see the results. There were several pages of jobs looking for people with AJAX experience in the area. As if.

I like the fusion of self-publishing and centralized search: another case of the edge taking over from the center. I would like to see a lot more attention applied to the social dimension, which I think is essential for growth into a community, and then into a marketplace.

[pointer from Steve Rubel]

Clay Shirky: Social Software is The Experimental Wing of Political Philosophy

Clay Shirky has nailed a manifesto on the door, here at the High Church of Technocracy at ETech. In a nutshell, his thesis is that we have a moral responsibility — those of us whose purpose is the development of social technologies — to explore the social contract between the users and owners of online interaction. More importantly, he calls us to a higher goal: to discover the most productive patterns for group self-moderation so that social tools can not only ‘work’ in a technological sense, but so that we can craft techniques that shape culture into positive channels. He argues that human society, as a whole, needs us to get this right, since we are in essence the experimental wing of political philosophy. His contention is that if we don’t get this right, meaning developing a Rosseau-like social contract where the rights of the individual are upheld, then we may be surrendering the future to Hobbesian tyrannies, both online and everywhere else.

I found it particularly funny that Clay used Dave Winer’s unilateral conversion of an once open mailing list into a centralized, moderated mailing list (which led to quite a howling by the members of the group) as the prototypical example of freedom devolving into tyranny.

Clay has asked us to become involved in the specification of the pattern language of moderation, which is the necessary precondition for deep understanding of the future social contract as realized in the pervasive social architecture now emerging.

To get involved, check out the wiki, which Clay says has reached the Alan Kay point — good enough to begin arguing about it — at http://social.itp.nyu.edu/shirky/wiki.

Rashmi Sinha on A social analysis of tagging

I stumbled on Rashmi Sinha’s blog and discovered a series of essays on tagging. I found A social analysis of tagging to be really insightful:

Tagging works because it strikes a balance between the individual and social. It serves the individual motive of remembering, and forms a ad-hoc social groups around it. If you are designing a tagging system you need to understand how it serves the individual and what sort of social formations it supports.

I will have to dig up the others.

Fred Stutzman on Leveraging the Future of Social Technology

A very interesting piece, pointed out by the author, Fred Stutzman, on Leveraging the Future of Social Technology.

Underlying all social technologies are certain fundamental aspects, and I’ve decided to enumerate them as the connection/description/attribution model. Put simply, the structural aspects of social relationships can be represented through connection, description and attribution; all social technologies enable at least one of these things, and better social technologies enable a mix of these. I’ll define the aspects of this model and provide examples.

• Connection: The most fundamental aspect of sociality. How we connect, how we converse, how we establish social relations. Imagine the telegraph, telephone, cellular phone, instant messenger.
• Description: How we enumerate our social relationships. In the real world, we enumerate our relationships through memberships, clubs, and the like. Social networking websites are a key example.
• Attribution: How we understand notions of power and authority in social relationships. A hugely affective part of social relationships; often thought of in terms of economy and social capital. Attribution exists in social systems, particularly in the “karmic” functions of virtual communities. Virtual approximations of real-world attribution are difficult, however, and current implementations do not streamline well with our lives.

The challenge of building social tools is the effortless integration of the underlying social model into the toolset. In email and telephony, the core action is communication. In a social networking website, the core actions are description and communication. In these cases, we see tools that are built on the social model.

Fred is more than a theoretician: his claimID project goes beta this Friday. Mark Hershberger has this to say about that.

The Coming Market Revolution

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:

1. those authors creating original writing (to the extent that anything is original),
   
   
2. 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
   
   
3. 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:

1. The individuals — the writers and the publishers — had well-defined, personal needs that would lead them to join the system.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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.

Starting From Scratch: Social Design Is Hard

I am smack in the middle of an experience I have thought about a lot over the past few years. I am getting the opportunity to work with an impassioned group of entrepreneurs who are trying to design a new social application — details omitted to protect my liabilities under NDA — and unlike my usual technology consulting, this is really, really early stage.

