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)

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.