Made out of people

Three definitions of social networks

I've heard people say "Social networking" a half-dozen times this morning, each time referring to "friend of a friend" tools. David Weinberger worried that all the good social networking is behind TOS and corporate walls, which makes it hard to repurpose or analyse.

I'm noticing several different defintions of "social networks" running about, which need disambiguation. I think we're up to three different ones, for better or worse.

1. YASNS ("Yet Another Social Network Service"--a danah coinage): This is the high-publiciity form of social networks. Friendster, Orkut, Ryze. Click in your list of friends, and let them click you back.
2. Social Network Analysis. This is the academic subfield that I have been playing in for four or so years. Interview people, draw a network diagram, calculate centrality and that sort of thing.
3. Social networks for CSCW: This is the people who scoop up social network data from various sources. Largely, this is analyzing online experience and trying to get a quantitative or--more often--qualitative picture of how groups

Now, I grant that (1) may be the one that's making the headlines, making the VC money, and has six million users (on Friendster) running about shouting "social networks". And I'm pretty sure that the word has been completely taken over by a new context. But I sitll try and fight the pure fight. And sometimes I just try to find a new word for what I actually do.

(In other news, I just watched a UI change happen at Ryze. As I was sitting here, Adrian Scott tapped a little bit of PHP, hacked a script, and then uploaded it. That's kind of cool.)