Next month I'm going to hold a 45 minutes lecture on social networks for a Dutch university. The theme of the day is "how do social networks allow for identity creation". My take on it is going to be from a commercial / design point of view. In short this is my idea: The search for income puts a strong force upon design, who in return keep on coming up with new solutions, these solutions lead to new ways we have to interact with each other and technology. I am aware that this is only one of the many stories that can be told about the development of social media, but it is the one I know most about.

First. Making money on the internet.
Through the short history of the Internet many ways to make money have been tried out. I highlight three that all still play a role in the design of social networks.

• Banner advertisement (can be further divided in payment for clicks, views and sales)
• Information harvesting (these bloody annoying long sign up forms you have to wrestle through, or the your profile is 40% done)
• Engagement enhancement (creating brand awareness, and helps to find community leaders)

Second: translated in to design challenges
Social network builders have to live up to an amount of challenges; keeping up with the current tide, building for scale, allowing to manage a large amount of data, and in the end, make a profit. I'll mainly focus on the  things design can do to enable the ways of making money as stated above

• More content in total and less content per page allows for as many banners as possible
• Increase the amount of places where users can leave information behind, more information is better targeted banners
• More engagement and activity, brings up the amount of page views, possibly the amount of clicks and teaches the system more about it's users.

Third: How a different design forces /allows for a different identity presentation

• Presentation model: based on the assumption that more pages will allow for more advertisements space, and that showing more banners would be the solution, websites catered for having as many pages as possible.
• Interaction model: By putting more focus on creating activity, the role of social network changes too. Where in the myspace era designing a fancy style for your profile was enough, at Facebook your profile is of little matter, what counts is what you do, to exist you have to constantly feed the network, and what you feed it defines how you the world sees you.

New style editor you say! I'll be checking it out

Most times not much fashion talk here, but this collection I find quite renewing, and it looks more like graphic design than clothing, so 2x awesome indeed

Lately I've spent some time in trying to map the 'true essence' of social networks, as always with true essence they refuse to be mapped. Here is my attempt though

There are (should be) three mayor components in any social network

• Users - this might be members, visitors, creators, editors, (who knows even spambots), someone needs to be willing to do something though.
• Actions - having user is not enough, a social network should also enable these users to do things, to alter the status quo, to change reality. 
• Objects - last there need to be things that user can preform actions on -to be visible in a digital world you will need to create, alter, reflect on media objects

In other words we could state the goal of a social network is to 'enable people to perform actions that will change what was there previously'

If you would be willing to follow my thoughts this would mean something for many of the current social networks out there, because it is NOT (only) about publishing (blogging, writing, uploading photos, uploading films) it's fine if you want to focus on that, but don't call yourself a social network. It is also NOT (only) about activity, displaying activity (twitter, friendfeed, facebook wall anyone. It is (here it comes) about the following three things:

Social networks should enable users to prepare, act, reflect:

Enable a user to see what is going on:

• Enable a user to see what is going on (activity feed) (real time)
• Enable a user to create, reply, act, do, take the action (publishing)
• Enable a user to know what effect this action had

To enable this, social networks should rebrand themselves as social collaboration tools and focus on

• Providing quick insights on what is going on
• Making actions disturbingly easy
• Provide an easy way to know what happened after you acted

You now might want to read more at Boxes and Arrows and read about Google Wave

And more important pleaes leave me your thoughts on what the true essence of a social network really is

A decent looking product by Microsoft, reminds me of the good ol' 80s volvo station wagons :)

other good looking news from the microsoft front: bing.com