YASNS?*

Whisking through my unread posts today, two items struck me as demanding a little follow-​​up. First of all, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison’s Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship. The nature of the paper is pretty obvious from its title, though that is not to imply that it is not well-​​written, intel­li­gent and pro­voking. The authors don’t spell out their defin­i­tion as a short list of unam­biguous phrases, so I’ll take the liberty of doing that bit for them. Social network sites:

• enable users to artic­u­late and make visible their social networks
• these networks often reflect offline networks in that they make explicit friend-​​of-​​friend links and other ‘latent ties’
• Friends on these systems are not neces­sarily friends in the offline sense, but are very likely to belong to the same offline social network somehow
• imple­ment a (variably) visible profile system, which also displays a list of Friends within that system
• Friends can normally leave visible messages for each other — some actually evolved from mes­saging systems e.g. QQ and Cyworld
• Many social networks attract groups of quite similar people, at least initially.

So far, so good — not much that most people would find enorm­ously con­tro­ver­sial — and a useful list of defining char­ac­ter­istics to keep to hand the next time someone asks you, ‘So what are these social network sites, then?’

Then I read JP Rangaswami’s posts Some Friday Night Ruminations about Facebook et al. and  More Musings about what makes Facebook Different. The short answer to what makes it dif­ferent, from the first of those posts is that:

I don’t quite know, but it is. Stuff like MySpace and Bebo are overtly nar­ciss­istic, it’s all about how you express yourself. Facebook, on the other hand, is about rela­tion­ships and conversations.

So that kind of wrecks the neat list and the gen­er­al­isa­tions, because while I agree with them all, I can’t help but observe that he’s right.

In his later post, JP remarks Facebook seemed like ‘a site where com­munities coalesced and some­times even collided’ — given its over­whelming take up among the UK and US pop­u­la­tion over the last twelve months, you find and re-​​find friend­ships with family, school-​​friends, col­leagues, ex-​​colleagues, lovers and rivals — its omni­pres­ence and insist­ence on real names makes your Facebook identity a lot like your real-​​life identity. JP reckons this ought to be of value to enter­prises because it allows work contact to deepen through the dis­covery of shared likes, random insights into a fellow’s per­son­ality which make you feel more intimate. This is a topic I wrote about in the Double Intimacy Score post at the end of September.

It seems to me that Facebook’s focus is on inter­ac­tion, not rep­res­ent­a­tion. The home page, cru­cially, I think, is not your profile, but the lifestream of your network. The topmost item of everyone’s profile page is the stream of their latest actions and inter­ac­tions on the network. That’s the big attrac­tion, not creating the pim­pingest profile page ever. That’s why you might go back several times a day — to see what’s going on in your neigh­bour­hood. Once you’ve set your profile up, maybe auto­mated streams from your blogs, flickr and twitters, etc., you’re not actually that likely to return to it very often at all. Once you’ve estab­lished contact with a Friend, you’re not even likely to visit their profile page very often, except the sub-​​sub-​​sections for new notes, imported items and photos, etc. The action’s in the actions. You add applic­a­tions because they provide addi­tional ways to interact with people. The action’s in returning that Poke, playing your turn at Scrabble, biting that chump. It’s the wall-​​to-​​wall page you look at, not the wall.

YASNS = Yet Another Social Network System

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Possibly related:

• Let’s Be Friends
• Facebook as Game
• The Trouble with Social Content