Social networks have always existed. The web just supplements existing structures for maintaining them. Online platforms led by Facebook, Orkut, Bebo and Hi5 are doing the job of coffee mornings, playground games, church meetings, etc. They provide a lightweight way to maintain and develop interaction with the people that you know, directly or indirectly, and you go by your ‘real world’ name.

Social media (as I understand it) is qualitatively different in that it isn’t based on an existing relationship. It means that you are more likely than not to have never met your followers. Many are brands, bands, organisations or bots.  As such, you generally follow them because of what they post rather than who they are (unless they are a celebrity, in which case they are really a brand). Asymmetry rules. Myspace and Twitter are the biggies here. Blogging was always social media.  With social media, you address the world and not just your friends.

Twitter is interesting in that it’s adapted from a social network pitch to a social media one. Their original front page pitch:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

…is now social media simple…

Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.

Of course, there is always some overlap. Social groups form around a shared interest and if you’re into social media then that can be the focus for a social network just like anything else.  Phenomenal social offshoots like Twitpanto wouldn’t work for Facebook.

Conversely, the most desirable place for brands is the voluntary endorsement across social networks — online or off.  This ‘tell your friends’ marketing approach has always been the golden strategy and online social network platforms only put a rocket up it.

If you are not sure whether a social web platform is social media or social network then a scientific, quantitative test might be to check the structure of the graph; if it’s heavily clustered around a minority of publishers then you are looking at social media. If it’s more evenly distributed then it’s more like a social network.

If you don’t have time for this analysis, perhaps a facetious snap test of whether something is social media is whether someone can make a living explaining how to use it

Firstly, the genius ethical-social-media guys at Dharmafly have put together OpenFreecycle at Yahoo’s OpenHackLondon to win the top two prizes. This massive Yahoo! endorsement is great stuff and very encouraging for my own little project.

I’ve now open-sourced this hacky swing at it with the carefully non-trademark-infringing name: freelist2web. There’s also a demo installation. Sadly, if you go there you’ll notice the most recent posts are starting to age. This is because I was banned last week from the Birmingham Freecycle Group (also from the Birmingham Freecycle Cafe Group). I queried it to hear that a member had complained after finding his posting on it. I’ve offered to limit post information to group members and hope when the Group owners get a chance to confer we’ll find a way that benefits everyone.

The obstacle is disappointing since I’d taken care to obscure e-mail addresses and assumed that Freecycle posters wanted their message to reach as many people as possible. I’ve tried to make my case on the OpenFreecycle blog post which I recommend as a place to carry on discussion about moving Freecycle on from a closed mailing list.

I’m still passionate about the principle of freecycling, if not the current dominant implementation. I think local community building through resource sharing is a fundamental social instinct that hasn’t yet found an online platform. I’m still bookmarking interesting sites like vSkips, GoodNewsForPolarBears and JustForTheLoveOfIt.

Without a critical density of users it’s an uphill struggle though. Maybe Facebook could be a cable car with a well-integrated app? The Facebook marketplace – now powered by Oodle – is already a reasonable service that allows you to give stuff away, support a cause or request stuff within a radius of your location.

In case any data junkies want to get a snapshot of freecycling activity in Birmingham over the last few months, I’ve made the post metadata available. Would love to see some cool data visualisation or mining insights.

As while ago I fed my Tumblr – which acted as my scrapbook of web postcards – into Facebook for a straight win. I carry on posting to Tumblr but now it reaches friends who I know wouldn’t see it otherwise and who jump on the chance to comment on it. When I spotted a familiar comic on a friend’s Tumblr I headed straight over to Facebook to comment, on a good hunch they also imported.

The case with Flickr is not so simple. By importing those, I’m also sharing my stuff with people I know. Those not on Flickr can give me flickr-esque feedback but it’s become detached from the source where I’d much prefer it. However, I know that Flickr isn’t everyone’s preferred photo biscuit. Since I’m Flickr faithful, I put up with this fracture even though it’s one more little nudge towards the Facebook vortex.

Reader seems to be chasing Facebook with the sharing and liking (formerly starring). Its far smaller user base seems to be mitigated by its users tendency to be reading the same sort of stuff as me. Of course, it’s also where I scan through recent photos from my Flickr contacts.

My Twitter posts rarely seem appropriate as Facebook updates somehow. Not only are they are lighter and more ‘disposable’ but they’re generally read by a different crowd (probably the one also using Reader). A better place to ‘host’ Twitter is probably FriendFeed which nicely integrates and enriches it with built-in friend lists, proper conversational support, inline images and expanded links.

Mine’s a complex, messy setup that doesn’t seem to have some about by design but really as an incremental series of reactions between what I want to do and what is available at the time. It’ll doubtless carry on evolving as the options multiply and I try to bind it all together in a way that makes sense.

