The story of the stirrup
Do you know the story of the stirrup? The stirrup was introduced to horsemanship alternately by the Central Asians, Chinese, or tribes in India more than 2,500 years ago. But it was not until combined with the armor-plated knight and a saddle with a backrest that it rose from toe-hold to game-changer in the murderous game that was then medieval warfare. Norman shock combat, featuring riders on horseback with couched lances, high-backed saddles, and stirrups, mounted their charge against faltering Saxons at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. England has not been the same since.

The story of the stirrup is not without debate — equestrians lay claim to the lance and archery work sans stirrup — but it is an oft-cited example of the role technology plays in social change. The stirrup not only produced a new war machine, in the mounted knight, but was a part also of an emerging social class: those who could afford the supporting needs of knighthood. Chivalry, nobility, glory in warfare, and the crusades all owe a relation to the stirrup. This simple invention was not alone responsible for these social changes, but was a notable and critical element.

I am not a technological determinist. I think culture paves the way for the use of certain technologies when it anticipates their use in that particular fashion. A similar point is often made about guns — whose introduction in some cultures was met with the unenthusiastic reception of warrior cultures for whom killing at a distance was ignoble.

In more contemporary times, technologies launched too early (the apple Newton), or out of synch with cultural practices and social needs (the video phone), serve as more recent examples of the same relationship between the social and the technical. Cultures invent needs and uses, and technologies fill them. It is unlikely that a technology, requiring the design commitments and resources that it usually does, comes along and out of the blue invents a new and popular way of doing things.

Connections

I recently was enjoying Connections, by James Burke, one of my favorite documentary series and in some circles a bit of a cult classic. In the series, Burke traces a dotted and dashed line through history, connecting inventions, discoveries, accidents, and events to trace the lineage of several modern-day technologies. Explosives, electricity, the gasoline engine, television, computing, money, and plastics all receive fascinating treatment.

Among the numerous tales of coincidence and serendipity that footnote the romp through the history of science and technology that is Connections, one recurring theme remains a narrative constant. It is the importance of relations, of the relationships that a new technology had with practices and possibilities, with needs and opportunities, problems solved and new futures created.

And in that not insignificant observation is the more emphatic point that no game-changing technique or technology (for that’s really what technology is — application of a rational technique) would have had the impact that it did were it not for its having leveraged and amplified existing relations.

Likewise, today, no social tool makes waves unless it levers and extends current practices, makes implicit connections explicit, surfaces the hidden and renders visible the latent. Relatedness is all, and online more so than “anywhere” else, for the online world has no “material” or “temporal” persistence beyond the connections and relations that weave it together.

Relations, subjective and objective
Two kinds of relations matter in the world of social technologies. Relations among data elements, digital objects, and the operations possible around them. And social relations, including those between a user and his or her social user experiences, communication with others, and social relations made visible in different ways on our many social sites and services. Objective relations and subjective relations.

It used to be that in computing, objective relations expressed a sort of subjective consensus, a choice given computing’s constraints, to operationalize and represent functions and interaction in a particular way. It might now be argued that an increasing amount of computing, that behind the social web and related businesses, at least, reflects a subjectiv-izing use of objective data relations. That the relations that matter in social web use are those that socialize the world of information, that renew and re-contextualize the static or objectively-structured world of data.

I am over-simplifying the computing industry and professions here, of course, but for the purpose of extracting the kind of truth that makes its point best beneath the arc-light of exaggeration. In social media use, individual user actions provide subjective taste and preference; communication between users supplies social relatedness; and social interaction among users animates social activiities and practices. Social uses connect the dots and dashes of a multi-threaded world of otherwise binary bits and algorithmic processes.

Social media connections
There are, in Connections, a number of connections made. They vary in their composition and so I thought it might be interesting to tease out some that bear relevance to us. In the vein of a “what if” sort of viewing — an exposition of what a BBC documentary aired in 1978 might have observed about the socializing world of today’s internet.

First of all, for a few of the big categories.

• Identifying, locating, positioning, indexing, and categorizing. Historical examples: astrolabe, gridlines, compass, star charts, triangulation.
• Improving the efficiency, effectiveness, application or extension of a process, method, or technique. Historical examples: plow, loom, water wheel, coal-tar, american manufacturing system
• Inventions the revolutionize, change, transform a process, method, technique, or pastime. Historical examples: money and credit, steam power, chemistry, car
• Methods, insights, techniques that give one an advantage over and against competitors. Historical examples: longbow, lateen rigging, gunpowder, synthetics, radar
• Creative innovations that lead to new markets, services, production, and demand in the marketplace and more broadly, socially. Historical examples: printing, double-entry book-keeping, electricity, plastics, wireless

In each of these types of technical innovation, a number of social relations were transformed. These run from the seemingly modest — but in fact transformative impact — of the chimney on dwellings and living spaces (one hall becomes many rooms, social classes divide, intimacies are enervated) to the more obviously revolutionary such as gunpowder, electromagnetism, or the combustion engine. In some cases an invention threatened a change of world view (the telescope and proof of heliocentrism); disruption of social order (industrialism and the worker); competitive dis/advantage (marine navigation, empire, and imperialism); or global repercussions (the atom bomb). And this is but a gloss.

So what do social media amplify?
I hope that I have not strayed too far from the trail, but the force of historical references is far greater than any argument I might muster on behalf of social theoretical insights. That, and Connections is simply such a darned good program(me) that I relish the mental replay.

So, to the point I had in mind to begin with: what power to leverage and amplify social relations might social media represent? And if that’s the generic version of the question, the more particular version is aimed at the startups and social tool vendors out there: what social are you changing?

An example, first.
Foursquare awards badges (think Knights — the lineage of liege lies latent, looming largely!) and points for checkins. This creates social visibility out of individual action. It differentiates socially by means of recognizable distinctions (badges). It locates individuals and renders them available by means mobile and in realtime.

• So it extends the position/location series arcing back long ago to maps, star readings, and the astrolabe. Does it extend the navigation series? Yes but not significantly (it’s not about going someplace with others as being or having been there).
• By combining places with visits and short messages, does it extend the knowledge/classification/indexing series? Not so much — we still use Yelp for that.
• It is mobile and has messaging — does it extend the signal/communication series (lighthouse; morse; wireless; phone) — it may be on the cusp of social location signaling practices (I’m here, yes, come say hi) but norms are still a check against location-based intrusion. A tweet, (meeting request) is often expected first.

And there are other social relations surfaced, rendered, connected, and amplified by Foursquare that I haven’t mentioned. We could run through Buzz, ChatRoulette, Plancast, Quora, or a host of other social tools to tease out the changes they help to introduce. And around which social practices may be forming or might form.

Chain of events
In the series Connections, each chain of events has circumstantial, if not questionable, causal relation. Author James Burke readily admits the numerous chains of connection he might have drawn otherwise: historically, socially, technically. In our universe, that is, the world of social media, we must admit that our chains are not causal, but social. That is, they are signifying chains.

