From the Elgg conference, December 2008. See http://benwerd.com/2008/12/the-internet-is-people/ for notes and description.

1. THE INTERNET IS PEOPLE Ben Werdmuller December 1, 2008

2. Social network

3. Social network adj. Relating to human society and its members.

4. Social network n. An interconnected system of things or people.

5. Social network n. An interconnected group of people.

9. The post

10. Phone

11. SMS, MMS

12. Fax, email

13. (Etc)

14. Web

16. Delicious is a bookmarking tool.

17. Last.fm lets you discover new music based on your preferences.

18. Facebook is a utility that lets you keep track of your existing friends.

19. "If you need scale in order to create value, it's hard to get scale, because there's little incentive for the first people to use the product. [...] The system should be useful for user number one." - Joshua Schachter, inventor of Delicious, Technology Review, 2006

21. Don't try to create the network

22. (New network connections may arise through a purpose)

24. Educational community software inflexible, expensive, underused

25. Top-down organisation

26. Little community focus

27. Elsewhere, a revolution was taking place ...

28. "If I went in there and said, Hey, you're using that tag wrong, people would just tell me [where to go]" - Joshua again (Or to put it another way: people are individuals.)

30. User maintains full control over their data and persona

31. Granular, cross-site privacy settings

32. Cross-site tagging

33. Discovery through relevant connections

34. Freedom to customise an individual site

36. Much greater flexibility

37. No features as standard; why mandate blogs? Or profiles?

38. Easier to create a new function

39. Easier to support different platforms

40. Me My university (Elgg) My friends (Facebook) My place of work (Sharepoint) My obsessive Doctor Who fandom (Livejournal)

42. Elgg is one way to facilitate a social network

43. The best social apps have another main purpose

44. Platform(s) and feature(s) should be chosen based on the needs of the network

45. Social networking tools don't have any required features (except users)

47. Thanks for listening! Enjoy the day. Ben Werdmuller [email_address] http://elgg.org/ http://benwerd.com/ http://twitter.com/benwerd/