My sister is a singer-songwriter. Her songs are great, and you can find them in the usual locations: MySpace Music, Last.fm and Facebook. Interestingly, though, she’s decided there are different purposes to each:

• Her Last.fm page contains more polished recordings.
• Facebook has those too, but also contains more rough-and-ready demos, ideas and experiments; it’s also updated the most, probably because she spends more time on it than on any other site.
• The MySpace page seems to exist because you’re expected to have one.

I wonder how common this is? Any other musicians care to comment? Is there one best place to promote yourself as an independent musician?

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My flash fiction story Meaningless Battles is up on Every Day Fiction:

Rain skidded across the window, the smaller drops holding still, helpless in the path of their larger cousins, which sped forth and absorbed everything in their path. The carriage was a wasteland of raindrop-on-raindrop destruction. Alex watched for a moment and then adjusted his focus to the industrial buildings speeding past in the background, graffiti crawling up the walls only to be endlessly scrubbed off and re-painted.

Meaningless battles, Alex thought.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, if you’re a writer in Oxford, the third Oxford Writer’s Group meeting will take place at 8pm on November 16th, at the Magdalen Arms on Magdalen Road. Most of us will be reading an excerpt of something we’ve written, to a rough limit of a thousand words. We’d love to see you there.

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In response to recent events, I’d like to propose a different kind of web service that overcomes the privacy and reliability issues with cloud web applications, while providing a solid business model for both application developers and service providers, as well as a seamless, easy-to-use experience for end users.

The T-Mobile storm

Over the weekend there’s been a storm surrounding the T-Mobile Sidekick, which is produced by Microsoft’s Danger subsidiary. It turns out the device stores the primary copy of data like calendar and address book information in the cloud rather than on each device; perhaps a fair proposition if you knew you could trust Microsoft’s servers. Unfortunately, said servers went down last week, and Microsoft didn’t have a working backup. Sidekick users suddenly found themselves without their personal information.

Is cloud computing safe?

Understandably, this has sparked a wider conversation about computing in the cloud. AppleInsider summed it up:

More immediate types of cloud services take away users’ control in managing their own data.

While Ina Fried over at CNet noted:

The Danger outage comes just a month before Microsoft is expected to launch its operating system in the cloud–Windows Azure. That announcement is expected at November’s Professional Developer Conference. One of the characteristics of Azure is that programs written for it can be run only via Microsoft’s data centers and not on a company’s own servers.

The issues surrounding cloud computing have been discussed for a while, and aren’t limited to these sorts of accidents; here’s a post I wrote in 2007 about the rights we ought to have over our cloud data. Partially because of the risks involved, and the risk of leaky data, some kinds of organizations and enterprises simply can’t use cloud computing services. (In the UK, for example, check out the requirements imposed by the Data Protection Act.) At the same time, the Sidekick debacle shows there are clear risks to end-user consumers too.

Despite this, the benefits of cloud computing are obvious, particularly for the organizations that can’t use them: device-independent applications and data we can access and use from anywhere.

Can we have the best of both worlds?

The personal computing model is relatively secure: you install applications on your computer, and they sit on your local hard drive, along with your data. Assuming there hasn’t been a security breach, or you haven’t explicitly provided access to your data over a network or through a direct action like emailing it, it’s safe.

On the other hand, because your applications and data are locked away on your hard drive, you generally have to have direct access to it in order to use them. There are remote desktop solutions like VNC, but these are clunky and fairly useless over a low bandwidth connection.

Web applications that store their data in the cloud overcome this obstacle, but lose the security of sitting on your own computer.

What if there was a halfway house between these two situations?

The personal web server that works

Theoretically, anyone can run their own web server, right now, that allows them to install web applications in a more secure, controlled environment and access them from anywhere. But there are some very good reasons why they don’t:

• You need system administrator skills, usually on top of Linux skills, to do it.
• Web applications – even relatively easy-to-install ones like WordPress or Elgg – are fiddly. There are configuration files, directory permissions and (potentially) source repositories to contend with.
• The web applications you can install on your own server are often not as good as the ones you can get in the cloud.
• When something breaks, it’s your own responsibility to fix it.
• Servers are expensive.

What if we could fix all of these things at once? Enterprises, organizations and individuals could have their own, more secure environment that would allow them to use the cloud applications they needed with fewer security risks, while enjoying the ease-of-use and immediacy that the cloud provides.

