On 04/09/2014 20:21, Kagamin wrote:
It comprises a social network in a sense that every user has his own "diary" - a place to store and share his work, and users can follow and watch diaries they're interested in, and when they get notified on updates in the followed diaries, they instantly go there to like, discuss and comment. And - in case of github - contribute.
I know that, but in Github its not common for people to follow other people. Rather, they follow repositories, or at most, organizations... That takes away a lot of the social aspect of it, since it's not people you are focused on. There is also little element of discovering new people through the people you already know (although that is technically possible), it's not a core competency of Github. At most you discover new repositories through the people you follow, but I would reckon even that is not a common workflow. Fundamentally the central unit of the network in Github is a repository (and perhaps organizations). The people unit is very secondary.
Like I said, you can still consider Github to be a social network with a very loose definition of what a social network is, but nonetheless, I consider it significantly different than Facebook/Google+/MySpace/LinkedIn/Twitter/Instagram/tumblr/etc..
-- Bruno Medeiros https://twitter.com/brunodomedeiros
