Engines of Meaning and Social Architecture

Stowe Boyd has a fantastic article over on /Message where he discusses the real revolutionary underpinnings of 'Web 2.0' (or whatever, he doesn't want to get tangled up with semantics, either). He makes the comparison with the first wave through the comparison of Last.fm to the recommendation lists of former days (emphasis mine):

"...an individual, Jane, may go through the effort of signing up for the Last.fm music service because of the solitary desire to discover new music. However, the implementation of providing such recommendations is based on a social network of other users, whose musical tastes are analyzed, ultimately being aggregrated into 'neighborhoods' of likeminded music lovers. Jane is provided her 'results' through a highly socialized context: browsing through others' music, listening to snippets, and reading their comments.

This model is at variance with the Web 1.0 approach to user experience where everything seemed to be a giant catalog...Very sterile and socially empty."

Stowe also breaks out the three simple levels of interests it takes to satisfy the success of today's emerging companies: the individual, the social network and the market. In other words:

1. What's in it for me?
2. Who else is using it? (my friends? can I meet new friends? could I get laid?)
3. Is there a need for this sort of thing?

He's right...interacting with just a computer is rarely satisfying. It's that middle piece that really makes the difference for the emerging technology today...and a better concentration on the individual's experience.

I've been thinking about this a great deal in respect to our impending public release...right now, we are answering #1 and definitely satisfy #3...but I am still trying to form exactly what #2 will look like for us. I think where I will finally nail it is when I properly connect the social architecture with what Stowe calls the 'Engines of Meaning':

This 'engines of meaning; is lifted from Bruce Sterling:

Ultimately no human brain, no planet full of human brains, can possibly catalog the dark, expanding ocean of data we spew. In a future of information auto-organized by folksonomy, we may not even have words for the kinds of sorting that will be going on; like mathematical proofs with 30,000 steps, they may be beyond comprehension. But they'll enable searches that are vast and eerily powerful. We won't be surfing with search engines any more. We'll be trawling with engines of meaning.

Hmmmm...trawling with engines of meaning...pictures are 60% context...Riya is a photosearch engine...need to find that social sweetspot...not like Flickr (we aren't a photo hosting community)...not like Google images (we aren't a web crawler)...somewhere in between and connected to the engines of meaning is where I will finally find it.

Thanks, Stowe, for finding me the other piece to the puzzle...;)

[photocredit: CarlosBravo]

technorati tags: enginesofmeaning, search, socialsoftware, socialnetworks, socialarchitecture, marketing, connections, photosearch, riya, person:stoweboyd