The Christmas period is traditionally when I take a step back and consider what I’m going to do over the next year. For me, it’s a time for family, for quiet reflection and for evaluation. What have I done well? What will I do better next year?

During 2009, I left Elgg, the project I’d been developing for five years, and concentrated on real-world contracts and projects. I spoke at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and met some very interesting people who are going to provide a new model for news reporting in America. I’ve been working with them for the rest of the year, and look forward to writing some more about that project soon.

I’ve also been working with a local publisher in Oxford, creating GeoRSS feeds for their content and paving the way for a mashup with the official University of Oxford mobile site. Imagine walking around your hometown, seeing rooms and apartments for rent displayed on an augmented reality browser, superimposed on the streets themselves. It’s just one way that the web is meeting simple, real-world needs with innovative approaches that are quickly beginning to resemble science fiction. Data is being mashed up and made available in increasingly sophisticated ways.

I expect mobile to come into its own in 2010, particularly now that the mobile Internet market is projected to be twice the size of its desktop cousin. Augmented reality and applications like RedLaser are the more obvious manifestations of this, but I expect the nature of web publishing as a whole to subtly morph. Platforms like WordPress are beginning to recognize this in small ways, such as adding native support for the Twitter API, but expectations are being set far higher than this.

Hardware like the iPhone, the assorted Android handsets and smartphones like the Palm Pre are very affordable multimedia all-rounders which have turned ubiquitous connectivity into a mass-market feature. People are going to expect to be able to save any digital content from anywhere, and share it with anyone. In 2010, I intend to help them.

The emerging news out of WordCamp 2009 in San Francisco is that WordPress and its Multi User cousin are to merge into one product (further discussion). This makes a ton of sense, and makes it even easier to create a community of blogs. I’m looking forward to this – I could keep my main blog at benwerd.com focused on technology, as it is now, but start a separate blog about my hometown at oxford.benwerd.com, using the same installation. Not a bad deal.

Of course, Automattic also own Andy Peatling’s BuddyPress, which is fast becoming a solid competitor in the open source social networking market. I’ve seen people have some installation difficulties with it (it’s apparently been simplified to a 13 step process), so it would make some sense to include it as an optional piece of functionality out of the box. But most importantly, I think there’s a change in progress, illustrated by the Google Wave announcement yesterday but not represented in this announcement.

Communities are forming around users, not users around communities.

In the web application model we’ve been using for the last fifteen years or so, you would install a piece of facilitative software in order to create a web community. That might be forum software or Microsoft Sharepoint depending on needs and context, but they’re both centralized communities. The user visits them to log in and participate; users swarm around a single community access point.

However, consider Skype. It’s not a web tool, but it’s often considered to be one of the new breed of applications. When you want to share something here, a community is automatically created between users, who can then have text discussions, call each other and share files – not dissimilar activities to those you might find on centralized communities like Sharepoint, but with the following advantages:

• It’s transient: there’s no need for the community to exist for longer than it has to.
• There’s no effort involved. Once you’re done with a community, you simply close the communication (but a backup is typically kept, so you can come back and reference the activity).
• It’s private: it’s very hard to share activity with the wrong people.
• It’s decentralized: the community is physically hosted between all the involved parties.

Google Wave also shares all these characteristics, and we’re going to see similar functionality crop up in a host of applications over the next year or two. The reason is simple: it’s a better way to communicate communally.

Of course, blogs are usually public entities, and in that sense WordPress Multi User does its job. But it’s tough keeping track of comment discussions, and there’s no elegant way to have a private, communal blog – something that intranet software needs and that tools like Elgg have done very well for years (disclaimer: I co-founded it). But even that sticks to a centralized model, and eventually, those ad hoc, transient communities are going to be everywhere. It’s going to be interesting to see how tools like WordPress evolve to cope.

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.

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?