Habitat for Humanity has a great program to help low income families along the path of home ownership. The cool thing about the program is that its not just a giveaway. The families are required to work 400 hours on other homes before they become eligible for their own home construction. The homes aren’t free to them either. They pay a zero interest mortgage.

Last Saturday our team was fortunate to be involved in this program. We helped build a home in East Austin. Our keyboard jocks did quite well away from the computer…Joel worked the circular saw, Blake was in charge of cement making and pouring, Marcus helped put up soffit. Glad to report no recordable injuries and everyone had a good time. To learn how you or your company can get involved find your local chapter from their main page: www.habitat.org.

Brandon daydreaming about PHP, Dewey showing off the guns, and Danielle standing on the wrong side of a ladder (she's young, she'll learn).

The debate goes on…is the future of social networking continued growth in niche sites or consolidation around the popular sites of today Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.  Our contention is that the proliferation of niche sites will continue so long as there are tools to make it easy to participate on multiple networks.  A thoughtful blog was written by Dan Schawbel on Mashable…”Twitter, Facebook, Digg:  Can You Join Too Many Networks?”.  He cautions against joining too many networks.  We break down the problems with joining numerous sites into two parts.  First, the basic plumbing (infrastructure) to connect sites.  Part of the problem with managing multiple sites is moving data between them.  The second part is managing relationships in a way that is meaningful to the user….NOT site centric.  At Minggl we are working to automate both of these.

Let’s start with the easy part, the plumbing.  Dan writes, as the number of social networks you use increases, “Your ability to constantly update each profile, to ensure it includes the most updated and accurate information, will be unmanageable and unenjoyable.”  As he notes, many tools exist today to help with this.  Currently at Minggl we offer the ability to update multiple parts of your identity across sites at the same time.  Users can update status, send messages, and post photos to multiple sites from Minggl (note – the photos are currently only viewable to other Minggl users).

Another plumbing problem we consistently hear is simply remembering passwords for multiple sites.  Minggl automates login and navigation to sites for users.  In fact, data sharing tools such as Facebook Connect, MySpace ID, Google Friend Connect, and OpenID address the login issue as well.  As long as Minggl and other apps continue to build plumbing to connect sites you can scratch that as a reason against joining more.

Dan also wrote, “by joining a social network, you are setting “conversational” expectations, meaning that people should expect you to have a decent level of participation on each one.”  This is the more difficult problem to solve.  But updating status on all your sites on a regular basis with one of the existing tools that enable this already takes care of managing a significant part of your identity.  And the opening up of platforms and data sharing also help you keep up your identity…if only in the “ambient awareness” sense.  You can scroll through your Facebook newsfeed to get a sense for what friends are doing on other sites outside of Facebook such as YouTube and Flickr.  As such, the aggregate feed of what a friend is doing around the web provides a sense of identity and participation.  So your friends don’t really have to be actively participating on all their networks all the time.

Minggl aggregates friend activity and plans to take it a step further.  We already help you prioritize information flowing in and away based on relationship categories (coworker, classmate, family, etc).  In future versions, what comes into your view and what goes out to your friends will be based on relationship strength with each of them.  For example, Minggl will know to share my party photos from the weekend only with my college buddies.  And it will know to notify me immediately when I get a message from super blogger Robert Scoble.  Since I am actively sharing and receiving content with my most important friends, my participation on social networks should be quite satisfactory to all.  To learn more about our view on managing relationships on the web, read our submission to the W3C Workshop on the future of social networking.

Please share your feedback and thoughts.

Below is our submissision to the W3C Workshop on the Future of Social Networking in Barcelona in January 2009.   A list of all the papers submitted to the conference can be here:  http://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/papers/.

The Relationship Layer and the Secretary

Copyright and Property of Minggl 2008 – www.minggl.com

Abstract

Multi-context relationship and social-interaction data should be shared and architecturally centric
to the social web.  This will allow many wonderful services which, acting as your virtual
secretary, can execute all manner of automated decision making and personal boundary
enforcement.

By:  Dewey Gaedcke, CEO, Minggl

Contributions by:
Marcus Irven, VP of Development, Minggl
Juan F. Sequeda, Founder – Semantic Web Austin, University of Texas at Austin

Introduction

A high-end Executive Assistant (my secretary) will know of each lunch, phone call, business
deal and tennis match that you and I have ever had together.  From that knowledge, she has a
sense of our relationship strength, and can intuitively and accurately prioritizes information,
requests and visibility between us.   If she’s really good, she’ll do it in a way that aligns with my
intentions and agenda regarding you, without ever bothering to ask me about it.    Our position is
that effective social automation will require technology that can prioritize and sort relationship
context in a manner similar to off-line human behavior.  Support for these capabilities will
require cross-domain data visibility and (at minimum):

1. A global identity for each person
2. Translation service between global and domain specific user identifiers (“domain”
   signifies user identity at each social site)
3. Historical knowledge of my relational activity across domains (i.e. all social services)
4. Data exchange format and retrieval API for dispersed individual “interaction history”
   (called “actionstory” from this point forward)

A Real World Example

In the absence of a central “actionstory” repository, each social service will fetch recent social
contact data from each of my other services.  They will then use this data to calculate several
dimensions of my “social tie strength” to everyone in my localized friend list.   From there, many
interesting conveniences and automations will become possible.  Before we discuss the future
potential, let’s look at problems with the current model.
For example, what happens when…

1. My accountant sends an emergency reminder about my late IRS tax-return deadline (due
   today), but he uses a 3rd tier email address….an inbox that I check only once every 10
   days?
2. A close friend posts important personal news on a social site that I rarely visit?
3. I post pictures of my children and the wrong people have access to them?

