Marc Canter provides Jyri's objects of sociality

Marc Canter is very pleased with what he has seen on Gnomedex in the past days. In his recent posting Open Source Infrastructure he sums up a list of microcontent initiatives that will be the building blocks of our digital lifestyle and presence.

Meanwhile at Reboot Jyri Engestrom gave a great talk on social networks. It is my own fault that I missed it to go hear somebody else, but my partner Elmine was in the room and very impressed. Through her eyes and also by reading Jyri's presentation (which Olle said is actually an almost literal version of the actual presentation Jyri gave: short good high-impacting message) I meanwhile have made up for not being there, I hope.

Basically Jyri's reasoning goes like this:

Relationships revolve around something, an object. This can be an artefact or a date a job or whatever. But it is a thing through which a connection is build between people. When it disappears the relationship will become hollow as well. Shared context this reads in my mind, but then that little sliver of it that is the focus of your interactions with somebody else. In YASNs such an object is often lacking, and that is why they fail. Then the YASN itself becomes the object of sociality: people competing on who has the most contacts etc. However that is a game only temporarily worth playing.

I can't stop thinking that Marc's microcontent is a list of objects of sociality, and hence indeed a good way to build our digital lifestyles, as it is bound to create, sustain and feed relationships. Probably this is what Marc had in mind all along, and what I intuitively felt as well. But now I see an explicit link between microcontent and relationships where I could not formulate that coherently before. Thanks Jyri, for providing me the means to share Marc's enthusiasm.