My Response to Here Comes Everybody

Dead code fills the ditches of the black-diamond trail called social tools. In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky uses his knowledge of social situations to unfold how social tools function, when they work and when they do not, and what their consequences are. I was surprised to find that social tools often fail; they only work under incredibly tight constraints. Three constraints stick in my mind.

Constraint number one: social tools must support a sustained promise to the individual. For instance, when Linus Torvalds invented Linux, his promise was just right: the creation of a new and interesting operating system as a side project and a learning experience. Torvalds was not promising world cooperation, or a world changing operating system; if he did, his project would never have taken off.

Constraint number two: social tools must overcome the group paradox: there cannot be members without a group first forming, however, a group cannot form without members preexisting. Usually this means that a community must preexist for a social tool to become of any use. For instance, Wikipedia had a huge community precede it: anyone with internet access. On the other hand, the predecessor, Nupedia, did not; experts were few in number and unwilling to volunteer their time to make Nupedia a success. Unless a community exists, a new social tool is not going to create the needed infrastructure.

Constraint number three: there are practical limits to the connectivity of graphs of social interactions. Since the connections in a network grow by the square with the number of people, it becomes impossible to communicate with everybody. For instance, getting a group together to decide on a movie becomes exponentially harder to schedule with every person added the group because it is unlikely that a large number of people will have the same movie preference. The usual solution is to have someone step up and pick a movie. If there some people disagree, they can form a subgroup and watch their movie choice. The same physics constrain social networks. The graphs of large social networks end up looking densely connected at the small-group level, with fewer connections between groups. As a result, an entire social network can stay connected because of friend-of-a-friend networking.

From a practical point of view, Shirky's examples and abstractions make Here Comes Everybody a smart choice for anyone wanting to develop the next Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.