[p2p-research] faroo p2p search + facebook quitters

[Samuel Rose]

On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 9:49 AM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Facebook (and for that matter the whole Apple process) is selling ease.
> People miss the point.  What Facebook has is little different than what
> anyone can have on their own webpage...that was even more true of MySpace.
> The trouble with tinkering worlds is that ease of use and access are not
> cool.  Just as actually working on real problems is not cool for political
> theorists.

Hahahah! Love it, so true.... :-)

>So it creates a huge market opening because people want ease.
> Apple's complete strategy is complex apps with ease.  Anybody...a
> neophyte...can do it.  Facebook is the same.  For that matter, Wikipedia is
> the same.
>
> Accessibility was the key.  There is something still perverse in the
> tinkering world that loathes everybody playing.  I think it makes something
> less "techy."   Part of this is political.  People want only their friends
> to be in their club, and part of it is market-oriented in that people want
> rare skills.  So they build fragmented units.  Again, that creates the
> authentic market opening for easy linkage along minimally complex lines.
> Giving people what they want at price they are willing to pay (often free or
> seemingly so) is the definition of markets.
>


I think this


> Those who don't get ease want to build "e-harmony" for their cause.

This is true, too. The belief that people want to fill out tons of
forms and profiles is usually not reflective of reality. They might do
it to find life or romantic companionship, or because a potential
employer requires them to. Otherwise it takes some real dedication and
digital media-literate thinking to inspire people to create extensive
ontologies about themselves and their activities. Even when it was
easy (like the lists on Myspace and Orkut) it was not really the
center of activity, or even findability (other than datamining for
marketing).

One place where metadata has exploded is social bookmarking. Through
work I've done in social media classroom and other projects, I have
seen that a significant amount of users who use browser bookmarking
for online research tend to gravitate towards social bookmarking. This
happens for personal reasons ( resources are now available to any
machine) and social reasons (research can be shared and coordinated).
Ontology mapping based on social bookmark, citation sharing, and other
research and work sharing can generate far, far more value than trying
to match "profiles" of people who might collaborate,  I think. Reasons
why:

1. The data that is "matched" is immediately potentially valuable to
both parties

2. The data itself is already moving towards being information that is
synthesized and distilled into knowledge

3. The research (shared bookmarks etc) are created in the pursuit if
various areas of interest or even problems being addressed.

That doesn't mean social bookmarking data alone can be used to
establish whom among the people you do not know would be good as
potential partners in direct collaboration. Yet, approaches for shared
learning are very easily developed centered around bookmark sharing
(as well as sharing links in microblogging channels, rss feed sharing,
links shared on social networks, etc)

>Those
> who get ease are readily inclusive of any model or form.

This is a great point. We proved this 5-6 years ago with
http://oddmuse.org wiki engine, and the "wiki net". OddMuse is
flexible enough to be molded into blog, microblog, wiki, forum,
distributed social network, rss sharing, wiki farm, presentation
sharing, collaborative graphic editor, etc OddMuse happens to have
lineage from the very first wiki engine (WikiWikiWeb by Ward
Cunningham ).  I've had 2 wiki hives running oddmuse for a number of
years at http://socialsynergyweb.com/cgi-bin/wiki2/FrontPage and
http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/FrontPage  OddMuse is missing
a number affordances that could have led to widespread adoption. Yet,
it is still extremely powerful, and can be used to create the
equivalent of virtually any web application you can think of.


>When they are not
> (e.g. Apple with porn) it generally causes almost more problems than the
> stance is worth.   Every exclusion creates a incremental perhaps exponential
> cost in terms of success.
>
> Ryan
>
> On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 3:03 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi sepp, I wonder if you could look into this:
>>
>> (I would also appreciate your comments on danah boyd's critique of
>> facebook quitters ... see
>> http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/23/quitting-facebook-is-pointless-challenging-them-to-do-better-is-not.html
>> )
>>
>> Michel
>>
>
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>
>



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Sam Rose
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"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human
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