Headshift: Smarter, Simpler, Social

The flight of the Orkut

January 27, 2004 :: by Lee 17 responses  

The flight of the Orkut draws a sad arc across the memetic sky that really makes me wonder about the nature of the virtual world I inhabit. A developer's personal project within Google designed to create Yet Another Social Network (YASN) Web site has gone from being the hot new thing to a failed experiment *in under a week*.

After seeing some early reports and pondering an invitation to join, I noticed Lilia tracking the hype curve. Elsewhere, Liz Lawley liked Orkut and set about comparing and contrasting Orkut with other online social networking sites, as did Stuart Henshall.

Following a few brief notes from others, Clay Shirky got down to some serious link traversal analysis: "...even as more users are joining, average path length is falling. It was 4.4 a few hours ago, and its down to 3.8 now." Martin Roell, on the other hand, made some sensible comments about the endemic problem of classifying relationships in online social networks and how this was affecting Orkut too.

Cory Doctorow, who obviously gets invited to way too many parties already, remarked that Orkut sucked (just like all the other YASNs) and said Google is missing a trick in combining social networking with search. In response, Marc Canter does the only sensible thing, which is to attack the 'British Intellectual Etech crowd' who all have their own personal FOAF servers (presumably to hide the fact that we are *all* personal friends with Saddam Hussein and secretly admire France). Marc, who admits that "some folks seem to delight in attaining the most friends (like me!) for no reason at all - except to do it", also argues that we need centralised organisation of our FOAF files to take the social networking craze forward and reminds us that although YASNs may seem trivial now, they are just a precursor to the wonderful functionality that will emerge when we embed social networking into other, everyday applications. To be fair, he is right on both counts.

And then .... poof! ..... it disappeared. Normally a cheerleader for the YASN business model, even the esteemed Ross Mayfield stepped up to bury Orkut and explain why it doesn't work: "orkurt doesn’t work because it lacks constraints. Nothing holds people back. Nobody knows what a friend means. No social capital on the line. Its so fun and easy, choices and incentives are irrational."

Chris Heathcote went further and pulled out his cluedo figures to point out some of the obvious flaws in the YASN approach, not least the fact that these systems depend on ever more people joining to create new connections which seem to inexorably lead towards binary relationships - friendship comes to mean one-degree connections only. You could argue that Chris is a cheese-appreciating surrender monkey, but actually his point reminds me of the pyramid selling schemes based on "how to make money" or "how to network your way to wealth" that were so rampant in the 1980's. Indeed, Thomas Power's simply stated philosophy for Ecademy is based on this idea, it seems to me: contacts = money; more contacts = more money.

Finally, Jason Kottke illustrates the absurdity of the YASN scene with his advert for an online social networking assistant to manage his profiles and traffic in the various YASNs to which he is invited.

So, what does this all mean?

First, the YASN novelty has worn off and we must now surely just assimilate its basic features into specific applications with specific purposes for specific groups of people. This is what we at Headshift have been wrestling with in the area of mental health service improvement in the UK for over a year - yes, that said "year" ... as in 52 weeks, and we are engaged with several other stakeholder groups to slowly and appropriately introduce these concepts into their online communications activity. When we do this, we should also remember that notions of friendship and relationships formation are remarkably varied across national and organisational cultures. If anything, the American model is the exception, not the rule. Indeed, networks/cultures with greater levels of real-world social capital have far less need for technology-mediated relationship formation, but they may find other uses for the ideas behind online social networking.

Second, though, I can't help thinking there is something rather odd about the geek culture that supports the YASN hype. Maybe in years to come, people will look back on the limited phenomenon of the online social networking sites and wonder at our complete idiocy, decadence or both. When my daughter grows up and asks what I was doing whilst a corrupt elite and its allies were taking the world to hell in a handbasket, will I tell her I was sitting in front of a powerbook counting my friends .... over and over again?

The Slovene philosopher Slavoj Zizek makes two points about our postmodern condition that are ringing like bells in my head when I watch intelligent, well-connected and privileged people wasting hours of their lives telling websites who their friends are every time a geeky engineer decides to put up a YASN site.

In "On Belief", Zizek talks about the 'future shock' that is such a part of postmodern living:

"Before one can accustom oneself to an invention, it is already supplanted by a new one, so that more and more one lacks the most elementary 'cognitive mapping'"

He sees this as a key driver behind our adoption of Western Buddhism, Taoism and (dare I add) network fetishism, which allow us just enough critical distance from the accelerating rhythm of technological progress and social change whilst simultaneously comforting us with the notion that we cannot change the natural flow of things. We don't just go with the flow these days, we measure its viscosity and count how many nodes it is connected to.

In "Welcome to the Desert of the Real," he picks up on Alain Badiou's idea that the Twentieth Century began with the pursuit of the "real" in all its bloody, violent technicolour, but ended in pure spectacle, whilst the postmodern era seeks spectacle but ultimately results in self-harm, fundamentalisms and other symptoms of a desperation for authentic "real" experience:

"The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is that of an individual living in a small idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he lives in a real world, while all people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic show ... The underlying experience of Time Out of Joint and of The Truman Show is that the late capitalist consumerist Californian paradise is, in its very hyper-reality, in a way IRREAL, substanceless, deprived of the material inertia."

This is not to suggest that online social networking has no "real-world" role to play in our work, our social lives or in bringing people together in pursuit of mutual understanding and collaboration - quite the contrary - but unless we can progress beyond the childish instinct to prove how popular/connected we are, and show some more meaningful uses of these technologies, then nobody will believe us.

There are some incredibly exciting ideas and developments (mostly coming out of the united States, I should add) such as Del.icio.us and work on underlying protocols such as RSS, Atom, FOAF, etc. We need our YASN pioneers, just as we needed early weblog pioneers, to help us learn lessons and develop tools and techniques that can be used more widely within a social software context. But if we are to convince the next wave of organisations and users to engage with this stuff, then we need to build on this experience and show some compelling real-world examples of online social networking in action, rather than social networking for its own sake.

Just in case I don't see you in Orkut or another online social networking system: Good morning, Good Evening and Good Night!

What do you think?