Integrated Web Design: Social Networking — The Relationship between Humans and Computers is Coming of Age

Date: Apr 2, 2004

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Back in the Bulletin Board Service (BBS) days, the online community had substance, grit, and a tangible human face. Widely used BBSs such as GEnie, CompuServe, Prodigy, Delphi, and The Well allowed regular people to get online from their home computers in real time for the first time en masse. That led to face-to-face meetings; in some cases, hundreds of members would gather. Local BBSs had "GTs" (get-togethers). People got together to chug coffee, talk technology, and connect socially.

The Web has struggled to implement a truly effective community that commercial online services seemed to accomplish with ease. Much of this challenge has been due to the difficulty in creating fast, effective, cross-browser applications for chat and discussion services.

A very modest level of success has been achieved over the years to improve the Web-based community, but the essential grit of earlier interactive formats has only recently begun to emerge on the Web. This is largely due to fresh visions and new technologies, as well as a re-emergence of older technologies such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC). This year, Howard Rheingold, long considered one of the gurus of the online community, came out of relative seclusion to keynote at SXSW, clearly demonstrating a resurgence in the use of computer technology for human connection.

The interaction between community, computers, and society is now being referred to as social networking, and it's making a lot of heads turn.

What is Social Networking?

Most people seek connection. In fact, most people require some kind of need to bond with others. Some of us have a significant need to create community or—at the very least—some kind of shared experience. This has occurred throughout the history of the online world, whether in the form of Usenet newsgroups, email lists, chat, instant messaging (IM), and Peer-to-Peer technologies. In recent years, some new offerings have been added to the mix, and they are reviving interest in community in fresh ways.

Dave Shea, creator of the CSS Zen Garden and avid weblogger via his site, Mezzoblue, says that "the potential to hook up disparate groups of distributed people with the same interests is amazing." Shea feels that "There's nothing like an online community to bring together people who can't create a local community out of lack of shared interest."

The continuing integration of sociology and technology is bringing about new insights and new platforms for advances for both. The technologies of interest in contemporary social networking include

• Weblogs. Weblogging has become a vastly popular social event. For the technologist, the tools being developed and perfected for weblogs—such as automated aggregation, blogrolls, and comment system—are making it profoundly easy to aggregate and connect related content as well as people. Surprise, surprise to all you folks who thought weblogs would be a passing fad! New markup languages are emerging to manage aggregation and to better express relationships within document content.

• Social networking Web sites. Along with Orkut and Friendster, a large number of social networking web sites have emerged. These sites aren't to be confused with general community sites; instead they specifically map individuals to other individuals.

• Geographical mapping. Easy-to-implement geographical mapping can be made of the precise location of you and the weblog or sites you represent.

Social networking is providing important and very useful technologies. There are other questions important to consider as well, as is always the case when technology and humanity interact.

Weblogs as Social Networks

I recently cleaned up a web server no longer in active use and found weblog archives from my site going back to my original weblog post four years ago. In that first weblog post, I wrote about how it was "better late than never" to get my weblog started. Now, I'm an old lady on the scene.

I don't think anyone could have properly envisioned the social explosion that weblogging would become. Now, technologists and designers are becoming aware that the tools being developed for the weblogger offer real solutions to real web design problems far beyond the vanity plate of a weblog and are in fact part of the social networking phenomenon.

Biz Stone, author of Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web Content and member of the Blogger team at Google, supports this perspective. "Social networking applications lack context. That's why I'm so keen on blogging. A network based on mutual intellectual attraction that has grown not by people choosing traits from a menu, but by continuously projecting the contents of their mind onto a living stage and inviting others to know the person behind the curtain is far more interesting."

Along with the social aspects of blogging have come numerous opportunities for technological growth. Blogging software has offered up such important tools as

• Comment systems. One of the most interesting side effects of blogging software is that commenting systems have become a key way of implementing social interaction on a weblog or web site with very little maintenance or overhead.

• Automatic content aggregation. Many packages such as Movable Type offer a variety of aggregation formats. Users can configure their blogging software to automatically create one or several aggregation formats seamlessly when a new entry is created for the site. Followers of a blog then input the aggregation data into a newsreader software and are automatically notified when new entries have been added to the blog.

• Blogrolling. Blogrolls are automated lists of blogs that a given blog author reads. The rolls are usually kept on the blog home page, and there are a variety of ways in which you can configure the software to work, typically having recently read sites roll on and those not recently read roll off, keeping the blogroll constantly rotating new links to new people.

• Trackback and Pingback. Some software for blogging allows for Trackback, which is a method of communication between web sites. The software essentially sends a Trackback Ping, a small message to another site. Typically, Trackback is used to exchange and aggregate specific topical content between sites. Pingback allows for web site authors to be notified when someone links to their site using the Pingback specification, which is considered by some to be more organized and documented than Trackback.

• Automatic pinging. This feature is similar to Trackback in the sense that you can configure some blogging software to ping a specific site each time a new post is made. Users usually set up their sites to ping weblog search engines, so the scope is usually broader than Trackback, less specific to the content.

That we're only at the beginning of our relationship with these technologies is a commonly held thought. Stone feels that "social networking has yet to reveal its most important use." It's the unexpected side effects of social software development that he feels is enriching the scene. "When Blogger launched in August of 1999, it was to make updates easier—not to fuel the emergence of a hyper-connected intelligence. That was people using a simple tool, reacting to their environment and establishing feedback loops. It was nature, not just software."

Mark It Up!

