whither open social network?
I had an interesting conversation with Joseph Miller( of The Plant).
While I am busy preparing for my two-week trip to San Francisco, I will just copy/paste the conversations from my e-mail (with Josephs permission, of course).
***** I was going to do some editing before I post it, but my Firefox didn't let me edit it, I was late for a meeting, so I left my post un-edited. But now I got some time, I made SOME corrections to e-mail #2 ;-) *****
#1: Joseph to Nobi:
That's interesting that you bring up Marc Canter as well. While he was in town I saw him present his PeopleAggregator open SNS platform at The Pink Cow. I agree with the concept and application of open communication between platforms. It just makes sense that you as the user should own the information that you create; it feels like the future of the web and it's probably going to win in the long term. If we had time, we'd probably implement it ourselves :)
However, there are some unique new problems that emerge in Marc's future. From the SNS perspective, my first fear is community moderation, since that's what I spend part of my time doing. I've spent a fair amount of time warning and banning members (mostly men) for being web なんぱ and scaring people away from Asoboo. I can envision a future in which an open SNS or service can become enormously popular extremely quickly, and " blog bullies" can rapidly destroy a site's community or culture. But I'm a pessimist :)
#2: Nobi to Joseph:
That is very true. I think Marc's idea would involve many problems.
I think that kind of problems can be serious in Japan because of such community as 2 channel.
Even the well-controlled mixi occasionally has those problems.
And to be honest, I don't know if it is right or wrong.
But I still believe it is worth trying especially in Japan. If you look internationally, you see diverse mix of social networks.
But in Japan, it is mixi and others. Japan is the country of the brain-deads, so to speak.
Many Japanese don't think before choosing their service.
It is the country where Yahoo! is still more popular than Google.
So no matter how good your social network is, it doesn't matter and it remains like "mixi and others"; I spent three hours in cafe talking with a news reporter explaining why mixi is so strong here and how other social network can be successful in Japan.
And that's how I have reached this open SNS concept.
Then, I found Marc was thinking about the same thing (but with a structure that would benefit him, of course ;-) )
Anyway, this is such an interesting discussion. With your permission, I would like to share this to my friends via Vox and ask what they would have to say.
Would it be Okay?
#3: Joseph to Nobi:
Nobi,
Sure, that sounds great. I'd love to see how other people would solve the moderation problem. When I asked Marc, his current solution was to either let people run free or require moderators to approve each picture before it's posted. Neither is sufficient I think.
Comments
My feeling is that self policing has to be built into the system. I haven't studied this at all, but from an observers perspective, it's interesting that sites like www.ecademy.com , www.xing.com and LinkedIn Answers don't seem to get much spam and I'm guessing they have just implemented good policies and a combination of self/moderator policing from the start. For some reason other sites like www.ryze.com and even Google's www.orkut.com seem to get a fair amount of spam. I wonder if in addition it has something to do with how strictly profiles are tied to people's real world identities. Probably so.
#2: Nobi to Joseph: actually starts at
That is very true....
I had series of meetings, parties, etc.
I posted this message and try to do some editing but my Firefox froze (maybe because of one of the plug-in I have). I thought I saved it as a draft, but when I got back home, I found it was published and you guys have commented already ;-)
I hope not many smart Japanese people saw my posting before correction ;-)
Joseph, thanks for nice links. They are very interesting articles.
Andrew made some interesting points too.
I think one of the reason that there is few spam on LinkedIn is because it is a very controlled environment. I don't see LinkedIn as a community but rather as a tool to find/message other people; perhaps, I use it only occasionally and my stay there is not that long.
BTW. let me tell you about another approach found by my friend, Soichi Ueda (of Think the Earth ). He was producing a community site back in the '96 and he found the "Fixing Broken Windows" does works.
As soon as, his community site has started he start receiving discouraging comments from anonymous people.
Later, the number of those anonymous pesimistic and often discouraging comments have grown so much that he had to take some action.
What he did was to change the aesthetic of the web site, so it would look very elegant and clean. He believed if the web site looks elegant and clean, it can generate a mood that prevents those unwanted anonymous messages.
He said that approach worked for him very well. Perhaps, this is worth trying. It should not only prevent unwanted messages but also make you proud of your site. ;-)
Wikipedia and, more-so, Citizendium are planning big overhauls of their identification systems to not only protect against malicious comments and vandalism, but also to actually make sure that people actually do have the expertise and qualifications they say they do. As this further develops I think it's going to filter right down to your average blog comment system, as people realize that generally, people behave better when easily identified.
Of course there's a lot of room for debate here, and big privacy concerns, but I think we'll see websites in general getting tougher on user contributions.