Communicating with the Web: Google could be Facebook…and more on networks and communities

Friday, June 08, 2007

Google could be Facebook…and more on networks and communities

There’s a lot of talk about networks and communities, I posted on blog communties or networks not long ago…Collaboration Loop has a comparison.
As often put networks are individual centric, whereas communities are a place, have a main topic, agenda, set members, moderated and they die out if members are not putting in effort.

Whereas networks are self evolving, may not be intentional (they can be parts making up a whole without perhaps even knowing their involvment), and they may de-evolve of no consequence.

Anyway, my post on Facebook got me thinking the way they incorprate communities and networks into the one ecosystem, whereas Google is scattered.

For instance Google have a startpage, they have a social network, and they have communities or groups.

These are all separate products and they still can be, but there could be an option to intergrate them like Facebook.

Notice that Facebook is a startpage or personal dashboard, and it’s also a social network as you can message and add friends (share stuff, keep updated), and you can also slice smaller networks by defining a region or a company or a school…you could come up with sub-networks by filtering on any piece of common data or parameter. Notice how this is still an individual centric network, no-one may even notice they are part of the “Australia” network, not knowing their profile and content is appearing under the Australia Network page.

Then they have groups around any topic, these you know about as you have to join, members and visitors take part in discussions, etc…without member or visitor input these groups or communities become ghost towns.

Whereas this doesn’t happen with a network, there is no trail left behind if a network fades away…in saying that if all the Australian Facebook people stopped using Facebook then there would be no Australia network and there would be dead profiles (that didn’t sound good, but you know what I mean).

Basically the network (the whole) only fades away as individuals (the parts) stop using their profile, so as long as people get personal benefit and thrive, you can see many networks depending on how you slice the data.

Anyway this post was more about personal dashboards, groups and networks being intertwined in the same ecosystem…hmmm, only thing missing is task collaboration, ala Foldera.

Source: libraryclips.blogsome.com

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