TheWayoftheWeb

I first came across ‘The School of Life‘ via the excellent Mark Earls. It’s apparently ‘ a new cultural enterprise based in central London offering good ideas about everyday living.’ And that includes: ‘ evening and weekend courses, holidays to unexpected locations, stigma-free psychotherapy, secular sermons, conversation meals, a floating faculty of experts and a new kind of literary consultancy service called bibliotherapy.’

There’s also a really interesting School of Life blog, which brought up this gem by Richard Reynolds on Guerilla Gardening.

He writes about solo nocturnal gardening missions to cultivate areas which were being left - and how he’s ended up being invoiced by the local council for gardening work that he actually did! One of the lines that jumped out: ‘A lot has happened since I began guerrilla gardening and it’s all because I blogged about it.’

You can see his own ‘Guerilla Gardening Homepage‘ here. What came across was his surprise at how many people were either doing the same thing individually, or have since got involved. He’s inspiring a tribe, despite the red tape and seemingly idiotic efforts of the local council.

A new social network site is offering to pay users for taking part. Yuwie aims to reward users for activity and referring more friends to the network, taking inspiration from old-style pyramid schemes.

You get paid for changing your profile, posting content, and when users look at your profile and content. And you get a share of everything from anyone you introduce, and anyone they introduce, up to the 10th level. So far, so multi-level marketing.

As for the actual site, it’s OK. It’s no Facebook beater for functionality, but it’s comparable to Myspace etc, with more focus on connecting and gaining views than actually on your profile appearance. Not surpising for something which is about getting an absolute shedload of connections in an attempt to grab some cash.

The scheme itself gets detractors picking up on the pyramid nature of the scheme, the high input versus low reward, and the encouragement to spam everyone you’ve ever met in the quest for a few more cents. And I think they’re all valid points.

If you do still want to try it for yourself, obviously I have to advise you to use my referral url: http://r.yuwie.com/badgergravling

I also have to say that so far, any commentary on the site gives rise to spam posts from Yuwie fans/employees/bots, so I look forward to 20 comments on this post tomorrow. And then deleting them all.

The interesting thing for me is how many people will be enticed to take part in the experiement. Most Long Tail and UGC fans promote the idea that the prosumers in the long tail aren’t doing it for the financial reward.

I’d strongly and heavily debate that someone spending hours creating videos, songs, apps and blogs isn’t looking for some type of reward, and that it’s a lack of opportunities to be reimbursed currently which has meant a focus on reward from social recognition and status etc. Sharing and exchanging ideas and knowledge improves the standing of everyone involved, but that tends to be more readily accepted by those who can afford to do it.

And when something like Yuwie comes along offering the chance to combine financial reward with social status and recognition it’s an interesting case study.

As of tonight, Yuwie is claiming 183,448 users, 78,471 this month, and 2697 today. That’s a fairly good curve to be on for the short term. How the business idea and interest pans out will be more interesting, as more people will be spreading the word about their good and bad experiences, and others could adapt the business model.

Interestingly Alexa shows a huge growth for Yuwie over the likes of Virb (which is a far nicer networking tool for design etc), although obviously it’s far smaller than most of the established names at present.

If not, there’s always the low paid, labour intensive prospect of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Or Deviantart for artists. Or for musicians, how about Amie Street to upload and sell your music for a web 2.0 crowd set price.

There’s a lot of options for the talented but financially uninterested. And the one great thing about the internet is that if you invest the time and effort, you can hedge your bets by going for more than one outlet…

Now that’s a Long Tail…

Researchers at Sheffield Hallam University have surveyed social network users, and discovered that you’re unlikely to make real, close friends, as reported on the Guardian
Despite the huge lists of contacts you can accumulate, the number of real, close friends is around the same as you’d have offline, and will tend to be people that you’ve met in real life.
Facebook, Myspace, Bebo et al can allow you to message 100s, or even 1000s of friends (In Robert Scoble’s case), but the actual number of close friends is likely to be about……five.
The reason is that humans tend to only really trust people after face-to-face interaction.

That figure may change as users become more trusting in connections made via social networking, but certainly it suggests that the social network would need to result in face-to-face meetings for real trust to be formed.

There’s also research that suggests those people who interact most successfully online are the same people who are most social-minded offline.

With all this is mind, it suggests that simply joining a social network and adding friends etc will simply maintain your existing contact list. The only way to use them to gain new contacts would be to go to the next level of participating in groups and discussion boards etc, utilising the now old school mechanisms of chat rooms and forums.

Certainly I’m a member of a huge range of social networking sites, but the only new friends who have become in any way close friends have come from two very focused forums, and one of those groups came together to attend a real life meeting.

The one reassuring thing is that it means those who put in time and effort will still gain more from social networking than those who just sign up to be part of the crowd…which is the way it should be.

Something that has always angered me about ‘old’ attitudes to the internet, and online socialising, is the view that anyone indulging in such a pastime is a sad loser, who obviously doesn’t have any real friends.

I’ve made some good friends by chatting and hanging out online, and some of these connections have grown into ‘real life’ friendships. I’ve also managed to rekindle friendships with people I haven’t seen in months or years, and add depth to people that I may have only spoken briefly with.

But is there a danger that social networks can become depressing?

I’ve started reading up on social sites and depression, and there are several schools of thought that look to online social support networks as ways to alleviate depression.

For instance, this blog, by Douglas Karr, points out the benefits of online communication (Even if he does slip into a stereotypical dig at the video game loner at the end - obviously not a fan of Xbox Live).

But at the same time, do social networks not still reward those who shout the loudest, just as in real life? They promote the appearance of knowledge, and the repetition of the thoughts of others, without promoting original comments and ideas. Forum posts can develop into debate, but how much of your social networking profiles is about forming and joining groups, just to say you’re a member?

And once the initial buzz of adding everyone you’ve got in your contacts list has subsided, and you experience a lull in the social action, will this not reinforce any ideas of isolation? Leading to users frantically refreshing the page in the hope a new friend will have added them, or a new post will have appeared?

I’m a member of numerous forums, social networking sites and an avid Xbox Live gamer. And yet last night when I logged on, most people were either offline, or busy doing something else. Luckily I quite fancied some single player action for a change, but that occurred with an online network in the 100s, and probably closer to the 1000s. If you’re prone to feeling rejection, and have a smaller network, it could be a fairly common occurence…

I’m not sure what the answer is. Any automated solution would be uncovered quickly, and no-one keeps Tom at the top of their Myspace friends for long. But at a time when people can be putting in an enormous effort to update their Facebook, Myspace and Twitter accounts, whilst checking out their favourite forums, it’s going to feel disapointing if they aren’t rewarded with interaction, even for one evening.

Not the most cheery post for a social networking fan, but one that is worth thinking about. Disapointment is the biggest enemy of converting new users to a website or community, and if you can tackle it head on, then you’ve got a good start in building decent, organic growth for your project.