YASNS?*

Whisking through my unread posts today, two items struck me as demanding a little follow-up. First of all, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison’s Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship. The nature of the paper is pretty obvious from its title, though that is not to imply that it is not well-written, intelligent and provoking. The authors don’t spell out their definition as a short list of unambiguous phrases, so I’ll take the liberty of doing that bit for them. Social network sites:

• enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks
• these networks often reflect offline networks in that they make explicit friend-of-friend links and other ‘latent ties’
• Friends on these systems are not necessarily friends in the offline sense, but are very likely to belong to the same offline social network somehow
• implement a (variably) visible profile system, which also displays a list of Friends within that system
• Friends can normally leave visible messages for each other – some actually evolved from messaging systems e.g. QQ and Cyworld
• Many social networks attract groups of quite similar people, at least initially.

So far, so good – not much that most people would find enormously controversial – and a useful list of defining characteristics to keep to hand the next time someone asks you, ‘So what are these social network sites, then?’

Then I read JP Rangaswami’s posts Some Friday Night Ruminations about Facebook et al. and  More Musings about what makes Facebook Different. The short answer to what makes it different, from the first of those posts is that:

I don’t quite know, but it is. Stuff like MySpace and Bebo are overtly narcissistic, it’s all about how you express yourself. Facebook, on the other hand, is about relationships and conversations.

So that kind of wrecks the neat list and the generalisations, because while I agree with them all, I can’t help but observe that he’s right.

In his later post, JP remarks Facebook seemed like ‘a site where communities coalesced and sometimes even collided’ – given its overwhelming take up among the UK and US population over the last twelve months, you find and re-find friendships with family, school-friends, colleagues, ex-colleagues, lovers and rivals – its omnipresence and insistence on real names makes your Facebook identity a lot like your real-life identity. JP reckons this ought to be of value to enterprises because it allows work contact to deepen through the discovery of shared likes, random insights into a fellow’s personality which make you feel more intimate. This is a topic I wrote about in the Double Intimacy Score post at the end of September.

It seems to me that Facebook’s focus is on interaction, not representation. The home page, crucially, I think, is not your profile, but the lifestream of your network. The topmost item of everyone’s profile page is the stream of their latest actions and interactions on the network. That’s the big attraction, not creating the pimpingest profile page ever. That’s why you might go back several times a day – to see what’s going on in your neighbourhood. Once you’ve set your profile up, maybe automated streams from your blogs, flickr and twitters, etc., you’re not actually that likely to return to it very often at all. Once you’ve established contact with a Friend, you’re not even likely to visit their profile page very often, except the sub-sub-sections for new notes, imported items and photos, etc. The action’s in the actions. You add applications because they provide additional ways to interact with people. The action’s in returning that Poke, playing your turn at Scrabble, biting that chump. It’s the wall-to-wall page you look at, not the wall.

YASNS = Yet Another Social Network System

Possibly Related Posts:

• Let’s Be Friends
• Facebook as Game
• Facebook on Privacy: ‘We’re Finished’