Building sites around social objects Jyri Engestrm zengestrom.com

$580M

Why do so many social Web services fail?

Social network theory is good at representing links between people - But it doesnt explain what connects those particular people and not others

Another tradition of theorizing offers an explanation of why so many YASNS ultimately fail Bruno Latour Yrj Engestrm Lev Vygotsky Pierre Bourdieu Karin Knorr-Cetina Actor-network theorist Activity theorist Psychologist Sociologist Sociologist 1947- 1948- 1896-1934 1930-2002 1944-

People dont just connect to each other. They connect through a shared object.

From John Thackara: In the Bubble. Designing in a Complex World. Used with permission.

From John Thackara: In the Bubble. Designing in a Complex World. Used with permission.

When a service fails to offer the users a way to create new objects of sociality, they turn the connecting itself into an object

Good services allow people to create social objects that add value

Flickr did it to photos Del.icio.us did it to bookmarks YouTube did it to video

5 Principles for building object-centered social sites:

1. Dene your object

2. Dene your verbs

3. Make the objects shareable

4. Turn invitations into gifts

5. Charge the publishers not the spectators

Quick checklist: 1. What is your object? 2. What are your verbs? 3. How can people share the objects? 4. What is the gift in the invitation? 5. Are you charging the publishers or the spectators?

What if all that brainpower was spent on the objects

Travel

On Dopplr the trip itself is the social object Dopplr

Tripit automated the generation of this object

Travel - comparison

Music Last. fm turns music tracks into social objects using their audio ngerprint

Soundcloud turns the waveform itself into a social object

Ebay & Amazon turned products into social objects

Thinglink turns the individual item into a social object

Our actions leave traces on the Web

- Some actions we type ourselves - Others are auto-generated

Social peripheral vision

No awareness of other peoples intentions = Inability to make plans

Sites that publish what people have been doing

Imagine a physical world where we have as much peripheral information at our disposal as in WoW From Joi Ito http://joi.ito.com

Terminator 2

The Daemon

Marauders map

People transmit updates, kind of like pulsars in space

At Jaiku it felt like we were hacking together a transmitter/receiver

Aggregation at massive scale

Pattern recognition

Detecting nodal points

What should I be aware of thats happening around me?

Was what just happened signicant to someone on the network?

What?

Who?

Where?

Just-in-time delivery

Discovery is becoming social

Pagerank Facerank? Who links to it? Social proximity (friends in common) Physical proximity Shared taste Shared objects ...

Own it, port it, share it Identity OpenID Authorization OAuth Interoperability OpenSocial

Ok.

Quick checklist : 1. What is your object? 2. What are your verbs? 3. What are your nodal points?

Facebook in Reality http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrlSkU0TFLs