Now I borrow here a bit from 20th century philosophers, and cultural semioticians in particular, but the gist of the signifying chain is quite simply that social media use means something, socially speaking. It goes without saying that nobody but nobody would check in with Foursquare if he or she were the only one doing it. In any given social media tool or application, success is begotten by the social significance with which the technology is met. The greatest power, the most paradigm-changing and transformative social impact, obtains to those services with the greatest social significance.

In Connections, there are moments in history when a certain discovery creates a myriad of possibilities. And moments when a combination of simultaneous but partially-useful discoveries produce something greater than the sum of the parts. In social media we see a similar phenomenon. The browser was game changing, as were the modem, the PC, and the internet. The iPhone, however, is more likely a device whose genius of market timing allowed it to leverage existing social web practices, (mobile) application developer community (some surely with Facebook apps on their CV), and established smart/phone audience habits.

To return to the our example, as the iPhone is helped by twitter, it also helps Foursquare. And it remains to be seen what Foursquare can do to amplify the most out of geolocal social practices. For if history is any fair measure, a host of subcultures and practices might yet take wing on the Foursquare model. (Question for Facebook Places: does the social graph enable or constrain location checkins?)

Or take, instead, Google Buzz. Buzz meant to extend the one-to-many email communication model (itself a time-condensed form of correspondence combined with one-to-many broadcast aspects). Buzz lifts the 140 off short messaging and threads responses for tighter conversationality. But socially it already can’t avoid resonating with public social media cultures and practices (high profile users). And with search just an algorithm away (to say nothing of social search), the DNA in Buzz must already be plotting its next evolutionary leap with a small step along the knowledge/indexing/categorizing series. Buzz, after all, was raised in labs more digital Gutenberg than twitter, which is more Edison.

Anticipating the social
All of the technical and social narratives told in Connections involve breakthroughs whose impact spread out like ripples, often far beyond the innovator’s original intent, and usually beyond the problem immediately solved. These secondary effects exist because things are related. Territory is related to navigation is related to exploration. Constellations organize the heavens and account for earthly events, setting expectations for the future. Credit mitigates risk which permits investment, thus begetting financiers. The curved plow and scabbard were more efficient, which led to surplus, and thus leisure time.

Technologies amplify along an axis, if not several axes, of relation. Each relational axis may be developed along a series of related and extensive tools and techniques, and corresponding social and cultural practices. Value accrues as a result in areas previously left out of administration. These amplifications may involve the extension of an existing method to new practices within a social group; may connect these new practices to new populations; may complexify and differentiate the domains of action and communication possible along a series; and so on.

Consider, for a moment, some of the series in play with social tools today.

• Personal to social: The differentiation of personal habits and real-world separation of private and public spaces and places is extended in “worlds” (experiences) developed online. Not only Facebook and Google, but all social networking and communication tools extend the personal-social series. Here issues are of containment, separation, mobility, visibility, privacy, intimacy, mediation, image, and so on. Issues concern the increase in options for play and use of personal and social distinctions in tool design as well as its uses; and the protection, respect, and containment of normatively-regulated social practices in which lines between the private and the public are understood. Communication, intentional but as often unintentional, easily leaks between and across today’s mediated “spaces” and networks.
• Action and its Consequences: All social actions are coupled to likely and unlikely consequences. We take these into account (consciously or not) in our actions. As tools become more complex, a greater number of actions are coupled to a greater number of consequences. Communication posted in one context but re-contextualized elsewhere (tweets, comments, shares). In some cases the consequences of an action seemingly taken in one domain (use of a webcam to stream a room-mate’s private activity?) have consequences transcending the domain in which action was initiated and taken. Inadvertent exposures result from the many audiences through which a recording may travel.
• Associating and signifying: Signs of social status and position are a focal point of today’s massively mediated culture, and are developed with great care and precision by our image-makers. Versions of these kinds of image-based distinctions, be they signs, icons, badges, points, or some other kind of representation serve to distinguish people online, too. But insofar as they are used by an audience, not just broadcast through mass media, social signifiers online may have a wider range of ambiguity. Do they mean what they appear to mean, or what they were meant to mean by the user who earns or transacts them? With ambiguities come interpretive skills. Users today possess the ability to read the nuances of meaning not only from signs and their original context of use, but also according to friends who use them, groups they belong to, sites they use them in, and more. There is an enormous amount of design possibility in the rich field of social signifiers — from virtual currencies to leaderboards and even enterprise incentive systems.

And that’s just a canvas. Additional series could be found in social tools along axes including: finding and re-finding; discovery and exploration; search and information; trust and loyalties; personas and reputation; mobile and place/location; and so on.

Social media amplify personal and individual uses and practices; extend and connect social practices, and often produce unforeseen common wealth. But how they do so varies, and not just by tool but by insight and foresight. Socially fertile ground can dramatically enhance the impact and spread of a new tool, service, or application. It’s not just about api’s and scalability, but about social api’s and social significance. Did Gutenberg anticipate that within 40 years of his new printing press there would be eight million books in circulation? Or the Vatican foresee that the press would present a real and present threat to the very Church itself? It’s all there in history, and changes afoot today portend as remarkable a shift in communication and social and cultural practices as did the printing press more than 500 years ago.

The story of the stirrup
Do you know the story of the stirrup? The stirrup was introduced to horsemanship alternately by the Central Asians, Chinese, or tribes in India more than 2,500 years ago. But it was not until combined with the armor-plated knight and a saddle with a backrest that it rose from toe-hold to game-changer in the murderous game that was then medieval warfare. Norman shock combat, featuring riders on horseback with couched lances, high-backed saddles, and stirrups, mounted their charge against faltering Saxons at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. England has not been the same since.

The story of the stirrup is not without debate — equestrians lay claim to the lance and archery work sans stirrup — but it is an oft-cited example of the role technology plays in social change. The stirrup not only produced a new war machine, in the mounted knight, but was a part also of an emerging social class: those who could afford the supporting needs of knighthood. Chivalry, nobility, glory in warfare, and the crusades all owe a relation to the stirrup. This simple invention was not alone responsible for these social changes, but was a notable and critical element.

I am not a technological determinist. I think culture paves the way for the use of certain technologies when it anticipates their use in that particular fashion. A similar point is often made about guns — whose introduction in some cultures was met with the unenthusiastic reception of warrior cultures for whom killing at a distance was ignoble.

In more contemporary times, technologies launched too early (the apple Newton), or out of synch with cultural practices and social needs (the video phone), serve as more recent examples of the same relationship between the social and the technical. Cultures invent needs and uses, and technologies fill them. It is unlikely that a technology, requiring the design commitments and resources that it usually does, comes along and out of the blue invents a new and popular way of doing things.

Connections

I recently was enjoying Connections, by James Burke, one of my favorite documentary series and in some circles a bit of a cult classic. In the series, Burke traces a dotted and dashed line through history, connecting inventions, discoveries, accidents, and events to trace the lineage of several modern-day technologies. Explosives, electricity, the gasoline engine, television, computing, money, and plastics all receive fascinating treatment.

Among the numerous tales of coincidence and serendipity that footnote the romp through the history of science and technology that is Connections, one recurring theme remains a narrative constant. It is the importance of relations, of the relationships that a new technology had with practices and possibilities, with needs and opportunities, problems solved and new futures created.