One of the reasons everyone’s leaping to copy the iPhone’s app store business model is that it just works. Sure, you’re forced to delegate root control of the phone to iTunes, and the operating system places some seemingly arbitrary restrictions on what applications can and can’t do. But the handset works, and installing software is easier than on any other platform. The truth is, most ordinary users don’t care about those restrictions. Hell, I’m a computer scientist software developer entrepreneur power user, and I’m just happy the thing works. (Context: my previous phone ran Windows Mobile, which doesn’t.)

Imagine if you could get your own server environment that was as easy to use as the iPhone. It would look something like this:

Front end & business model

• You sign up for the service, possibly for a small monthly fee, possibly for free (depending on the service provider). Alternatively, if you’re more technical / an enterprise / an organization, you install it on your own infrastructure. The platform is available for free and could be open source.
• From a secure web-based admin panel, you can add and remove users (although the platform optionally also supports Active Directory and similar standards, as well as OpenID), and install / uninstall applications from a centralized app store with the usual features: ratings, search, similar apps, etc. Installation is one-click, and upgrades are similarly seamless. (That WordPress “what, I have to upgrade again?” problem: solved.)
• Much like the iTunes app store, applications may be free, or may cost a small amount. Applications may impose licensing restrictions based on number of users: for example, the app costs $4.99 for up to 5 users, $19.99 for up to 25, etc.
• As with the iTunes app store, the application store provider takes a cut – and so does the service provider. This creates a strong incentive for multiple vendors to provide hosted services for little cost. It also effectively creates a discount for enterprise, organizational and technical users, who can bypass a service provider. The payment to the web application developer also, for the first time, creates a solid commercial marketplace for high quality web application products, while the free option allows open source vendors to distribute as normal.

Technology

• Behind the scenes, the server runs existing open source technology: Apache, Tomcat, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Postgres, etc. However, there are restrictions on how applications must be structured, behave and share their data. This allows the one-click install and upgrades to function correctly. Importantly, though, users of the system need never worry about the underlying framework.
• The platform has a central data store that all applications may access via an API. This data store is fully exportable, allowing (for example) a datastore stored with a service provider to be moved to an internal setup as an organization expands. As with the iTunes app store, applications are linked to a store account rather than a physical machine, so the application licenses are portable too.

Of course, this wouldn’t replace standard web servers. What it does provide, however, is a simple cloud operating system that simultaneously works in a more secure, dependable way than existing services, would be more acceptable to many organizational users, and provides a genuine business model for web application developers.

The web is now an end user application platform, but still behaves like a lightweight document store. To obtain the level of software customization we all enjoy on our home PCs, a much higher level of technical competence is required. I strongly believe that this situation must change for the web to be a viable commercial application framework.

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There were some great comments on this weekend’s guest post for Media140 about Lily Allen and sharing, so I’ve written a follow-up, exploring some ideas (and the arguments left in the comments) in a little more detail.

However, after at least a decade without tangible participation from the media industries, illegal file sharing has become mainstream. Companies, rights holders, device manufacturers and digital distributors have been engaged in difficult and important conversations for that time, while file sharers, unencumbered with that responsibility, have gone right ahead and developed easier and easier ways to share content for free. If I want to watch Up, the Disney/Pixar film that’s still awaiting release here in the UK, I can download Vuze and be downloading it inside of five minutes. To beat file sharing, any business model has to beat that experience.

Click here to read the whole article. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Just a quick note: I’m starting an Oxford writers group.

My idea is that participants will be able to upload their work to a closed online space, so that it can be read and commented on in a more natural reading environment. Of course, if people want, they can also read their work aloud at meetings, which will be held regularly. If it works, I’ll expand the infrastructure so it can be used by local writers groups elsewhere.

The preliminary meeting, which will help determine the size and scope of the group, will take place this Wednesday, September 30th, at the Gardener’s Arms pub on Plantation Road in Oxford at 8pm. See you there?

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I’ve written a guest post over at the Media140 blog about Lily Allen’s file sharing stance, and the wider place of traditional record labels in the Internet economy.

If the Internet has brought us anything, it is individuality. We have the ability to publish, share and consume the media of our choice, based upon our own preferences. We are no longer happy to adhere to the conventions of broad demographic groups. This change is not just occurring in the record industry; it is happening in politics, in journalism, and across the media spectrum.

You can read the whole post here.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about storytelling on the Internet.

