LIFT07: Stowe Boyd says that "social = me first"

Running notes from the LIFT07 conference in Geneva.

"Social = me first", says Stowe Boyd. In 1999 Stowe wrote an article pointing to an emerging category of software, and describing them with a concept that lasted: social tools. The old way of thinking about helping people collaborate with software was really about an organizational group mindset: people are part of groups, subgroups, and info-sharing happens there. This is very limiting. There is a fundamental shift from being a member of a group towards the idea that an individual is the center of his/her own world. The individual is the new group. The most successful social applications today are those that allow individuals to pursue what they're interested in, and then deal with affiliation and participating in markets. What happens is that the edge dissolves the center. If you allow people to put their interests first, you put power in their hands. People create groupings and affiliate with others based on those interests, and it's really them at the center of this network of people that matters.

The primary driver ("primary abiding motivator", he says) of people on the web is discovery: of things (music etc), but that's a side-effect, it's the functional domain. What people are really looking for is places where they can learn about things (like music), and they choose places and return to places because of the people that are there. The hidden reality is: people are looking for themselves, trying to define themselves, discover who they are through these layers of affiliation. The buddylist is the center of the universe.