And in that not insignificant observation is the more emphatic point that no game-changing technique or technology (for that’s really what technology is — application of a rational technique) would have had the impact that it did were it not for its having leveraged and amplified existing relations.

Likewise, today, no social tool makes waves unless it levers and extends current practices, makes implicit connections explicit, surfaces the hidden and renders visible the latent. Relatedness is all, and online more so than “anywhere” else, for the online world has no “material” or “temporal” persistence beyond the connections and relations that weave it together.

Relations, subjective and objective
Two kinds of relations matter in the world of social technologies. Relations among data elements, digital objects, and the operations possible around them. And social relations, including those between a user and his or her social user experiences, communication with others, and social relations made visible in different ways on our many social sites and services. Objective relations and subjective relations.

It used to be that in computing, objective relations expressed a sort of subjective consensus, a choice given computing’s constraints, to operationalize and represent functions and interaction in a particular way. It might now be argued that an increasing amount of computing, that behind the social web and related businesses, at least, reflects a subjectiv-izing use of objective data relations. That the relations that matter in social web use are those that socialize the world of information, that renew and re-contextualize the static or objectively-structured world of data.

I am over-simplifying the computing industry and professions here, of course, but for the purpose of extracting the kind of truth that makes its point best beneath the arc-light of exaggeration. In social media use, individual user actions provide subjective taste and preference; communication between users supplies social relatedness; and social interaction among users animates social activiities and practices. Social uses connect the dots and dashes of a multi-threaded world of otherwise binary bits and algorithmic processes.

Social media connections
There are, in Connections, a number of connections made. They vary in their composition and so I thought it might be interesting to tease out some that bear relevance to us. In the vein of a “what if” sort of viewing — an exposition of what a BBC documentary aired in 1978 might have observed about the socializing world of today’s internet.

First of all, for a few of the big categories.

• Identifying, locating, positioning, indexing, and categorizing. Historical examples: astrolabe, gridlines, compass, star charts, triangulation.
• Improving the efficiency, effectiveness, application or extension of a process, method, or technique. Historical examples: plow, loom, water wheel, coal-tar, american manufacturing system
• Inventions the revolutionize, change, transform a process, method, technique, or pastime. Historical examples: money and credit, steam power, chemistry, car
• Methods, insights, techniques that give one an advantage over and against competitors. Historical examples: longbow, lateen rigging, gunpowder, synthetics, radar
• Creative innovations that lead to new markets, services, production, and demand in the marketplace and more broadly, socially. Historical examples: printing, double-entry book-keeping, electricity, plastics, wireless

In each of these types of technical innovation, a number of social relations were transformed. These run from the seemingly modest — but in fact transformative impact — of the chimney on dwellings and living spaces (one hall becomes many rooms, social classes divide, intimacies are enervated) to the more obviously revolutionary such as gunpowder, electromagnetism, or the combustion engine. In some cases an invention threatened a change of world view (the telescope and proof of heliocentrism); disruption of social order (industrialism and the worker); competitive dis/advantage (marine navigation, empire, and imperialism); or global repercussions (the atom bomb). And this is but a gloss.

So what do social media amplify?
I hope that I have not strayed too far from the trail, but the force of historical references is far greater than any argument I might muster on behalf of social theoretical insights. That, and Connections is simply such a darned good program(me) that I relish the mental replay.

So, to the point I had in mind to begin with: what power to leverage and amplify social relations might social media represent? And if that’s the generic version of the question, the more particular version is aimed at the startups and social tool vendors out there: what social are you changing?

An example, first.
Foursquare awards badges (think Knights — the lineage of liege lies latent, looming largely!) and points for checkins. This creates social visibility out of individual action. It differentiates socially by means of recognizable distinctions (badges). It locates individuals and renders them available by means mobile and in realtime.

• So it extends the position/location series arcing back long ago to maps, star readings, and the astrolabe. Does it extend the navigation series? Yes but not significantly (it’s not about going someplace with others as being or having been there).
• By combining places with visits and short messages, does it extend the knowledge/classification/indexing series? Not so much — we still use Yelp for that.
• It is mobile and has messaging — does it extend the signal/communication series (lighthouse; morse; wireless; phone) — it may be on the cusp of social location signaling practices (I’m here, yes, come say hi) but norms are still a check against location-based intrusion. A tweet, (meeting request) is often expected first.

And there are other social relations surfaced, rendered, connected, and amplified by Foursquare that I haven’t mentioned. We could run through Buzz, ChatRoulette, Plancast, Quora, or a host of other social tools to tease out the changes they help to introduce. And around which social practices may be forming or might form.

Chain of events
In the series Connections, each chain of events has circumstantial, if not questionable, causal relation. Author James Burke readily admits the numerous chains of connection he might have drawn otherwise: historically, socially, technically. In our universe, that is, the world of social media, we must admit that our chains are not causal, but social. That is, they are signifying chains.

Now I borrow here a bit from 20th century philosophers, and cultural semioticians in particular, but the gist of the signifying chain is quite simply that social media use means something, socially speaking. It goes without saying that nobody but nobody would check in with Foursquare if he or she were the only one doing it. In any given social media tool or application, success is begotten by the social significance with which the technology is met. The greatest power, the most paradigm-changing and transformative social impact, obtains to those services with the greatest social significance.

In Connections, there are moments in history when a certain discovery creates a myriad of possibilities. And moments when a combination of simultaneous but partially-useful discoveries produce something greater than the sum of the parts. In social media we see a similar phenomenon. The browser was game changing, as were the modem, the PC, and the internet. The iPhone, however, is more likely a device whose genius of market timing allowed it to leverage existing social web practices, (mobile) application developer community (some surely with Facebook apps on their CV), and established smart/phone audience habits.

To return to the our example, as the iPhone is helped by twitter, it also helps Foursquare. And it remains to be seen what Foursquare can do to amplify the most out of geolocal social practices. For if history is any fair measure, a host of subcultures and practices might yet take wing on the Foursquare model. (Question for Facebook Places: does the social graph enable or constrain location checkins?)

Or take, instead, Google Buzz. Buzz meant to extend the one-to-many email communication model (itself a time-condensed form of correspondence combined with one-to-many broadcast aspects). Buzz lifts the 140 off short messaging and threads responses for tighter conversationality. But socially it already can’t avoid resonating with public social media cultures and practices (high profile users). And with search just an algorithm away (to say nothing of social search), the DNA in Buzz must already be plotting its next evolutionary leap with a small step along the knowledge/indexing/categorizing series. Buzz, after all, was raised in labs more digital Gutenberg than twitter, which is more Edison.

Anticipating the social
All of the technical and social narratives told in Connections involve breakthroughs whose impact spread out like ripples, often far beyond the innovator’s original intent, and usually beyond the problem immediately solved. These secondary effects exist because things are related. Territory is related to navigation is related to exploration. Constellations organize the heavens and account for earthly events, setting expectations for the future. Credit mitigates risk which permits investment, thus begetting financiers. The curved plow and scabbard were more efficient, which led to surplus, and thus leisure time.