I’m not completely impressed with how it’s been done so far. Not that the examples I’ve seen haven’t been beautiful, but their presence on the web has been irrelevant: they’ve essentially been multimedia presentations using web technologies, rather than a different medium that uses the Internet as an intrinsic part of its fabric. A great example of this is We Tell Stories, the digital fiction project that Six to Start built for Penguin a couple of years ago.

The Internet, as I’m so fond of pointing out, is a system of interconnected people: uniquely, the audience is an intrinsic part of the medium. I don’t think that’s been exploited to its full potential, possibly because it couldn’t be until recently.

I love the idea of a plot that reacts to how the audience is interacting with it and each other – not an alternate reality game, which has set goals and tasks, nor a virtual world like Second Life, but something that uses elements from the real world as the building blocks for a story in order to raise questions and get the audience talking with each other. The journeys of storyteller and audience would be interlinked in a kind of feedback loop, which emerging augmented reality software could potentially make more immediate and visceral. The story would use the Internet as a delivery mechanism, but it would be experienced entirely outside, in the real world.

The trick wouldn’t be to get people to forget it was fictional, but to reveal talking points about the real world – a kind of epic theater approach to storytelling as opposed to naturalism. The epic theater was a style popularized by Brecht (the German playwright who most famously wrote The Threepenny Opera), which dictated that the audience should never forget it was watching a play. As well as using particular styles of acting and stage production, the lights were often left on, and the audience was encouraged to discuss the events unfolding in front of them.

In digital, networked storytelling, this effect would almost be necessary due to the limitations of the medium, but could be exploited as a powerful feature. Never before has the audience been able to discuss a story on such a scale. It’s an opportunity.

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Oxford Twestival is a night of musical entertainment, comedy and more in aid of Oxfam’s water sanitation project in Mali. We’ve got some great musicians lined up, there will be prizes on the night and the venue is pretty cool – anyone remember the old Point, above the Cape of Good Hope? That’s where we’re holding the event.

Here’s the details you’ll need to remember, complete with handy link to get a discount on your ticket if you buy in advance:

Oxford Twestival: September 13, 2009
The Cape of Good Hope (upstairs)
£5 in advance / £8 on the door

Okay, Twitter skeptics, so it’s got a kind of annoying name, but you don’t need to be a member of Twitter to attend, and the crowd promises to be a great mix of local artistic talent and professionals from around the area.

Every penny goes towards that Oxfam project, so not only will it be lots of fun, but you’ll also project the warm, fuzzy glow of someone who knows they’ve helped make a real difference in someone’s life.

There’s been a bit of bad publicity surrounding Twestival’s San Francisco incarnation, who kind of screwed around the DNA Lounge. Each Twestival is organized independently, and those shenanigans, while irresponsible, were unique; here’s the main Twestival response. I’m pleased to say that the Oxford Twestival’s organization has been very responsibly managed by Sylwia Presley.

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I designed the following poster for BarCamp Transparency, this Sunday, July 26, at the University Club on Mansfield Road, Oxford. (It starts at 10am and tickets are free; visit the website to get yours.)

Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, saw it and had this to say:

[..] What’s so great about TRANSPARENCY, OPENNESS and ETHICS? I’m in favor of OPAQUENESS, DISHONESTY & AESTHETICS.

We aim to please:

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TechMeetup is a set of monthly technology gatherings in Edinburgh and Glasgow. It feels somehow illicit: the Edinburgh meetup takes place at the top of the Appleton Tower, a famous eyesore in the middle of the Edinburgh University campus. Piles of pizza and free beer are placed on tables, and after 7pm the doors are locked to the outside world.

It’s great fun, and interesting, and one of the brilliant ways Scotland has been energizing its technology industries lately. It comes highly recommended.

I’ll be heading up north to speak at the August 12th event about digital identities and the decentralized social web, and will be hanging around for drinks afterwards. If you’re in the area and would like to talk about these ideas, or just to say hello, please come along.

Photo credit: Appleton Tower in all its glory was captured by Patrick2978 and released under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 license.

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This how-to isn’t in the usual remit of this blog, but it solves a problem I’ve had for a while – I can’t use the iPhone’s built-in calendar functionality with Google Calendar – so I thought I’d share.

The iPhone 3.0 software update supports CalDAV, an open standard for sharing and updating calendar information. Luckily, so does Google Calendar.

It should really be easier than this; one of the important aspects of integration through open standards isn’t just its possibility, but also its accessibility. This feels more like a hack than real functionality – but at least it works.

