The Social Networking Landscape

Posted on November 2, 2005 by Dave Pollard

In preparation for one of my presentations in San Jose, I’ve been trying to define the boundaries of Social Networking, rather than simply (and less usefully) trying to define the term. The best way I found to do so is to list the various functionalities (applications) of Social Software by objective, rather than listing the tools themselves by type of content (as Judith Meskill does with her wonderful omnibus directory of current Social Software) or by audience. Most Social Software serves more than one function and has more than one objective, but that doesn’t invalidate this as a useful taxonomy for Social Networking — in fact, by deconstructing the functionality of various Social Software tools we might actually get some insight into what combinations of functionality, when well designed and integrated, make a good product.

What emerged from this effort is a ‘Landscape’ diagram of Social Networking, shown above. The eight major objectives are:

Finding people (discovering, rediscovering, or locating them)
Building directories, network maps and social networks
Inviting people to join your networks
Managing access to your networks (“permissioning”)
Connecting with people in your networks (using various media)
Managing relationships across media (e.g. making the jarring transition from e-mail or weblog-based relationships to voice-to-voice or face-to-face)
Collaborating with people in your networks, and
Content sharing with people in your networks (and other learning, knowledge-finding and knowledge-sharing functionalities that are arguably the domain of Knowledge Management rather than Social Networking)

Because they are so easy to build, there is a temptation to design Social Software to provide many Social Networking and Knowledge Management functions in a single tool. The consequence, often, is an over-engineered, unintuitive, overwhelming product. Let’s take a look at ten of the most successful tools to date, to see what critical functionality has made them so successful:

Weblogs: Content-Sharing/Filtering + Finding People (in your Communities of Interest) + Publishing/Subscribing + Forum. Weblogs provide context-rich knowledge plus a forum for reader conversations. As social software they are successful because (a) they are easy to set up and maintain, (b) thanks to Google, they attract a lot of attention, but they are also very valuable KM tools, so their social value is a bonus.
Wikis: Collaborating. They have succeeded because they’re the simplest imaginable asynchronous collaboration tool, and don’t mess that up by trying to be something more.
Del.icio.us: Content-Sharing/Filtering + Finding People (in your Communities of Interest) + Publishing/Subscribing + Forum. Same formula as blogging, but trading off less work for against a poorer-context relationship, by publishing your bookmarks instead of your articles.
Flickr: Content-Sharing/Filtering + Finding People (in your Communities of Interest) + Publishing/Subscribing + Forum. Just like Del.icio.us except the shared content is images instead of bookmarks.
DodgeBall: Finding People + Finding Where People Are Right Now. DodgeBall gets around the invasiveness of tracking other people (stalking) by putting a reverse spin on it: You tell DodgeBall where you are and it tells others in your network (current and desired associates, friends, and crushes) when you are nearby, so that, if they are so inclined, they can contact you to meet up.
BaseCamp: Collaborating + Messaging + Scheduling/Calendaring. An intuitive project management tool that makes contacting project team members using various media, with a minimum of other bells and whistles.
MySpace: Finding People + Messaging + Content-Sharing. Dead simple social networking tool, primarily for young people looking for friends & romantic interests and sharing music and photos.
FaceBook: Finding People. Focused on students in high schools and universities, this simple tool lets you establish networks within your current school and track people from former schools.
Insider Pages: Content-Sharing + Finding People. The content is reviews of companies by consumers. The idea is to take the Consumer Reports concept local, so that consumers can see what others think about local suppliers. Information not available elsewhere and probably only ever available peer-to-peer. Enormous potential here, especially if Google Maps is integrated. The challenge is getting people to take the time to volunteer their opinions. The way around the challenge is getting reviewers to sign up their friends and neighbours.
Mind-Mapping: Collaborating. Simply and quickly documents what’s being said and agreed to, graphically, in real time, so that participants in a conference/meeting/community can see and react to it immediately. Gives participants a complete ‘map’ of the conversation as soon as the conversation ends. The mind-map above was made using FreeMind.

Weblogs, and tools like Del.icio.us and Flickr both share and socially filter content: The critical Web 2.0 concept that as the content in Web 1.0 gets overwhelming, we need to filter what we look at, and there’s no better filter than the opinions of people we trust.

It’s not a coincidence that, except for wikis, BaseCamp and a few weblog tools, all of this Social Software is free. Because of this, it’s built an audience bottom-up. Also because of this, getting corporations of any size to adopt these powerful and effective tools is like pulling teeth.

Here are (still) the ten biggest problems with most existing Social Software tools:

Inflexible, tedious information architecture (“Why is entering this field mandatory?”)
Profile poverty (“This tells me absolutely nothing of value about this person”)
No separation between What I Have and What I Need personas (the information about you I care about depends on whether I am ‘buying’ or ‘selling’ — even classified ads ‘get’ this)
Lack of harvesting capability (“Why do I have to enter this again?”)
Populated just-in-case instead of canvassed just-in-time (“Oh, sorry, I no longer work there” and “Oops, sorry, I’m married now”)
The most needed people have the least time and motivation to participate
Over-engineered and unintuitive
Lack of scalability and resilience: Centralized instead of peer-to-peer (when it gets too big or goes down, you’re out of luck)
Socially awkward (“I’m not going to tell someone I’ve never met that!”)
Low signal-to-noise ratio because of dysfunctional information behaviours (blockages, disconnects, lack of trust) — these need to be accommodated by Social Software tools, instead of ignored

Once we get these problems solved, Social Networking is poised for tremendous growth, and because its value proposition is so compelling, might just be the application that attracts the 80% of the population still on the other side of the digital divide.

