The problem with social media is that in it’s current, most popular form, it’s constructed at cross purposes to getting work done. If social networking is to support work groups engaged in productive work, it needs to have the following characteristics: Coherence Transparency, Telepresence, Authentication, and Attribution.

Facebook emphasizes growing your friend network. For most people, anyone you know is your friend, and their prestige is based on the total number of friends. This causes a lot of diffusion and noise, as the list of friends gets populated by many people you have little in common with, much less any shared goals for getting something done. Facebook also has groups and networks, but again, these things are based on growth, mainly because Facebooks’ business model depends on growing the user community, not on building groups of people who accomplish any particular goal or task. What’s needed is Coherence – formation of association around common goals or purposes.

In it’s current form, social networking is interesting because of its extensions to on-line life, making it much easier to find people and keep track of what their up to. The opportunity presented is for Transparency. This makes it fun, but a huge waste of time. Some sort of project system, where people could agree on a set of goals and end-results of an effort, and filter the noise outside of that, is were social media has to go.

It’s missing a couple of other ingredients: Authentication and Attribution. It’s hard to say who people really are on Facebook, and what their real accomplishments are. Similarly, Linked-In offers networking in a business-oriented way, and has some basic “reputation” features via its peer recommendation system, but it’s pretty hard to verify what people say they’ve accomplished.

Authentication is more than just keeping the bad guys out – it really needs to be there so that you can be sure people are who they appear to be. In real life, we have finely evolved skills for recognizing faces and voices – there needs to be an online equivalent.

Similarly, attribution must be linked to authentication so that we all know who has done what. Reputation systems are a bit different, telling you what others think about an indivitual – attribution is more about allowing you to make your own judgements. An attribution system would like like a cross-discipline version of IMDB, where you could find out what someone has worked on, and in what capacity.

Beyond attribution and authentication there are merit systems which provide a ranking or shorthand of how accomplishments compare to the group. Think of boy scout merit badges – a summarisation of various relevant accomplishments.

After struggling with lack of structure in my own work, and reading Time Management for Anarchists, it seems to me that project-based social media could serve the purpose of providing the structure that we used to rely on the corporate office for.

With authentication and attribution providing the foundation for reputation and merit systems, we could understand how we might work and contribute across multiple projects and programs, and causes.