Redefining social networks
Social networks today have a few major flaws. They tend to be clustered, segmented, and are really representations of only our strongest ties. While this is good to keep in touch with our close friends, we do not need a social network to do this. As we grow our networks on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even LinkedIn, we follow the same people and generally see the same things. Paul, founder of Ripple, has the belief that “the internet is about destroying cultural, economic, and political brakes that we naturally have.” In network terms, we are only really getting content on the internet from people with which we already exhibit strong triadic closure. We have few local bridges connecting us to other clusters of people with different ideas and we have trouble getting past the inherent barriers of social networks today.
A second flaw with the social internet of today is the way stories travel. Who you are on the internet matters more than what you are saying. For example one, of Donald Trump’s tweets will get exponentially more exposure than one of my tweets, no matter the content. Content we create rarely spreads outside of our inner network, where we are already strongly connected to each other, and we rarely see content outside of our close network. Overall we have little opportunity to see other content and expand our thoughts.
An interesting idea to solve this problem is a new social network app called Ripple. As the name suggests, the app gives users a chance to have their content and ideas spread like waves ‘rippling’ out from a source. When using the app, you make a post and it can be seen by people who are geographically near you. Likewise, you can see posts from people who close by. If a user likes the post they see, they can share the post and it is then able to be seen by others in their further reaching geographic radius, without any bias on who sees post. This feature allows posts to ‘ripple’ and spread to a wide variety of people. An interesting feature is the ability to watch your post spread across the country, or even the world, on the built in map feature of the app. With the ability to see a post spread, users can see the network they are joining by sharing content on Ripple. Moreover, a new kind way to define ties between people arises from Ripple. Users no longer have a strong tie based on the number of friends they have in common, instead they can be strongly connected by the spread of their content across the world. Ripple is facilitating the growth of many connections among people on the internet that may have never occurred before. It will be exciting to see how Ripple can affect existing social networks as it continues to grow.
Source:
https://medium.com/@RippleMeThis/redefining-social-networks-92e0a73dfd1c
