Mike Butcher

It is almost a privilege to be accused of sour grapes when it’s the Washington Post that’s doing the accusing. The mention is in relation to an article I blogged on TheStandard.com and (more fully) at E-consultancy about bloggers at the Democratic Convention in Boston. Unfortunately, I was being accused of sour grapes, when I actually said “However, it would be churlish to deny bloggers their day in the sun. ” No matter.

The so-called Social Software world grew even more crowded this week, with the launch of SoFlow.com. I have decided to go into therapy for hyper-connectedness. Here’s my confession.

I’m a 35 year old man and I am a social software addict. Well, I must be.

For research purposes (famous last words, I know) I’ve registered on just about every online networking web there is. The latest to appear this week was SoFlow.com, the Friends-Reunited-meets-Friendster-meets-LinkedIn site.

Its backed by former Clickz.com founder Andy Bourland, and headed-up by dotcom veteran of these parts Robert Loch.

SoFlow wants to “create the most effective networking service in the world.”

I wish them well. But they are going to have to join the queue.

I, along with all the other addicts, am already registered on LinkedIn.com, Friendster.com, Everyonesconnected.com, Ecademy.com, Tribe.net, Ryze.com, Plink.com and the Google-backed Orkut.com.

Hyper-connectedness is a diverting pastime. But, like most addictions, it’s getting a little tiresome.

Online networking / dating / Friends-Reunited-nostalgia-hunting, whatever you want to call it, is clearly of huge fascination to people.

Why? Because people are interested in people. It’s in our DNA.

The Web has managed to revolutionise a number of areas since it’s invention, and to some at least, online networking looks set to be the next big thing.

Yesterday, the tech news site Netimperative ran a sector seminar on e-tail at which delegates heard how e-tailing is changing retailing on the high street.

A similar paradigm shift is happening with online networking versus real-world networking.

What it has started to do is interesting enough. We’ve all read the stories in the newspapers about the divorces resulting from Friends Reunited members getting re-acquainted.

The Social Software area remains an academic debate, and many a blogger’s favourite topic. And there are high hopes for its role in re-connecting communities, atomised by the modern destruction of the nuclear family and a mobile population.

But from a business perspective, social software sometimes seems more like a solution in search of a problem.

The business models of some of the latest social software start-ups remain a curiosity.

LinkedIn.com will (eventually) be a subscription service allowing users to input and manage their contacts and to search for connections. Right now it is quite grey and business-like. To some this has been an advantage, along with its relatively closed system of networking. But the jury is still out on how big a business this is.

Spoke.com is a deeply integrated enterprise solution which extracts contact data from enterprise applications (such as Outlook) to establish what connections you do have. There are more, like VisiblePath, Contact Network and SocialText, digitally mapping the relationships inside and outside corporations. These tools try to leverage connections, often through email traffic.

There are the beginnings of a useful sales contact tool here. Possibly. Though most sales people already know who their best contacts are.

ZeroDegrees is an Outlook plug-in and related service which inputs, manages, prioritises and searches your connections on email. If you like that sort of thing.

Then there are the online SocSoft businesses which vary from dating services to friends of friends sites, like Ryze.com, perhaps the original networker’s paradise.

There’s an online social network to suit anyone and everyone’s taste.

But register on them and what happens. Usually very little. You invite your friends and contacts. You email friends using the system, with messages you would have sent on normal email anyway. You get testimonials from people you know you’d get testimonials from. Everyone slaps each other on the back and then what?

A few month later your registered profile is out of date, you’ve made a bunch of contacts who aren’t on the system anyway and you’re now being spammed by multi-level marketers who’ve found your profile and want to sell you something you don’t need or want.

Outside of re-connecting with the odd contact you’d lost touch with, it all feels a little incestuous.

Worst of all, you get approached for connections by link-whores, trying to impress others with the size of their network.

Last week I had to contact LinkedIn.com direct because their system didn’t allow me to break my connection with a prominent networking guru. This individual has over 2,000 connections in their personal network, a staggering number of contacts, which implies that a network so indiscriminate is actually pretty useless.

But after deleting him from my network, the emails started again in earnest: “Hi. I noticed that you are also using LinkedIn. I’d be happy to recommend you to the people I know. If you feel the same, please accept my invitation to connect networks. I’ll only pass requests on to you from people I trust, and I hope you’ll do the same for me.”

Can this guy not take a hint?

His sheer connectedness suggests that the people who have chosen not to connect with him, are far more discriminating than those who have. (And that’s how you insult 2,000 people in one stroke, BTW. OK, make that 2,001).

There are probably a few more, but I can think of two main avenues for business-oriented social software from here on.

