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Collaborative Filters and Japanese Society

One of the question of the emerging long tail economy:

Who knows the coolest stuff?

Answer 1: My friends (colleagues, co-workers, fellow experts).

Answer 2: A scattered group of people, connected only by their coincidental common taste in one particular field.

In a way, both answers are true, but the second one is central to social software. It should not be about connecting people who know each other already and want to share their interests, it should be about finding people who have my interests in a special field.

It is a general error to think that my good friends (colleagues, co-workers, fellow experts) are the best experts for my taste of music, books, information. When you use services like last.fm or furl or del.icio.us or rojo or flickr you all of a sudden realize that there are buddies out there who know your taste better than anyone else just by coincidence. This is the central pleasure connected with social software: To realize that for every interest there is group of different people out there who knows you better that yourself - without knowing anything else about your life.

This reminds me of some Japanese friendships that seem restricted to special applications: the friend to go to the movies with, the friend to have sex with, the friend to go to the sports club with. In many cases these friends only know the slice of your life that is especially reserved for them.

Very good blog entry over at the long tail.

04.02.2005, 12:13

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