Technologies amplify along an axis, if not several axes, of relation. Each relational axis may be developed along a series of related and extensive tools and techniques, and corresponding social and cultural practices. Value accrues as a result in areas previously left out of administration. These amplifications may involve the extension of an existing method to new practices within a social group; may connect these new practices to new populations; may complexify and differentiate the domains of action and communication possible along a series; and so on.

Consider, for a moment, some of the series in play with social tools today.

• Personal to social: The differentiation of personal habits and real-world separation of private and public spaces and places is extended in “worlds” (experiences) developed online. Not only Facebook and Google, but all social networking and communication tools extend the personal-social series. Here issues are of containment, separation, mobility, visibility, privacy, intimacy, mediation, image, and so on. Issues concern the increase in options for play and use of personal and social distinctions in tool design as well as its uses; and the protection, respect, and containment of normatively-regulated social practices in which lines between the private and the public are understood. Communication, intentional but as often unintentional, easily leaks between and across today’s mediated “spaces” and networks.
• Action and its Consequences: All social actions are coupled to likely and unlikely consequences. We take these into account (consciously or not) in our actions. As tools become more complex, a greater number of actions are coupled to a greater number of consequences. Communication posted in one context but re-contextualized elsewhere (tweets, comments, shares). In some cases the consequences of an action seemingly taken in one domain (use of a webcam to stream a room-mate’s private activity?) have consequences transcending the domain in which action was initiated and taken. Inadvertent exposures result from the many audiences through which a recording may travel.
• Associating and signifying: Signs of social status and position are a focal point of today’s massively mediated culture, and are developed with great care and precision by our image-makers. Versions of these kinds of image-based distinctions, be they signs, icons, badges, points, or some other kind of representation serve to distinguish people online, too. But insofar as they are used by an audience, not just broadcast through mass media, social signifiers online may have a wider range of ambiguity. Do they mean what they appear to mean, or what they were meant to mean by the user who earns or transacts them? With ambiguities come interpretive skills. Users today possess the ability to read the nuances of meaning not only from signs and their original context of use, but also according to friends who use them, groups they belong to, sites they use them in, and more. There is an enormous amount of design possibility in the rich field of social signifiers — from virtual currencies to leaderboards and even enterprise incentive systems.

And that’s just a canvas. Additional series could be found in social tools along axes including: finding and re-finding; discovery and exploration; search and information; trust and loyalties; personas and reputation; mobile and place/location; and so on.

Social media amplify personal and individual uses and practices; extend and connect social practices, and often produce unforeseen common wealth. But how they do so varies, and not just by tool but by insight and foresight. Socially fertile ground can dramatically enhance the impact and spread of a new tool, service, or application. It’s not just about api’s and scalability, but about social api’s and social significance. Did Gutenberg anticipate that within 40 years of his new printing press there would be eight million books in circulation? Or the Vatican foresee that the press would present a real and present threat to the very Church itself? It’s all there in history, and changes afoot today portend as remarkable a shift in communication and social and cultural practices as did the printing press more than 500 years ago.

The design of social media tools and services is a bit of an art, and a tricky one at that. Where design methodologies exist, they compete with business requirements and a rapidly changing landscape. Where business goals exist, they, too, must adapt to a marketplace rife with competition. Where best practices exist, use of them in new contexts and tools relies as much on trial and error as it does a well-conceived social design plan. And where engineering solutions exist, they tend to reflect only cursory appreciation of distinctly individual user habits and social practices.

Negotiating these complex and often competing needs and requirements can be a challenge. But we retain a deep sense and commitment to the promise of social media. They are used by millions, in spite of shortcomings, and as audiences embrace new ways of communicating, networking, interacting, and sharing information, it is virtually certain that socialization of the web and internet devices in general will continue unabated.

Trends pointing the way forward suggest a shift of attention and usage from web-based browsing to apps. The enterprise world wants more and better social media, retooled for the constraints and needs of the workplace. Shopping is becoming social, as users gradually expose their social data (consumption but also tastes and preferences), and as commercial services offer discounts, coupons, and other forms of sales and loyalty. Brands continue to embrace social media on a number of fronts (they are fools not to). And new practices, from social games to viewing video, listening to music, and mobile checkins all indicate that more is yet to come.

What all of these have in common is a high degree of susceptibility to the whim and fancy of market adoption. Small businesses and web startups, seeking to catch a wave, crash upon discovering they have chosen the wrong one. Even large companies, eminently skilled at engineering information solutions (Google and Wave; SecondLife; Microsoft and Live; among others) have also failed to get the social mix right. Even services such as twitter, Yelp, Friendfeed, and Foursquare have become or became something other than their founders likely intended.

In social, things often do not go as planned. So where is the blindspot?

The fact is that when social media are rolled out to an audience, their creators lose control over their products’ destiny and design. Users do with them what they want, and as actual practices emerge, reinforce behaviors, and become established, they come to define what a tool is for and how to use it more than anything set into the design. The more open a design, and the less it is structured, the more can be done with it. That would describe the directions in which audiences took twitter and Chatroulette. At the other end of the design spectrum, Wave, which took a good year in development and which featured some truly compelling innovations, suffered from overwrought complexity.

Users have no insight or interest into the thinking of the product’s creators. And creators have no leverage over audience behaviors. Social media are as much event and practice as they are design and engineering. And the models and requirements specs that stabilize the latter founder on the organic and dynamic instability of the former. But this is not to say that there’s no order in the chaos, pattern in the practices, or probability in the system. There is. It’s just that we’re not trained to think about it.

The uses of social media are determined as much by the habits of users anything else. This is where social interaction design can come into play. For the social interaction design (SxD) approach seeks to capture insights into social user behaviors and social practices and outcomes, as well as the design of architecture, features, UI, and the like. SxD takes the view that interactions occur among users, facilitated by technologies but not determined by them. For it is the actions of users, and the content they leave behind, that inform the activities of others. We can’t control these outcomes, but we can anticipate them. Social practices may not be predictable, but they are probable (Chatroulette’s instant appeal to exhibitionists being an obvious example).

The root of the problem lies in the natural inclination of creators to think in terms of product, and for users to think in terms of themselves. Creators tend to build according to features and functionalities that are technically and financially feasible, and modeled after similar approaches proven elsewhere. Users tend to use social tools according to how they suit them, who else uses them, and what they get out of the experience. The creator’s notions are anchored on thingness, on technical challenges and smart solutions, informed by the pressures of competition. The user’s notions involve how the tool connects them, becomes an extension of their daily habits, connects and helps them communicate and feel involved and relevant.

It’s up to the creator to think from the perspective of users. This has been a fundamental tenet of user-centric design since its inception. With social tools, the challenge is simply a bit different. It involves not only many kinds of users and uses, but also the social dynamics that emerge when people begin to interact with one another.

This suggests that designers of social media should know something about psychology, sociology, and communication. For those are the underlying practices in which our technologies become embedded. When tools become social it is because their technical features and functionalities accrue personal and social utility to people. Indeed social utility must be broadly defined, to include irrational behaviors as well as those we consider “utilitarian.” Tools that are technically dysfunctional (from the perspective of software design) may still work socially. Some audience workarounds are indeed quite catchy: consider hashtags.