The answer:  not what I intended….I’m missing key information, getting it late, or experiencing
privacy consequences.  So what do we mean by “close friend”?

In the real world, our brains automatically (without conscious effort) prioritize relational events
and content based on context, agenda and social-proximity (how well we know someone).  You
can witness your brain doing this every time you walk into a public place and connect naturally
with people in varied ways.  Your brain’s “prioritization process” may dictate that you hug an
ex-girlfriend, shake hands with an acquaintance and only introduce yourselves to strangers under
certain circumstances.

The three anti-examples above illustrate how familiar technical abstractions, such as the
communication channel (i.e wrong email address), the social venue (i.e. land-locked information
in different websites) and specific features (i.e. inflexible privacy settings) have gotten
fundamentally in the way of reasonable human intention.  The brains’ natural prioritization
process has been thwarted because the sender and the technology did not consider our full
relationship and intentions….e.g. the site did not know that we were “close friends”

Technology Centric vs. Relationship Centric Social Infrastructure

Technical abstractions such as features, tools, and social venues, are currently how the social
web is organized, and have therefore (unfortunately) become it’s de-facto center.  Just imagine if
the supermarket (social venue) and the cell-phone (communication channel) dictated who, how
and where you could socialize with other people.  It’s just not how we humans operate….we (or
our secretaries) carry stateful context across all domains and apply this former meaning to each
new relationship situation.

“Social” is defined by the relationships and context between people. The personal meaning that
flows from our collective history is among our most valuable assets.  Our brains use it to
automate all manner of things in the real world, but this asset is almost completely missing on
today’s Social Web.

Facebook, et al, mistakenly acted as if the social venue (the website) was equivalent to the
community.  A community is a collection of people who share history, context, common values
and group norms.  A social site is only a location, no more a community than your local
nightclub or supermarket.  People, relationships and context create “community” and the social
web of today has this reality completely upside down.  We argue that the relationship (social
interaction) data should be architecturally centric to the social web.  This will allow the
technology (your virtual secretary) to support automated decision making, which could include
things like:

1. Prioritizing or demoting a message depending upon who sent it
2. Rerouting a message to other recipients or through a faster/optimal delivery track
3. Automating Privacy (context appropriate disclosure)
4. Delivering birthday flowers with minimal intervention

Relationships as the Central Driver of the Social Web

For these automation capabilities to become a functional reality, the Social Web needs an“Interaction History” (“actionstory”) data format and an API centered on a universal human identifier (UHI).  This data format might well be an appropriate extension to FOAF.  The various social services will (optionally) extend an option to log all “actionstory” activity between me andthose with whom I interact.  Only by storing robust knowledge of my entire social “actionstory”, can the cloud begin to function as my very effective executive assistant.  Participating social services will track (and share) details of every interaction or social encounter including:

1. Interaction type
2. Frequency
3. Duration (or persistent)
4. Who initiated
5. Whether responded/attended/punted/referred
6. Who else included
7. Subject matter/context (standard taxonomy based if possible)
8. Relative connectedness to other touch points with the same person (i.e. we work together)

This data will then be used in all manner of automated-assistant services.  As another example, if
LinkedIn knows that we work together, Facebook will be able to (automatically) use this meta-
data about our relationship, and keep certain data private, while giving you access to work
related content and personas.

Conclusion

Charlene Li of Forrester predicted that the future of social networks will be “like air”.  We
believe she means functional and ubiquitous, yet widely unnoticed.  Just as the supermarket and
the cell-phone do not control socialization options in the real world, online services that base
user control upon “actionstory” data, will move the technology out of the way and allow our
socializing to really be, as thin as air.

People start to complain about “clutter” on webpages when content is not interesting or relevant to them.  The New York Times is now beta testing showing links from Blogrunner, a new aggregator, under the headlines of their own stories.  Erick Shonfeld of TechCrunch argues these links don’t belong on the NY Times homepage as they mostly just clutter it up.  It begs the question of how much is too much?  And how do we tune out non-relevant content?

One of the things we are working on at Minggl is helping people tune out clutter and surface friend activity on a page.  For example, when you visit NY Times we’d show you if friends have read or recommended any specific articles.  And you’d be able to respond to their comments on an article in a private forum on the page…only viewable to you and your group of friends.  We think surfacing relevant friend actions on a page is part of the future of the social web and getting around all the clutter that exists.

Are we crazy?? Give us your feedback…