Clay Shirky on social software

[Tim Regan]

Hi All,

I know membership of a large mailing list does not imply interest in 
mailing lists and other social software, but some of you may be.

I've just read an interesting article 
<http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html> on social software by 
Clay Shirky, one of the popular O'Reilly speakers / writers.

He draws some conclusions for the design of social software (though 
the first three are obvious):
1) design for handles [his term for identities] the user can invest 
in
2) design a way for there to be members in good standing
3) you need barriers to participation
4) you have to find a way to spare the group from scale; scale alone 
kills conversations

But on route he makes some fun contentious statements, e.g.
"eBay has done us all an enormous disservice"
"This is one of the things that killed Usenet"
"Almost all the work being done on reputation systems today is 
either trivial or useless or both"
"community leads to content, which leads to commerce -- never worked"
"when they're trading music [
] they're FedExing one another 180-gig 
hard-drives"
"nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy"

And this is the bit that I thought might be music-to-the-ears for 
anyone frightened away from the main list at present:
"mailing lists are self-moderating with scale, because as the signal 
to noise ratio gets worse, people start to drop off, until it gets 
better, so people join, and so it gets worse. You get these sort of 
oscillating patterns. But it's self-correcting."

Cheers,

Dumbledad.