Thinking about: Social Scaling

Normal scaling discussions center on the ability of a solution to effectively satisfy increasing demands driven by growth in users, data or some other key metric. Social Scaling relates to the ability of social software to maintain effectiveness with increasing participation. Participation includes the number of active users as well as the utilization of the solution by those users.

In many ways the need to confront these challenges is desirable. At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this past June many of the discussions concerned adoption. Software vendors are making user adoption more organic and best practices are emerging to encourage adoption. As more users participate and increase their usage, organizations are confronted with a new challenge. Simply stated, when the volume of user created content speeds up to the point that it interferes with the desired collaborative benefits of the solution the issue of "social scaling" is a problem. Its a buzz kill for your project to be so successful it gets in its own way.

This is not a new issue but in many ways ignorance has been bliss. Email has been the primary tool for wide-scale user publishing and sharing. Most of these interactions quietly become buried and die in many separate inboxes often fragmented by reply-to and forward-to activity. With social software the interaction design and desired result is obviously different. Interactions are centralized around topics or context and they are persisted. The pace of content contribution and interaction becomes very high. This velocity and growth of information ultimately becomes a barrier to finding, utilizing and sharing information.

In a conversation with a friend recently about this topic he brought up the similarities to the discussions occurring about the challenge and opportunity of "Big Data". Social scaling is in-fact a variant of the same set of trends. In fact, the meta data that we can collect from user attention and other behavior will be part of the solution. But even before we consider advanced issues we need to make sure that users can manage the streams of information these systems generate in a simple and intuitive way.

This concerns me because it is critical to achieving adoption success and keeping users engaged in large scale implementations of social software tools. In another recent conversation with a group of MBA students I am working with they described an almost defeatist attitude of some they were interviewing regarding the status of information systems in a particular market segment. That is an attitude that can create increased friction to adoption and change management.

Internally at Attensa we defined the term social scaling to make sure that we consider it prominently in our design and roadmap for the StreamServer. While the StreamServer enables capabilities that address the challenge of social scaling it is worth considering in the context of an organizations overall information architecture. We are at the beginning stages of understanding the profound consequences of pervasive networked information. As always.... more later.