OPINION
Social networks and smart mobs
02-04-2003
by Bernie Goldbach
Internet collaboration gives rise to social networks that may offer a real insight into societal as well as business trends.
A little more than a year ago, Howard Rheingold coined the term "smart mobs" in a book of the same title. "Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation," he said.
Anti-war demonstrators in the streets of Dublin personify the "Smart Mobs" that Howard Rheingold describes in his book. We carry smart mob technology in our pockets and purses. We can be appropriately labelled in terms of the communication media that we use.
It's not just in Ireland. J.D. Power and Associates surveyed consumer long-distance telephone use in the US and discovered that 57 percent of all respondents use some alternative to traditional long distance calls, including e-mail, instant messaging, mobile phones and Internet-based calling. That's up from 50 percent in 2000.
Without thinking about it, people will refer to Web pages for information as diverse as parcel tracking information, class start times and anti-war protest assembly points. Supplemental information flows through personal communication devices.
This new kind of information management would be inconceivable without the Internet, mobile phones and SMS. And when like-minded people from Berlin, Sydney and Rome attend marches in Dublin, you get the feeling they're part of an international political set piece, loosely linked by technology.
Dan Gillmor, Silicon Valley journalist, believes we are witnessing the real-world testing of social software products that help groups work with each other more effectively. "Social software effectively combines the best of real and virtual worlds," writes Gillmor in the San Jose Mercury News. "The smaller the group, the more immediate value in the relationship."
At the annual PC Forum conference in suburban Phoenix during the last week of March, Clay Shirky described "the latest in lightweight, bottom-up and Internet-enabled tools." He was demonstrating SocialText -- a Web you can write on as well as read. SocialText expands on technologies that have been around for some time. With SocialText, people can collaborate through their browsers in remarkably simple and surprisingly efficient ways.
SocialText isn't the only way to share space inside a personal browser. But it illustrates one way toward a goal we all crave -- to share our ideas, organise ourselves and generally make better use of this vastly collaborative new space that combines the real and virtual worlds.
Most Irish programmers have some form of an on-line chat or instant messaging program running during the day, alongside their browsers. Providing it's used to focus technical requirements, instant messaging can increase productivity by preventing meaningless meandering down cul-de-sacs.
The Harvard Business Review thinks there's value in social network analysis because it shows how to tap into the power of informal knowledge and action creation in a company.
If you've used the Internet for more than year and you interact with a daily dose of e-mail, you're already a member of a social network. French computer consultant Roland Piquepaille, in his Technology Trends Weblog, points to a cluster of new social network mapping tools that are emerging. Here are some tools that appeal to people first exploring the social networking potential of Internet collaboration.
Over at NetVis.org, the NetVis Module allows a dynamic visualisation of social networks. It simulates, analyses and visualises social networks using data from "csv" files, on-line surveys and geographically dispersed work teams. This seems to be a next step in the evolution of search engines, not giving URLs that match queries, but relating them, showing the relationship between actual data.
Steve Wolff's Surf3D Pro tool may reduce your search time because it allows you to visually evaluate search engine results. It has specific agents, including Google Usenet groups, eBay auctions and Yahoo Boards.
You can get another visual look at search engine results by using the KartOO visual meta search engine at Kartoo.com. It appears to be similar to the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser but it doesn't require Java and uses FlashPlayer to draw interactive maps.
All these networking tools help people to use the Internet as a truly social forum. You can't help but think this is what the Net was always ultimately supposed to be.
Caped Koala Studios has built a virtual world for kids, combining education and social networking 