Users are people, and they take up an interest in their own use of a tool, or what it does or offers. They take an interest in other users, also, be these friends and colleagues or be they a vague sense of “public.” Users find their way to content through people, or to people through content. As they use a tool they become personally invested in it — not only as a habit (thick or thin), but for how it represents them. Tools present and represent their users, whether to friends, peers, groups, communities, or the public. Indeed the reflectivity of social media is unique to our age. The mirror it holds up to us can be motivating and compelling in ways we are only dimly aware of.

Social media not only produce representations and presence from users’ contributions and use. They also permit communication. Some of this is but gestural, and works by means of objects, images, graphics, and icons. Some of it may be transactional, as in the case of tokens that can be given, owned, earned, purchased, traded, and so on. Even where icons for these gestures are not available, linguistic substitutes or even numbers, such as followers, may provide these elements. Elements (features) are not just things. They have meaning for users who are represented by them; they communicate interests and intentions; solicit responses and interaction; and signify social status, position, culture, and more. They are like grammatical units of social expression.

These elements are available to differentiate among users. When the social tool can differentiate among individuals, and represent those differences, the creator need only create categories (for elements) and design views (of activity) to then grow social practices and culture. Because the elements are not things — they communicate, express, solicit, and signify. By categorizing, ranking, relating, connecting, tools can group individuals. By capturing meta data and performing operations on that data, tools can create feedback loops that report activity back into any social system, thus reinforcing certain uses and practices over others.

The key to successful social tools is in the breadth and depth of social differentiation. Not only because all society and social relations differentiate and are differentiated. But because people are different, too. Their interests are different, personalities are different, styles are different. And their social skills and competencies are different. Some talk about themselves, some riff off what others say, and others get in between. Some are confident, headstrong, opinionated, and see themselves being seen. While others enjoy their company, want to connect them, and be seen with them. Some know what they like. Others seem to know what others like. And some like it if everyone likes it. Some use words, some their faces, others their activities. Some to tell, some to ask, some to connect.

These, and so many more kinds of differences, are amplified by social media. Amplified, because the media works by text, pictures, video — not bodies, faces, and being together. Amplifies, because ambiguities of meaning and intention introduced by this “means of production” tend to exaggerate our perceptions and interpretations. We project onto, read into, or guess what’s behind a particular communication or action. And there’s often no correcting our perceptions until others have communicated back, or reacted, in turn. Social tools are not things, they are times: episodic, habitual, ongoing, recurring, interrupted, interrupting.

Because social media depend on users to create communication, and to become engaged in interactions with others, they have social distinctions. This is an important point. For it is where social interaction design diverges from the conventional user—application interaction model. We have said that users are different. Some of our social tools encourage users to declare, vote, rank, rate, tag and share these differences (as interests and tastes). Others require that users state their differences. In many cases differences are excluded and the tools are biased to similarities (the Like). But here, too, there are different reasons to Like (and to share that one Likes). Identity and difference, in quality, quantity, and degree: these are the distinctions underlying all social actions, and on which all that is social is meaningfully organized.

All social tools have structure. Structure arrange relations, make connections, and express a bias in their arrangement and organization. Some things are more visible than others; some things more likely to happen than others. Structures contain what they connect, relate, and arrange; and they eliminate and exclude what they don’t. This more true online than elsewhere, for things “exist” only only if they are linked. Structures limit but also enable, for in the constraint of structure is the production of meaning (through meaningful relations) that enables action.

This is good, and is a necessary first step. But what brings social to life are dynamics. The celebrity needs fans, and fans need celebrities: their dynamic is mutually engaging and interesting. Its particular social dynamics are behind cultural practices that include electing presidents and celebrating the Oscars. (And yes, following Lady Gaga on twitter.) Similar dynamics are at work among other personality types. And form the basis of group behaviors, inter-group behaviors, community activity and trends, and so on. Dynamics form over time and become self-reinforcing.

Dynamics are not structural properties, but are system properties. All social tools are structure and system. Systems bring structure to life by producing probabilities: in system dynamics are those things like to recur, and those which do not. Again, there is activity included and highly likely; and activity excluded and highly improbable. Social systems are self-reinforcing and self-reproducing, on the basis of the aggregate activities of individuals who unwittingly cause the system’s ongoing reproduction.These are social phenomena, and are as necessary to the design of social media as technical know-how and business sense.

So, too, is an understanding of how communication and interaction make use of the medium’s various forms of expression. It has rich and thin forms, from video and webcam to text and emoticons. These forms change meanings in context. A follower number on twitter means more than just a number. Forms can be constructed out of formal elements, as when narratives are constructed from text, be those tweets, updates, comments, blog posts, or even riche media (youtube videos and video responses). These narratives may have some resemblance to narration, but are changed by virtue of being different kinds of action, activity, and practice.

We have focused on social tools, but in fact the online practices that emerge within and among them also reflect their relation to “real world” practices. So job sites, dating sites, and social sites each involve different kinds of networking. To which users can already bring a rough sense of how to go about networking in ways appropriate to the activity they’re engaged in — in short, context. For this reason, best practices cannot be lifted out of one context or tool, and simply dropped into another. Again, the differences are explained by use and practice, not by design, functionality, or some other aspect of technology. What technologies dis-embed from daily face to face routines, they re-embed into mediating social systems.

These are just some of the aspects of social interaction design that belong to the framework and methodology of designing social tools. The attributes of individual uses and corresponding social practices that bring social tools to life accompany and supplement the features and functionalities on which tools are designed. Where SxD offers a unique approach and perspective is in its ability to anticipate outcomes and provide guidance to a product roadmap. Social outcomes need not be left to audience adoption, but can indeed be anticipated and worked into social product development. The alternative is to plow ahead and to turn when the turn is necessary, or more likely, flip a u turn and hope it’s not too late. Blindspots in this industry are real, as is what’s hidden within them.

The design of social media tools and services is a bit of an art, and a tricky one at that. Where design methodologies exist, they compete with business requirements and a rapidly changing landscape. Where business goals exist, they, too, must adapt to a marketplace rife with competition. Where best practices exist, use of them in new contexts and tools relies as much on trial and error as it does a well-conceived social design plan. And where engineering solutions exist, they tend to reflect only cursory appreciation of distinctly individual user habits and social practices.

Negotiating these complex and often competing needs and requirements can be a challenge. But we retain a deep sense and commitment to the promise of social media. They are used by millions, in spite of shortcomings, and as audiences embrace new ways of communicating, networking, interacting, and sharing information, it is virtually certain that socialization of the web and internet devices in general will continue unabated.

Trends pointing the way forward suggest a shift of attention and usage from web-based browsing to apps. The enterprise world wants more and better social media, retooled for the constraints and needs of the workplace. Shopping is becoming social, as users gradually expose their social data (consumption but also tastes and preferences), and as commercial services offer discounts, coupons, and other forms of sales and loyalty. Brands continue to embrace social media on a number of fronts (they are fools not to). And new practices, from social games to viewing video, listening to music, and mobile checkins all indicate that more is yet to come.