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10 Responses to The Social Networking Landscape

Jon Husband says:

November 2, 2005 at 19:56

Can’t help but grow … as these issues get picked off one by one.People using technology to do what people have always done, in a world full of fast-moving activities, will create and re-create, over and over again, what are the fundamental human social impulses and their resultant forms and activities.And maybe, just maybe, we’ll get smarter about it when we are asjked, and forced, to do it more often together, in interconnected ways.First we shape our structures, then our structures shape us .. and vice versa ?
Marty says:

November 2, 2005 at 23:22

I’ve been tracking my social network using a mind map as a km tool and a graphic display of the quality of connections. I can see who I have connected with and all those they’ve connected me to and vice versa.It started as a fun way to become familiar with the tool, but given mind map’s searchability AND that I can create/SEE links made for romance, business, friendship, advice etc. I get a powerful sense of who are the locksmiths to doors-upon-worlds unfolding.Remind me when we finally meet to show you. Looks like a map of all flights out of and into La Guardia. Mind maps need to be three dimensional (or more) to capture the intricacy/quality/patterns of the connections.
Emily says:

November 3, 2005 at 17:51

My favorite is tribe.net, which combines many of the features you discuss. In my opinion, it’s a far superior site to Friendster or MySpace.
Jo Murray says:

November 3, 2005 at 22:05

Hi there David, You may be interested to see that we are feeding your blog into our e-journal but pity we don’t get the great graphics in the feed. Must be something we can do to improve that. Just yesterday held our edition 7 launch with a live online panel discussion on social software, including Ulises from ideant and other Australians. Pity I didn’t realise earlier as I would’ve invited you to join us..but what great serendipity.Check out http://www.flexiblelearning.net.au/knowledgetree/edition07/html/cr_how_save_world_blog.htmland the mp3 of the live session athttp://ssielearning.tafensw.edu.au/Audio/AFLF_20051103_Knowledge_Tree_eJournal_Launch.mp3Cheers Jo MurrayKnowledge Tree editor
Bill Burcham says:

November 4, 2005 at 17:27

I want to pick up on this bit:”Because they are so easy to build, there is a temptation to design Social Software to provide many Social Networking and Knowledge Management functions in a single tool. The consequence, often, is an over-engineered, unintuitive, overwhelming product.”Every web application is an island and since many of the collaboration applications you mention are web applicatons, there is a natural tendency for each of these applications to undergo feature growth beyond what the application provider is able to sustain. Also, it seems that the prevailing wind among the providers is that the best way to monetize is to attempt to capture and keep the “eyeballs” and that adding more and more features is the way to do that. This is of course futile when taken to the extreme. This weak signal speaks to an alternative to the monolithic web application cum platform — an alternative future in which web applications work together, providing a market for many more small innovators as opposed to a choice of monopolies.
Dave Pollard says:

November 4, 2005 at 18:46

Thanks everyone. Bill, what you say is very important, and worthy of a post all by itself. I’ve been talking so much about World of Ends, I don’t know why it never occurred to me that software could also be atomized into hundreds of mini-apps that people could turn on and off to suit their preferences and needs.
Scott Allen says:

November 5, 2005 at 12:59

Where was all this six months ago? :-) We would have loved to include it in our book. Great work, Dave – this really helps get a cognitive handle on what social software actually does.A couple of things I’d like to make you aware of – we have our own map of the social software space, organized along a different taxonomy, and a wiki-based directory of online network / social software companies, which is by no means comprehensive, but more in-depth than any similar directories I know of. Plus, it’s a wiki, so we can hopefully grow it and keep it up-to-date over time (a far too daunting task for one or two people).
xian says:

November 13, 2005 at 17:21

Nice work (as usual) Dave, and a great survey of the topic. I have a few relatively minor quibbles. For example, the “why is entering this field mandatory” example is a matter of data model, not information architecture, strictly speaking. Also, what you call lack of harvesting capability I would call lock-in or lack of interoperability.I can tell you that the startups I’ve given advice to are being told not to try to own the user but to provide value to a distributed social-networking space.
Jim Stroud says:

November 21, 2005 at 18:12

This is scarily brilliant work. Good job!!!
Bob Weil says:

November 19, 2006 at 10:42

This is an excellent picture of the socnet landscape, even though it is a year old. I would extend it to more explicitly included UGM (user generated media), as you see in semi-structured mash-ups on sites like bannermoments.com (cancer patients / survivors / caregivers can create banners that will run on WebMD and other healthcare sites). Also notable is the Chevy Tahoe “create your own ad” debacle as an example of brand-related social networking gone awry (at least for Chevy).So, I would add ‘brand building” to the finding customers node, and UGM to the Learning/Finding/Sharing Knowledge node.If you’re so disposed, Dave, it would be great to see your year-heance insights integrated into an updated version of your original taxonomy.