At the O’Reilly conference on emerging technology I agreed to talk about “the future of groups.” How the hell would I know? So, I’m turning to you. I just want enough to stimulate a discussion, so all I need from you is 20 minutes worth of brilliant insights that are staggeringly fresh, indisputable, and vastly amusing.

Here are the sorts of things I’ve been thinking about:

The Eskimos may have 35 words for snow (they don’t, and they’re not called Eskmos any more), but we have 100 words for groups. (Note, we also have 100 words for dirt.) But we don’t have good words for what we do online together. This is part of a general trend: as computing enters new phases, it takes over old words and stretches them beyond recognition: information, documents, and now communities. It’s actually the concepts that are being stretched, of course.

Groups vs. groupings. A grouping is a set of people who are unknowingly lumped together for some third party’s purpose: a demographic is a grouping. A group consist of people who have clustered themselves. The Internet gives dominance to groups over groupings.

Why the word “community” is wrong for most of what’s on the Net. A community is a group of people who care about one another more than they have to. That certainly occurs on the Net, but not always. In fact, the ease of virtual group-forming means that there are many more ecological niches that are being filled in the social ecology. E.g., membership in RW groups used to be required because of problems scaling meetings; now membership often plays a different role, if it’s required at all. Maybe do a 3-D matrix and suggest unfilled niches. (If that doesn’t work, maybe show “The Matrix” in 3D.)

Groups are at the heart of the Internet’s value. (See Reed’s Law vs. Mecalfe’s Law.) Yet the Internet doesn’t look like groups, with a few exceptions (mailing lists, buddy lists). Myopia rules. I can’t see the web of people who whom I’ve sent out email. We can’t even do anything with the rich social web created by second degree buddy lists. What would the Internet look like if we looked at it from the group point of view? Answer: I dunno.

Why hasn’t word of mouth done even better on the Net? We have generalized sites (epinions, Amazon) but not among friends and not for geographic localities. (Note: I’ve started failed businesses to address these so-called opportunities.)

I don’t want to look like a moron in front of an audience of my betters! Hellllllp!

Categories: Uncategorized dw