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social networking and its discontents V
My old pal Brian S. sends along one link to this social software weblog and one to an article on Club Nexus, an online social network at Stanford. (The article is co-authored by Orkut Buyukokkten, the Orkut that gives Orkut its name, and Club Nexus appears to have inspired at least a few of the Big O's quirkier features, including the sexy/trusty/cool thing that I hated on last week.)
The bulk of the article is dedicated to a variety of statistical observations made from sorting and sifting the data-sets of user information in various ways. For instance, correlations can be observed between the way users describe their personalities (via personality-descriptors selected from a menu) and what those same users describe as their interests. (Appendix A, which begins on page 14, entertainingly records these correlations.)
This is an interesting use of the technology, although it's worth noting that this view of the "big picture" is only available to the system administrators, those who have the access and the tools necessary to organize the big picture into meaningful data.
Question: is there a social networking website that offers total information openness, by which I mean a site that allows all of its users to access, navigate, and sort all of its accumulated information? Because it's worth thinking about not only the value that these sorts of systems provide for their users, but also the value that they provide for their administrators. I would bet that the information that these sorts of systems may yield will turn out to be worth actual money, and as a result it's worth trying to develop a sense of exactly how much of a gap exists between what the administrators can learn from the system and what the users can learn from the system. Reading this article gave me the feeling that we may all be merrily participating in the world's largest market research scheme, and for the first time it made me think that there might be a political point to feeding noise into these systems. Labels: internet, networks, rants |
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
11:13 AM
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