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Brynn Evans pointed me to an intriguing piece of future gazing from Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström – The Web at a New crossroads. In it, they describe the evolution of the internet from a document-centric content sharing mechanism, through to the way we see it today – with the emergence of people-centric media solutions like Facebook and Twitter increasingly taking a prominent role.
It’s a well thought out and innately resonant concept – we are currently at a stage in the web’s development where people are sufficiently acclimatized to the technology, and the technologists are realizing what personal elements are required to bring people into the web – offering elements that are innately social and vital to the way that humans behave. As Clay Shirky puts it, “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” Hence the dawn of what Messina and Engeström are calling “The people-centric Web”.
Among my circle of friends, there are few who aren’t on Facebook. And those few who aren’t, are missing out on the conversations, the lame jokes, the cat pictures, and all the stuff that goes on in social circles– for whatever reason, they’re not at the party. If there’s one thing that people fear, it’s being left out – solitary confinement is the single worst kind of punishment dealt out by the human race. As the web becomes more and more socially interesting, it seems likely that the kinds of pressures that we impose on ourselves as a society – pressure to be seen, to contribute value, and to achieve will continue to manifest more and more as part of the social web.
Work is different from play. In recreational social circles, the social objects –the things we’re talking about – often take a back seat to the fact that people are talking about them. A Facebook conversation about, say, Keyboard Cat, provides a mechanism for the conversation participants to engage and jest – the content itself is not of particular importance. Social systems grow based on the actions of the contributors, not on the artifacts or information that catalyzes their existence.
In a work setting, the conversation happens exactly the same way – it is, after all, the only way people know how to interact, but the social object tends to have a lot more value. In fact, in days of old, content management systems placed all the value on the content – often not providing any way to allow social interaction or discussion about the important documents, plans and policies that are the artifacts produced by people in work environments. With the dawn of Enterprise 2.0 (the people-centric web for work), we realize that we need to bring more social approaches to the way people work, and to design workflows that mirror the ways people interact with their friends.
Say Messina and Engeström: “We want a web where people are as important to the architecture of the system as documents.”
While I applaud the sentiment, I think it’s more than just a case of bringing people up to the level of documents in terms of importance. They way we manage content has to change in order to allow these conversations to take place. There needs to be more accessibility, more transparency, and clear ownership of content. With the current web, people are clearly indicating to systems architects exactly how they want to work with social objects. We need to take the Content Management tools of old and ensure that they meet these social needs first.
“Ask not what you can do for your Content, but what your Content can do for you”
Hugh MacLeod, over at gapingvoid gives some great insight into “Social Objects”:
“The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else”
I really like the term. Social Objects are everywhere in modern web applications – Check out the discussion pages at wikipedia, or flickr. Every one of those crummy facebook applications that you accidentally join has, at it’s core, a social object.
As for the Enterprise, the social objects that are present in the workplace may not be as interesting as say, Vampires, but they are nonetheless important artifacts that people interact daily with. The latest copy of the employee manual is a social object. A previous forgotten version may also be a social object. The new team put together for the latest PR campaign is a social object. Other people who contribute decisions on that campaign are social objects. (isn’t inter-office gossip fun?) And all of these social objects co-exist in the workplace with a stream of social objects that people bring along with them.
Now, these social objects are a nice abstraction, but they don’t really offer us much utility – the real opportunity to improve the function of the enterprise lies in the conversations about these objects, and the actions taken as a result of those conversations. As Dean said in a previous post, Computers aren’t very good at conversations. But they are very good at remembering and tracking things.
Since we started infovark, social objects and people have been at the forefront of our thinking. (We’re working on the best way to manage these enterprise social objects for the people who work with them.)
Every time I see a post like Hugh’s that explains what we’re working on, it makes me feel a little less nervous about the whole startup thing…
Rock on, Hugh 
Gordon discovered a tiny URL stuck to the bottom of our new rubber friend.
Clicking on it seemed to have no effect, so we decided to type http://www.ifoundtheaardvark.com into a web browser. It appears that our new mascot is a collective art project! The website has a few broken links, and the forum hasn’t been updated in a while, but the project claims to have “no end”. Maybe we’ll post our corporate logo to the art gallery.
Viral Marketing is an interesting thing. A small rubber aardvark from an art project sponsored by a community newspaper in Southeastern Massachusetts wound up in a startup software company in Northern Virginia by way of my aunt and uncle living in Eastern Georgia. And that’s just the motion of a physical object. Think how much further and faster word of mouth can travel. It’s encouraging to have evidence of how far an idea can spread.