The talk by Erik Duval stuck out as particularly TED-ish.  He polished the old chestnut about the historical scarcity of information and how the resulting all-you-can-eat habits overhang into the age of information abundance.  The challenge, as I recall him putting it, is not to produce information but to filter it to match the type of stuff you like.  The reason I don’t follow TechCrunch any more is that I pass it through the GuardianTech filter to improve the signal.  I might miss the odd story there but with the time spared I can stretch to a more diverse bunch of sources.

I guess the next challenge will be to connect you to the stuff you’d appreciate but wouldn’t normally stumble across. That is, the value of the source is given by the inherent interest of the stuff it feeds you divided by the probability of finding it otherwise.  That’s non-trivial.

The other thing that tickled me was the phrase ‘Personal Learning Environment‘.  I thought this must be another name for Virtual Learning Environments like Moodle at first.  However the stream of associated terms — tagging, feeds, peer-to-peer, blogs, podcasts, wikis and mashups — made it all sound mighty familiar.  Back home, they’d call it ’social media’.  Fascinating to see the same technology used from an alternate perspective with different aims.

The particular brand of social software I’m excited about is social awareness, i.e. knowing what’s going on with people and things in a way that is anchored to the here and now.  Why? Because it sparks positive interactions.  Advice is dispensed.  A coffee chat occurs.  An item is lent.  A nodding acquaintance is tipped into a valued friendship.  There’s a net gain.

None of these consequences is explicitly coded into the social software platform which solely aims to emulate a kind of telepathy.  For this, it must gather and represent the information somehow to avoid overload, irrelevancy and ego.  Getting this model right an open problem.

My preferred flavour of evolutionary algorithm is the constructive sort.  This approach builds solutions to problems from the ground up making more complex solutions from simpler ones.  Via trial-and-error, it learns which parts of the solution depend on each other and can then support those associations.

The beauty of this approach is that, not only it can search for solutions that I don’t have but it is finding out stuff I don’t know along the way.  It’s an automatic creative process.

The buzzword that connects these two endeavours is emergence. Both should intrinsically reinforce ‘positive’ interactions, even though the form of the interaction may not be anticipated in advance.  Balanced against this is the need for exploratory interactions which give an unknown payoff.  Most likely the payoff will not be as good as current interactions but some will and these are the ones that lead away from stagnation.

Conversely, I’ve gotten into the habit of tweeting geeky, brummie, webby stuff because, well, most (but not all) of my followers are brummie social media types. If I were a celebrity (or more involved in the local scene) things might be different but right now I can’t bring myself to tweet my caffeine levels to Birmingham Bloggers.

Having said that, there’s enormous value in being able to dip into this crowd to pick up the vibe or lob an idea out there. It’s rather like wandering around a friendly convention or themed festival. You overhear stuff and can strike up conversations on anything that snags your interest.

I’m looking at getting my long-overdue second camera lens and it feels very analogous. I want to take in more of the picture but I also want to get the detail of my actual friends. The obvious Twitter hack (twhack?) is to create a new account under my actual name. This’ll be selective but get all notifications. Meanwhile, the @sixball account gets notifications toned down but I’ll add anyone who catches my eye and — best of all — no-one has to suffer an unfollowing.

KABOOOM by Guigui @ Context Free Art

I could easily sink a week of evenings playing around with Context Free Art. It’s a system for producing abstract art from ‘grammars’ – essentially simple recursive computer programs – and can produce some stunning images.

It reminds me a lot of the ImageBreeder project I started off a couple of years ago. The images weren’t nearly as refined as those from CFA but they came from a similarly generative process with the added bonus of an online generator.

The real feature of ImageBreeder was the breeding part which made the system instantly accessible to anyone who could express a preference with a mouse click. I’d love to try to connect these two systems together but I can’t see it happening soon, sadly.

EDIT: just noticed in the forum a JavaScript port of ContextFree that would make an online breeding extension much more feasible (and rather more elegant) if the speed and compatibility are non-issues.

Much obliged to Rag! for putting me on to all this.

The singularity, if you hadn’t already heard, is a hypothesised point in the near future where technological progress effectively comes to a head.  Graphs of technological progress appear exponential: not only is technology advancing but the rate at which is does so is constantly increasing. This is natural since our new tools allow us to build better tools faster.  Simply carrying on the curve does something funny around the middle part of this century: it goes vertical.

A standard interpretation for period is framed as an AI that bit smarter than us and which goes ahead with improving itself way beyond our comprehension. Then it becomes god or at least something from which scary but fun and compelling movies are made.  Alas, there’s the paradox of the world advancing beyond recognition overnight.  The latest device brought in the morning becomes relatively stone-age by tea time. Physics makes such scenarios implausible. Artifacts are just products of technology as organisms are disposable vehicles in the larger continuous process of life.

