Social Networks and Online Communities: a Second Order Effect

By David Coleman

I have written before about first, second and third order effects of technology. The first order effect was to take things that were on paper and put them up online. This happened between 1995 and 2000 when publishing to your web site was king.

However, with the new millennium, people began to realize that the Internet was really an interactive rather than just a publishing medium. This was a second  order effect of the Internet, and built on the first order effect, but takes it further.

So it is no surprise that over the last few years social networks and online communities have been popping up all over the place.  People don’t just want to connect to information or content (first order effect), and the frenzy over “Search” that has gone with that--. They also want to connect to each other.

I am surprised that no one has built a tool that deals with the transition from first to second order. For the Internet, that would be a tool that does search like Google or Yahoo, but allows you to search for people rather than just documents or web sites. However, this is what mybloglog.com and peopleaggregator.com are trying to do.

Lots of Options

Probably the best known social network site is MySpace which allows you to share your life, music, pictures, videos, etc. But most online social networks are focused on a specific population or content type: For finding work (LinkedIn), around different types of content (Flickr for photo sharing, YouTube for video sharing, Last.fm or MOG for music sharing). Friendster, one of the pioneers of socail networks is for just making friends or hooking up, LiveJournal for sharing blogs and teen age angst, and Tribe is for affinity  groups and is based on a topic or shared experience (Burning Man, Paganism, etc.).

Some social networks are based on age (Friendsover50.com), Facebook for High School or college Students, or race (MiGente.com (Latinos), BlackPlanet.com (African Americans), or even geographic location (Grono.net (Poland), LunarStorm (Sweden), Nexopia (Canada)). There are social web browsers (Flock) and social search (tagging – technorati, tagworld). There are even ways that you can package up Internet information for sharing and comment (Jeteye).

There are lots of communities for dating: Match.com, Yahoo Personals, etc. and even some for the socially conscious (Zaadz). There is even a growing trend in mobile networks with people on cell phones (MyGamma, MoBanGo).

Network or Community

Wikipedia defines online social networks as “Social networking also refers to a category of Internet applications to help connect friends, business partners, or other individuals together using a variety of tools. These applications, known as online social networks are becoming increasingly popular.”

Often the term Network or Community are used interchangably, but they are not the same. The best definition I heard that differentiates the two was from Amy Jo Kim  (The Author of Community Building on the Web) once made this distinction at a talk I heard her give“ a network is composed of loose ties, often the focus is on a topic or particular type of content or behavior. A community may have the same focus but the ties are stronger. No one misses you in a network; they might if you’re a popular and vocal member of a community.”

A community is based on fairly intense interactions between its members, while a network is not. According to Ross Mayfield, the founder and CEO of Social Text, Communities are:

• Top-down
• Place-centric
• Moderator controlled
• Topic driven
• Centralized
• Architected

While Networks are:

• Bottom-up
• People-centric
• User controlled
• Decentralized
• Context driven
• Self-organizing

Unfortunatley, like everything on the Internet it is not that black and white. There are lots of examples that don’t fit the criteria for either definition. The UseNet (the pre-cursor to the Internet) had thousands of interest groups which were top-down, place-centric, moderator controlled, topic driven and centeralized (charcteristics from both networks and communities).

Building Communities is Hard!

Everyone agrees with this, it is hard, slogging work. I believe that communities are like sharks, that is, if they stop moving they die! This is where many of today’s social networks like Friendster went wrong. It is not always enough to see who the friends of your friends are. You need to be able to do something of value with them.

A few years ago, I gave the keynote talk at the Online Communities Conference. For that talk, in 2003 I created 10 rules for establishing online communities. I have listed these rules below and believe they are still useful today.

1. Identify community founders/initiators, and explain the reason for starting the community, ongoing roles, and participation.
2. Provide a good reason for people to be in the community.  What are the benefits?
3. Provide a community member directory (profiles) and an easy way for members to contact each other and learn about each other.  The goal here is to develop trust.
4. Establish a way to handle conflict at the initiation of the community.  Present these rules clearly.  Conflicts must be handled quickly and fairly or they will tear the community apart.
5. Provide hosted or focused chat.  Facilitator with editorial capabilities (with editorial policies stated) discussion owners drive the discussion to a decision, conclusion or action.
6. Create informal spaces for people to socialize and interact, this too helps to build trust.
7. Create a critical reason for members to be active in the community.
   1. It should be the only place they can get critical information;
   2. People should receive intrinsic rewards from the community that make it important for them to be there personally, and;
   3. People enjoy interacting with experts in the community and should be able to learn much that is helpful to them in their everyday work.
8. Bring newbies up to speed fast (guides, buddies, docents, tours, FAQs).  It is also a good idea to post or e-mail new members the "rules of engagement" for acceptable behavior in the community.
9. Keep the content fresh and new with critical information and regular events that keep people coming back to participate in the community.
10. Monitor participation frequency and quality, and reward those who deserve it.

Third Order Effects and Social Networks

Various pundits have seen the way Social Networks and Online Communities (which are fluid social structuries) are changing and evolving. Amy Jo Kim, sees them becoming more mobile, because everyone has a cell phone. I see them becoming more political.

What the Internet does is it cuts time and cost out of the com-munication equation. You can reach anyone, almost instantly. It also cuts distance and geography out of the equation, since it is as easy and cost effective to communicate with someone down the hall or half way across the world. When you take these factors out of the communication equation, for the first time in human history you have given people the ability to organize around a topic, idea or cause.

Already today the AARP is a very strong lobby. The Internet is intruding into our political process, and there will be some upheaval over the next decade as people begin to realign their allegances not to geography, but to specific ideals.

I often feel living in the U.S. that where I live is some other country then all those people that voted for our current administration. The country was almost evenly divided for and against Bush in the last election. Soon people will begin to align themselves more specificly with affinity groups, and those groups, if they get large enough and organized enough will begin to exert political power. This is the third level effect of the Internet on social structures.

I see a world in the not too distant future where we are not represented by a politician in the house or senate, because power does not have to be concentrated as it did because of slow communication and transportation when the U.S. Consitution was written. Power can now be distributed, and affinity groups can help to represent the individual in their interests and in many areas of their life.

This does not mean things that came about from first and second order effects will dissappear, on the contrary, they are necessary for a third order effect to happen!. We will still see publishing to web sites, and social networking. It will just start to evolve in a more political direction, and more and more of the group, network or community effects will be imlemented online. 

Being a "Baby Boomer" this is a very different world from what our parents knew, but very similar to what our children have grown up with. These online communities and networks in one way are like governements, in that “we get the governement we deserve” those that do not participate do not get a participatory government. I expect this to be even truer online.

I would love to hear your comments on this Guru's Corner article!

David Coleman is the Founder and Managing Director of Collaborative Strategies (CS) and the editor of the “Inside Collaboration” newsletter. He is the author of two books on groupware, and is the editor and writes the “Guru's Corner” column for this newsletter. He can be reached at davidc@collaborate.com or 415-282-9197.