Posted by Kevin Anderson

I’m going to blog a bit about this talk because he’s going to give a talk about the design of social objects and five guiding principles. Social sites have been around for a while. Firefly. Bought by Microsoft and quickly killed. SixDegrees rises and then fails to gain additional funding after dot.com collapse. Next is Friendster, which is still in the top 100 English-language websites. Is MySpace another butterfly? Will it flutter in and then fizzle out?

Something about sites like Flickr that you will be using these sites for years to come.

The sites that work are built around social objects.

It is a criticism of the idea about social networks. It’s not just about collecting contacts or people connecting to people but connecting around an object. When we’re building services, it’s helpful to think about it from this angle rather than simply social networks. You think about Flickr. What they managed to do was to turn photos into social objects. Flickr with photos. Del.cio.us with bookmarks.

MySpace. What is the real focal object? Music. Once they lose that focus, it is in trouble.

How does one build a useful service around social objects? Five key principles.

1. You should be able to define the social object your service is built around
2. Define your verbs that your users perform on the objects. For instance, eBay has buy and sell buttons. It’s clear what the site is for.
3. How can people share the objects?
4. Turn invitations into gifts
5. Charge the publishers, not the spectators. He learned this from Joi Ito. There will be a day when people don’t pay to download or consume music but the opportunity to publish their playlists online.

What’s next? What’s the future? Principals of disruptive innovation:

1. Simpler
2. Cheaper
3. Frees people from the need to go to an inconvenient place

Here’s the full presentation. More people need to use SlideShare. It makes live blogging so much easier.

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