There is a trend but its driver is rooted in social interactions rather than technical innovation. The latter trails the former. Speech allowed ideas to spread to anyone within earshot, physical text preserved them across space and time, electronic networks made it straightforward to forge arbitrary new connections.  In this way we freed intelligence from the limited confines of the individual and released it into the social domain.  I believe the next stage will see it organising itself through us. Our thoughts will become joined up and continuous as thoughts flow between us almost seamlessly. Our self-identity remains intact yet our social awareness develops beyond recognition.

The technology that will support this is in the works but you’ll sense it’s approach in those serendipitous sparks of technology-mediated fruitful connections where strangers meet for some mission. These goals will become increasingly trivial as the effort in finding the right people drops away. Whether you are creating something or looking to dispose of something.  Finding immediate answers to questions will expand beyond Internet databases to include what is known but not transcribed digitally. Trivially, you will know what book or film or conversation to experience next. It’ll be like the Borg’s collective intelligence but in a nice way.

The individual benefits are enormous and inclusive as society effectively starts to think for itself.  In summary: the singularity is not about what we invent so much as how we connect.  That’s what makes it really exciting.  It won’t be a magic, hyper-intelligent box: it will be a new form of society that is reflective and intelligent to the point of being virtually self-aware.

Postscript:Just finished the initial dump of this post and popped on to Twitter.  Somewhat bemused to see @stef had tweeted about the new Singularity University almost exactly the same time I started drafting.  I’m predicting many more of these spooky ‘coincidences’ in the future to the point where people started to get rather freaked out.

Tightly integrated with my Google contacts it takes a big chunk out of that side of the big FB. Why?

My contact list is mine.  It’s wirelessly synchronised to my iPhone and I can export it any time in CSV or vCard format.  As well as the fulfilling the principle of portability this means it’s also populated by people I actually communicate with – rather than those I sat next to at school.  My actual phone list is far more selective than Facebook’s (though that’s bound to come in useful at random points in the future).

Likewise with the photos.  PicasaWeb lets me download the lot and securely and selectively share with people who may not have Google accounts.  The service isn’t quite as polished as Flickr yet but for sharing albums of occasions and holidays with family and real friends (not FBF) it does the job better.  Photos of places that I was pleased with might make me dither between Flickr and Panoramio.

This is clearly part of Google’s drive to weave social structures into the web rather than have Facebook stitch their own  patch on top of it.  It won’t succeed overnight but if it can pull the threads together nicely there might be… [metaphor deforms under strain] …a nice jumper in it.

The established way of doing this online would be freecycling, i.e. via the Freecycle network facilitated by Yahoo! Groups.  The Birmingham Freecycling group works off a mailing list which comfortably tops 4000 posts a month.  Even with a daily digest mode that’s a hefty load to your inbox when most mails will be of not interest to the recipient.  Going to the group page and searching is clunky and doesn’t really cut it.  Also missing is any way to dodge collectors to regularly fail to show.

A better solution is a dedicated web service, as any good blogger will be able to tell you.  There are already some excellent examples out there such as: Reyooz, Freebootr, SnaffleUp , Free2Collect, Gigoit and Freemesa.  However, starting from scratch is a long, rocky road.  People often gravitate towards the crowd irrespective of technically superior alternatives.  I think Reyooz rocks but I’m the only one who’s posted anything in Brum so far.  It’s a shame since all these implementations have the same general goal as Freecycle: to get stuff re-used.  They shouldn’t be competing.

Some lateral thinking produces the obvious transition for improving Freecycle: scrape the Freecycle data (e.g. by parsing the constant flow of emails) to maintain a database which can then be exported, filtered and viewed in all sorts of ways.  I spent a few spare hours over the odd Sunday afternoon hacking up a proof-of-concept.  Before putting it out there I need to check I’m not indulging in some kind of Edison voting machine.

So, I did some belated research and turned up possible non-technical issues.

The Freecycle trademark is fairly vigorously protected with a established association with Yahoo Groups.  There’s some controversy in the history of The Freecycle Network which you can read and assess for yourself.  Although there are general goals to wean Freecycle off Yahoo Groups, the beta my.freecycle.org serves only as a simple control panel for this.  They may not be completely laid back about their name and data being used outside their control.

Whilst the actual work is carried out at a grassroots level, the self-named Modsquad don’t do the hugely tedious work for money.  I guess the reward is similar to that of wikipedians in making a small but discernible positive difference with recognition in the form of responsibility.  They are naturally going to be cautious about endorsing any change to the current model.

Despite these caveats, there’s some fascinating insights to be mined from the growing database about large-scale freecycling.  There’s a whole blog post there but here’s a taster:

• The most common postcodes map to Northfield, Woodgate, Erdington, Tamworth and Kings Heath (thanks, wikipedia!).
• Of 481 freecyclers, 10 have posted 10 times or more.  Over 40% have posted only once with a fairly even split between ‘wanted’ and ‘offered’ posts.
• 10 pianos have been offered (1 taken).