What all of these have in common is a high degree of susceptibility to the whim and fancy of market adoption. Small businesses and web startups, seeking to catch a wave, crash upon discovering they have chosen the wrong one. Even large companies, eminently skilled at engineering information solutions (Google and Wave; SecondLife; Microsoft and Live; among others) have also failed to get the social mix right. Even services such as twitter, Yelp, Friendfeed, and Foursquare have become or became something other than their founders likely intended.

In social, things often do not go as planned. So where is the blindspot?

The fact is that when social media are rolled out to an audience, their creators lose control over their products’ destiny and design. Users do with them what they want, and as actual practices emerge, reinforce behaviors, and become established, they come to define what a tool is for and how to use it more than anything set into the design. The more open a design, and the less it is structured, the more can be done with it. That would describe the directions in which audiences took twitter and Chatroulette. At the other end of the design spectrum, Wave, which took a good year in development and which featured some truly compelling innovations, suffered from overwrought complexity.

Users have no insight or interest into the thinking of the product’s creators. And creators have no leverage over audience behaviors. Social media are as much event and practice as they are design and engineering. And the models and requirements specs that stabilize the latter founder on the organic and dynamic instability of the former. But this is not to say that there’s no order in the chaos, pattern in the practices, or probability in the system. There is. It’s just that we’re not trained to think about it.

The uses of social media are determined as much by the habits of users anything else. This is where social interaction design can come into play. For the social interaction design (SxD) approach seeks to capture insights into social user behaviors and social practices and outcomes, as well as the design of architecture, features, UI, and the like. SxD takes the view that interactions occur among users, facilitated by technologies but not determined by them. For it is the actions of users, and the content they leave behind, that inform the activities of others. We can’t control these outcomes, but we can anticipate them. Social practices may not be predictable, but they are probable (Chatroulette’s instant appeal to exhibitionists being an obvious example).

The root of the problem lies in the natural inclination of creators to think in terms of product, and for users to think in terms of themselves. Creators tend to build according to features and functionalities that are technically and financially feasible, and modeled after similar approaches proven elsewhere. Users tend to use social tools according to how they suit them, who else uses them, and what they get out of the experience. The creator’s notions are anchored on thingness, on technical challenges and smart solutions, informed by the pressures of competition. The user’s notions involve how the tool connects them, becomes an extension of their daily habits, connects and helps them communicate and feel involved and relevant.

It’s up to the creator to think from the perspective of users. This has been a fundamental tenet of user-centric design since its inception. With social tools, the challenge is simply a bit different. It involves not only many kinds of users and uses, but also the social dynamics that emerge when people begin to interact with one another.

This suggests that designers of social media should know something about psychology, sociology, and communication. For those are the underlying practices in which our technologies become embedded. When tools become social it is because their technical features and functionalities accrue personal and social utility to people. Indeed social utility must be broadly defined, to include irrational behaviors as well as those we consider “utilitarian.” Tools that are technically dysfunctional (from the perspective of software design) may still work socially. Some audience workarounds are indeed quite catchy: consider hashtags.

Users are people, and they take up an interest in their own use of a tool, or what it does or offers. They take an interest in other users, also, be these friends and colleagues or be they a vague sense of “public.” Users find their way to content through people, or to people through content. As they use a tool they become personally invested in it — not only as a habit (thick or thin), but for how it represents them. Tools present and represent their users, whether to friends, peers, groups, communities, or the public. Indeed the reflectivity of social media is unique to our age. The mirror it holds up to us can be motivating and compelling in ways we are only dimly aware of.

Social media not only produce representations and presence from users’ contributions and use. They also permit communication. Some of this is but gestural, and works by means of objects, images, graphics, and icons. Some of it may be transactional, as in the case of tokens that can be given, owned, earned, purchased, traded, and so on. Even where icons for these gestures are not available, linguistic substitutes or even numbers, such as followers, may provide these elements. Elements (features) are not just things. They have meaning for users who are represented by them; they communicate interests and intentions; solicit responses and interaction; and signify social status, position, culture, and more. They are like grammatical units of social expression.

These elements are available to differentiate among users. When the social tool can differentiate among individuals, and represent those differences, the creator need only create categories (for elements) and design views (of activity) to then grow social practices and culture. Because the elements are not things — they communicate, express, solicit, and signify. By categorizing, ranking, relating, connecting, tools can group individuals. By capturing meta data and performing operations on that data, tools can create feedback loops that report activity back into any social system, thus reinforcing certain uses and practices over others.

The key to successful social tools is in the breadth and depth of social differentiation. Not only because all society and social relations differentiate and are differentiated. But because people are different, too. Their interests are different, personalities are different, styles are different. And their social skills and competencies are different. Some talk about themselves, some riff off what others say, and others get in between. Some are confident, headstrong, opinionated, and see themselves being seen. While others enjoy their company, want to connect them, and be seen with them. Some know what they like. Others seem to know what others like. And some like it if everyone likes it. Some use words, some their faces, others their activities. Some to tell, some to ask, some to connect.

These, and so many more kinds of differences, are amplified by social media. Amplified, because the media works by text, pictures, video — not bodies, faces, and being together. Amplifies, because ambiguities of meaning and intention introduced by this “means of production” tend to exaggerate our perceptions and interpretations. We project onto, read into, or guess what’s behind a particular communication or action. And there’s often no correcting our perceptions until others have communicated back, or reacted, in turn. Social tools are not things, they are times: episodic, habitual, ongoing, recurring, interrupted, interrupting.

Because social media depend on users to create communication, and to become engaged in interactions with others, they have social distinctions. This is an important point. For it is where social interaction design diverges from the conventional user—application interaction model. We have said that users are different. Some of our social tools encourage users to declare, vote, rank, rate, tag and share these differences (as interests and tastes). Others require that users state their differences. In many cases differences are excluded and the tools are biased to similarities (the Like). But here, too, there are different reasons to Like (and to share that one Likes). Identity and difference, in quality, quantity, and degree: these are the distinctions underlying all social actions, and on which all that is social is meaningfully organized.

All social tools have structure. Structure arrange relations, make connections, and express a bias in their arrangement and organization. Some things are more visible than others; some things more likely to happen than others. Structures contain what they connect, relate, and arrange; and they eliminate and exclude what they don’t. This more true online than elsewhere, for things “exist” only only if they are linked. Structures limit but also enable, for in the constraint of structure is the production of meaning (through meaningful relations) that enables action.

This is good, and is a necessary first step. But what brings social to life are dynamics. The celebrity needs fans, and fans need celebrities: their dynamic is mutually engaging and interesting. Its particular social dynamics are behind cultural practices that include electing presidents and celebrating the Oscars. (And yes, following Lady Gaga on twitter.) Similar dynamics are at work among other personality types. And form the basis of group behaviors, inter-group behaviors, community activity and trends, and so on. Dynamics form over time and become self-reinforcing.

Dynamics are not structural properties, but are system properties. All social tools are structure and system. Systems bring structure to life by producing probabilities: in system dynamics are those things like to recur, and those which do not. Again, there is activity included and highly likely; and activity excluded and highly improbable. Social systems are self-reinforcing and self-reproducing, on the basis of the aggregate activities of individuals who unwittingly cause the system’s ongoing reproduction.These are social phenomena, and are as necessary to the design of social media as technical know-how and business sense.

