Hybrid social software

Tom Coates is right when he says that people need to get past their infatuation with social networking sites and remember what went before. Interestingly that seems to be what Microsoft has done with Wallop, which is (apparently) built on IM. So, with Wallop there's no need to register again; create yet another profile; build a new friends list; or learn new tricks to move from conversation to publishing.

What social networking sites like Friendster have shown is that some people enjoy creating public profiles, displaying their friend lists and browsing people. This can easily be layered under IM. In fact, sites like IMchaos and BuddyZoo have been doing this from the sidelines for a while.

BuddyZoo, for example, runs analysis on AIM Buddy Lists to let you (or teens, more likely):

Find out which buddies you have in common with your friends.

Measure how popular you are

Detect cliques you're part of

See a visualisation of your Buddy List

View your Prestige, computed the way Google computes PageRank to rank web pages

See the degrees of separation between different screen names

And IMchaos recently developed an IM-based blog:

Do you have a blog? Do you wish you had more traffic to it? Well how about putting your blog straight into your AIM profile – and knowing who is reading it at the same time!

...Whenever you feel like it, just log on and type your thoughts, mood, and what music you are listening to. We will automatically update your blog, which people can access from your AIM profile. When people read it, their screen name will be added to the visitor log (which only you can see).

Posting from IM to a blog is not very far removed from crafting an expressive away message, which is already immensely popular with students. And you can easily imagine a scenario where you could publish an IM conversation to your blog, so long as you had the consent of all participants. (Loads of people already cut and paste IM conversations into blog posts.)

So it all seems quite sensible, in principle, and the foregrounding of regular contacts is an especially nice feature. But of course because it's Microsoft it will most likely be proprietary.

Posted at 10:16 PM in Social software | Permalink

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Comments

(Loads of people already cut and paste IM conversations into blog posts.)

And more and more people are running blogbots on IRC channels. Witness: 2lmc, The Daily Chump, Monkeyfist's Daily Churn, etc.

Posted by: Yoz at 12 Nov 2003 13:48:44

Thanks for that addition, Yoz. It would be interesting to do a bit of compare & contrast to see how the writing style is influenced by the publishing tool (cf Tom's post about 2lmc)

Posted by: Foe at 13 Nov 2003 12:27:19

yea, I have been using the IMchaos blog since it came out and I must say it is very convenient and addictive

Posted by: Ben at 18 Nov 2003 17:36:47