1. On your iPhone, press Settings, and then Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
2. Press Add Account… and then Other.
3. Press Add CalDAV account.
4. Follow the instructions for enabling Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal. Specifically, this means using your Google account details for the username and password, and setting the CalDAV server name to be https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/YOUREMAIL@DOMAIN.COM/user.
5. I found that the iPhone didn’t pick up the authentication first time round – you may need to go into Advanced settings and re-enter them. The www in the server name seems to be important.

You can also do it using Google Calendar’s Exchange emulation, but that never worked for me. As with this, your mileage may vary.

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North Oxford is the wealthiest part of a wealthy city, where BMWs sit in gravel driveways and wine bars nestle amongst delicatessens and stylish cafes; a part of the city I always yearned to belong to as a kid, but never quite did. It was where I went to school, and where we had our first offices when we were building Elgg.

In keeping with the rest of Oxford, it’s suddenly begun changing dramatically over the last couple of years (I’ve joked a couple of times that someone at the City Council planning office must have died, but this may not be too far from the truth; despite a glut of brilliant minds and genuine creativity, the city itself has always been stiflingly conservative). One of the newcomers is The North Wall, an arts centre that actually sits a few doors down from that first Curverider office on South Parade, and is in some ways more exciting than any other arts space in Oxford. From hip hop comedy dance to puppetry, its events seem to bring new blood.

Ben’s Big Gig was probably the first gig of its kind. Ben Walker is Internet famous for his Twitter Song, an in-joke that, appropriately enough, has been bookmarked, re-tweeted and blogged all over the web, and attracted praise from the likes of Demi Moore. He’s also a genuinely talented songwriter and musician who has been playing around Oxford for years at various events, including a regular stint at the now-defunct QI Club (which was associated with the TV show of the same name). Together that was enough to sell out the arts centre, as well as attract hundreds of visitors who watched live over the web – Nick Gill’s gorgeous lo-fi poster, pasted up all over town, couldn’t have hurt either. A Twitter wall on the back of the stage read out feedback as it happened, forming a back-channel to the music and allowing the audience to heckle the comedy warm-ups with relative safety. All of this felt not like a technological gimmick, but an organic part of the experience.

Live web gigs happen all the time, but they’ve usually got major backing. Sandi Thom was famously discovered through webcasts, but it was a PR stunt: she already had a major publishing deal, and at the time the streaming technology would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. Times have changed: although it’s probably not free, technological improvements have brought live streaming within reach of independent artists. Ben’s the real deal, a performer with old-school talent who just happens to be using contemporary tools to reach his audience. We’re going to be seeing much more of this.

However, the first-mover advantage definitely holds water. At the end, as I was leaving, I told Ben that he needed to do it again. He confirmed that he will; I suspect the audience will be even bigger next time.

In the meantime, here’s the video feed from the gig:

The delightful picture of Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall was released under a CC attribution license by Ben Walker.

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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.

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I took some time out this afternoon to hang out in Oxford University Parks with Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which I’d been given for Christmas but hadn’t a chance to read yet. It’s a children’s book, and one whose 526 pages were whizzed through in a couple of hours, leaving a kind of screen burn on the way I look at the world. It’s probably the most beautiful hardback I’ve ever owned, but more than that, it pushes the boundaries of what’s possible with a traditionally printed and bound story. Prose gives way to graphic novel, and then to cinema stills, all becoming part of a visceral patchwork that adds texture to its plot and subtexts. It overtly promotes thinking outside predetermined structures, which is an important lesson for any kid (even a big one in his thirties), and dares the reader to imagine what they could achieve, even going so far as to equate creativity with magic. I loved it.

It’s also a good reminder that people, particularly in crunch times like that one we’re now in, will always try and constrain things to the categories that make sense to them. The people who are really successful, and who changed the world for the better, all managed to take the skills they’d learned and built up over their lifetimes and turn them to breaking through the barriers other people had put in their way. They weren’t afraid to be themselves, think the way they think, and push the boat out that little bit further.

What can you imagine? Why aren’t you doing it?

Flying by Francisco-PortoNortePortugal, released under an Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license.

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Vero nails what I’ve thought for a long time:

Since I moved from Canada, I have seen too many Brits or Europeans be very sheepish about self-promotion. American sales people are reputed to be bubbly, brash and bigger than life, speaking louder than anyone else in the room and gesticulating endlessly to illustrate what they’re saying. Quite at the other extreme, British marketing folks are often seen to be more reserved and self-deprecating.

