Tribal Futures and Tribal Past

Last Monday I participated in a focus group about Tribe.net. I've been meaning to write something about it since then, but I've been lazy this week.

I signed a piece of paper that said that I wouldn't reveal any personal info about the other people in the focus group, but oddly, they didn't make us sign a non-disclosure agreement. Well at least it seemed odd at the time. Now that it's past and I've read a bit more about Mark Pincus, the CEO, I get the feeling that Tribe is consciously or unconsciously trying not to be that corporate. I'm taking that as a good sign.

There were about 8 of us including danah boyd who lead the discussion. She works for Tribe and she's also a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, amongst other things. She asked us all to introduce ourselves and tell the everyone else why we were there. I ended up summarizing and referring to what I had written here about Friendster and Tribe.

It would be safe to say that the people there were early adopters, seeing as Tribe had apparently only been live for about two weeks at that point. Still, some people had much more depth of experience with the net than others. I'm guessing that was intentional - I don't think Tribe is just trying to appeal to hardcore geeks. Everyone had used Friendster, and that was often a reference point for our discussions. I'm sure that Tribe would prefer that they would be judged on their own merits and not in opposition to Friendster, but it is inevitable, seeing how popular Friendster is right now. Ryze, Linkedin and Sixdegrees also came up, but not everyone there had even heard of them.

We discussed Fakesters and the quick path that many Friendster fiends have between "wow this is so cool" to "this is so over". Unless Friendster adds new features and cuts down on the draconian obliteration of the Fakesters and real people that are mistaken for Fakesters, it will become like a one hit wonder and fade into the past. Apparently Friendster has recently implemented a 200 person limit on your friends. While that will probably be fine for most people, I have some hyper-social friends that are bumping into this absurd rule already. Friendster seems really out of touch with its populace.

Everyone seemed to like the fact that Tribe adds ... um ... "tribes" to the mix. Tribes are really yet another incantation of newsgroups, listservs, mailing lists, bulletin boards, or Yahoo groups. I'd like to reiterate that the subtleties of how moderation, threads, replies, creating new Tribes, splintering old ones etc. are handled will make or break this feature. A lot of different organizations have re-invented this particular wheel many many times since the beginning of email, and I'm not sure that anyone has ever gotten all the details right in one instantiation. This is one area where I think it would be useful for Tribe to do some serious research and cherry pick from the best of what's come before. This includes custom systems that only are available to students at particular colleges, the Well, eGroups, and the first public computer bulletin board system, the Community Memory Project. Even the punk/emo/goth-porn site Suicide Girls has an interesting bulletin board, group, journal and friend system that's worth investigating.

I also have a fundamental problem with the fact that Tribe is creating yet another parallel universe. It used to be that if I wanted to know everything that was said "publicly" on the net about a given subject, I would just subscribe to the appropriate newsgroup, or perhaps I would have to be on a mailing list as well. Sometimes, people involved in certain topics would set up gateways between those worlds. Subjects were available as newsgroups or mailing lists, and even in daily or monthly digest formats. These days, there are countless web sites each with their own bulletin board systems, blogs with discussions, mailing lists, and gated communities like AOL, Yahoo groups or Tribe. As a media junkie and geek I find it overwhelming. If I take a topic that I love to follow like Apple Macintosh computers, digital cameras, or mobile phones, I end up reading about a dozen sites - for each topic - a day to keep on top of what's going on. This doesn't seem effective or rational. Some may point out that RSS helps re-integrate all of your news sources, but to me it just ruins the experience of reading a story that is on a well designed web site.

Usenet was once a very powerful and amazingly useful system, which is really hard to explain to someone these days. Unless you were talking about an "alt" group, people had to vote to create new groups or reorganize old ones. There were FAQs for most groups, and there were often some very smart people who posted on a regular basis on a given topic. Hell, even alt.sex used to actually be informative and interesting. Unfortunately, spam and the rise of the web killed the relevance of Usenet to most people. Of course Usenet is still there, and Google has done a largely fantastic job of making the past accessible and searchable, which is something that used to be impossible (hence the necessity of FAQs). However, the spammers and the vast unwashed masses have made the signal to noise ratio of most groups near zero. Occasionally I search for something on Usenet using Google and find useful info but almost invariably it is buried in shit. I haven't bothered to read any newsgroups on a regular basis in years.

