Technology In Search of a Purpose
Posted in Uncategorized on 04. Feb, 2008
I’m on the Keystone train heading to NYC for the week, wondering if I’ll get to eat a Fasnacht on Fat Tuesday. Something tells me Pennsylvania Dutch traditions may not reach as far as Eli Manning country. (What a game, btw!)
This past week I had the privilege to speak at Penn State’s 2008 IST Graduate Symposium where I met some amazing people. I was really impressed by the level of energy around virtual world research by the faculty and students.
Joyce Bromberg, Director of Workspace Futures for Steelcase, gave an excellent presentation on processes for innovation and as part of her intro, she relayed a story, that while I forget the context, had an quotation I found fitting for the title of this post.
I’m sitting here reading about the “decline of social networks” in my news reader. It seems that rumblings of a social network slow down will be further confirmed today at 4pm when News Corp gives an earnings report on MySpace.
People like Nick O’Neill blogged last week that “while Facebook had fantastic growth in their overall user base, the total amount of time spent on the site decreased month-to-month.”
When masses of ordinary Internet users engage a new technology, and they do so to a lesser degree than the technology’s early adopters, it does not mean the technology is a failure, it’s just technology in search of a [common/mass marketable] purpose.
Similar to what happened with virtual worlds in 2007, the hardcore users and evangelists quickly find themselves outnumbered by a class of curious users wanting to understand what the buzz is about. They sign up, log in, and some “get it” while others lose interest.
I think Raph is on to something when he suggests here that the gaming industry is in trouble because its too focused on hard core gamers. I think all these industries are experiencing a similar trend.
Are social networks and virtual worlds a boutique industry? What kind of incarnations must they go through to be integral to the same mainstream that watched the Super Bowl last night?
I’d say yes to the notion of social networks being a boutique industry along with the genre of virtual worlds as well, Second Life and the plethora of others that are popping up. I’ll be the first one to admit that I’ll take a look at a new Social Network tool or virtual world on the recommendation of those who I’ve had conversations, or whose opinions I respect. I’m also one of those you mentioned that sometimes gets it and sometimes doesn’t, and therefore moves on. I’ll also assert that in the current environment there are many more tools and worlds competing for our interest that there is likely an ADD effect overall. Hopefully in 2008 there will be some consolidation of these tools and worlds. Also I hope that the developers and marketing folks of these Web 2.0 (?) companies begin to listen to those of us, the end user.
Very interesting post. I was in a similar discussion recently about technology adoption and social media. One problem that I feel is contributing to the stuttering adoption of these networks (and I’m including things like vanilla comunications like skype, through facebook and myspace and up to second life and PS Home) is the lack of interoperability.
What I guess I’m waiting for is someone to bridge both the communications and profile elements of all these separate networks together.
As a late adopter to some of these technologies, one of the things that made me hold back was the number of similar-yet-different offerings and the need to pick one (or two)… What I’d love to see is the content that I manage from my blog, my twitter account, my SL profile can be automatically agregated and found via other social networks. And yes, I’d like to be able to google it too.
I’d like to be able to chat (or voip) a colleague from my SL account to his skype account.
This would stop me feeling like I have to manage myself in 4 different environments … with different friends in each that cannot crossover (because of their personal choices about the networks that they use) and I would be able to operate in the environment of my choice – second life – but know I was visible and available from the others.
On a second life specific note: the discrepancy between total registered users and the number that use it regularly is as much to do with interface design and what I’m calling “the magic first half-hour” (there’s a blog post on my site about this)… People designing interfaces for things like second life could learn a lot from the designers of console game interfaces. I’ve introduced a lot of people in my office to second life recently – most get it almost straight away, most struggle with the interface and the what do I do now / how should I behave concepts. A better orientation program could deal with this quite well I feel.
Sorry for the unstructured brain dump – I hope at least some of it proves interesting!