[Foundation-l] Social networking (was: Analysis of lists statistics: community in decline)

[Samuel Klein]

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 3:13 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 3:05 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Besides
>> all other things, one of the methods is to keep users at our sites
>> instead of building tools for commercial (and close source) platforms.
>
>
> Well, I disagree.  I don't see how keeping users "at our sites" as long as
> possible is a method to meet that mission.

I do.  If I don't have to leave wikipedia to find, chat with, and
trade stories with other wikipedians, I have much lighter frictional
costs of switching between chatting and finishing my last essay,
uploading images that I was just writing to a friend about, &c.  There
are also network effects to sharing ideas stories and chat; This is
why usertalk pages were a vast improvement over either including
little notes in comments in the article text and using external IM
clients.   We could do much more along those lines; "you have new
messages" was cool (and a cool color :) when it first came out, but
that's effectively the last innovation in on-wiki chat in the past 5
years.

> I don't see how having users do
> their social networking at wikiwhatever.org helps people develop educational
> content under a free license.

Socializing is a way of sharing goals and enthusiasm, collaborating, &c.

> Getting users to come to "our sites" in the
> first place can be helpful, and creating plugins for sites like Facebook
> would do that.

Also true.

SJ


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