The Architecture of online social systems – Populating the world

My last post related to the Architecture of Online Social Systems (OSS), was about Identity.

OK then! So we have taken the first step in the creation of an OSS. But one person does not make a world, so presumably there are others who will create an identity for themselves as well, and things will start to get interesting when there is at least a third person. Just like the three-body problem in Physics, now we might perhaps start to see some of the messiness that makes social worlds interesting.  

The point of today's post though is somewhat different. What would a world be without objects. In the real world we know what objects mean, and we know how to name them. "Man gave names to all the animals...." said Bob Dylan. Somewhat like that, we name things, and these names have meanings, which tell us something more about them. In the world of OSS though, objects take on a very specific meaning. Not only might they be representations of objects from the real world, but there are now a whole lot of Information and Knowledge objects, things and people who are associated with information or knowledge, and that includes other people. Now, we have dealt with the issue of identifying people.  

Just as in the case of people, therefore, objects, pieces of content, documents, blogs, comments on blogs, a web-site perhaps will need a way to be identified. For us to transact with these objects, we will need to know more about them, we will need a description of what they are, one provided by the creator, and others that get appended over time by people who use these objects. Imagine stones gathering moss over time, in the rivers of information and knowledge, in a nice way.  

Objects not only need an identity, but now that we have brought them in this world, we now need to keep track of them throughout their life cycle. We need to therefore associate with them, their time of creation, who their creator is, and track them till they are no longer active participants in the online world.  

All this information about the object, of course is important for the object to be available to others in this OSS world. There is one more aspect which we need to consider. We need to be able to locate the object somehow, be able to find it and know what class of objects it belongs to, if at all. In the OSS world, links and associations matter a lot. Objects are associated with their creators, and then they are linked to other objects and people in the OSS through various kinds of relationships. Creating a networked world of objects, which are linked in multiple different ways, is what makes the OSS worlds so promising.

 
For example, a blog object, has a creator, it has readers, it has people who comment on it, it is related to other similar blogs, people give it tags that make sense to them and so on. All these add-ons of descriptions and associations make the objects more valuable and interesting over time. Documents, photographs, web-sites, people, music, on-line discussions, blog posts, comments, communities - these are the objects that populate the OSS world. Naming them, describing them, linking them to each other, this is the second major architectural aspect of Online Social Systems.