Social Configuration is Coming

Mark and I have been playing around with a name for this topic (Mark Ackerman). Social Configuration will be it's name for this writeup. (Configuration 2.0 would be another trendy name)

Over the past few months I have ran across a few projects that are building upon this idea of social configuration. Whether they know it or not.

iusethis.com - apparently will help people keep track of their applications on OSX. (and probably more, it's down right now.)

http://www.ohloh.net - is sort of at the edge of where I see social configuration. It is a social network built around open source, but is not really exactly what I had in mind when I said social configuration. I see it as sort of an infrastructure level service, i.e. this social network information will be important to build other tools, and is a great first step. However, their focus on open source software regulates this service's popularity to the periphery.

http://wakoopa.com/ - Is another company/website that keeps track of what pieces of software people are running, I am not sure if it keeps track of what is installed on machines or not. But, it has the social networking side of the equation down.

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/pixi/projectList.shtml- Keith Edwards has a really interesting prototype piece of software called 'bonfire' that is designed to help people make decisions about firewall rules using 'social software'. This is a really interesting solution that makes use of my idea of 'social configuration' to help people make decisions about what to do based on the decisions of others. Maybe this is really just a normal part of decision making, but I guess we are looking at tools that help people make decisions about software, as opposed to other types of decisions. Maybe this is just 'social decision making' or 'smart mobs'.

So this is a brief summary of projects I am aware of that have worked to build social networks between people (nodes) using software (edges). I think the next step would be figuring out how to leverage this information to provide value.

And so it Begins

I had some references I wanted to drop somewhere ( and I just deleted them off another paper.. so I should drop them here).. BTW this site is more for me than for you.

Boyle, M., and S. Greenberg. "The Language of Privacy: Learning from Video Media Space Analysis and Design." ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 12.2 (2005): 328-70.

Palen, L., and P. Dourish. "Unpacking" Privacy" for a Networked World." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (2003): 129-36.

Gemmell, J., et al. "Passive Capture and Ensuing Issues for a Personal Lifetime Store." Proceedings of the the 1st ACM workshop on Continuous archival and retrieval of personal experiences (2004): 48-55.