Passive-Blind Voyeuristic Social
Written by Russ on August 26, 2008 – 1:52 pmThat title alone makes me feel like this entire post should be written by a slew of people who are a whole heck of a lot smarter than me, so I apologize in advance if you stumbled across this and thought you were going to get something highly academic.
It seems to me that there is a perception that “being social” means that you have to actually engage other users actively.
I do not think that is true.
I think that you can be socially involved with someone by quietly watching them–lurking, if you will. In fact, “lurking” has been going on in email discussion lists, online forums and, dare I mention it, BBSes for years and years.
Lurking, I believe, is sitting back and watching the conversation–letting it all happen around you, without anyone knowing you’re even there. However, with lurking, you also begin to understand the behavioral patterns and personalities of others.
Just by watching.
Seems kind of passive, if not voyeuristic to me.
So, if someone serves you up content based upon the actions of others who share similar traits with you, or have identified similar likes and aspirations, then it would seem to me that is rather blindly doing so–you don’t know who those other people are, just that they’re like you.
It’s like seeing a bunch of nameless, faceless “you”-types running around and doing their business and getting content served to you based upon their–and your–collective actions.
So, Passive-Blind Voyeuristic Social would be sitting back and watching content as it is served to you based upon actions that others, identified as being similar to you, and then acting upon it, which in turn influences someone else’s results as they do the same.
Or, at least, so I think it is. Sure, there’s a good chance that someone else has already thought of this and has a better definition, but this kind of works for me right now, and it makes sense to me as another way in which we can interact–socially–without having to actually cross any lines of “faux friendship” and add to our ever-growing lists of contacts that we may not actually even know.
It’s a great way to provide context and direction to users without forcing them to reveal themselves to each other.
There is an unbelievable amount of power in the following statement:
People <like you> who <do something> also <do something else that you’re not doing>.
Don’t you want to know? iTunes has been doing it for us for quite awhile (and have since taken quite a few nickels from my coin purse), but that is very loosely based upon qualities of music–and not “qualities of Russ”; there’s an opportunity to go a little deeper and deliver content to our users that don’t require them to becoming visibly engaged.
I’m going to go ponder this for a bit. I’d welcome additional thoughts.
Note: Search engines have been offering up “What People Are Searching For Now” types of content since, like, forever. This is different as it is actually based upon some identifiers that you have selected, and have in common with others, without actually having to engage them.
Posted in Community, Social Networking | 7 Comments »
There are a number of services that work this way, mostly related to recommending things for you to buy. iTunes (like you mentioned), Amazon, last.fm even… Music is actually a perfect place for this because your listening habits can be tracked without any active participation…
I agree with you, but I see music as slightly different because it’s not always “people like me like this music” it’s more like “this music is also like that music”.
Maybe it is the same–if I like camping and you like camping and thousands of others like camping, but I only buy my camping supplies from REI, it would be nice to know other places that I don’t know about–but you and the thousands of others do. Bass Pro Shops, etc. etc.
I guess it could be the same–this store is like that store.
But I’m trying to throw in the mix of “this store is like that store” (or not) and people like me shop there, too, but I’m not shopping there.
My head hurts.
or is it more like:
this store is like that store, and those people shop at this store AND that store -> see where else they shop
or is that moving too far away from the initial point of commonality?
I think it’s like that.
That way, I get to learn where you shop that is different than where I shop without having to actually shake your hand, be your friend, or even know who you are at all.
It becomes an approach to let me learn about new things without having to have any real “public” skin in the game.
Make sense?
actually makes a lot of sense.
in my current project we actually have a “trust” feature.. where instead of adding other users to a network as friends you can trust their taste/opinions on specific criteria. the goal is connecting people with content, not people with people.
I agree that this already goes on all over the place. In buying contexts like iTunes, sure. But also in most social sites. Doing research on teens from the Pew studies, even in younger generations we consider to be far more social and Internet-savvy than we ever were at that age: you’ve got about 30% active creators, and 70% watchers.
Even here, as I write this comment.
I know that for each comment, there are 5-7 other people who are reading, reacting, but not reflecting back through the system. And that’s okay. Like you say, this has always been the case, and will continue to be the case. Most people would rather see what people like them are doing, and act based on those recommendations.
In completely saturated Internet cultures like Korea, they’ve gone to the next level by employing panels to make recommendations. An ecommerce store has a number of professional personas, as I understand it (not being a native Korean, or in any way literate in the language), who are like you, but professionally attuned to being really good at knowing what you’ll like to buy. They’re not friends at all, but you learn to trust them based on the collective suggestions they’ve made in the past.
I totally skimmed everything because it’s 5:20 and I’m about to run out the door…
But…
I think the nifty bit is that the majority social activity is passive lurking, but we tend to optimize the interfaces for active participation.
The really succesful social apps have made it really easy to passively lurk: livejournal, email lists, twitter.
IMO, places like MySpace make it easy to participate, but are succesful despite this. (I think their success is more about the ease with which you can “flourish” and the huge network effects they have.)
(MySpace is probably a good example because LiveJournal actually hides and/or limits the flourishing. In fact, the users is more likely to see thier own flourishes and almost guaranteed to not see other users’s flourishes.
This is the exact opposite of MySpace where the user’s own flourishes are hidden, but you are constantly bombarded with other people’s flourishes.
Dammit! I missed my freaking bus… (Shakes fist at @russu)