social architecture: modeling the next generation

Social Architecture: Modeling the Next GenerationSean Madden

Webvisions 2007, Portland OR

Webvisions 2007 Social Architecture May 3rd, 2007

Social networks have revolutionized the way people

think about software, from both the business and consumer

perspective


Passion Centricvs.

Passion Agnostic


I Love @#&!


Shaun the Stylist


The Social Software Toolbox


Tagging


Tagging is reinventing information architecture as we know it


Tags create a highly-malleable cataloguing system

Tags communicate “meta data” to the masses

Tags are easy


Voting


“... I suspect in a matter of a few years a Web page without a dynamic ratings system attached

will trigger the same response that a Web page without hyperlinks triggers today”

Stephen B. Johnson Emergence


People understand voting

Voting promotes trust and believability

Voting enables the community to decide what it feels is important


Extension


Extension empowers your users

Extension increases stickiness

Extension establishes credibility and exhibits confidence


Customization


Customization in the social space represents an entirely new software paradigm


Customization allows for self-expression

Customization increases sense of ownership

Customization is a di!erentiator


All of these combine to form what are being called

self-organizing systems


Purposeful Self-Organization


Tagging is a conscious choice, it is work


Voting pushes towards the mean, it does not organize


In its current state, customization is too manual


Ironically, these tools detract from the primary goals of our systems


The next generation of social systems should organize information without inhibiting the acts

of creating and consuming


Ubiquitous Computing


Ubiquitous computing is a model of computing in which computer functions are integrated into everyday life, often in an invisible way


It is not only inevitable, it is already here


Mobile Phones


QR Codes


Locality


Aside from designing directly for it, we can learn from its basic principles


Calm Technology


Beautiful Seams


A point of presence becomes a field of presence


Enabling our networks to leverage ubiquitous computing will reduce the cognitive load required

to achieve the desired task


Emergence


An emergent system is one of great complexity that is created without oversight from a “master

designer” and comes about through agents following their own set of simple, local rules


Ants


More is di!erentIgnorance is usefulEncourage random encountersLook for patternsPay attention to your neighbors


Truly emergent organization can be hard to pin to human behavior


But we can start working towards it


Newsvine Groups


Pattern Matching / Behavior Recognition


The Genetic Algorithm


The outer boundaries of today’s systems are defined by our own intellectual limitations


Release the prioritization / creation of our back-end systems to the community in the same manner as we have released our IA through

tagging


Create a base set of rules and let the community grow /cultivate them through use


A crowd is at its wisest when it is:

Diverse, Independent,Decentralized, and Aggregated


Purposeful Self-Organization becomes...


Emergent Organization


It’s already here in some capacity


An emergent system is a less bounded system


It is time to take the next step forward and stop putting the hard problems o! to another day


Social Networks have limitless potential, but we need to work towards designing them that way


AcknowledgmentsSpecial Thanks ToJasmyn Madden, Nick Finck, Valerie Casey, Je! Veen, Tom Watson, Jina Bolton, Mykola Bilokonsky

Photo Credits

http://flickr.com/photos/74833619@N00/93440933/http://flickr.com/photos/boogah/151536846/http://flickr.com/photos/damgaard/449566520/http://flickr.com/photos/add/187811645/http://flickr.com/photos/catskillsgrrl/99502267/http://flickr.com/photos/whateverthing/128106986/

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