Social Software

Besides appropriation of worlds, characters and images, I'm also interested in how people appropriate technologies to serve their purposes instead of the intended purposes.

Livejournal wasn't meant for roleplayers to co-construct stories. Neither was IM. But people have been able to use a combination of the two to play their games.

Friendster and Orkut are similarly interesting. danah comments on Friendster and Orkut from the perspective of a social networks researcher. She gave a rather scathing review of Orkut recently that made me go and join up immediately to see why it was so bad. I understood her points about friends, ratings and the way networks are set up and viewed. But I have to admit, I like Orkut. Why? It's community-based, not individual-based.

Friendster was set up as a dating service. You list your friends, see how you're linked to their friends, etc. with the theory that you're more likely to find a partner through friends than through some algorithm. I thought Friendster was pretty boring once I set up my profile. Sure, I found some long lost friends and could send messages to all of my friends, but I never sent any because I didn't have anything I wanted to say to the entire group represented since they were from very different social circles. I was interested in friends/activity partners, but given the interface, it was hard to find people with similar interests. I thought the Fakesters and Pretendsters were much more interesting and liked how people hacked the system, although even that couldn't go more deeply than a profile with a few links to friends. There were testimonials, but all in all, it's hard to tell a story in a space like that. Livejournal provides much more freedom and customization for a hackable system. So Friendster wasn't compelling to me either as an appropriable system or as a space to meet new people. My connections to my friends stayed outside of that space, via phone, email and in person.

Orkut fixes the Friendster problem of finding friends, activity partners, and people to network with for business. Anyone can create a community and there are numerous communities available to join, from schools to authors to bands, political discussions and craft communities. You can see what communities your friends are in and if those are for you, or just something in which your friend is interested. The communities provide basic bulletin board services. This seems to be a much better way to meet people who share interests. You get a space to post online, get to know a person, before deciding to contact that person as an individual. You can still do the Friendster type things like see who your friends' friends are, etc. but the Orkut community spaces provide much more context for meeting people who share interests and for having discussions.

I haven't seen much Orkut hacking in the Fakester/Pretendster sense or in the way Livejournal has been appropriated by RPGers and don't know if that'll follow. I have seen numerous special interest communities develop, though, some of which are thriving, others that merely exist. These groups are diverse, and I enjoy that community aspect of Orkut. It may get too big, but I've found communities on crafts, fanfic, virtual ethnography and various other personal interests. I'd love to see interesting visualizations of my personal social network and how my network fits into some larger group, but the way Orkut is set up now, I don't find the connections to my friends circle any more compelling than Friendster. But the broader community development is great.