This presentation from Paul Adams of Google has been traversing the blogosphere for the last couple of weeks. But it is such a fantastic document that I can’t help but add to the chorus of approval.
The Real Life Social Network v2
View more documents from Paul Adams.
It is full of great thoughts and ideas, but there were two metaphors that particularly caught my attention:
- Sitting by some shops, a group of girls may gossip about a guy but when he walks over they change the subject. If they did that online, their prior conversation would still be visible, since conversations are persistent
- Imagine trying to arrange all your online friends into a seating plan for a wedding. They would fall out into fairly discrete groups. There would be some crossover (such as college friends knowing city friends, if you moved to the same place), but there tends to be fairly minimal interaction. A social network is the equivalent of the function room, but the controls aren’t yet there to adequately create a seating plan (Facebook does have some sub-groups but they are pretty fiddly)
The presentation is full of great stuff. Although it is 216 slides, it can be read in 20-30 minutes and I would wholly recommend it.It’s also further ammunitation to disprove Mark Zuckerberg’s compeltely fatuous provocation that our one online identity is our actual identity, and that having multiple identities represents a lack of integrity.
Wonderful web site. A lot of useful info here. I am sending it to several pals ans also sharing in delicious. And naturally, thank you to your effort!