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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Social software pioneers have the Internet biz buzzing again. But their new networks are even more valuable as booster shots for human connection.
Jun 16, 2004 | In May 2003, Stanford graduate students Lada Adamic, Orkut Buyukkokten and Eytan Adar published a study in the online journal First Monday discussing research they had conducted about an online gathering place for Stanford students called Club Nexus.
"The electronic nature of online community participation presents an opportunity to study human behavior and interactions with great detail and on an unprecedented scale. Traditional methods of gathering information on social networks require researchers to conduct time-consuming and expensive mail, phone, or live surveys. This limits the size of the data sets and requires additional time and effort on the part of the participants. When studying an online community, our ability to learn more about the social network is simply a side effect of users transmitting information digitally."
What kinds of things could they learn?
"The richness of the profiles allowed us to characterize social ties and identify what factors influence friendships ... The richness of this information can be used to model dynamics such as the spread of ideas on a network or the way that people can find each other through their contacts."
After leaving Stanford, Buyukkokten, one of the designers of Club Nexus, took a job as a user interface designer at Google, where he designed and built Orkut "in his spare time." (Google programmers are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time on their own side projects.)
Google's rebuffed attempt to purchase Friendster casts some doubt as to whether Buyokkokten's venture into social networking design was a hobby as purely innocent as he maintained in a phone interview. Equally revealing were Google CEO Eric Schmidt's comments in April that Orkut and Google's search capabilities would probably be combined. In any case, the advent of the eponymous Orkut spawned a minor Net frenzy throughout the spring of 2004. For those who found Friendster too juvenile, Tribe.net too Burning Man counterculturish, and LinkedIn and Ryze too buttoned-down, Orkut exerted an irresistible attraction.
Its position as part of the Google empire conferred additional cachet on Orkut. As rumors of Google's upcoming public offering began to circulate, a rosy glow suffused the entire enterprise. The Internet was coming back! Silicon Valley was safe for capitalism again! And not only was Orkut comforting for grown-ups, but it was just so easy -- ridiculously easy. Within weeks of its launch, it was, as technology writer Annalee Newitz dubbed it, "the crack cocaine of social networking." What Google had done for search, it was now going to do for an even more essential human activity -- being social.
But you can't gather too many Net geeks in one place without a backlash sure to brew. No sooner had Orkut begun to take off than outraged users were sputtering over the wording of Orkut's Terms of Service, which appeared to give Orkut ownership for all time throughout the known and unknown universe of all intellectual property associated with an Orkut profile. The ensuing debut of Gmail, which for some raised the terrifying specter of e-mail content scanned so as to better allow targeted advertising, was followed by the revelation that Google was using the same software cookie to register user identities on all its services.
The alarm went out, across the blogs and mailing lists of the Net: A new 8,000-pound terror of privacy invasion had been born. Call it Googlezilla.
At first glance, Googlezilla is scary indeed. Google appears better positioned than any other Net service to successfully amass a truly staggering database of user behavior. If we care about privacy, then we should be leery, right?
But as I watch my Orkut network jump by 10 percent a week without my lifting a hand, and listen to the clamor of people begging for a test Gmail account, I wonder just who is being frightened. Seven million people have accounts on Friendster, and 200,000 new users are reportedly joining every week. Two million are registered to MySpace. A whopping 16 million are supposed to have registered on Tickle for a chance to take a personality test. Judging by the documentary record, privacy doesn't seem all that important a value for today's online masses.
The growth of social networking brings to light a contradiction inherent in the structure of the Internet. The geeks who built the Net tend to be among the more privacy-obsessed individuals in our society. But the network they have constructed is inexorably abolishing every last scrap of privacy that we may have once enjoyed. And yet the masses of people who use that network do not appear to share the values of the people who designed it.
Some observers of new media, like NYU professor Clay Shirky and social software analyst Danah Boyd, speculate that there is a generation gap at issue -- that we are watching the first generation to have been weaned on the Net grow up, and they simply accept, as one Friendster über-user told me, that their lives are open books.
"We're dealing with a generation of people -- the first generation of people -- for whom the Internet is normal," Shirky says.
Their attitudes may change as they grow older and suddenly become alarmed at the thought of their children viewing their let-it-all-hang-out Friendster profiles. A privacy backlash may still be imminent. There may also be, in the future, technological innovations that allow us exquisite control of what information we reveal to others and what we keep private. But at the moment, the point is moot. Most people, by their behavior, are stating that they don't care if all their online activities can be collated in a dossier somewhere on a server in Silicon Valley. If joining a social network leads to one hot date then it's all worth it.
