Congratulations are in order for the Curverider folks: over on the Elgg blog, Dave’s announced a new round of funding for the company. Additionally, Leonard Lin is working with the team on a consultancy basis.

Although I left to pursue other projects last month, Elgg is close to my heart. I headed technical direction through Elgg version 1.5 (the most recently-released version), co-founded both Elgg and Curverider, was co-author of Elgg’s vision and ethos, and remain a major shareholder in Curverider. As a result I’m absolutely delighted about this state of affairs, which should allow the project to realise its commercial and technical ambitions.

I have a major announcement to make:

I co-founded Elgg with Dave Tosh five years ago, and it’s been a heck of a ride. I’ve been immensely proud of what we’ve been able to achieve, not least establishing the most popular open source social networking platform, helping establish the first social network to run campus-wide at a university, and developing a commercial business with a first-class team of brilliantly intelligent, creative people. Each major milestone has been both a thrill and an honour.

However, I have decided that the time has come to move onto other projects. As of Wednesday, April 15th, I’ll no longer be part of Curverider or the core Elgg team. I’m immensely excited about my next projects, and announcements will be made about these later in the year – it’s too early to talk about them now, but I intend to continue pushing the envelope of what’s possible on the Web. I’ll also be providing expert advice to organizations who want to create excellent Web-based services.

I’m also very excited about Elgg’s future plans. I’m very proud of the team we’ve created, and the platform is about to enter its own new era. Keep an eye on Elgg.com.

Elgg 1.5 was released today. There’s an official post over at news.elgg.org, but I wanted to make a note of it here too. This is the longest we’ve taken over a release since 1.0, and there are almost eight hundred significant engine changes since the previous version. More than one person has remarked to me (while testing the release candidates) that it feels more like a version 2.0.

Marcus points out:

Elgg 1.5 has loads of new functionality – both visible and under the hood. There’s a brand new theme and dashboard, groups are more powerful, and the whole core has been made much much much faster.

The notifications engine is another feature worth highlighting: you can subscribe to the content produced by any of your friends, or any group you’re a member of, and have it delivered using the method of your choice. Out of the box that might be email or internal messaging, but developers can add new notification methods, and Curverider offers a commercial SMS service.

This release makes Elgg particularly suitable for professional social networking, and pushes the software well ahead in its field. And there’s more to come.

See the official Elgg site to download the software or read more.

Since we started Elgg, I’ve always kept a very open philosophy about how the software should work. From the human perspective, we wanted it to be as inclusive as possible, with an easy-to-use interface and innards that allowed you to do very technical things (like, in Elgg 0.x, republishing aggregated RSS) with very little knowhow. From the organizational perspective, we didn’t want there to be a barrier to entry; we released it under the GNU Public License and allowed anyone to download and install it for free. And technically, we allowed anyone to augment, extend and replace its functionality, maintained an open architecture and embraced technologies like FOAF, RSS and so on.

That was five years ago. The world is only now beginning to catch up.

The Silicon Valley Web community is buzzing with “open” ideas: data portability, the open stack, the open mesh, OpenID, OAuth, and so on. There have been two Data Sharing Summits, a bunch of Identity Workshops, and efforts are crystallizing around open activity streams, contacts sharing, and virtually anything else you might want to transfer between web applications. David Recordon, co-creator of OpenID and all-round cheerleader for openness, has predicted that Facebook won’t be a walled garden by 2010.

This is fantastic stuff, which I intend to get even more involved with as the year progresses. Good work is happening all round, and even sleepy behemoths like Microsoft are beginning to take notice.

What worries me slightly is that the work is centered around the Silicon Valley community, and within that is largely built with public-facing commercial websites in mind. Those sites (like Digg, MySpace, the SixApart properties and so on) are awesome without a doubt, but the potential of social technologies falls well beyond the commercial web. People are beginning to use them on intranets, within universities, across governmental departments and so on – places that could use the same approaches, but need to be represented in the discussions.

Their exclusion is not the fault of the people producing the standards and doing this great work; they’re very happily welcoming anyone with a productive contribution to the table. Instead, it falls to those organizations to realize what they’re missing out on and begin to pay more attention to cutting edge technology. The Obama administration is certainly waking up to this, but others – notably the UK government – are extremely reticent to embrace anything open at all.

The technology is falling into place to allow for an open, transparent, knowledge-orientated economy. Now it’s time to look at what else is needed.

There are a couple of jobs advertised on Elgg.com – if you’re an excellent PHP developer, Linux system administrator or business development manager with experience in social media, we’d like to hear from you.

The following post is a fleshed-out version of my notes for my talk at the Elgg International Conference on Monday, December 1st, wherein I discussed my attitude to social networks and how they should be built.

My slides are available in Powerpoint or OpenDocument Presentation format.

Let’s take this to first principles. Stating the obvious, what is a social network? Is it a collection of profiles, friends lists and so on, or is it something more fundamental? What does the term even mean?

Social is an adjective that means relating to human society and its members.

A network is an interconnected system of things or people.

Therefore, I’d suggest that we can define a social network as just being an interconnected system of people.

When defined like this, everyone has a social network, regardless of Internet or technology use, and they’re as old as human society. Your friendships, colleagues, professional contacts, fellow students and book group members are all social networks. They’re not necessarily communities – a “community” tends to imply a common geography or set of interests, which isn’t always true to a social network. But while a social network is not always a community, a community is always a social network.

Clearly, social networks are made of people, who are joined through something in common – perhaps something as community-like as an interest or a shared geography, or something fuzzier, like a mutual friend, a chance encounter, etc. People are complicated; they have individual personalities, quirks and foibles, which make it hard to interact with them in a cookie-cutter way.