Quite a crop of languages or extensions to existing languages has popped up lately. Many of these languages are related to content aggregation; others, such as XFN, are used to tag relationships between people and people.

RSS and Atom

RSS, also referred to as Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, is a term used to describe a number of XML-related aggregation technology versions that grew out of a project at Netscape geared to manage news headlines for portal web sites.

Within a short time, seven RSS formats emerged from different vendors, making it a bit difficult to figure out which is best to use. You may have also heard the term RDF, which is Resource Description Format, a more formal XML language being developed at the W3C. RDF, as with all aggregation technologies, is very concerned with metadata and how to use it to connect people to information, and vice versa.

Based heavily on the concepts within RSS, Atom is an emerging next-generation format for content syndication. Its goal is to provide a more stable standardized platform for aggregation and to offer developers far more choice and flexibility than in RSS.

Fortunately, many weblogging tools generate more than one form of RSS, including Atom, and you can manually create RSS and Atom documents, too.

FOAF

FOAF is the Friend of a Friend project. FOAF is described as an "RDF vocabulary." It's used very much like RSS, and has properties that can be used to describe information about individuals—such as nick, homepage, phone and so on. The ultimate goal with FOAF is locate people with similar interests and help build communities.

XFN

XFN is the acronym for XHTML Friends Network. Developed by Matthew Mullenweg (who also is the developer of the semantic blogging software WordPress) along with standards evangelists Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik, XFN is conceptually like other aggregation technologies, except it uses HTML vocabulary, not other markup languages.

Mullenweg looks to the simplicity of XFN as one of its most appealing points. "I think there are a couple of really exciting things about XFN," he says. "It leverages higher-level semantics into the HTML everyone already knows. You don't have to learn a new awkward syntax or mess with strange files. It takes what you're already doing, linking, and enriches it semantically."

By adding a number of attribute values to the rel attribute, anyone writing documents in HTML or XHTML can make their links XFN-friendly. Here's an example of a link on one of my site's pages to Biz Stone's web site:

<a href="http://www.bizstone.com/" title="Go to http://www.bizstone.com" 
rel="friend colleague">Biz Stone</a>.

As you can see, I added the rel attribute to the link and also added values that describe our relationship as being friends and colleagues. Beyond simple, but sure to be very effective when blogrolls, specialty search engines, blogging tools, and markup editors begin supporting XFN more explicitly.

The other piece of XFN that Mullenweg points to as having tremendous potential is that XFN is distributed, unlike social networking web sites. "XFN doesn't tie you in to any one place; it connects people across domains, literally," Mullenweg says. "The history of the Web has shown that decentralization is the wave of the future."

Social Mapping via Web Sites

Surely you've been invited by someone to Friendster or Orkut, and if you haven't yet, believe me, it's going to happen soon. The premise of these sites relates to the "six degrees of separation" theory, in which it's been suggested that any two humans are connected by six or fewer other people in some way.

Social networks seek to map relationships and connect like-minded individuals to each other via each individual's social group. A friend initiates an invitation. That invite arrives via email, I click a link and am taken to the site in question. I fill out a form and agree that the invitation is in fact from my friend. As my network grows, I can ask a person I know to introduce me to a person they know that I'd like to know, and so on.

Social network web sites can focus on friendships, dating, or business relationships. Typically, a social network web site requires registration and offers a range of features from email to message boards and other social activities.

But not everyone is convinced that the social networking web site phase will hold its own. "Most SN sites are all about being sticky; they want you at their site all the time." Mullenweg adds, "When they're successful, they falter under the load, like Friendster. When they're not, it feels like an empty coffee shop."

Geographical Mapping

Another intriguing piece that I include in the realm of social networking is the geographical mapping of individuals. We have of course been mapping the Internet itself for many years and we have a means of knowing where any given server resides. In fact, the majority of the servers I use are geographically nowhere near my home, and that's likely to be true for many readers, too.

Geographical mapping in a social context means that instead of mapping by machine, mapping is done for the location of the individual. A perfect example of this is GeoURL. By including some metadata in my site documents, the GeoURL server takes my coordinates and compares them to other registered blogs near me. This way, I can look through the web sites of people within my geographical area, potentially increasing and improving my social network on a local scale.

Get Social, but Ask Questions

There are important social questions that must be raised, too. In his seminal work, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, Joseph Weizenbaum writes that "...a highway permits people to travel between the geographical centers it connects, but, because of the side effects that it and other factors synergistically engender, it imprisons poor people in inner cities as effectively as if the cities were walled in."

Are we leaving people out that should have easier access to social networks? I think about the comment that Matt Haughey once made about how the community web site Metafilter was purposely made difficult to navigate to keep out the less-technically-inclined. Do we risk controlling communities too tightly? Who makes such determinations?

Another issue is whether we aren't just littering the Web with Internet junk. I can understand the importance of social network web sites; for example, I enjoy them to a certain extent because it really is interesting to watch how people map to one another. But after joining a few of them, I got really exhausted trying to keep up with the entire experience. One such site would be enough!

Finally, concerns about privacy and appropriate use of personal information raises numerous questions that only time will reveal answers to. A word of advice, though. If you're going to use social networking web sites, read their Terms of Service (TOS) carefully. Orkut, for example, owns everything you post. Many critics of social networking web sites point out that avoiding their use and sticking to weblog-related networking provides far more protection to authors.

One thing is certain: Social networking isn't just a fad. There's no doubt that some of the web sites and technologies we're using now will become radically different or fall off the radar altogether. The advancing connection between computers and machines is inarguable, but whether we use these tools for the benefit of the greater social good is still very far from view.

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