Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Thursday, April 03, 2003Matt Webb shares some insights regarding the nature and utility of social software:
Social software acknowledges that in the real world people like to work in groups of more than two, so this person-to-person versus person-to-unbounded group in email is missing a step...And therefore triads my be treated differently...but only as the first possible manifestation of few-to-few, which bleeds into other form/axioms with larger groups.
Facilitating ad hoc, on demand, purposeful small group conversations among our members and their associates is an objective that drives us. The conversational and creative dynamics of a 3 to 7 person group are, well, different. A friend of mine, Andrew Field, once told me that whenever he faced a particularly perplexing problem about his business in its early stages, he liked to talk to me and a mutual friend, Dee Russell. As Andrew explained, he could count on Dee and me to have significantly different perspectives, which allowed him to more quickly get a fix on a possible resolution. Allowing for easy creation of bounded relationships and conversational context seems to be key. By easy, I mean that both emerge in a naturalistic way, notwithstanding the mediation by technology.
