Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Thursday, March 06, 2003In The Future of Online Community, Jon Udell writes, "I'm convinced that destination sites and centralized message stores are not the future of online community...ad hoc assembly and loose coupling will increasingly characterize both social and technical architecture."
Our social networks are naturally characterized by a small set of strong ties and a relatively large number of weak ties. Technical infrastructures are beginning to become more aligned with that reality. The hard part is to let go of our misplaced belief that we can control our audience. Becoming a hub is not enough, one has to compete for attention every day. As blogs are showing us, becoming valuable as a hub is often a function of how generously one connects your audience with others. You've got to give to get: TANSTAAFL.
Like countless others, I've been intrigued by the potential for business-related, computer-mediated social networking. We saw web-based services such as SixDegrees and PlanetAll come and go. Notwithstanding the fact that I made at least one very significant business relationship (and good friend) through PlanetAll, the service quickly devolved from useful to useless. By far, the best executed centralized service to-date is Ryze.org. However, like Stuart Henshall, my initial enthusiasm for Ryze has subsided.
There are at least two subtle, but considerable, problems associated with centralized networking architectures. From a user's perspective, the value of a connection is extraordinarily difficult to predict, so unless our networking objectives are very clearly articulated, we tend to severely discount the value of an incremental connection. As a result, the cost in time and attention of creating and maintaining an online profile can be perceived as being relatively high. We see this in our own Pioneer Entrepreneurs discussions board, which includes a self-introductions forum. By far, they are the most frequently viewed posts on the board, but only a fraction of our members post. Secondly, centralized systems are vulnerable to abuse. No matter how sincere a service provider's privacy policy, and no matter how sophisticated its security technologies, neither are as fool proof as my decision to withhold my most personal (hence, most valuable) information.
In the final analysis, relationships are built through private conversation. The very visibility that services like Ryze.org provide seem to limit their ultimate utility. In the end, they may have to be satisfied with getting the conversation started.