The first is recruitment advertising. Knight-ridder, the US-based newspaper network has already made a strategic investment in Tribe.net. This was a canny move. They have realised that some day classified recruitment ads will start disappearing into SocSoft applications. They already are in an informal sense, with subscription services effectively replacing the classified model.

RealContacts.com, for instance, is a New Zealand-based company focused purely on allowing people to pass around information about jobs through friends of friends. It’s model could have implications for recruitment advertising publishers such as newspapers and magazines.

Have you noticed the number of recruitment firm personnel registering on these services? I rest my case.

My networking guru’s example suggests a second path.

It’s wonderful to be able to see who the contacts are of my contacts. Oh, to surf other people’s address books. Privacy? What’s that?

But surely the really valuable people either won’t go onto these systems, or will lock down their profile so hard, they’ll be practically invisible.

History tells us that the most powerful networking communities have always been closed, not open. Have you ever seen the Mason’s throw open-house drinks parties?

However, as I said. I’m an addict. So I will be registering on SoFlow.com.

See you in The Priory.

I’ve known David for the past 13 years. A gifted teacher and poet, for many years he has been plagued by a terrible disease which, so the doctors said, should have killed him years ago. Lately it got so bad, he had to go into hospital long term to fight it. He lost one leg to the disease. Then the other. As the days, weeks and months drew on, the Net became a vital source of news about his progress.

With so many friends and family wanting news, just keeping everyone informed had been a full time job for his wife, Katy. Eventually she put together a web site to catalogue how Dave was doing. Through it, he has been contacted and encouraged by friends, family and even other visitors. It’s helped at least, especially when the days have been hard, to carry the simple burden of communication.

Now, the Net is being formally recognised as an outlet for patients to give vent to their experiences and creativity by a UK charity.

Rosetta Life is a charity which puts artists in residence in hospices around the UK. The artist-led organisation enables those with life threatening illnesses and their families to express and channel their experiences through the arts.

This week it launched a digital network, linking fifteen hospices in the Rosetta Life network, giving some two hundred hospice users the opportunity to work with artists-in-residence via digital means and publish their work on the site Rosettalife.org.

The initiative was launched at Rosetta Live!, the first national festival of the arts in palliative care. It featured specially commissioned works by leading international performing and visual artists, such as director Mike Figgis (best known for Leaving Las Vegas), Meredith Monk, the composer, and Dr Oliver Sacks (the writer best known for the film Awakenings). The festival included live performances,murals, installations, films, talks and a series of video projections.

Funded largely by the Arts Council and backed in part by Barclays Bank, the festival produced some amazing moments. For instance, a one act musical theatre piece was performed, which contained a libretto written by two people suffering of cancer, one from AIDS and two from Multiple Sclerosis.

The project is well named for the digital space. Rosetta Life founders Lucinda Jarrett and Filipa Pereira-Stubbs say they chose the Rosetta Stone, the ancient Egyptian rock, because its interweaving of three languages helped to unlock the code of hieroglyphics. Similarly, the charity’s arts focus aims to unlock the ‘code’ of the dying.

Rosetta Live! features the artistic work of hospice residents, but it has a wider role. The project will produce six live-streamed web events a year, accessible to approximately fifty receiving hospices (including South Africa), each equipped with broadband video conferencing, and participating through web chat. Rosetta Live! will also go out to the wider web via the Rosettalife.org site. Each event will be archived on Rosettalife.org and made available to other hospices for online learning.

The web site also offers an opportunity for people with terminal illnesses to share their experiences with eachother online. It’s a great example of how digital channels like the Net can be used to engage patient with patient, patient with doctor in a new way, in particular through the arts.

Jarrett, also creative director of the festival, says: “Working within hospices for the last ten years, I have realised that those facing the end of life have a unique capacity to teach the living how to live. Rosetta Live! will offer the first public platform for this experience, highlighting the value of the arts in delivering palliative care.” Each Rosetta hospice/hospital is equipped with a digital arts centre – computers, cameras, and scanners – allowing people to produce artwork of the highest quality, and digitally.

Searching the Net for examples of how people use online as a cathartic way of sharing their experiences of illness, and pretty soon you realise how powerful a medium it can be. “It was three years ago on this date that I was diagnosed with kidney cancer,” writes one woman on her blog, who eventually recovered. “I thank God for this every day. Life is sweet.”

As for David, he is fighting on against ‘Polyarteritis nodosa‘ and its damned complications. He cannot post directly to the web site at the moment, and Internet access from the hospital is highly limited. But Katy updates it regularly. If you want to send him your support visit Loffman.co.uk.