Heterogenous Social Networks
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
Could I ask you a question. What makes you smart? Is it your personal skills and what you can do all by yourself, or is it the accumulated social network of friends you’ve made who supplement your own abilities? Expertise on sociology, various programming languages, or graphic design skills.This circle of friends are what Bill Buxton calls a heterogenous social network.
The value of developing strong heterogenous social networks is obviously that your own skills and intelligence are vastly enhanced by having friends and associates in other fields of expertise. They make us look smarter than what we really are. For example, when I’m stuck on a server-side issue I can go and ask someone I know as opposed to reading three large reference books and studying a whole branch of computer science. If I want to know if something is possible then I tap into the same resource network.
While the anarchy of unstructured social networks makes for a lot of noise it does not necessarily make for a proportional amount of value information. Everything being equal generally equals everything being said simultaneously.
The value of homogenous social networks (where we all have very similar skills and interests) also has it’s place in our lives. But it doesn’t offer that wider net of knowledge value that heterogenous social networks provide. Who you know can very much affect what you know and what you can achieve.
When you hire someone with a strong heterogenous social network you also bring on board a wide resource beyond the individual. It’s something to keep in mind.
