Social Silo Liberation Front
Just posted The VRM Vector at the ProjectVRM blog. Because I, like Dave, am snowed under by too many requests to join competing social silos.
Social groups to which I belong in the physical world do not compete. They do not carry advertising. They do not have business models. They are not gathered so somebody else can make money. Except maybe at work. Maybe.
Weirdest of all for me is this stage in the Facebook process where you're asked how you know so-and-so. Did your braces get tangled? Did you fight over the same parking space? Share a disease? I always hit "skip this step", but why should that step be there in the first place? And why should my only form of association with a school be "student" or "faculty"?
For all their goodness, these "networks" are silly. They are also as temporary and annoying in their competitive isolation as Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL were, back in the day (or the decade). Those things were Net-unfriendly long before their surviving members became Net-native.
I don't think these silos can fix themselves. But I think we can fix them, and make better ways to associate with each other, and with vendors, without living in isolated corporate silos.
That's one mission of VRM, seems to me.
Social Silo Liberation Front
Just posted The VRM Vector at the ProjectVRM blog. Because I, like Dave, am snowed under by too many requests to join competing social silos.
Social groups to which I belong in the physical world do not compete. They do not carry advertising. They do not have business models. They are not gathered so somebody else can make money. Except maybe at work. Maybe.
Weirdest of all for me is this stage in the Facebook process where you're asked how you know so-and-so. Did your braces get tangled? Did you fight over the same parking space? Share a disease? I always hit "skip this step", but why should that step be there in the first place? And why should my only form of association with a school be "student" or "faculty"?
For all their goodness, these "networks" are silly. They are also as temporary and annoying in their competitive isolation as Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL were, back in the day (or the decade). Those things were Net-unfriendly long before their surviving members became Net-native.
I don't think these silos can fix themselves. But I think we can fix them, and make better ways to associate with each other, and with vendors, without living in isolated corporate silos.
That's one mission of VRM, seems to me.