> Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender.
exactly.
exactly.
"Computer nerds" have plenty of friends. I know factory workers that have very high depression levels due to not having enough social contact or friendship in their lives. Sure, when I was 9 I was beat the fuck up over and over but when you are friendly, smart and successful people like you. They want to be your friend. Let's play devils advocate for a second. Take the most popular person in high school and get him to design social software. It would suck. Bad.
Let's assume they had the technical skills to do it, why do you think it would suck?
So basically a nerd with social skills?
The most popular person in high school was almost certainly not a nerd. Nerds take a while to maxing out their social skills, but once they do I find they are almost as good at it as sales guys or MBA gals.
From my experience the most popular kid almost never had the time to dedicate to crafting the technical skills necessary to build a mega-successful online business, Social or otherwise. Nerds think about things far more than the typical prep or jock.
If you have the chops to do it, you're almost by definition, a technology nerd of some kind. (Yes, the 'popular' and 'nerd' sets are not mutually exclusive so I guess you have a point but you know what I'm getting at, right?)
Whereas the technical skill required to build a basic electronic social network is "can you dial a phone?" Been that way for sixty years and more. For a dramatic musical rendition of the social networks designed by your parents (oh, wait, I mean your grandparents, maybe even your great-grandparents, how time flies) watch the first ten minutes of Bye Bye Birdie. Ooh, look, a video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKhR8QtQ4do
(I was never a fan of Bye Bye Birdie, by the way, but you can't forget that number once you hear the darn thing.)
Now, these days every eight-year-old has mastered a far greater technical challenge: Mobile text messaging. That's a better social technology because you don't have to talk, or say "hello" or "goodbye", or avoid communicating in seventeen directions at once.
There are things Twitter and Facebook can do that can't be done with chains or trees built on one-to-one texting, but I'm not sure any of them are more social. (Is anything more social than the game of phoning people and asking them to relay messages?) Really, the point of these higher-tech "social networks" is that they fill a gap by letting you be barely social and yet still be present in a bunch of people's lives. I can follow your tweets without you even knowing. I can add Facebook "friends" and then basically ignore them most of the time. I can be "introduced" to a friend-of-a-friend on Facebook without any of the real stress of even talking to them, let alone meeting them in person.
You're giving examples of people using social networks. I (and the person I'm responding to) am talking about people building the infrastructure to host social networks. Using your examples, the inventor of the phone and sms would be more appropriate.
I'm pretty sure it would still suck because they wouldn't know to translate their intuitive understanding of how to leverage social dynamics to gain popularity with how to facilitate them in software. But it's hard to be sure, and would depend on the latent design skill hidden in your "popular person".
I think most people don't know how to approach software design, even from a UI perspective. It's hard even for professionals. You would have to get lucky with a person who happens to get it intuitively.
What you've just described is Facebook, except that the "most popular person in high school" got cut out of the loop by the nerd smart enough to realize that the idea was good enough to be worth stealing.
And you're right. It does suck, in a million ways, reflecting our society at large rather well, overall. But it's also the most successful social network to date.
But in my opinion, at least, the main idea that the yacht club twins brought to the mix was actually the primary reason that it grew so easily: Facebook was, initially, at least, a social network for students at elite schools, let the rest of the University-of-CrappyPartySchool rabble diddle themselves on Myspace. Without that, I don't know that it ever would have taken off the way it did...
It's the same thing that drives (some) nerds towards libertarianism, a fascination with formal models and rules over the messy complexity of reality, especially social reality.
Besides, I suspect there are plenty of nerds who understand social relationships in theory very well (there's plenty of literature out there for those willing to read). Not to mention that, apparently, not all tech people are completely socially awkward.
Also, there's an unstated assumption that in order to write software that is useful socially, one has to be very social. This sounds like the arguments people used to have in the mid-90s about whether a program could ever replace a librarian. Well, it didn't -- but it didn't need to.
I think it's clear that what we call social networks don't model our friendships well. That doesn't mean they aren't useful in some other way. Perhaps the great shift will come when we stop trying to make social networks be our Advanced Friendship Substitute, and instead make them do something more useful.
Another example: programmers of Deep Blue didn't have to be good at playing chess. They just had to understand the rules and the concept of search trees.
It might be selection bias on my part, but as far as I've seen if someone is able to comprehend a concept like social graph, he's on his way to becoming a nerd. Even being able to handle social relationships on abstract level[1] require insights of mathematical concepts, on the level that is not taught to majority of human population.
That's why I dislike all those 'nerds suck at XXX', whether it's about maths, physics or computer nerds. All of those groups are good at maths, which is basically applied thinking, and thus is applicable not only to computers, but to real life as well. So, given a problem and no domain expert around, I'd definitely trust nerd or an engineer more than anyone else.
[1] - as in, go meta and talk about things like social graphs, how they evolve, transform, while having a clear model in ones head.