So, too, is an understanding of how communication and interaction make use of the medium’s various forms of expression. It has rich and thin forms, from video and webcam to text and emoticons. These forms change meanings in context. A follower number on twitter means more than just a number. Forms can be constructed out of formal elements, as when narratives are constructed from text, be those tweets, updates, comments, blog posts, or even riche media (youtube videos and video responses). These narratives may have some resemblance to narration, but are changed by virtue of being different kinds of action, activity, and practice.

We have focused on social tools, but in fact the online practices that emerge within and among them also reflect their relation to “real world” practices. So job sites, dating sites, and social sites each involve different kinds of networking. To which users can already bring a rough sense of how to go about networking in ways appropriate to the activity they’re engaged in — in short, context. For this reason, best practices cannot be lifted out of one context or tool, and simply dropped into another. Again, the differences are explained by use and practice, not by design, functionality, or some other aspect of technology. What technologies dis-embed from daily face to face routines, they re-embed into mediating social systems.

These are just some of the aspects of social interaction design that belong to the framework and methodology of designing social tools. The attributes of individual uses and corresponding social practices that bring social tools to life accompany and supplement the features and functionalities on which tools are designed. Where SxD offers a unique approach and perspective is in its ability to anticipate outcomes and provide guidance to a product roadmap. Social outcomes need not be left to audience adoption, but can indeed be anticipated and worked into social product development. The alternative is to plow ahead and to turn when the turn is necessary, or more likely, flip a u turn and hope it’s not too late. Blindspots in this industry are real, as is what’s hidden within them.

In the past months I have been systematically scoping out social media businesses, startups, services, agencies, and more. It’s what us “freelancers” do &emdash; especially now that the industry has matured. I have a filemaker database of more than 650 companies worth tracking. Along with notes, and various other sundry details.

If I were to rush my way through the database, read company descriptions provided by founders, reviews gleaned from techcrunch, killerstartups.com, etc, I would come away with the impression that these were almost all technology companies. That’s the common narrative arc, the identity by so many efforts in this space. And the professional culture that unites so many of us located in and around the Silicon Valley.

And yet so many of these companies are not technology companies. Not from the perspective of what they promise to better and improve. Not from the perspective of the business opportunity they seek to create or extend. Not, certainly, from the perspective of individual users, clusters of friends, groups, or communities.

If this were the age of the television, perusing local company profiles might read like a directory of television manufacturers, broadcasters, transmitters and relay providers, cable guys and dish installers. A Detroit of post-industrial industry, risen out of the early and pioneering PC and software years to mature through database, operating system, hardware, software and finally internet business eras. One epoch after another of technological innovation and business value creation.

And yet from the user’s perspective, very little of this matters. Sure, it may matter (a lot, even) to local pundits and industry experts &emdash; because this is our narrative. But the audience and marketplace of people expected to adopt and embrace this stuff couldn’t care less about funding rounds, acquisitions, and other milestones on the roadmap of entrepreneurial success.

Technology’s manufacture is transparent to the user. It neither gets in the way nor attracts attention to itself. We’ve always designed to that principle: the user experience should not have to attend to interactions with the technology itself.

Which allows me to return to my initial impressions, having sampled a large number of startup and social media profiles and reviews: where is the social? Or to back up, where is the appreciation for utility and value, as well as for interaction and social relations? Where are the descriptions and insights into what users want; how users behave; how user experiences are improved; how social outcomes are shaped and designed?

We are, after all, in the entertainment industry now. (And it is no accident that much of the Silicon Valley’s growth now takes place in New York and Los Angeles, where the content and advertising people are). Social media are an extension of the mass media &emdash; are just another medium. Granted, a medium in which content is contributed; distribution is free and occurs by means of communication; and interactivity creates worlds of possibilities.

Those of us here in Bay Area startups and social companies are creating content &emdash; content of experience. We’re creating entertainment &emdash; pleasure of experience. We’re creating routines and habits and reshaping relationships &emdash; surfacing and enabling what used to be tacit and invisible. We’re bundling information together with actionables to change consumer habits &emdash; granting power to consumers and forcing transparencies upon brands and their advertising.

All these things we do, and yet we self-identify as technology. This is not technology. These are not technical problems, solved by means of technical solutions. We make the infrastructure of experiences. We don’t make guns &emdash; we make the pain and strategy and the fear and the hope and the charge and the sniping. We don’t make engines, wheels, dashboards, and back seats &emdash; we make the driving, the getting there, the waiting in traffic and the weaving and rear-ending and making out at the town’s last drive in.

So where are the descriptions of value, of utility, experience, of individual, group, social, and public habits of use and practice? Do we not have the language for it? Is this just how we identify with what we are doing? Is it too difficult to see that we’re not making TV’s but creating shows? Do we lack confidence in what our “technologies” are for? What if we suspect that only a small number of us will ever take to this stuff &emdash; is that why we prefer to describe what our stuff does rather than what people do with our stuff?

Once in a while, I come across a great company description. I get a sense for what the company’s trying to do, with, through, and for its people (users). Most of the time I read about features, about faster, bigger, wider, broader, narrower, more targeted &emdash; in short I read about the increments on a measure who’s metric isn’t ever defined. Incremental improvements towards what end? Addressing what individual or social problem or need? Enhancing what essential experience of relation, communication, information sharing, or, what?

If I can’t see it, and I’ve been in this since the beginning, and I’m no fool, it’s not there. Perhaps it could be there &emdash; but hasn’t yet been identified and named. Most of the time it’s just not there. It is easier to name an incremental improvement to an existing technical practice than to capture the social benefits resulting from its use.

None of this need be a problem, if it weren’t for the fact that we all tend to the nerdy end of the spectrum, personality wise. We are heavy users of our own product (never a good idea &emdash; but in our case, less self-harming). We make what we want in order to compete against those very similar to us. We increment based on feedback that we obtain from people who use our products &emdash; aware, or not, that the feedback can only possibly tell us about what we built, and not what we could have built.

We eagerly engage in what is an ever-unfolding process of co-evolution undertaken by a great milieu of companies building up component parts to a shared set of experiences &emdash; of media, information, relationships, time, action, and so much more. And yet I have to say that it is entirely possible that behind all of these individual startup efforts is but a myth that this is good, smart, better, and more useful. And that these technical or design attributes naturally go hand in hand with social and cultural practices &emdash; relationships, friendships, being together, relating to and through and with, having an identity, communicating and sharing it….

It is in fact it is cultural and social change that leads technology. Technologies succeed or fail to the degree to which they capture implicit, latent, and ready individual and social needs. Where are these insights? Who has them? Why are they not self evident? I have over 600 companies right here in front of me, and a set of descriptions that reads, altogether, like technical documentation authored by a marketer.

But I just spent two months off social media and out in the world of “normals” in order to re-calibrate my perspectives and reset and re-test my notions. A necessary break, in hindsight, if only for the reason that we are an over-amplified bunch whose work is the very medium in which we conduct our work.

