Made out of people

A stance on networks

In the last few days, I've gotten a lot of emails about social networks. My brother, for example, just sent me a link to a New York Times article about the business aspects of networks, while a friend from the east coast sent me an article about the security aspects of networks.

I fall into neither camp.

In some sense, I feel like we've explored a lot of that space already: I played games of "who slept with whom" and "Jewish geography" long before Friendster. The computer version is cool, but not unusual to me.

Similarly, it's pretty interesting to see security analyses, but not unusual. Network analysts have been collecting data on people's networks of various sorts for years.

My own interest is in something a little more unusual. What I am asking what can knowing about my social network do for me? It's an odd question: the naive answer is "very little": I already know who my friends are, don't I?

I claim that the information is not only rich and evocative, it's meaningful, and a useful form of communication.

Networks give me a useful way of talking about stuff, and a good way of organizing data: my email archives, my file system, my buddy lists. Why should I have to manually solve contact and social organization problems when I can feed them a network, and let the applications make that information available to me appropriately?

This stance means that there are certain things that just don't really interest me. I understand that my software project--with very little tweaking--might be used by a crazed manager ("you! you should talk to Bob more!") or a thoughtful consultant.

But that's not the part of the space I think needs to be explored. There are plenty of people out there to talk to the security folks. There's fewer of us, I think, who just want to make information visible to the people who use it each day.

Social Networks: Will Users Pay to Get Friends? [Feb 9, 2004]

But as the popularity of such sites has taken off, the big question for investors in new technologies is whether social networking sites can ever make a lot of money by connecting friends of friends in mini-networks of trust, whether for dating, business or maintaining acquaintances. For many, the buzz over social networking sounds a lot like vintage Internet hyperbole from the late 1990's.

A Social Network Analysis of the Iranian Government
[November, 2001]