Stephen Collins has been telling me to get onto Facebook now for a while. I finally succumbed last night after Steve mentioned the Facebook group for the Canberra Coworking Space concept.
I invited everyone I know who I thought might be interested.
Paola Kathuria and I correspond via the SIGIA-L list every now and then. In asking who I was and how I came to Facebook, she and I started a conversation on the true worth of Facebook. I think between us we decided that we weren’t quite sure of the true worth – whether it was a truly valuable thing or not. In the end, I suggested that Facebook was a flag that showed us where the social computing wind was blowing this week.
So here is my extrapolation of this: Boyd’s Law of This Week’s Hottest Social Computing App – social computing applications are massive social experiments that provide us with data so that we can understand the nature of social computing, and anything else that we get out of them is a bonus.
This definition is a little bit existentialist – the thing exists to prove the existence of the thing, and allow analysis of the thing. In this case, the thing is social computing. Whatever the thing is, we’re out there creating it – and just as Altavista gave way to Yahoo, and Yahoo to Google, so MySpace will give way to something like Facebook, and Facebook to the Next Big Thing. Will LinkedIn be replaced by the new business-oriented Facebook applications? Probably.
really? that’s been quite different to my experience of social applications, which has been that they provide some really rich and interesting ways to build and maintain relationships with people – some of whom I’ve known for eons, and some who I only knew in passing before connecting on FaceBook or Twitter etc.
They’re very definitely providing us with fodder for some very interesting research, hypotheses and future design directions, but for me that’s secondary to the richness of the human connection that they provide.
Or perhaps I just don’t get out enough
Hi Leisa,
I know that I don’t get out often enough
My point related to the differing definitions of worth – Paola found Jyte addictive, I didn’t, Steve Collins gets Twitter, I don’t – so maybe I am the common factor here
I think it is about the social part – the relationships, the search for belonging and self-esteem. And it’s about startups making lots of $$$ by selling successful projects off to big companies too.
It’s all interesting, if only from an academic perspective. I found myself checking my facebook inbox shortly after getting up this morning, so perhaps I am hooked too.
Best regards, Andrew
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