Elements of Social Software Build Order

This is related to the Elements of Social Software, which shows the relationship (those tightly related to identity are blue while the others are identity and object focussed). The elements are not a checklist but a logical order, which can stop at any point moving upward. But, if a service is offering something toward the top and not accounting for the all the elements below it, there is likely a good reason the service is not working optimally.

The most difficult bit in this to account for in any digital system is reputation.

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alexdecarvalho says:

At which point does "collective" kick in? From Actions upward?

Presence is low in the stack, but services can be successful without it. For instance, there's no active notion of presence on Flickr and it must be inferred from recency of latest posted picture or other user activity (comments, favorites, etc).

Relationship and Reputation may be closely related to each other, since familiarity with someone signals the relevance/bias/credence of the rating.

This is a great chart, thank you.
Posted 16 months ago. ( permalink )

vanderwal says:

Alex, I have actions before sharing, as one hindrance I am regularly running across is people like the idea of taking actions (favoriting, tagging, annotating, etc.), but they are not so sure about sharing and many times they want to know who things are shared with before they share (private, selective, collective, & mob spheres of sociality). Many people are more comfortable sharing selectively (with a known group or invites) than they are with all members of a service. So collective compes with after action and sharing.

Presence is as simple as an account in the system (an ID). In systems that have selective sociality, knowing who is behind an ID is important (is this the John Smith I think it is?). It also can have the shared actions of the person that are related to many objects or just profile info.

I agree with reputation and relationship, but looking at how people make decision on connecting stating there is some relationship (publicly or privately) they are often basing it on the reputation they have of the person in their mind (is this person someone I want to follow on a subject or more broadly, are they somebody I want to share things with and how broadly). The ability to see a collective view of contributions in a system may be one means of a person's understanding of the reputation they are applying, or if they can discern the person is someone they know from another context (personal face to face interaction or familiarity from another service or digital context (e-mail)) they may combine the reputation.

Systems often can see relationship and interactions in a system and surmise reputation that one person may attributed, but it does not seem like anybody has put this together in a digital context yet, which will be really difficult.
Posted 16 months ago. ( permalink )

xian says:

Thomas, is this one of the diagrams you were hoping to show me at SxSW? It's a pretty compelling stack. As you know I've been trying to visualize and relate a lot of these concepts and this is a strong argument for a particular way of doing it. Thanks!
Posted 16 months ago. ( permalink )

vanderwal says:

Xian, this is one, but it leads up to some others that really start making things jell better. They start building on the edges of a conceptual framework to place design patterns and provide a much better understanding of interaction that is needed at various stages of use.
Posted 16 months ago. ( permalink )

alexdecarvalho says:

Thanks for the clarification, Thomas, and congrats for this great slide.

Regarding presence, I read it to mean as in an Instant Messaging sense, where you see whether the person is online or not. For example, if you switch on GTalk in Orkut, you can tell whether someone is online. On other services, you can tell whether the person is online and logged in to the service.
Posted 16 months ago. ( permalink )

vanderwal says:

Alex, IM is more of status and statement, but at its simplest presence is the existence of an account in a service that provides an ID, but can also include some profile info, which could be a place to surface status (active in the system or a message of last action). This sort of status normally should be seen as an action with if to share as well as how and with whom to share considerations to follow (unless the question has been asked prior and is set as a default).
Posted 16 months ago. ( permalink )

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Elements of Social Software Build Order

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