I tried to break down the elements of social networks. I'll email you the little table I ended up with if you want, but it wasn't worth posting. Then I wrote another post about how huge the work around social networking management is. It basically went nowhere, so I scrapped it. But there was one paragraph that seemed to me to be the key to understanding social networking at a high level. This post is my exploration of that idea.
Social networks are platforms, like consoles, operating systems, browsers, instant messaging clients, internet video services, and games like Rock Band. Platforms provide an environment for interaction and achievement, and tools to facilitate it. The goal is getting people to invest themselves in relationships and activities that exist on a specific platform. There are three main ways to encourage this: compelling content, low barriers to entry, and personal investment.
Getting compelling content usually comes down to money. Employees are paid (if necessary) to seek out and / or generate interesting content, and content creators are paid (if necessary) to put it on the platform. If a platform achieves critical mass, enough content is created by the community that the platform developer can focus on keeping it organized, pulling inappropriate content, and keeping people interested by pointing them to the most interesting content and creators and by educating them, so that they develop a deeper appreciation for the content.
Low barriers to entry are fairly self explanatory. The lower the cost in time and money to get to what feels like valuable, personalized content, the quicker a community can be built. Allowing users to import content from other platforms can drastically reduce the barrier to entry for users of those platforms.
Personal investment comes down to what individual users value. Exclusive content that speaks to them, enough friends on the platform that they don't want to leave, the feeling that they "own" their presence, and a lack of time and money to invest in multiple platforms are all ways for a user to become bound to a platform.
So that's my foundation to start talking about social gaming. It's still super simplified and will need to be fleshed out and expanded, but hopefully it will give me a base to intelligently discuss from.
It was hard get to partly because the platforms are nested. A game is a platform running on set of network services which are also a platfrom, which are running on a console which is also a platform. (And the consoles have operating systems, but I'm ignoring them. LA LA LA LA LA!)
2 comments:
Sure, I'd be interested in the table. My experiments with Facebook show that it doesn't work for me. I understand "The Social" in that it provides a place to hangout for people that can't physically hang out together (because they are at work, or required by parents to be at home, or whatever the reason may be).
However, from my experience, I can't just keep the facebook window open while I am programming. Programming requires too much focus. And keeping the window open causes me to think that I shouldn't have to refresh the page (a la Gmail) to get the latest updates. I want to know "what has happened since I last [logged in/refreshed/looked around]." But if Facebook provides that info, I can't seem to find it. So I gave up.
Facebook appears to be for people who don't need fully focus and concentrate on their job. Like the last job that I had. It would have worked there. ;-)
As I told Michelle the other day, someone, somewhere will get social networking "right" in that it will just work for many people ... but in spite of the huge numbers put up by MySpace and Facebook, they are still broken and don't simply "just work." I still consider them to be this decades Geocities page builder. Remember when _everyone_ you knew was building their own webpage, and they all sucked. And it was so cool, because now, people would be able to stay up with things you were doing without needing to call you? Because you would update your Geocities account. Yeah. It didn't work. Then we all started blogging/rss-feeding. And it was so cool because now, people didn't need to go visit your website to find out what you were doing, the news you posted would come to them. Except people never (rarely) posted. Now we have Facebook, where it's a giant interactive Webpage/Blog-type thing Web Application. And it's so cool because we can totally stay up with what everyone is doing, all in one application and I don't need to subscribe to 52 different feeds for my 48 different friends (a few have multiple blogs, which they still don't update). Now we call all log onto Facebook and watch and wait, and see that really no one is really doing anything interesting. So, the problem that has been around since Geocities, is that it is work to communicate. Lowering the technical skills required to communicate online is a good thing, but all that does is make it easier to do something that has always been hard. Have something meaningful to say.
Wow. This comment was much longer than anticipated.
Paul
(Table sent and acknowledged.)
Once I acclimated, I saw facebook as you do. At first it seemed like they'd lowered the bar so much on what constituted content that I would have a constant stream of it. It would be interesting just to watch it go by, even if none of it was useful. Or maybe just enough of it would be interesting to my voyeuristic tendencies to make it addictive.
As it stands I think social networking is still for people who live to socialize (teen girls? active art communities? bored housewives?). I'd heard game developers who were very much afraid, saying social networks were learning how to do gaming while gaming wasn't learning how to do social networks. Maybe in certain market segments, this is true, but I would be a liar if I said I understood those segments.
You're right about these services being more work than what people really want to do. I think that's why instrumentation (making "content" out of normally solitary activities) is important, like when you simply click a button to share something interesting on your RSS feed. The problem is that with so many sites and so many standards, content providers have to do too much work to integrate with all of them. Perhaps facebook (or any competing site) really wants to have a browser toolbar so that the button to flag any given web page as interesting is always there.
You don't have to have any communication skills at all. You just have to be able to recognize and gesture at someone who does. The scary thing is, even listening at this level requires more knowledge, effort, and attention than many people can muster. The truth is most people our age just don't think that much. Go to work. Come home. Eat. Watch TV.
But the 360 will supposedly allow you to watch movies together. What if that functionality was extended? What if you logged on to TV?
Imagine that any time you turn on the TV, you could see what Ozone was watching? What if you could request to join him and get a live stream and voice chat?
How much would your kids love to be able to audio chat (or picture in picture video chat) with his kids as they watch whatever DVD they're watching? Sure, you could jury rig something like this on your PCs right now, but the 360 and PS3 have more than enough storage and CPU power to make it user friendly and put it in millions of homes.
The technical and DRM issues will take time to sort out, but just like with TiVo, the system will constantly be recording what you watch, when you watch, and who you share with. This is all valuable data to advertisers and content providers.
Honestly I can't believe TiVo doesn't already have community features like these. Maybe it does and I just don't know about them. Or maybe they cheaped out so much on the hardware that they can't add them without forcing everyone to buy new boxes.
As I said a long time ago, this generation of consoles is not about games, it's about living room dominance. Whatever features are needed to get to that point, Sony and Microsoft will pursue.
Of course, neither has the chutzpah to bet big on this strategy. They're both still desperate to look profitable, or at least less disastrously unprofitable in Sony's case. Still, in the long term, gaming feels like the side show to me.
Post a Comment