March 24, 2004

Danah Boyd on RELATIONSHIP

Danah Boyd has posted a thought-provoking criticism of the RELATIONSHIP ontology (by way of Marc Canter) While I approach this matter from a strongly technical perspective, the perspective she presents should be carefully considered as we define social software standards.

• Relationships are situated within a CONTEXT.
• Relationships are defined by CULTURE; their types are SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS.
• Relationships do not exist without POWER.

Source

My answer is that we will have to allow the semantics of relationships to emerge from the somewhat distorted political dynamics of the labeling process. Openly developing standards for the assignment of relationships surely is better than relying on online services to force standards through flat, html interfaces.

Categorical Context

At the very least, the surface sort of relationship context (i.e. defined by logical groups of relationships) must be incorporated into a relationship ontology. Beyond adding a new dimension of expressiveness, this would create a natural framework for participation. I can see all kinds of useful (and humorously useless) ontologies of relationships withing a certain category being maintained. RDF and OWL allow for contributions from whomever wishes to host one - what ends up being adopted is a different matter entirely.

Perspective

The context of perspective (i.e. defined by who may be viewing this information about your relationship) is something that must be customized by the person maintaining their own information. Identifying the viewer would allow more detailed access, or contextualized access, to the relationship resources.

Culture

As for the cultural aspect, this can be accomplished through subclassing of context, or through the definition of new contexts. Translation services might play a role in how this information may be understood by people of other cultures. Lets be friends in the American sense, or pen pals in the Japanese sense. Actually, lets just be friendster friends.

Power

The power dynamic aspect may be (somewhat badly) incorporated into a standard through guiding the formation of a relationship, especially those which may need to require some sort of verification. Ultimately, the complex power dynamics of relationships should be simply interpreted by the users. My favorite implementation of this notion: the "open marriage" designation.

With a more expressive ontology for defining relationships (certainly more so than RELATIONSHIP), we may actually end up with a better understanding of the social dynamics of the real world, across the world. In order to have a conversation, we need to agree on some conventions, so we can't complain too much about the RELATIONSHIP. :)

Interview with Ken Jordan

Seb Paquet has posted a brief summary about an interview with Ken Jordan, one of the thinkers behind the Augmented Social Network (by way of Many 2 Many).

March 23, 2004

Rules and Rankings in Social Systems

AJ Kim has posted an interesting article about the gaming aspect of social software.

The rules of the game in services such as Google, eBay, and Orkut are enforced and sometimes altered in order to extract the desired information, or to encourage certain behaviors. The rules must also be structured to prevent cheating and abuse, for once there is a game to be won, there will be people who go very far to win it.

Traders in markets such as the NYSE participate in what is probably the largest-scale implementation of social software which uses game play to achieve, through rules governing behavior and information flow, the proper balance between cooperation and competition.

RELATIONSHIP: Two Worldviews

Clay Shirky has posted a very interesting clarification of his earlier comments about the RELATIONSHIP schema.

Human social calculations are in particular a kind of thing that cannot be made formal or explicit without changing them so fundamentally that the model no longer points to the things it is modeled on...

The flaw in RELATIONSHIP is not that you can’t characterize someone as a colleague and an employee, but rather that you can’t completely specify the fullness of any reasonably complex relationship, you can’t know in advance which of those characterizations you would use in what circumstances, and you can’t make even a subset of those things explicit without changing the thing you are trying to describe. Source

I completely agree with Clay's comment about the importance of circumstance. I have been working on the issue of circumstance in developing a framework for customized social networks. There needs to be a means to contextualize the relationship: friends, co-workers, co-students, acquaintences, strangers (one-way), family members, participants in a common activity, and so on. There may also be more than one context: family members who are also co-workers.

Providing a relationship contexts would place restrictions on the nature of the relationships that could occur between two personae, which would also provide a higher level of expressiveness for users. Further, I believe that working circumstance into a social networking standard would also simplify the development of a means to fetch and query the distributed data.

March 22, 2004

Technorati Redesign

David Sifry has posted a list of new features. Among them is BookTalk, borrowing some good ideas from All Consuming.

March 19, 2004

LOAF: using social software to minimize spam

Clay Shirky has posted a summary of LOAF, a perl app designed to create networks of trust among email correspondents. The email addresses are obscured by a Bloom Filter in order to prevent "Ex-Girlfriend" attacks :)

LOAF works by attaching a small file to each outgoing email you send, and monitoring your incoming email for LOAF attachments. These attachments are automatically stored away in one of two folders - a 'trusted' area for people you have corresponded with before, and a 'strangers' area for people who are unknown to you.

Each incoming mail is tested against the LOAF files of all the people in your trusted folder. If the sender has corresponded with one of your friends before, a header is added to the email to indicate the number of matches, and the addresses that matched. Source