Friday, April 28, 2006

Wallop.com: Thoughts on Next Generation Social Technology

Justin Pfister from Waterbury, CT who works at a TimeWarner company says he “loves keeping tabs on everything that connects us and projects us into greater awareness.” You can email him at justin@openyard.com.

Think for a second: Could MySpace, Orkut, Yahoo! 360 and Friendster be the DOS operating system that Wallop.com, as Windows, overcomes? Does history repeat itself like this?

Wallop.com, a social technology company, is a newly announced member of the Microsoft IP Ventures program. There’s not much on their website, but you might get the impression that Wallop.com, like the box on their page, is just exploding with ideas about social computing. Their site is a tabula rasa, or blank slate, and ideally it will grow with the people who embrace it over time. Check out their jobs page. (Hey, Wallop, hire me!)

Could Wallop.com bring the next dimension of Social Technology? Well they have a pretty socially advanced parent. I don’t feel like its embraced enough, but Microsoft Windows has laid the foundation of social computing from the very beginning. The simple Microsoft platform got people to stop optimizing code and start living life. Windows makes it easy for our older family members to send us email. It’s because of products like Office that business people around the world can communicate with thoughtful documents like PowerPoint and Excel. My friend can record a song and be confident that it would play on my Media Player. So many things have progressed because of Microsoft.

Here are some things we’ve learned about social technology over the past few years. I’m using the bullets from Danah Boyd’s article and expanding on her points with my own thoughts.

• Social services need to fit in with our lives. Credit cards and Quicken are perfect examples for me of technology that fits into my life. In fact it enhances my experience of day to day life while living in a capitalist society. What if Quicken allowed us to tag our purchases and openly share them with people? Do you think I have more in common with someone who searches for snowboards or someone who buys snowboards?
• People use services that all of their friends use. Google Talk and Yahoo 360 are examples of great services that my friends don’t use and that aren’t any fun using alone. Why is email so universally cool? I don’t care what domain you use, I can send you an email! What happened?
• Social technologies need benevolent dictators who love their constituents. Tom @ MySpace.com alone makes MySpace much friendlier than “The Man” at Friendster. Wallop.com has already said that they will introduce a new way for consumers to express their individuality online. This doesn’t sound to caring, mostly because we’re not just consumers, but we’re also producers of value too, just look at our blogs. I remember a girl in high school who used to make hats! I hope Wallop will give people like this a chance to sell hats and manage their single item inventory without paying developers and becoming ecommerce masters.
• Social technology isn’t about productivity. Talking to my neighbor about his dog isn’t very productive in the scheme of my professional life, but it does make me a better friend, community member and citizen. The chaotic customized MySpace pages definitely aren’t productive, but they do make that website fun for so many people.
• Social technology isn’t about perfection. Hey! If Microsoft waited for Windows to be 100% perfect before they released it, we wouldn’t have it yet. If everything had to be perfect for me before I left the house, I might never leave. If this article had to be perfect before I submitted, you might never be reading it. Life isn’t always perfect and although we might be able to fake it with our Excel calculations or Google searches, most of the time we just need to do our best and we’re all better for that.

In the end, social computing and Wallop are going to need to be more like life and less like technology. I think Microsoft will be a good mentor for them. If they can stay true to the human condition, they may create the next social sense. A long-term sustainable sense of social awareness will happen sooner or later! For Wallop, a blank slate combined with out of the box ideas about simple things (look at the image above) seems like a great way to start.

[Image by Wallop.com.]

Wallop.com: Thoughts on N ... by Justin Pfister | Comments (8)

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