social software again

Filed in archive Technology on May 23, 2004

I got a bit deeper into the topic of social software recently. It seems there something of a battle going on between the open networks Ryze, OpenBC, Orkut, Tribe and Friendster and LinkedIn and the only internally active such as VisiblePath and ContactNetworks on one side and Spoke and Zero Degrees.

The fear is that the social software model that essentially based on trust in giving away personal data might be hampered when Spoke and ZeroDegrees get their first corporate customers that crawl through the data in order to identify leads.

It's interesting enough that well-funded Spoke hasn't been able to add new customers but more importantly, only 25,000 of the 18 million �people in the network� have signed up, so most people in their network (99.8%) don�t even have a correct/approved profile.

Meanwhile I got more insight from Chris about the aim of Spoke's business model:

"We have worked extensively with Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, the pioneer in the study of weak ties and a key member of our advisory board, to figure out how we can deliver the most value to users of our network, and designed a system directed at this goal. The primacy of privacy as a key part of that value has been clear from the beginning, which is why we spend time and resources in building features that could limit the short-term growth of the network in favor of building long-term value. We don�t think that you should have to email all your friends and acquaintances to establish the fact that you already have a relationship. (We do of course encourage Spoke users to invite others to try the system, though, and allow them to do �contacts cleaning� if they wish.) We believe that declared ties are relevant, and to facilitate them, we allow creation of online profiles and an Inner Circle of only a few people who are particularly close to you."