So I’m not seeing it &emdash; not for many of the companies in this database. I see potential, I see direction, and I see increments. But for the full measure of things, I use a bigger metric. And by its measure, we’re thinking too small.

Having studied more than a hundred top designers in various fields over the past couple of years (while doing research for a book), I found that there were a few shared behaviors that seemed to be almost second nature to many designers. And these ingrained habits were intrinsically linked to the designer's ability to bring original ideas into the world as successful innovations. All of which suggests that they merit a closer look.

Question. If you spend any time around designers, you quickly discover this about them: They ask, and raise, a lot of questions. Often this is the starting point in the design process, and it can have a profound influence on everything that follows. Many of the designers I studied, from Bruce Mau to Richard Saul Wurman to Paula Scher, talked about the importance of asking "stupid questions"--the ones that challenge the existing realities and assumptions in a given industry or sector. The persistent tendency of designers to do this is captured in the joke designers tell about themselves. How many designers does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Does it have to be a light bulb?

In a business setting, asking basic "why" questions can make the questioner seem naïve while putting others on the defensive (as in, "What do you mean 'Why are we doing it this way?' We've been doing it this way for 22 years!"). But by encouraging people to step back and reconsider old problems or entrenched practices, the designer can begin to re-frame the challenge at hand — which can then steer thinking in new directions. For business in today's volatile marketplace, the ability to question and rethink basic fundamentals — What business are we really in? What do today's consumers actually need or expect from us? — has never been more important.

Care. It's easy for companies to say they care about customer needs. But to really empathize, you have to be willing to do what many of the best designers do: step out of the corporate bubble and actually immerse yourself in the daily lives of people you're trying to serve. What impressed me about design researchers such as Jane Fulton Suri of IDEO was the dedication to really observing and paying close attention to people — because this is usually the best way to ferret out their deep, unarticulated needs. Focus groups and questionnaires don't cut it; designers know that you must care enough to actually be present in people's lives.

Connect. Designers, I discovered, have a knack for synthesizing--for taking existing elements or ideas and mashing them together in fresh new ways. This can be a valuable shortcut to innovation because it means you don't necessarily have to invent from scratch. By coming up with "smart recombinations" (to use a term coined by the designer John Thackara), Apple has produced some of its most successful hybrid products; and Nike smartly combining a running shoe with an iPod to produce its groundbreaking Nike Plus line (which enables users to program their runs). It isn't easy to come up with these great combos. Designers know that you must "think laterally" — searching far and wide for ideas and influences — and must also be willing to try connecting ideas that might not seem to go together. This is a way of thinking that can also be embraced by non-designers.

Commit. It's one thing to dream up original ideas. But designers quickly take those ideas beyond the realm of imagination by giving form to them. Whether it's a napkin sketch, a prototype carved from foam rubber, or a digital mock-up, the quick-and-rough models that designers constantly create are a critical component of innovation — because when you give form to an idea, you begin to make it real.

But it's also true that when you commit to an idea early — putting it out into the world while it's still young and imperfect — you increase the possibility of short-term failure. Designers tend to be much more comfortable with this risk than most of us. They know that innovation often involves an iterative process with setbacks along the way — and those small failures are actually useful because they show the designer what works and what needs fixing. The designer's ability to "fail forward" is a particularly valuable quality in times of dynamic change. Today, many companies find themselves operating in a test-and-learn business environment that requires rapid prototyping. Which is just one more reason to pay attention to the people who've been conducting their work this way all along.

Warren Berger is the author of GLIMMER: How design can transform, business, your life, and maybe even the world (Penguin Press). He edits the online magazine GlimmerSite.com.

Jeff Clark is part of this community. He, like many data visualization enthusiasts, fell into it after being inspired by pioneer Martin Wattenberg‘s landmark treemap that visualized the stock market.

Clark’s latest work shows much promise. He’s built four engines that visualize that giant pile of data known as Twitter. All four basically search words used in tweets, then look for relationships to other words or to other Tweeters. They function in almost real time.

“Twitter is an obvious data source for lots of text information,” says Clark. “It’s actually proven to be a great playground for testing out data visualization ideas.” Clark readily admits not all the visualizations are the product of his design genius. It’s his programming skills that allow him to build engines that drive the visualizations. “I spend a fair amount of time looking at what’s out there. I’ll take what someone did visually and use a different data source. Twitter Spectrum was based on things people search for on Google. Chris Harrison did interesting work that looks really great and I thought, I can do something like that that’s based on live data. So I brought it to Twitter.”

His tools are definitely early stages, but even now, it’s easy to imagine where they could be taken.

Take TwitterVenn. You enter three search terms and the app returns a venn diagram showing frequency of use of each term and frequency of overlap of the terms in a single tweet. As a bonus, it shows a small word map of the most common terms related to each search term; tweets per day for each term by itself and each combination of terms; and a recent tweet. I entered “apple, google, microsoft.” Here’s what a got:

Right away I see Apple tweets are dominating, not surprisingly. But notice the high frequency of unexpected words like “win” “free” and “capacitive” used with the term “apple.” That suggests marketing (spam?) of apple products via Twitter, i.e. “Win a free iPad…”.

I was shocked at the relative infrequency of “google” tweets. In fact there were on average more tweets that included both “microsoft” and “google” than ones that just mentioned “google.”

So then I went to Twitter Spectrum, a similar tool that compares two search terms and shows which words are most commonly associated with each term and which words are most commonly used in tweets with both terms. Here’s the “google, microsoft” Twitter Spectrum:

I love that the word “ugh” is dead center between Google and Microsoft. But the prominence of social media terms on the blue side versus search terms on the red side is fascinating. It looks like two armies marching at each other ready to fight different wars.

Clark has also created TwitArcs. This one, I feel, is still a work in progress and Clark says “visually I like it but it might be the least useful so far.” In this case, you type in a tweeter’s handle and it returns a stream of that person’s tweets with arcs that link common words between tweets (on the right) and common retweeters (on the left). Rolling your mouse over highlights the last tweet in the arc. Here’s a TwitArc of @timoreilly:

Finally, the Stream Graph. Enter a search term and Clark’s engine returns the frequency of the most common words found with your search term for the last 1,000 tweets. You see a literal flow of conversation. You can also highlight one term to see how its frequency changed over time and you’ll see the most recent tweets that include both your search term and that highlighted term.

Sometimes 1,000 tweets with your term may span weeks. For my search term, “Tiger Woods” which I entered yesterday afternoon right after news that he’d speak publicly broke, 1,000 tweets covered about 20 minutes. Here’s the “Tiger Woods” stream graph with “silence” highlighted:

It isn’t hard to imagine how this may be applicable to business. I can already see eager marketers watching the stream flow by as their commercial debuts during next year’s Super Bowl.

Clark, like many data visualizers, believes we’re on the front end of a revolution in information presentation. “There’s a lot of work done called scientific visualization or business intelligence graphics,” he says. “And it’s pragmatic, trying to solve practical problem. It’s all standard, a bar chart or pie. But those standard ways are not adequate when you’re trying to mine a richer data space. The world is full of complex data and we’re just starting to get the tools to make sense of it. We’re looking for new ways of presenting data.”