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

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.