Social Transactions

Andre is right. To create a truly effective social network, you must consider what people do, not just who they know. You must extrapolate the social map based on social transactions—the activity surrounding personal interactions. This data must also be captured in candid ways as part of the natural process of working.

"To be a truly powerful technology, as well as both more relevant to the larger population as well as inherently more accurate, social networking systems should focus on an automated means of data-collection (the data itself has no ulterior motive or ego). One way to do this might be to insert (with the users permission), agents or listeners 'in-stream' to our existing communications systems (such as Spoke) and then focus the attention on the algorithms which accurately reconstruct a social map of our connections as well as the relative strength & context of the connection." -- Andre Durand

Two people that know each other, but rarely interact in meaningful ways, does not represent useful information. You must consider the social transactions as the most prominent aspect of a social network. And you must do it in the usual and customary course of the work process. When I invite you to look at my whitepaper, that's a social transaction. When you comment about my whitepaper, that act is additional social data. When Bob declines to look at something, that's also valuable social network data. Tracking events (or meta-data) relevant to social transitions is where social networking must go, and that's what the MyST platform does.