Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Shirky's thoughts on social software (circa 2003) Read more. Still good in 2006.

Some prescriptions from Clay. In order to to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups (italics are mine):

1. Allow users to invest in their "handles" or identities. (What price, reputation?)
2. Recognize good works to maintain participants in good standing. (Loyalty, to whom?)
3. Create barriers to participation. (Privileges?)
4. Find a way to spare the group from scale. (How large should a community be?)

1 comment:

Joel said...

Shirky is right in most respects but Alex Bunardzic begs to disagree. In his Ethical Software blog, Bunardzic writes that although scale may kill conversation, he argues that since not all conversations are verbal, scale may after all foster non-verbal conversations.