I’d been saying this all along . . . (see my post: Online Social Networking: A Fancy Word for Friendship ).
—————————
@ Mixx: Social Networking: From Shut-Ins To Political Action To Products
By David Kaplan – Tue 23 Sep 2008 06:56 AM PST
It’s day two of Advertising Week in New York, and to keep people in their seats at theInteractive Advertising Bureau’s Mixx conference, Charlie Rose was tapped to bring his talk show format to a morning session with new media academic Clay Shirky. In offering a primer of social networkings evolution, Shirky told Rose that it started with with people who didn’t leave the house—“people who were confined in some way”—and then spread to others who wanted to share photos and details about their lives. It then got serious as political activists started using it, which was shortly followed by the business world.
— Almost all you need is love: In seeking to understand how social networks work, Shirky says you have to understand “household economics.” Shirky: “Economists have a tough time explaining why you feed your children. Household economics is not seen as terribly important. But it is and it explains a lot about why we do what we do, especially in social networking. Non-financial motivations are getting people to do something. People create value for each other because we’re human. We’re not self-obsessed, we like to know other people. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBaysaid the idea behind it was that people are basically good. He was proven wrong three months later when eBay nearly tanked because people were stealing from another. ‘Oh, yeah, I’ll send you a check for those Beanie Babies.’ But when the grades were added for buyers and sellers, people suddenly got good.”