Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness
Inquiry and learning into social networks, organizational network analysis, and the relationships among people and systems in complex organizations and networks.

Tuesday, December 02, 2003

Stowe Boyd always says it best

[From a Ryze posting: The Promise and Pitfalls of Social Networking, Stow Boyd in Darwin Magazine.]

Stowe gives substance to my complaint in my blog about Spoke: you can't go inviting all your colleagues into multiple standalone social networking "services:"

"Like the world of instant messaging, the lack of interoperability between social networks has led to a fragmented and non-uniform market for social capital exploitation. It's just too much work to upload your contacts into all the various mass-market social networking solutions, and actively participating in more than one or two of them would require too much care and feeding.

We are stuck at the Beta-versus-VHS fork in the road, where some company (or a few at the most) will break out of the pack with a winning business model, and establish a de facto standard for social networking, either as a monopoly (like Office) or through interface and protocol standards (like POP3 and SMTP). "

He goes on to say that the networking software must be integrated into the tools in which we live. I was surprised one day by Spoke, which has given me an extra toolbar in Outlook (as has LinkedIn). I wanted to search my contacts to verify the spelling of someone's last name, and I searched the Spoke search by mistake. If my network had been large, it would have been very interesting to see what serendipity would have brought me!

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patti anklam. How to make networks work.

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