Hi Everyone, Here's an interesting speech on Social Software, given by Clay Shirky at the O'Reilly conference a few months ago that I think is very relevant to what we're working on: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html
It's pretty long, so if you don't have time to read it, here are a few good points that are relevant to our work (their relevance is left as an exercise for the reader): - As online groups grow, it becomes harder for the group's goals to be fulfilled (the group's goals are usually different from any single individual's goals) and the core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations. - We cannot completely separate technical and social issues. - Members are different than users (since becoming a user is so trivial in an online system), and there needs to be a way to differentiate between them. - Things to design for: reputation, barriers to participation (it seems counterintuitive, but think about how Usenet became worthless...pre-google at least), and scaling. Joe
