Read a good article 35 Perspectives on Online Social Networking from a fellow wordpress blogger. Very interesting. And that led to another article The Four Pillars of Social Software.
Both writings raise interesting dimensions -
The last pillar “Scale kills conversation, so Protect Conversations From Scale” is very relevant (and very difficult !)
“Finding way for people to self-organize, split up and reform dynamically, and form affinities with groups ” is congruent to the graph primitives in ad-hoc networks, one of my passions !
When a social network group scales in a scale-free manner, one would like it to morph into sub-graphs (to keep the conversation, one really cannot shout to 10,000 folks and manage the threads ;o(), still maintaining the connectivity thru sentinel nodes and thus keeping the “bigger” network alive.
Each network has it’s own form, function and utility (Book [1] below explain the dimensions of organization very well), so we cannot arbitrarily create sub-groups and forget about the original organization.
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Couple of good books for summer reading (in addition to The Deathly Hallows, of course ;o))
1. Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
2. Watch This, Listen Up, Click Here: Inside the 300 Billion Dollar Business Behind the Media You Constantly Consume
3. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
4. Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature
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