We have been talking about various well-known solutions that incorporate social elements — like friends, groups, collaborative filtering, tagging, and so on — and stargazing about what the hypothetical users will want and care about (we even flew in a few to get their insights and thoughts). And what I have realized, after the first day, is how hard this is. I mean, I have designed lots of software in the past, and used a lot of different approaches to doing it, but this is somehow more complex: exactly because it is all about the social aspect.

I feel that we don’t know enough about social tools to have the necessary design patterns defined to construct the social architecture that will surround all future successful social applications. Based on the events of the past day, I am offering a few — perhaps obvious and overgeneralized — observations:

• People Are The Living, Breathing, Beating Heart Of The Universe — Those folks that I know and form my social reality are the center of my universe. Therefore, activities involving interacting with them, learning about them, and perceiving the world through their eyes should be the centerpoint of social applications. I am strongly biased toward the instant messaging buddy list metaphor as a central motif around which social interaction can swirl, but it’s not essential, I guess. The motif of an address book can serve, I suppose, or the network models that underlie social networking apps, but seems to me less helpful than buddy list aggregation into groups.
• Artifacts Bind Us Together and Define Us — People create and leave a trail of their social activities, like creating blog posts, comments, tags, links, ratings, posting pictures, even the path that they have taken through a series of pages on a service. These artifacts are actually a more interesting way to characterize people than simply written stuff in a profile. More importantly, some of these artifacts — links to people and posts, ratings, testimonials, and so on — represent the social glue that links us, and is a reflection of emergent value in social networks. When dozens of people link to a book review I post in a hypothetical service, and rate it highly, they are — in essence — suggesting that my post matters, that it should be read, that others would find it helpful, and, by extension, that I, as the author, have made a contribution that is valued. This accretion of meaning through the tens of thousands of individual activities within a social application is larger than the ‘content’ generated: the whole is truly greater than the sum of the parts.
• Social Interaction Is Bottom Up, And So Is Everything Else — Features like tags, user defined groups, arbitrary user-defined relationships, and user defined categories make sense and work because social context is very personal and local, not universal and general. All fans of what I think of as downtempo music will not use that term, and even if they did, they may still not agree with my characterization of a specific album as downtempo. But when you surrender to the bottom-up nature of social applications, that ceases to matter. Over the long haul, those that care about downtempo-ish music will converge toward a more-or-less consistent use of the term, at least consistent enough for the term to be useful in an approximate sense. Which is really all we can hope for in a subjective universe, anyway.
• Social Stuff Absorbs and Trumps Domain Stuff — Imagine a social application dedicated to the love of wine (I’d join!). There is a natural information schema in the world of wine, based on things like country of origin, regions, vintners, vintage, kinds of grapes, and so on. That information structures an intuitive schema that we all adopt regarding wine. The same holds in other areas, like music, books, blogs, and nearly anything that people can obsess about. But you shouldn’t imagine that this domain schema should the primary axis for people’s interaction. That just leads to a giant catalog experience, which basically sucks. The primary axis of user interaction in social applications is human interaction — people communicating, or individual looking at what others say about their obsessions, or finding new potential friends based on shared obsessions, or finding new wines, books, or music based on the recommendations of friends. The natural schemas of the world should be leveraged in the social sphere, but should be subsumed by it. People will want to live in a coffeeshop, talking to people about books, not in the stacks at the library or the warehouse at Amazon.

Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I bet that all successful social applications will be based around the same, shared social architectural patterns, while ten thousand failed solutions will fall by the wayside by adopting some “innovative” take on social architecture that will, in the final analysis, miss the point. Like a social bookstore that forces us to stare, endlessly, at the stacks, and makes it hard to find out what your friends are reading, or to connect with other people that quote Tolstoy in their blogs. Even established realms like Amazon will have to rework their architecture to match the social architecture latent in our wiring, or they will get pushed aside by an upstart that cracks the social code.