Supernova 2008 held day 1 of the three-day conference yesterday in San Francisco's Mission Bay Conference Center. The opening session tackled "defining the challenges", which was admittedly a fairly vague title. Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, started off the session taking about the characteristics of organizing groups online and offline. Shirky pointed to prospering examples of organizing groups online such as the Meetup Alliance.The presentation pointed out a number of case studies to gain insights from. From a flashmob being arrested in Belarus for organizing a collective "everyone eat ice cream at the same time" event to Xerox's lack of source code in 1980, characteristic contrasts were made between the ease of online versus offline. It was explained that density and continuity in niche groups used to exist due to inconvenience, but those same aspects need to now exist by design online in order to be able to network and organize effectively.Questions from the audience asked for advice on "community management" (or, lack of a better English phrase, as Kevin Marks stated). Shirky said that a self-policing communities often take care of the problems that arise. Later, Shirky clarified, to my concern of the possibilities for a community run by mob rule, that this mostly works and works when the community knows they can "call a cop at key moments".
Google I/O: OpenSocial 101
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Google I/O, a two day developer gathering in San Francisco. The first session I sat in on was OpenSocial: A Standard for the Social Web with Patrick Chanezon, Kevin Marks, and Chris Schalk from Google. The session aimed to answer "what does social mean?" and "how do we socialize objects online without having to create yet another social network?".While APIs provide data for friends, profiles, and activities in social networks, different APIs make it difficult for developers. This is where OpenSocial comes in. Based on HTML+Javascript+REST+OAuth, OpenSocial was promoted in the session as an easier way to develop applications for a variety of participating social networks at once. With upwards of 275 million user distribution, OpenSocial can definitely be seen as an API that opens the flood gates.While OpenSocial is great for developers, what do users get out of it? Chanezon, Marks, and Schalk explained that the users are able to then use more applications. More applications aren't necessarily a good thing, however, like in the case of Facebook where many users are experiencing the fatigue of using applications that lack relevance.Marks discussed how containers (e.g. social networks) don't choose users - they simply grow through homophily and affinity, sometimes bringing unexpected user bases. Because of this, OpenSocial provides a sense that specialization is no longer required. Though the lack of specializing may benefit the developers, I think it may hurt the users in the long-run. A lack of application specialization based on each individual network often overlooks the intricacies and quirks that resonate with the individual userbase, thus creating a less-than-ideal user experience and a lack of unique value propositions. OpenSocial may represent progress for open standards, but not if it means an outbreak of "Zombies vs. Vampires" starts following you from network to network.