Homophily and Social Software Design

Nat Torkington has a great post on He goes on to explore the tradeoff of fulfilling our desire to group with the similar and expose people to the different. I'd suggest considering that the most productive social networks have a dense core and a dynamic periphery, and strong ties don't come cheap, there is a role for both. Nat suggests recommendations (if you liked X, try Y) are quick wins, but still within narrow interests, while Mavens-as-algorithms (people who liked X also liked Y) can serve as connectors. Personally I prefer designing in popularity indexes because it inspires productive gaming for participation. I also fear my Gmail thinks I am gay. But while you can automate some aspects of social discovery, they lead to weak ties at best. The answer may be more pivotal...

Another way to build in serendipity is to have pivotal navigation: tags, top ten lists, and Flickr's interestingness measure are all ways to break people out of whatever group they're in and take them to something new. Links are at the heart of this: we've all been lost in clicking our way through a drunkard's walk of the Internet at one point or another. Inspire that in people: build those links and the metadata behind them into your site from the get-go.Links remove barriers to our abundant desire to share. Not only do we have a desire to be with people we like, we suffer from the problem of believing what we write and create is more valuable than it really is (cough). Some facet of our identity is just waiting to show off to strangers, not just in hopes of finding more people we like, but affirmation from even people we may dislike (deep down George W wants Kim Jong Il to like him, really really like him). We may want to be with people we like, but we have multipleobjects that help express given facets of our identity. More practically, people and the social incentives that drive them are incredibly diverse, and value accrues to people who bridge social network clusters. So give users tools to bridge divides and create new groups. Support Kirsten Jones noted she realized has been so heads down at work that she was going to subscribe to some new feeds on the outside. But I have one point for this post, it is that people are better connectors than algorithms and if you give them tools for it, their practices will exhibit emergent properties you couldn't predict as a solution for serendipity. I'll end this post with an underscore, fromComments Tag: Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Ross Mayfield's Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.