1. THE INTERNET IS PEOPLE Ben Werdmuller December 1, 2008

2. Social network 3. Socialnetwork adj.Relating to human society and its members. 4. Socialnetwork n.An interconnected system of things or people. 5. Social network n.An interconnected group of people. 6. Networks of people are complicated.

Not discrete (may overlap)

7. Different, but not distinct, contexts (may communicate or meet in a variety of ways)

• More formal, or specialised, networks have more restrictions

Subject to personalities

8. Some ways to communicate within networks

Face to face

9. The post 10. Phone 11. SMS, MMS 12. Fax, email 13. (Etc) 14. Web 15. Social networks don't live on the web.

Flickr is a photo sharing site.

16. Delicious is a bookmarking tool. 17. Last.fm lets you discover new music based on your preferences. 18. Facebook is a utility that lets you keep track of your existing friends. 19. "If you need scale in order to create value, it's hard to get scale, becausethere's little incentive for the first people to use the product. [...] The system should be useful for user number one." - Joshua Schachter, inventor of Delicious, Technology Review, 2006 20. Social networking tools

Have features appropriate to the network

• One common feature: people

Amplify the network effect

21. Don't try to create the network 22. (New network connections may arise through a purpose) 23. Long ago, at a university far, far away ...

(500 miles away, give or take)

24. Educational community software inflexible, expensive, underused 25. Top-down organisation 26. Little community focus 27. Elsewhere, a revolution was taking place ... 28. "If I went in there and said, Hey, you're using that tag wrong, people would just tell me [where to go]" - Joshua again (Or to put it another way: people are individuals.) 29. Elgg 0.x: the 'personal information landscape' (2004)

A niche social networking tool

30. User maintains full control over their data and persona 31. Granular, cross-site privacy settings 32. Cross-site tagging 33. Discovery through relevant connections 34. Freedom to customise an individual site 35. Elgg 1.x: the 'social application engine' (2008)

Maintains principles

36. Much greater flexibility 37. No features as standard; why mandate blogs? Or profiles? 38. Easier to create a new function 39. Easier to support different platforms 40. Me My university (Elgg) My friends (Facebook) My place of work (Sharepoint) My obsessive Doctor Who fandom (Livejournal) 41. In summary

Social networks are made of people

42. Elgg is one way to facilitate a social network 43. The best social apps have another main purpose 44. Platform(s) and feature(s) should be chosen based on the needs of the network 45. Social networking tools don't have any required features (except users) 46.

What do you want to do?

47. Thanks for listening! Enjoy the day. Ben Werdmuller [email_address] http://elgg.org/ http://benwerd.com/ http://twitter.com/benwerd/