Steven Blyth's 'Social Fabric', or a close approximation thereof, is bound to join the rank of most popular MoSoSo tool in the not too distant future. 'Layers' of this avatar inhabited mobile handheld world are even more appropriate. A layer for friends, business associates, press associates, blogging associates, book club associates, dog walking world associates, etc.

Our lives are swathed in many layers of social fabric. Most of us use our cognitive abilities to keep these layers aesthetically organized but… Mobile and MoSoSo tools open a whole new level of awareness in communication.

I would love a tool that would enable me to pull up a page on my mobile while traveling the planet, and pick out my Japanese blogger layer when visiting Japan on business, thereby combining ‘business’ with meeting my blogger ‘friends’ in that area of the world—easily accenting my closest contacts, those i’ve communicated with most frequently in the near and distant past. Lovely.


Barb:

The idea behind the Social Fabric is solid — break out of the explicitly defined and delineated methods we use to articulate our social networks, and instead start to tap into some of the less observable metadata about our actual social practices and interactions to tell us something useful about our connections. It also breaks away from the mostly text and grid-based representations commonly found in our YASNs “friend bins” and creates a graphical representation of an individual’s social world. Contacts are represented by animated avatars that use posture as a metaphor for connection “health” — an alert stance indicates frequent contact, but a droopy posture or turned back indicates a friend neglected.

The idea of translating this sort of attention metadata into something as intuitive as real-world body language is novel and welcome. However, the main axis of measurement in the system is frequency of contact, which for many folks may not be a very accurate means of measuring relationship health. For example, I may see the clerk at the post office every other day and only talk to a dear friend across the country once a year, yet feel completely satisfied with the strength of the latter friendship. It seems like there would have to be some sort of axis of intimacy integrated into the system for it to work as intuitively as it hopes. Still, the idea of mapping less familiar representations of social connection (rows of static icons) onto more familiar real-world terms (body language) is intriguing, and I imagine we’ll be hearing more about these sorts of metadata visualization applications as we come to terms with the fact that we’ll inevitably need yet another layer of metadata abstraction to start making sense of the growing volume of metadata we’re now expected to analyze.