Because people are complicated, networks of people are exponentially more complicated. To get the most out of your social networks, you need to be able to embrace everyone’s individuality. Furthermore, they’re not discrete; they may overlap in all kinds of ways. My friends may also be my coworkers, or someone at work may also be a part of my knitting circle. (If I had a knitting circle. Cough.) They have all kinds of different contexts, which may impose requirements on how the members of the network interact with each other. Work colleagues generally need to communicate within an office space, or via methods imposed by management, for example. More formal networks have more restrictions. Personalities may also impose restrictions: some people are bad at talking on the phone, for example.

Of all the tools and methods social networks can talk to each other, the Web is just one. Face to face conversations, telephone calls, SMS messages, faxes, emails, letters and telegrams are all perfectly valid types of communication.

So in short, let’s reclaim a piece of language: a social network is an interconnected system of people, as I’ve suggested above. The websites that foster social networks are simply social networking tools. A social network doesn’t live on the Web, but a website can help its members communicate and share with each other.

With this in mind, what’s the best way to foster a social network using a Web tool?

Joshua Schachter, the creator of Delicious, has this to say:

“If you need scale in order to create value, it’s hard to get scale, because there’s little incentive for the first people to use the product. [...] The system should be useful for user number one.” 

In other words, people need to be able to visit your site and see something immediately useful, even when a network has not developed around it. Flickr, first and foremost, is a site for uploading photographs. Delicious is a flexible bookmarking utility. Facebook is the exception to this rule, because it’s a utlity that helps you keep in touch with your existing friends – but because it was initially limited to Harvard students, Mark Zuckerburg et al were able to carefully grow it from a handful of people. The Harvard community was an existing social network, and Zuckerburg simply gave them a tool.

To summarise: you cannot install a social networking tool and assume that a network will grow around it. You must either have another purpose, or an existing network of people to plug into it. Either way, it’s also going to take a lot of work: you need to lead by example, and participate heavily every day.

As each tool should focus on one particular network, or at least type of network, I’d argue that the exact feature set should be dictated by the needs of that network. Educational social networks might need some coursework delivery tools; a network for bakers might need a way to share bread recipes. The one common feature in any social network is people; even profiles may not be entirely necessary. (Look at Twitter.)

What they should do, however, is amplify the network effect. The idea of a social networking tool is to make that network communicate more efficiently, so anything that the tool does should make it easier for that network to talk to each other and share information. The tool itself shouldn’t attempt to create the network – although that being said, new network connections may arise through a purpose. Most of us have made new contacts on Flickr or Twitter, for example, because we enjoyed someone’s content.

The final lesson is that, once again, people are individuals, and social networks are complicated. Therefore, the featureset in any tool needs to embrace as much of the full range of personalities and ways of communicating as possible. Tagging was a great invention, because it didn’t try and dictate the terms with which people sorted their content. As Schachter said about Delicious in the above linked article:

“If I went in there and said, Hey, you’re using that tag wrong, people would just tell me [where to go].” 

In other words, he was smart enough to leave people to sort their bookmarks however best suited them. There will be inevitable variations in the tags different people use to describe the same resource, but because the network’s personalities are catered for, they’re more likely to continue to use the tool.

This attitude is what led us to develop Elgg, initially for the educational market: a user-centred social networking tool to support educational communities rather than the top-down, rigidly specified software that was common at the time. The features we built into it – extremely granular access controls, cross-site tagging, personalisation and customisation for site admins – drew a lot of attention, and it quickly became apparent that they would be useful in scenarios well beyond education. We spent the next four years developing Elgg into a flexible tool for facilitating social networks.

The latest version – rewritten from the ground up to be even more flexible, while learning from all the feedback and Elgg usage to date – addresses all the aspects of social networks I’ve discussed above, except for one: overlapping networks. That’s what the Open Data Definition is trying to solve – and something we’re coming very close to being able to support. Marc Canter is trying to solve something similar with his Open Mesh, and he’s not alone.

The Web has become a great tool for supporting networks of people, and with the kind of innovation we’ve seen over the last eight years, can only become better. The only remaining question is: what kind of network do you want to build?

As has been reported by everyone and his dog in the tech echo chamber, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey have swapped roles at Twitter. I really like the Twitter guys; I’ve met Ev and Biz in different contexts, and they’re both extremely open and generous with their time. Although I’ve never met Jack, I bet he fits into the mould. (Biz, of course, is on Elgg’s super awesome advisory board.)

The title of this post comes from the Twitter Song. My head isn’t so far stuck up the prosterior of Web 2.0 that I’ve lost perspective. Nonetheless, I’m a Twitter addict; I have business contacts, friends, relatives and celebrity idols on my friends list. More importantly, I think that they crystalised a new form of communication, which was originally birthed when someone at a mobile phone company decided that SMS could be for more than system messages.

The iPhone is misnamed; it’s not a phone. If you were to measure activity on an iPhone, I think you’d find that actual call activity was a tiny percentage. Instead, it represents a sea change: mobile communications is moving from a last-century landline metaphor to a fully-connected smorgasbord of data-heavy protocols. It’s by no means alone (my Blackberry has a similar purpose), but is the most visible.

What’s cool about Twitter, and the other services that are beginning to catch on to this model, is that it recognises that when you’re on the move, you don’t have time for a lot of information. Posting an update, or reading your friends list, is effortless; you can check and put your device back in your pocket in 15 seconds flat. They’re designed to be part of your life on the move, rather than a destination in themselves.

We’re keen on mobile communication with Elgg too, and have deliberately built the architecture both to allow fully mobile interfaces to be placed over the top, and to allow for API-based service applications for particular tasks. With the 1.1 release, those hooks will be more explicit and fully formed, and we’ll be rolling out some pretty exciting mobile-only features in the future. Stay tuned.