Glog

Diego has a great (albeit somewhat brief) blog post about the social graph in the context of both the audience to which said concept is important and Ning. I can’t but agree with him. For people (not users), the key to any engagement is interest at an intrinsic level (or obligation, but that’s another matter altogether). Of course there are people intrinsically interested in social graphs: mathematicians, geeks, marketers (money!) and, of course, the press (buzzword!). They all amount to a tiny tiny percentage of the connected population (never mind the total population), and I’m willing to bet that’s still true for people using Ning or any other social network.

Unlike Diego, I was late to the virtual social network game (and I make the distinction of virtual because I was –and am– doing fine in the real world). In fact, it wasn’t until I came to Ning almost three years ago that I joined the hordes and got involved, primarily within Ning itself. Months passed, in fact, before I finally bit the bullet and opened a Facebook account, one which lied mostly dormant for a few more months before I started using it relatively often (which is still true today): I really only log into Facebook whenever I get an invite or some other viral event that drives me there (duh!). Interestingly enough, it is something I do almost daily on the handful of Ning networks I am a member of, primarily because I am personally (i.e., intrinsically) drawn to the network’s theme. There is always an exception, and that would be LinkedIn, but even there, and with a reasonable amount of connections, it’s still mostly an interrupt-based visiting process. And yet I know people who practically live in one (or both) of those networks, and if I think about what drives them there long enough, they have an intrinsic interest (which may be personal or professional) to be there as often as they do.

That’s not to say the social graph is a useless concept. Diego makes that point masterfully:

I live and die with abstractions. You will have to take my little diagrams and sourcetrees and formulas and tools from my cold, dead hands. But these are the things I build software with, not for.

I’ve seen Diego’s whiteboard and there’s plenty of all of the above in it.

The social graph will be useful to people when it’s called something else entirely and when it is given a purpose closer to their lives. I can think what seems like a good example of a successful company that has made such leap with a handful of products: Apple. They have mastered the process of taking such concepts (in their field of computer electronics) and polishing them into something usable people connect with (and crave). The iPod is one such product. iPhoto comes to mind as well. Not such much “dotMac” (but rumor has it they’re about to tackle that).

And this is likely the reason Ning is building such a strong (and diversified) community:

They don’t ask what people enjoy doing on the service. They don’t ask for stories of users, of finding long-lost friends, or of newfound friendships. They don’t ask what makes people on Ning join ten different social networks, as they often do, even if this flies in the face of conventional wisdom about how people are sick of joining social networks.

It’s not about social networking for the sake of social networking, but about what makes people tick and the interactions they bring from the real world into the networks they belong to, another channel (and a powerful one at that) to share their intrinsic interests.