Social Tools: Shallow Versus Deep
I was asked recently about what I meant by social tools: aren’t all things sharable on the web, she asked? Isn’t even email social?
The outcomes for all are increased by the actions of everyone: I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections.
I made the case of deep versus shallow sociality, stating that while you can take almost any functional tool and smear a shallow layer of sharing on it, the tool itself is not necessarily social.
Take the example of the game of scrabble, which is social in the way that board games are. Imagine that you wanted to make an online version of the game. The most obvious approach would be simply to implement the game, and allow users to compete against friends, invite friends to play, and so on, leaving the core of the game as it originally was.
This is like email, which implemented an online version of interoffice or surface mail.
However, imagine a fundamental rethinking of the scrabble game, where the nature of the game is made more social. Imagine these changes to the rules:
- Players each take seven chips.
- The ‘pool’ — a shared group of letters — also is formed with seven chips.
- The players as a group make a word from the common pool, the score of which is shared among the players.
- The group as a whole decides which of the players should get how many points from the word, and if a decision isn’t made in one minute the points are shared equally, rounding up.
- As play proceeds, each player contributes in turn chips into a common pool, making up the number to seven, and drawing more chips to get back to seven in their own set of chips.
- The purpose of the game is to make the highest score for the group as a whole, which is the combination of all the individual scores.
- Of course, it is also fun to get a high score personally, which is basically a reputation conferred to a player by the others, indicating the contribution they made to the team’s efforts.
Implementing that game would be a deeper sort of social than simply implementing online scrabble. It is a non-zero sum game, where players are not adversaries, but collaborators.
So, the social structure of open follower style streaming apps is deep in a similar way to this non-zero Scrabble: some individuals become well-regarded, and have many followers, but this doesn’t take away from the others. On the contrary, the reason that they are highly regarded is because they are making the game more interesting for those that they are in contact with. And the outcomes for all are increased by the actions of everyone: I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections.
This is how I try to steer my clients, those that are making social tools, and want to make them richer and deeper. It is not easy to get them to rethink their product ideas, sometimes, because they want to build an online scrabble instead of a non-zero sum scrabble. And doing what they set out to do may be easier, and more its far more simple to decide if you have built the thing you designed, but it may not be a deeply social tool.
I am only interested in helping with deeply social tools, where the opportunity to change our society, media and business worlds is high.
Call me if it’s deep, or you’d like it to be.
People can already play old school scrabble in their kitchen: they don’t need an online version, really.
But social TV? Social news? Social business tools, that shift the way that we collaborate and coordinate away from industrial era norms? Open social communication tools, that support rich many:many modes of call-and-response? Social games? All of these are interesting, and worthwhile, and there are a lot of areas where little innovation seems to be happening.
Call me if it’s deep, or you’d like it to be.
