Comments on: Affordances of social software

By: Nate Westheimer

Nate Westheimer — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 13:03:26 +0000

As you read with my nextNY post, I’d include “Effects my offline life” on that list. For me it’s about the value it affords to me. On that note, Facebook is more like a badass Plaxo for the college/alumni crowd. It helps us stay in touch with people we otherwise wouldn’t, and share things with them (photos, notes, etc) we ordinarily wouldn’t. There’s value in that because it means there are more people you’ve kept in touch with when you go visit another city or need a reference to a company.

By: The Ectoplasmic Connector » Blog Archive » Categorizing Social Networking Sites

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 00:59:01 +0000

[...] This is part of a response that I wrote to Eric Nehrlich’s post, ” Affordances of social software”. [...]

By: Anca

Anca — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 00:41:49 +0000

I totally agree with you about affordances and usability enhancing the desire to use a particular technology. However, I think the particular feature sets and usability of these sites are derived from their initial goals, which drove the development approach.

LiveJournal, Flickr, MySpace and others are social networking sites that grew out of helping people accomplish a particular task that happens to be much more fun when you are doing it with other people.

Facebook, Friendster, Tribe.net and even LinkedIn are sites that grew out of the desire to build connections with each other and talk and link up. Now all those sites are adding features like blogs, customized pages, answers sections, RSS feed aggregators, time-based organization of things you’re looking for, and, in the case of Facebook, “applications”. Fundamentally, though it’s harder to figure out what you can do there because it’s mostly “just hang out”.

Twitter is a hybrid that falls more in the second category than the first, since being the only user of Twitter doesn’t get you any benefits, whereas you could be the only LiveJournal user you know and still have a great blogging tool that allows you to get stuff out to the world.

Hmm, there’s probably more to this that I’ll have to ponder – like where do thing like Yahoo/Google groups fit in, and maybe even eBay…

By: Bats

Bats — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 05:15:40 +0000

Heh… was my adding you to Facebook part of what prompted you to write this? No idea myself why I bothered to do that–I guess I figured that if anyone had started the tEp network there, it would be you.

I agree with your views, in terms of the usefulness of LJ (concatenating friends postings), and not really finding a purpose (so far) for Facebook. I’m wondering if this might become a generational teetering point for my tech-savvy peers. Similarly for text messaging–I have started to use it pretty regularly, but at a get together of ~10 tEps at U5 & Rebecca’s, I was the exception for the post part.

However, back on the Facebook topic, I did get a kick when a former coworker (now in California) added me to her list out of the blue. Also, friends from UW (Dan & Daniel, Engineer Girl) are on that list.