What we should take for granted
in online communities
The building blocks of Distributed Social Networking (DiSo)
Presented at Community 2.0 by Chris Messina
Las Vegas, May 14, 2008

Overview

Overview
• My background

Overview
• My background
• Enemies of social networking

Overview
• My background
• Enemies of social networking
• Why were the silos built?

Overview
• My background
• Enemies of social networking
• Why were the silos built?
• The web citizen

Overview
• My background
• Enemies of social networking
• Why were the silos built?
• The web citizen
• The building blocks

Overview
• My background
• Enemies of social networking
• Why were the silos built?
• The web citizen
• The building blocks
• The DiSo Project

My background

CivicSpace
A network of grassroots political organizing sites

Spread Firefox
A vast collective of volunteer marketers

BarCamp
A worldwide community around unstructured events

Flock
A browser for the distributed social web

Coworking
A loose network of shared workspaces

Citizen Agency
Consultancy focused on community “in-reach” marketing

DiSo Project
Open source, distributed social networking infrastructure

Spot the trend?

The Starfish and the Spider
The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

Enemies of social
networking

Consuming
Participating
Source: groundswell.forrester.com

Consuming
Participating
Source: groundswell.forrester.com

Consuming
Participating
Source: groundswell.forrester.com

Enemy No 1.
Signing up for
a new account

Enemy No 2.
Adding friends

Enemy No 2½.
Inviting friends

✖

✔

Enemy No 3.
Profiling-filling,
linking your services

Satisfaction

Satisfaction

FriendFeed

Enemy No 4.
multiplying inboxes
& BACN

“Email you want, but not right now.”

Enemy No 5.
Finding & joining
your groups

Viddler

Enemy No 6.
Duplicating content

10 Interesting Things I Learned About Ansel Adams
by Thomas Hawk, Some rights reserved.

Copyright © 2008, Six Apart

Why were the
silos built?

bands
college students
professionals
All about the niches bitches!

everyone!
everyone!
everyone! (w/ a job)
Then niche sites traded focus to serve “everyone”
:(

System-centric
design

System-centric
value

Source: Le Monde

Source: Mick Hagen (mickhagen.com)

Users are not the
same thing as
customers!

The web citizen

the web citizen
has identity

the web citizen
has provenance

the web citizen
has friends

the web citizen
has enemies

the web citizen
has agency

The building blocks

Activities

noun verb noun [context]

Chris tweeted Niches bitches! from SMS

Chris bought 300 from Amazon.com

FriendFeed

Contacts, friends
& identity

Dopplr

Pownce

Google Friend Connect

Messaging &
notifications

Twitter

Brightkite

Permissions

Basecamp

Plaxo Pulse

Flickr & Yahoo! Mash

Brightkite

Fire Eagle & Dopplr

Groupings

barackobama.com

Upcoming

The DiSo Project

More...
http://diso-project.org
http://groups.google.com/group/diso-project
http://diso.googlecode.com
http://ma.gnolia.com/groups/diso
http://flickr.com/groups/diso
http://slideshare.net/group/diso

Me
http://factoryjoe.com
http://twitter.com/factoryjoe
http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe
http://citizenagency.com

Me
http://factoryjoe.com
http://twitter.com/factoryjoe
http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe
http://citizenagency.com
http://vidoop.com

End.
Neural network images by Mark Miller