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.
