[Air-L] the growth of some groups and not others (Murray Turoff)

[tom abeles]

Hi Larry

virtual worlds developers are working very hard for interoperability. One factor which is making this of interest is that there is a business model for the virtual worlds. People make "markets" in VW's assets so commodities can be bought/sold/traded as one goes from world to world. What the VW's have to do is keep their participants interested or they vote with their credit cards.

social networks such as Linkedin, Facebook, etc are still struggling with a business model-one that builds on or is different from the Google ad-driven model. While interoperability or cloud computer linked social networks are interesting, somewhere there needs to be a cost recovery model and that has not materialized. VW's are like countries where persons can immigrate, maintain dual or multiple citizenships etc. That does not play well for public social networks where all are in flux. Private VW's and SN's have clear business models. We see the conflict clearly with the asynchronous systems like Blackboard where choice is a zero sum game for the owners of the SN.

Incidentally others of us had "conferences" on EIES and The Well in those days as well as Caucus. But these wre early and most of us were stuck with 300 baud modems and long distance dial up costs to participate. And there were no browsers. Caucus's features have not been exceeded even in this age of the www.

tom

tom abeles

> Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2009 15:16:17 -0800
> From: lpress at csudh.edu
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: Re: [Air-L] the growth of some groups and not others (Murray Turoff)
> 
> Murray Turoff wrote:
> 
> 
> > The standard design philosophy currently being used in many social network
> > systems is to encourage the user to sign into the site and duplicate
> > functions like exchanging messages in different formats.
> 
> The duplication goes beyond message formats and exchange -- one may have 
> different image or video collections, identities/profiles, reputations 
> (formal and informal), etc. in each system. Perhaps we will see 
> standards that let us abstract this sort of thing and associate it with 
> a user independent of the system being used.
> 
>  > The addition of
> > groups that social networks finally recognized (they existed in some systems
> > in the 70's) as a key valuable addition to communication systems will spread
> > and be better integrated in message services.
> 
> I used EIES in the 1970s -- a group of around a dozen people conducted a 
> "Teleconference on Teleconferencing" over a period of several months, 
> but, as I recall, EIES was a "walled garden."  In what ways did it 
> interoperate with other BBS or messaging systems?  (There weren't many 
> things to interoperate with in those days :-).
> 
> Larry Press
> 
> 
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