In a sense the fact that the net keeps dividing itself into groups is understandable. I can't find a good reference right at the moment, but I've read in the past that there are optimum sizes for certain kinds of social groups - I remember that number being around 200. Certainly the most interesting mailing lists or newsgroups that I've been on have a core group of regular posters and then lots of lurkers, with the number of people being somewhere between 50 and 1000. If the number is too big it is hard to have enough shared values to carry on discussions, if the number is too small, there isn't enough diversity to keep things interesting. So it makes some sense that we can't have one central discussion forum for everyone on the net who's interested in a given topic unless that topic is sufficiently esoteric. So the fact that there are multiple places on the net that I could go to discuss Mac OS X, for instance, isn't that surprising. Or the fact that there is only one mailing list that one should join if they are analog synthesizer fanatics makes sense too. (Of course this is ignoring the fact that not everyone in the world speaks the same language.)

In the print world there are numerous magazines that cover similar topics, yet they all have the same interface, and given a sufficiently large store, you can buy them side by side. In some strictly utilitarian sense this is a duplication of effort, yet in another sense it is just a good example of capitalism at work (well at least in theory). On the net there is no guarantee that an individual will easily be able to discover all of the bulletin boards, newsgroups, mailing lists, etc. devoted to a given topic. And each one has its attendant differences in UI and availability. Any given magazine's availability is certainly limited by distribution, but I can read any of them using the exact same methods.

Despite many companies efforts to bastardize and brand email, it is still fairly standard. While some of the formating, attachments, or HTML email (just say no) may get munged going from one system to the next, in general any email client can communicate with any other email client anywhere in the world. One can't say that for bulletin board systems.

After the official part of the focus group was over, Mark came in from behind the one-way mirror to introduce himself and invite us out for a drink and more discussion. From the focus group and the conversation that ensued afterwards it's clear that Tribe is conceived as much much more than just a "Social Networking System". The elevator summary is that Tribe is a cross between Friendster and Craigslist. In some senses that's true - Tribe handles the basic network-of-friends idea of Friendster (minus its dating myopia) and it will be supported by paid "listings" much the way that Craigslist is supported by paid job ads. However, Mark seems to have much more overarching (possibly unbridled?) vision for Tribe. It has the potential to become a way to represent yourself to other people on the net.

On Tribe your immediate friends can see your last name, whereas your second degree only gets your first name and your last initial. This is a really basic example of the sort of intermediation that something like Tribe could do. In your profile, Tribe has tabs for Basics, Personal, Professional. At some point they may figure out ways of sharing your information depending on the context. Even in San Francisco not everyone wants to advertise their fetishes along with their resume. Tribe, like Craigslist and other systems, allows anonymous postings which still let someone reply to the post without revealing your email address. This is a really important feature that works on Craigslist or even Slashdot because of community moderation, something that Friendster is totally missing. It sounds like Tribe hopes to go beyond this binary choice of anonymous or not to allow shades of gray in between. If they can figure out how to make this work, I think that they will have something very compelling.

Given the massive problems that spam causes and many peoples concerns with privacy on the net, I can certainly imagine that there could be ways of using a trusted service as an intermediary - something that can control how you are represented on the net. One of the main problems of course is that unless a system becomes pervasive, it is likely to be a hassle not worth dealing with for most people. Mark was also talking about ways of displaying listings on blogs or other non-Tribe pages. I could see this working something like Google's ads, which many people seem to like much more than the usual banner ads.

I'm sure I'm missing some important threads from our discussions, but in short, I think that Tribe has some good ideas and I'm looking forward to the execution.