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More on “Social Objects”

Alex De Carvalho, via Twitter:

I, too, find [Social Objects] a useful paradigm for web service design and community building.

Stop me if I’m wrong, but this is what I got out of the concept: A social object is something that you care about enough to form a social bond around. It’s an interesting, external thing.

Or, to put it another way, a social object is something “sticky.” It’s a node that gathers attention and acts as a network link between people.

In LibraryThing, the object is a book. On Flickr, it’s a photo …or a short video. On de.licio.us, the objects are URLs or tags. On Twitter, it’s short messages.

In blogging, the objects are sometimes posts, and sometimes something more nebulous: a shared interest or tag. This is one way that I feel blogging on Wordpress or Blogger or TypePad could be improved, and one reason why my posting here is sometimes sporadic: there’s no easy, accepted way to make those social bonds, without doing a lot of extra work to hold it together. There are ways: to name one, you can create a Technorati search, or subscribe to feeds and piece the threads together yourself, or use the comments on the blog itself (and then subscribe to the blog comments, I suppose), but the experience is fragmented and frustrating.

This is a difficult problem to resolve: in a network of independent actors, without a coherent service to form explicit bonds, is it possible to make a “sticky” social object? Can you still form an automatic, explicit bond in the absence of a controlling authority? Can you do it in a way that’s as easy as commenting on a Flickr photo and then getting to see the rest of the conversation through email?

(I’m using the term “explicit bond” to mean a way in which you can set a flag, so that changes to the object get pushed towards you, like a comment on a Flickr photo, or a @reply in Twitter.)

I hope the answer to this question is “yes,” but as of yet, have no idea how it would happen. Or, if it’s happened yet, would someone tell me? I’d like to stop doing the gruntwork myself and let the computer do it. I hear that’s what they’re for.

Josh,

Thanks for the interesting post which inspired some thoughts.

I find it helpful to approach a webservice in terms of design and community building by:

1- defining what the social object(s) is(are);

2- multiplying the types of social gestures people can make with each other through the social objects. Examples of social gestures are tagging, favoriting/bookmarking, commenting, adding each other as contacts/friends, sending to a group, voting/digging, etc.;

3- encouraging and showing people how to use the features of the webservice in order to socialize and make social gestures with one another.

On Twitter and blogs, the social objects may be the individual posts or even more specifically, keywords and tags that interest you. As such, it’s possible to make these bonds explicit by setting up tracking systems and alerts to bring you the relevant tweets and blog posts containing those keywords. There’s also services like cocomment http://www.cocomment.com/ which allow you to subscribe to comment threads.

The social object is something that interests you. The stickiness, socialization and friendships form from the social gestures and conversations between people. The social object brought people together and then they construct their fiction or story between themselves, about that object. The object grows rich with meaning and history through the interaction of people.

There are of course different categories of social objects, from ice breakers to memes, from physical objects to ideas, philosophies, sounds, pictures, videos, people (including celebrities) and more.

In addition to social objects, or object-centered sociality, there’s also the object-centered environment, which becomes a social object in itself. Flickr’s social objects may be photos, but the sociality occurs within Flickr’s quite sticky social environment.

Thanks for the link!

-Alex
@alexdc

More on “Social Objects”

Alex De Carvalho, via Twitter:

I, too, find [Social Objects] a useful paradigm for web service design and community building.

Stop me if I’m wrong, but this is what I got out of the concept: A social object is something that you care about enough to form a social bond around. It’s an interesting, external thing.

Or, to put it another way, a social object is something “sticky.” It’s a node that gathers attention and acts as a network link between people.

In LibraryThing, the object is a book. On Flickr, it’s a photo …or a short video. On de.licio.us, the objects are URLs or tags. On Twitter, it’s short messages.

In blogging, the objects are sometimes posts, and sometimes something more nebulous: a shared interest or tag. This is one way that I feel blogging on Wordpress or Blogger or TypePad could be improved, and one reason why my posting here is sometimes sporadic: there’s no easy, accepted way to make those social bonds, without doing a lot of extra work to hold it together. There are ways: to name one, you can create a Technorati search, or subscribe to feeds and piece the threads together yourself, or use the comments on the blog itself (and then subscribe to the blog comments, I suppose), but the experience is fragmented and frustrating.

This is a difficult problem to resolve: in a network of independent actors, without a coherent service to form explicit bonds, is it possible to make a “sticky” social object? Can you still form an automatic, explicit bond in the absence of a controlling authority? Can you do it in a way that’s as easy as commenting on a Flickr photo and then getting to see the rest of the conversation through email?

(I’m using the term “explicit bond” to mean a way in which you can set a flag, so that changes to the object get pushed towards you, like a comment on a Flickr photo, or a @reply in Twitter.)

I hope the answer to this question is “yes,” but as of yet, have no idea how it would happen. Or, if it’s happened yet, would someone tell me? I’d like to stop doing the gruntwork myself and let the computer do it. I hear that’s what they’re for.