Analogies and Metaphors: Marc Canter's vision of the open social network
I have also been thinking about Analogies and Metaphors and how they help clarify, crystallize and convey ideas so elegantly sometimes. Sometimes you can summarize lots of concepts very simply with a well thought out analogy. So I have decided to try to use them more.
So here is my first attempt (be gentle)...
Do you have a better Analogy (wouldn't be hard)? Post it in the comments...Facebook (and other social networks) are like shopping centers. Independent business owners set up shop and sell you their products and services while the shopping center itself attracts the foot traffic.
However these shopping centers are not like real shopping centers. They let invite people in and you can form friendships while you are there, but they won't let you leave together. They remember every purchase you make, but they wont give you a receipt. They sell you plenty of stuff, but those things don't have any value as soon as you leave. These shopping centers want to lock the doors and trap you inside - they don't want you to go home.
They don't want you to go to that little corner store. If you do, you can't take any of your friends with you. Once you go into these shopping centers and spend time with your friends, form great friendships and 'buy' stuff, they think they own you, your stuff and your relationships.
Facebook should be more like real shopping centers. They are nice to visit. You can take your friends in, you can leave with your relationships intact and your purchases in hand.
Labels: analogies, APML, facebook, Marccanter, Media 2.0, Social Networks
2 Comments:
No, the analogy is more like a movie theatre gigaplex, you get sold entertainment (and a smidgen of useful information) among a crowd of people whom you've probably met some of at the arthouse theatres and village cinemas around the place, and they want you to bring all the rest of your crew from those places to them.
But perforce they have to cater to a lower common denominator so the arthouse features like Twitter's immediacy are replaced with the much slower and more constrained XXXX is: microblog toy, the social networking that made Flickr what it is today are "already taken care of" by the Wall.
And so forth. Imagine a cineplex that also tries to run successful nightclubs, reading groups, "hole-in-the-wall" theatre groups, and blogger meetups. In the same cineplex...
But they don't want us to live there, they want us to go there for all our entertainment needs and bring all our friends and colleagues along. They may be putting all of these things a venue for free, but make money on the information revealed.
What is wanted is a cineplex which has affiliations to all those other venues, lets you use your Facebook Card at all the other places, and uses the e-paper card to display trageted ads to you as you go from place to place.
If you can't see this happeningin the real world where business owners are expected tohave some common sense and see the advantages in such a system, when will that happen among developers whose cooperation strategies have prompted comparisons with "herding cats?"
I'd say it's a lot like "Currency".
Every login, and every closed network is like having a closed country. While it may protect the countries initial investment, it slows down and hurts those that are traveling between countries, and unnecessary 'tax' on conversion rates.
The open network is more like when Europe adopted the Euro.
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