A Functional View of Social Networking - Highlighting the Challenges Moving Forward

I have to admit, I’ve always been “soft on” diagrams.  

Diagrams are always a great way to tease out, sort, organise, and “reality test” discrete elements out of total ambiguity and confusion.  Which is why they are such great tools for both VCs and entrepreneurs to use as a starting points when trying to develop strategies in markets that are not only ambiguous — but may not even be real. 

On the flip-side, diagrams can also give us —

1) false sense of authority

a false confirmation of a complex world now simplified

2) premature consensus

a common image embedded in the majority of the minds of an industry can dramatically decreasing “diversity” of views at critical junctures in an industry’s evolution

While a diagram is always very real — what it is describing may not be.

(For example, see Sacred Cow Dung: FIND OF THE WEEK - Confused About Web 2.0? Web 2.0 - The Diagram )

Since the Spring, I’ve been working on a post on the future of social software.  Basically, I’m focused on issues of “personal integration” — or how these tools change the environment that individuals interact with.  So I’ve got lots of doodles on napkins, index cards, and backs of envelopes in a neat little “social networking project” pile at the end of my big desk covered with lots of other “project-specific” piles.

So I have to thank Michael Pokocky for alerting me this morning about the following post by Dave Pollard — It’s definitely “The Find of the Week”.

How to Save the World: The Social Networking Landscape

First, I love the diagram. 

Not only is it purely functional, but it deconstructs the functions behind the manifest features of the current generation of social media or social software.

Using these eight functional categories, Dave shows how the full range of successful social software tools to date (eg., wikis, weblogs, tagging, online communities, mind-mapping, file-sharing, etc) all incorporate various combinations of these categories into their products and services.

I also agree with Dave’s list of “the ten biggest problems” that remain to be solved before social networking can really take off —

1. Inflexible, tedious information architecture ("Why is entering this field mandatory?")
2. Profile poverty ("This tells me absolutely nothing of value about this person")
3. No separation between What I Have and What I Need personas (the information about you I care about depends on whether I am 'buying' or 'selling' -- even classified ads 'get' this)
4. Lack of harvesting capability ("Why do I have to enter this again?")
5. Populated just-in-case instead of canvassed just-in-time ("Oh, sorry, I no longer work there" and "Oops, sorry, I'm married now")
6. The most needed people have the least time and motivation to participate
7. Over-engineered and unintuitive
8. Lack of scalability and resilience: Centralized instead of peer-to-peer (when it gets too big or goes down, you're out of luck)
9. Socially awkward ("I'm not going to tell someone I've never met that!")
10. Low signal-to-noise ratio because of dysfunctional information behaviours (blockages, disconnects, lack of trust) -- these need to be accommodated by Social Software tools, instead of ignored

Definitely give his post — a read, a bookmark, a del.icio.us tag — and remember it.  

I think Dave Pollard’s Diagram of the social networking landscape is as good a starting point as any to begin building the blueprint of social media’s future.