It’s worth reading the whole post; particularly her tips for breaking the habit. I’ve been to some Toastmasters meetings, but I just might give karaoke a go.

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This lecture by Obama transition team member Greg Simon is worth a watch (click the Flash icon in the top right). While ostensibly about advocacy strategies for lobbyists, the fundamentals of what he talks about are applicable to marketing of ideas much more generally – commercial marketing, creative writing, and so on. The first 40 minutes or so are particularly worth paying attention to.

Essentially, marketing your ideas – what Greg euphemistically calls “getting someone to listen to your iPod” – comes down to providing an emotional reason for them to listen to you and buy into what you’re saying. This lecture is a great starting point for thinking about how to do that, and provides lots of food for thought.

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A very happy new year to everyone reading this (assuming you follow the Gregorian calendar, obviously).

One of my new year’s resolutions, alongside the annual stalwarts like “lose weight”, “eat better” and “go to bed before midnight once in a while”, is “update your blog more often”. I’m also going to turn this site into much more of a personal space for reflection and splurging jotting down what I’m thinking, which might not always be technology related, or even very sensible. When I have time, the design will change accordingly. As ever, I welcome your comments with open arms and the offer of a beer if you’re ever in my neck of the woods.

In the meantime, I hope 2009 brings peace and prosperity to you as individuals, but also to your families and the communities around you. Have a good one.

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If these products existed, they’d make it onto my Christmas list for me and my loved ones:

The open ebook reader

• Electronic paper screen
• A DRM-free format (in a perfect world) or at the very least a format that allows borrowing (from libraries and friends), lending and passing on of ownership, like a real book
• Not necessarily much memory (2Gb would easily do) but lots of battery life
• RSS subscriptions
• The ability to subscribe to the paper versions of magazines like the New Yorker and Wired (but get them electronically rather than on paper)
• An optional waterproof case to cater for the people in my life who like reading books in the bath with candles lit and a glass of wine
• Optionally, a screen reader

Bespoke television

• Streaming TV through the Internet, with an optional set-top box for a standard TV
• Subscribe to any TV channel anywhere, both free and pay, without having to commit to a package of multiple channels (although you might have to pay a TV license to get British channels, for example)
• Digital Video Recorder capabilities
• Subtitles (new media technologies shouldn’t be allowed to step backwards on support for the hearing impaired)
• Movies and TV shows on demand (paid)
• Pushing the boat out: the ability to pay more to excuse yourself from watching commercials

All-in-one health kit

• Blood pressure and unobtrusive heart rate monitors
• Pedometer
• USB connectors for all of the above
• Software that reads from the above and also prompts you to enter your age, weight, daily food, any additional exercise and health issues
• Produces fitness plan to meet goals, whether they’re improved cardiovascular health, weight loss, etc

In the meantime, happy holidays to all of you, and best wishes for an excellent new year.

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I just finished watching Pirate Radio USA, a great little independent documentary about pirate radio and free speech over the airwaves. It makes one major, fundamental point: although freedom of expression is guaranteed by the US constitution (and by similar laws in many countries worldwide), because the medium of that expression has changed over time, there are often tight controls on how that medium is used. The film concerned itself with radio broadcasting; low-range, local radio stations can play vital roles in communities, but larger broadcasters have succeeded (using disinformation about things like the potential for signal interference) in making them largely illegal. The same media companies are visibly attempting similar things with the Internet as a medium, and the principle is the same: free speech is protected, and that involves not just the right to think and talk, but also to disseminate.

Although I don’t have much time for the commercial, national stations like BBC Radio One, in general I like radio a lot. Blogs, videos and podcasts are all well and good, but there’s definitely a place for live, local information; although I spent a lot of my late teens and early twenties reading websites and newsgroups, the local Oxford and Edinburgh stations were my soundtrack. There’s also a potentially much larger audience with radio: a cheap radio can cost $5, whereas a laptop and Internet connection are still not within everybody’s reach. I’ve spent some time this evening thinking about networked solutions for free speech radio, but they involve peer to peer networks, special software and broadband connections. A transmitter and an AM receiver are still much more realistic in many places.

I recommend Pirate Radio USA, by the way. I saw it on public access TV, but you can buy a DRM-free video at bside.com. (I couldn’t find anywhere that would stream it online legally; if you can, please leave a link in the comments.)

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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?

Related entries

• Building the user-centered web (8)
• Social networking: beyond the silo (1)
• Activity Streams and OAuth: a social web architecture (0)