A couple of years ago, I was heavily involved in the e-learning world, and spent a lot of time advocating the use of Elgg (naturally) and similar social media tools to that community. Two worrying trends became apparent: the use of mass-media hosted networks like Facebook and Flickr to host class-related information - something I still think is a terrible idea, for a whole set of reasons that would be resolved if people started reading EULAs - and the use of online technologies as a replacement for face-to-face interaction.

I said it then, and I’ll say it again: if I thought people were going to use it as a replacement for real-world interaction, I’d stop developing it tomorrow. (Well, okay, it’s a much larger company now, and things have changed accordingly: I’d bring it to the board.)

When Facebook launched, they were the first social tool to make this explicit: it’s a utility for connecting you to the people you already know. In that sense, it works very well - if the people you already know are already there. The Facebook Platform was a kind of diversion from this core purpose, so it’s been very interesting seeing them downplay those widgets and distill it back into a river of activity. Even then, I’ve noticed a lot of my less techie friends revert to text messages and phone calls. The Facebook honeymoon is definitely over.

I spent the last couple of days in Brighton, and it similarly interesting to see the smart, tech-orientated community there use Twitter as a kind of social glue. It’s a very different to my use case as a kind of mini-blog; there, because of the density and proximity of the community, it becomes an incredibly efficient way to keep in contact and organise ways to meet up face-to-face.

On top of which, there’s a huge amount of ambiguity inherent to online communication, particularly via email. Emoticons don’t cut it; we’ve evolved, both socially and biologically, to read tiny cues that really only occur when you’re in the same room with someone. It’s very difficult to incorporate that into a website. Which, to be clear, doesn’t mean that the web isn’t useful, and I’m of course passionate about the benefits that social media can provide to society. It’s just that these tools must be considered as part of a balanced diet of different kind of interaction.

Speaking of face-to-face, there’s going to be an Elgg Meet this Saturday, October 18, at the Peartree in Edinburgh, from 3-5pm. Come and say hello! I’ll be branded up with an Elgg T-shirt, so you can’t miss me.

Worldmapper’s statistically adjusted maps provide some food for thought. Check out worldwide personal computer ownership, as of 2002, or Internet users from the same year (they’re very similar).

I spend a lot of my time thinking about how Internet technology can promote information flow, and through it efficiency and transparency, in peoples’ lives. When you’re allowing people to publish their opinions and experiences, and then share them in the kind of social mesh that the web is becoming, I think it’s also important to remember to somehow include the people who aren’t part of the mesh, and whose circumstances mean that they can’t possibly participate. The danger is that people who aren’t active in the network will lose out, and be underrepresented in important ways.

This clearly doesn’t matter much in the consumer web, but I believe that the principles proved in the social web will take greater hold in software, and through that to society as a whole. We are becoming more democratic; we have more access to information. Anyone can publish an idea, a news report, a photograph or any other piece of transmittable media, which can then propagate to anyone else. The roots are in web technology, but the effect is clearly felt way beyond the tech sphere; we’re fast getting used to this privilege, but for most of history freedom of expression has been a radical idea.

Ideally, the result of this freedom through technology is a real-life social mesh, more closely-bound on a global level than people have ever been in the past. Through the free flow of information comes transparency, and through that, again, democracy. But this ideal can only work, in my opinion, if everyone feels the benefit. Part of the point of democracy, surely, is that everyone can take part.

So how can we extend the network? And should it even be an issue, given that around 2.6 billion people don’t have access to basic sanitation?

It’s a fact that cellphone penetration massively outstrips computers in the developing world, which is one reason why a lot of very large computing names are beginning to focus on handsets (and why the free, open source Android software that Google is peddling has nothing to do with competing with the iPhone). That means that cellphone networks also have a great deal more reach than other forms of network in those areas, and it’s therefore significant that the next generation of ultra mobile PCs - for example the next Eee PC - have connectivity through the cellphone network built-in. The result, I hope, will be a sea change in Internet demographics; from that, I hope many things will follow.

These are my interests. I want to bring the technologies that have been proven on consumer websites and in the tech sphere to places where they can benefit people, and make the offline world a better place. I’m under no delusions that I’m going to have any effect myself, but as the technical head of an open source social networking engine, and as someone who just has a personal interest, I can try and do my bit.

This blog is going to be for the sorts of thoughts - like this post - which don’t lend themselves well to a company-sponsored space. It’s often going to be rambly, and will probably raise more questions than answers. Still, you’ve got this far, which hopefully means I won’t be shouting into the void. Thanks for reading; please let me know what you think.