clay speaking to his "cult"
degines social software as software that supports group interaction - finally, someone prepared to define!
groups are their own worst enemy - humans are fundamentally individual but also fundamentally group immersive according to byann? psychologist from the 50s that identified groups need to find name
social stickiness - the party phenomena : the paradox of groups
interesting idea that sex talk is an important requirement for group identification
identification and vilification of external enemy really brings a group together
religious identification - find an icon: then worship together
group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself and keep it on focus
example - bbs called communitree - open access/open dialogue - they had too much openness as the environment was taken over by a group of high school students...therefore there wasn't enough structure in order to defend themselves from each other. the students "overrun" the environment and it ended up closing.
you can't separate the technology from the social
part ii -
multimodal discussions
ubiquity - all access lets you take some things for granted. software is now coming out that assumes online access and components.
clay's meetings all have at least bimodal access - ie. f2f and online
part iii -
what is it that makes a good long lived community
"it depends" :)
the normal experience is that they fail.
things that make good groups -
accept 3 things
-you cannot separate tech and social
-you can't program social issues into the technology - the group will asset its rights
-members are different from users -
all groups of any integratity has a constitution - "how we do it around here" is the least formal version of the constitution.
you need a handle that matters - ie some kind of handle that persists. you can change but you loose reputation with it.
reputation is not portable across situations - eg. someone can cheat on their spouse but not cheat at cards.
example of reputation - referral to join and that referrer is explicitly stated in your handle as their handle is appended to your handle.
cost for use - ease of use is wrong - the user of social software is the group not the individual. therefore ease of use should be for the group not for the individual.
spare the group from scale - scale alone kills