When I first started writing about social
technology, years ago, the term was
rare.  I wrote mostly about creating social
connections. Big issues were interpersonal
matching and employment services: matching
people to jobs.

Elsewhere I’ve explained my logarithmic
scale for match quality: the number given
is the base ten logarithm of the size of
the pool of candidates from which a match
of that quality is likely. Thus a Level 2
employment match would be best job out
of one hundred available ones, while a
Level 6 match would be the best job out
of a million available ones. From an
employer’s perspective, a Level 2 match
is the best of a hundred applicants,
a Level 6 match, the best of a million.

A key idea which I have tried to explain
many times is that some tools and techniques,
collectively called technology, social
technology, can approximate bipartite
matching.  That would mean that every one
of a million individuals could be matched
to a million job openings so well that
each employee and each employer would
be achieving an extraordinary Level 6
or one-in-a-million match.

I’ve written about this kind of employment
services for a long time, but actually
wrote many more words about interpersonal
matching. Fitting well into the workplace
is important, but I suspect that purely
social matching is even more important.
That may be true even if economic impact
alone is considered.

There are other kinds of matching I’ve
written about. Today I reflected on how
long I’ve been doing this. If I am right,
then a lot of good could have been
accomplished by establishing a connection
between this one idea person and some money
person. Now think about this: think
about matching one million idea people
with one million people who have money
to invest. I think technology exists
to approximate a bipartite match with
such pool sizes. What would it be like
if every one of a million people with
good ideas found exactly the right person
to understand and fund the development
of those ideas?

So that you have the choice of receiving new
post by mail, I have installed the Subscribe2
plugin on this WordPress site. That software
is supposed to give you almost complete control
over what you will receive. If you want no more
messages from here, there should be a link
elsewhere on this message, to ensure that
you don’t receive any. Other options include
receiving digests of excerpts on a weekly basis.

More on this topic will appear very soon. In the meanwhile I am reorganizing my other sites.   — dpw

I now use ‘social technology’ to refer to any collection of tools and techniques which a person or organization might use for social purposes, but for me the main goal is still network optimization. By this I mean the process of replacing poor social connections by good ones. This doesn’t necessarily mean turning your back on former friends, it just means spending less time with them. The amount of time you should spend with a friend or lover should depend on the quality of the connection. In technical terms, a social connection should have a high effective bandwidth, low distortion, and high signal-to-noise ratio. I’ll talk about bandwidth now, leaving the other two topics for later posts.

Social technology can be broken down into hardware and software, though of course hardware devices like smartphones and tablets contain a lot of software which is just there, behind the scenes, below the level of the user app.

Imagine a piece of hardware like a cellphone which supported only texting, not voice or video. It is easy to see that this has a low effective bandwidth.  ‘Bandwidth‘ is not quite the right term here. What I am referring to are channel capacities and channel data rates, which could be measured in bits per second, bps. At blindingly fast typing speeds, a person might text 10 characters per second, or 80 bps, but someone else might find that composing and typing in messages at 1 character per second is much too fast, and end up communicating as slow as 1 bit per second, 1 bps.

In contrast a high-definition video link with voice can let people see and hear each other, but take 10 million bits per second, 10 mps.

The actual effective bandwidth is harder to specify. Imagine using voice and video to transmit a license place number. With texting, you might just type in “213 YES”, while on videophone you carefully enunciate “Two One Three Yankee Echo Sierra”.

Decades ago I began thinking about social or personal bandwidth, in which an individual is thought of as a communications channel. This is a natural enough notion, since people are often hired precisely to serve as a communications channel between two people who would otherwise have trouble communicating. For example, if I wanted to explain this to someone who understands only Japanese, the traditional intermediary would be a person, a bilingual English-Japanese interpreter.

When I began writing about what I then called ‘Social Network Optimization’, my idea was to think of a person as a communications channel in the abstract, not as a channel to anyone in particular. What I meant was that the ultimate recipient of the message was to be the global social network, everyone. Suppose you have some remarkable new idea or interesting piece of gossip. You could tell it to different people. Some might not listen, some might misunderstand, some might fail to pass the idea on to anyone. But one or two of your friends might listen carefully, ask questions, make sure they understand, then try hard to pass the idea on to everyone they can. The same friends might be people who listen carefully to what other people have to say, and carefully summarize the best of what they hear when speaking to you.

Such friends would be good communications channels. Just how good would depend on the quality of their own connections. If they didn’t have any good incoming or outgoing links of their own, they might be almost dead ends, capable of communicating with you but unable to push information further out into the network or pull it in from there.

Decades ago I had a vision of an optimized social network. The core of this network would be at least two very high quality social connections per person. I have written a lot about a third, fourth and fifth, but the first two were obvious: a best friend and a spouse or lover.

I envisioned a world in which it was easy to make good social connections of these kinds. That raised several questions, which I have written a lot about over the years.

“How easy?”

“How good?”

“What kind of relationships would these be?”

“How would the world change as a result?”

I think the answers might surprise you. Stay tuned.

dpw

It has been a while since I posted here, since this blog has not been an effective communications channel. That is probably my fault: my supplied content has not been all that good. I’m going to post some new stuff and see if there are any interesting responses.

dpw

dpw

I decided to post the fact that there will be a completely interactive real-time and personalized question-and-answer interface instead of user profiles to be filled out. That is almost revealing too much already. Other social networking services could easily decide to use this approach, though I doubt they would be as sophisticated as what I plan.

I also decided to post a few words about the chaining method for growing social networks. This is less likely to be understood by potential competitors, so I decided to mention it.

I do not want to say much more. I do not want to tell people any more details about the user interface for fear that the competition would adopt them.

I don’t know how to interest potential partners and investors without telling them more, so I propose the use of non-disclosure agreements. But even that may not be enough. Sometimes only a hint is necessary.

A cautionary tale is the story of Smalltalk, Apple and Windows. The management at Xerox PARC asked Adele Goldberg to show Steve Jobs of Apple the Smalltalk system with its revolutionary windows interface.  Goldberg refused, saying that would be giving away the shop – even a brief demonstration would be enough to show Apple what to do.

Xerox management ordered Adele Goldberg to give the demonstration, which she was coerced into doing despite her protests. Steve Jobs saw a well-developed windows interface, the first one ever developed, and the rest is history. Everyone knows Apple and Microsoft’s Windows, few have heard of Smalltalk.