Some thoughts on a good post titled: Barriers of Content and Context, by Stowe Boyd
Stowe Boyd , strong advocate for social networking technology, is discussing a critical downside: the barriers protecting content and context. Social networking is more than a hyped phenomenon, it actually reached out to the masses in no time, especially with dating application and IM, and suffer this fast growth and a lack of maturity in the approaches and techniques, an extremely large and reactive audience.
Though Stowe believes there is real business to do with it right now, for example to boost the sales process.
Content posted on a Social Network (SN) site is not reachable from another, and the process to get to it varied also from one site to another or to a blog: lack of standard to make it searchable.
RSS should spread into the social network sites.
More central to SN is the information about relationships. There again poor or no interoperability and no standard. Each SN website keep jealously closed these information. The most you can do is upload your outlook.
A solution could be a sort of FOAF with some security measures to handle privacy and trust issues. But that's only for the explicit relationships.
Though the bulk of implicit relationships knwoledge reside in less accessible form such as emails , or comment in blogs, blogrolls. Some corporate social network software do mine the email information to reveal and make sense of the relationships (VisiblePath , Spoke ) but few or none, examine the blogs side info.
Some company and services start to mine the publicly available data such as the known relationships between venture capitalists and high-tech management (www.linksv.com for the silicon valley high tech sector).
Right now the market is segmented and companies don't see the value to share their data or make a move toward standardization. We'll have to wait that they see that nobody can handle it all to watch a move towards standardization.
Another and more problematic issue to solve concerns the social context. Every single person juggles with many different network each with specific ethos and context. Not a yest a focus of social software companies.
Though some knowledge management companies, such as Tacit, have refactored their solution tawards social context discovery (linguistic analysis). Their mature technology applied to that booming sector will give them an advance hard to catch up with. A model: licensing their technology?
Stowe also talks about the need to understand very finely the subtle differences in context between the subnetworks of an individula to acheive any positive leverage. A request to introduce someone into a group mind be percieve as intrusive , connecting to fans of NewYork?create page rap underground music sounds more like a fit...
And two quote to end and open-up some vision:
"social software will need to provide a means to contextually denote relationships, so that I can gain or provide access to appropriate individuals or information easily"
"Social tools, i.e., software designed to intentionally shape culture, are going to become the cornerstone of a revolution in information technology. "