by Paul Stavropoulos
Social networks have not changed in decades.
The first network I became infatuated with was Myspace. This was back in 2005, the year that Friends ended.
Since then, social media has not changed much at all…different networks have come and gone, but they’ve all gravitated to the same method for sharing information: the friend or follower system. Think Facebook, Twitter, Instagram…you must build a set of followers to start sharing your moments and opinions.
Why have the big social media players depended on this method? What value do these networks bring to us? What are these networks not good at?
Our Personal Networks
Let’s take a step back and look at how our networks outside the internet look like.
In “real” life, personal networks are made up of close friends (people we know well) and acquaintances (people we know but don’t consider close). If we were to map one’s network, it would look something like this graph.
This is an image of my LinkedIn Social Graph from 2011. Each circle is a person I know, each line a connection between people in my network, and each color a different social circle of mine.
There are two things to note that are characteristic of most everyone’s personal network:
- Our Personal networks are highly clustered.
In this graph of my network from 2011, there are four clear groups of people I knew (the orange, blue, yellow, and purple). Members in each circle are closely tied; see all the lines between similar-colored nodes? - The different clusters rarely intermingle
The different circles of ours networks rarely intermingle with each other. In the graph above, the vast majority of people reside within one cluster, and very few people in one group have ties to another one. From my own personal experience, it’s hard to get artists to “hang out” with engineers and for “liberals” to hang out with “conservatives.”
This “clustering” phenomenon also applies beyond our personal networks and to the clique-ness of types of people. People interested in art mingle with other artists, those interested in sports hang out with other sporty people, and folks who love technology spend time with their computers — er, other technologists. If we were to graph the connections between technologists, artists, and athletes, it would look similar to the graph above.
Our personal networks are so important; they define our opinions, news we hear, and gossip we spread. Our personal networks bound our views and shield us from opinions and voices of others around the world.
Our networks on the internet
Back to our discussion on social media.
So far in the history of social networks, it looks like we’ve taken the existing dynamics of our personal networks and recreated them on the internet. People organize contacts as friends or followers, and information travels to us from those sets of people, much like how information travels outside of the internet. The end result is that our follower lists are made up of people very similar to those in our personal networks, and our feeds have the same types of posts, news, and viewpoints that we have been already exposed to.
There are two problems here.
Breaking Barriers
One of the points to the internet is to “destroy cultural, economic and political brakes” that we naturally have. The internet should facilitate the spread of information, introduce us all to new viewpoints and voices, and allow us to interact with people we barely know all over the world.
The internet is about destroying cultural, economical, and political brakes that we naturally have.
How can we do this if we spend time on networks that just mirror our existing circles and create an echo chamber of our own views? How can we gain new viewpoints and break barriers if we get most of our online news from social media that feeds us what we want to hear?
Yes, there are some places on the internet where this is possible. My go-t0 place is Reddit. I love it; its wide array of content feeds my schizophrenic tastes — serious news, debates, and all the puppies. But even a forum like that isn’t perfect, and its culture is very polarizing.
Share your story
Current social media also impedes the flow of posts and information. Posts travel based on how many friends or followers you have, not what content you’re sharing. You may have the most inspiring or thought provoking thought or image, but this Kim Kardashian tweet will get more attention than what you have to say. In a perfect world, posts would travel to people around the globe based solely on the merit of its content and message, not it’s creator.
A post should spread based on the quality of its content, not the popularity of the creator
Ripple
I’ve spent the last 8 months working on a new social network called Ripple. It’s a service that allows people to share and interact with the most engaging content from around the world.
We believe that everyone has a story to tell — something to share with the world — and that one’s voice should not be limited to a list of friends and followers. We’re on a mission to perfect a platform where people can reach others beyond any boundary or social cluster, where we can all learn from each others’ backgrounds and experiences, and where anyone can have their voice spread to thousands of people.
Ripple allows users to post a message or picture, and sends the content to a number of people geographically nearby. Those who receive the post — or “ripple” — can spread it to others nearby, and so on. Ripples spread so long as people continue to spread them, and are not biased in whom they are sent to.
With Ripple, the most engaging content reaches users across the globe, as people spread them, while noise does not travel far. We also allow you to visualize the spread of ripples on a map. People love quantifying and visualizing the influence and impact their voice has. This mapping of ripples spreading is a multi-dimensional form of a like or retweet; Ripple shows shows not only how many times something was liked/upvoted/retweeted, but where each piece of information has gone and how it got there.
Our ecosystem is filled with images from different countries, art from folks looking to gain exposure, articles people post to look for other viewpoints, and -of course- the occasional cat picture or dreamy sunset pic.
We’re at the beginning of our journey and committed to creating a boundless way for people to share and learn about the world around them. It’s by no means perfect, but we’re getting better and better every day.
Sound appealing to you? Join us and explore your world.
Onwards and upwards,
Paul S.
