Danah Boyd speaks out on Friendster, social behaviors, online environments, and social architectures.
Mentioned in this article, in order of appearance:
danah boyd, Friendster, connected selves, Joi Ito, Sixdegrees, Jonathan Abrams, Burning Man, Pretendsters, Fakesters, Sarah Tuttle, Intel Research Anthropologist, Genevieve Bell, Tribe.net, Mark Pincus, Peter Lyman, and SIMS: School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley.
The New York Times :: Decoding the New Cues in Online Society
By MICHAEL ERARD
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A SOCIOLOGIST among geeks and a geek among sociologists, Danah Boyd has 278 friends who link her to 1.1 million others.
So says Friendster.com, whose millions of members have transformed it from a dating site into a free-for-all of connectedness where new social rules are born of necessity. A 25-year-old graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, Ms. Boyd studies Friendster, hovering above the fray with a Web log called Connected Selves (www .zephoria.org/snt) and interviewing Friendster users. Her irrepressible observations have made her a social-network guru for the programmers and venture capitalists who swarm around Friendster and its competitors.
"She's definitely a Pied Piper for a bunch of different people," said Joichi Ito, a high-tech venture capitalist who lives in Tokyo. "At the same time she, as an academic, is able to articulate what is going on in a way that the people building the tools rarely understand or can articulate."
Ms. Boyd explained Friendster this way: "It allows you to purposely say who the people in your world are and to allow them to see each other, through a connection of you." An individual registered at Friendster has a home page with photos, a brief profile and photos of people to whom they have agreed to link. That person can then browse his or her network or search it for dates or activity partners.
Ms. Boyd says that the real world has a set of properties, which she calls architectures. With its deceptively simple set of features, her thinking goes, Friendster bends or replaces all of the real-world architectures.
For instance, when two people speak to each other, they assume their conversation is fleeting, but e-mail and instant messaging, by making that conversation persistent, offer a new architecture. When two people greet each other on the street, neither can see (nor hope to grasp) the range of the other's social network. For that matter, no individual can see information about his or her own social network: who knows whom, and how...
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