/Culture/ By invitation only
04/07/2006 | Filed under Discover > Culture
If you could rid the web of spammers, scammers, annoying teens, pointless bloggers and general net riff-raff, wouldn’t it be a great place? From file sharers to fashionistas, a growing number of web users are doing just that. Gary Marshall investigates the invite-only internet
The internet has cracked international communication wide open. This global coversation means that cats can talk to kings but what if the king is reluctant to talk to the cat? In the real world, most people choose their friends carefully: when you’re having a group of friends round for dinner, you don’t invite the odd passing tramp as well; when you’re having an important meeting at work, you wouldn’t include people from rival companies or strangers you met at the bus stop. It’s the same online: while there are lots of people with important, useful or interesting things to say or share, there are also plenty of spammers, scammers and people who don’t just have chips on their shoulders, but entire potatoes. By limiting interaction to people you can trust, you can make sure your online time is much more productive and hassle free; a place where you meet who you want to meet.
There are other reasons for excluding strangers: if you’re a celebrity, you don’t want your contact information distributed to the entire internet. If you’re swapping documents, files or state secrets, you might not want them to fall into the wrong hands – or for people to know you’ve got them in the first place. For more and more net users, the solution is simple: use networks that strangers can’t see, search or subvert.
What do Naomi Campbell, Lady Victoria Hervey, various minor royals and hundreds of paparazzi favourites have in common? No, not vacuity. They’re all members of aSmallWorld (www.asmallworld.net), along with around 130,000 others. Dubbed ‘Friendster for the jet set’ or more unkindly, ‘snobster’, aSmallWorld is an online community whose unique selling point is that we, mere plebs can’t join it. That means celebs, it-girls and the ridiculously rich can chat in confidence, discussing such important issues as the best swanky restaurants to be seen in, which beach is best to flash a bit of flesh on, or how to fly your pet poodle to St Tropez.
You can’t sign up for aSmallWorld, the only way to get in is to be invited by an existing member, and that member needs to have a network of 50 other members before they can invite anyone new. Even then, getting an invite is no guarantee of membership: the site is obsessed with the ‘quality’ of members, and recently zapped more than 300 accounts because they weren’t the right sort of people. As we went to press, the site had put a temporary block on all new memberships.
Louise Wachtmeister is aSmallWorld’s marketing director. Ignoring our requests for an invite, she explaines: “The common denominator for aSmallWorld members is that they are well-connected in real life, welleducated, well-travelled, are trend setters and are connected by only three degrees of separation.” So what do members actually do? According to Louise, they “exchange trusted information among friends and friends of friends, [and] reconnect with old and sometimes lost friends from different corners of the world.”
Isn’t such a large membership at odds with aSmallWorld’s sales pitch of exclusivity? Louise doesn’t think so: “130,000 members is not much for a global exclusive club, considering the size of the world population,” she says. “We want to grow, but slowly and within those three degrees [of separation] in order to maintain a high quality.” In other words, if you haven’t already been invited, don’t sit in front of your inbox waiting for the golden email to appear.
You might not be able to join aSmallWorld, but introduction-based networks are available for us mere mortals, too. Sites such as Soflow (www.soflow.com) and LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) are designed to help you build business networks – and you don’t need to be a minor royal or own a yacht to join them. Like aSmallWorld, these networks operate on the principle of ‘degrees of separation’: when you’re a member, you have a network of friends and colleagues, and you can contact their friends and colleagues if your contacts are willing to introduce you. It’s very effective: our LinkedIn network of 17 people means that if you take our network’s friends and colleagues into account, we’re in touch with 2,800 people. If those people in turn introduce us to their networks, the number of potential contacts leaps to 199,500; one more level, and our contacts book reaches nearly five million.
Why is this important? If you’re looking for work, for new contracts or for potential investors, you’ll get much better results if you’re introduced by a mutual friend than if you contact them as a complete stranger. As the cliché goes: it’s not what you know, but who you know that matters.
It’s good to talk
The most common use of invite-only networks is for like-minded souls to discuss shared interests. Those interests could be digital media, web development, music, or dressing up as a badger. Sites such as Yahoo! Groups (groups.yahoo.com) make it easy to build a simple, invite-only email list, or you can add web-based features such as chat rooms, shared photo libraries or file archives. Crucially, Yahoo! doesn’t just enable you to make your groups invite-only, it also enables you to prevent non-members from viewing messages, files or the list of members.
Some of the most successful invite-only networks are simple email lists, which can be set up in a matter of minutes. Most web hosts provide everything you need, or you can download ready-made scripts for mailing list management from sites such as HotScripts (www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/Mailing_List_Managers). One such network is ePubPros (epubpros.chrisknight.com), whose 700+ members discuss electronic publishing from email newsletters to web development. As founder Chris Knight explains: “One of the primary benefits of a private discussion list is that, typically, the users are at a more intermediate to advanced level rather than newbies.” He stresses that there’s nothing wrong with being a newbie, but in the case of ePubPros the discussions need a basic level of technical knowledge so they don’t get bogged down with having to explain the basics.
“Another benefit is knowing that there will be no public, searchable archive of posts,” Knight adds. “Every private email discussion list should really be treated as a public forum, but there is some peace of mind knowing that your private thoughts won’t be posted on a public web site to be potentially used against you some years in the future.”
Like many such lists, if someone’s invited to join by a member then they’re unlikely to be refused. However, there are some basic rules that, if broken, mean instant banishment. “I have revoked membership for violating some of our simple rules, such as no autoresponders or challenge-response systems, and a few for blatant self-promotion or excessive signature lines,” Knight explains. “Really, 27 signature lines is too much.”
Industry-based networks tend to be fairly easy to manage, when people have their business heads on they’re less likely to misbehave, spam or call one another names. However, every group is different – while ePubPros requires little moderation, other lists may require more of a hands-on approach – particularly in their early days, when the tone of the network is still being set. Spam and blatant self-promotion need to be zapped, and anything that makes the network a pain rather than a pleasure – such as autoresponders that send an out-of-office reply to every single message, or users who can’t say anything without being abusive – require the quick use of the unsubscribe button.
Safe sharing
The networks we’ve covered so far have been about sharing information, but private networks are also being used to share files – and not necessarily illegal ones. Sites such as Grouper (www.grouper.com) enable you to create small, invite-only networks for sharing music, video and other files, and unlike peer-to-peer networks you don’t need to worry about the copyright cops. When you share music or video clips on Grouper they’re streamed rather than downloaded, which means you’re playing the files to other people rather than giving them copies, and the number of people in your network is strictly limited to a maximum of 50 members.
Edith Mason runs the Music Mania group (www.grouper.com/GroupProfiles/?id=257909). “I use Grouper to store my music,” she explains. “I use it mainly for storing my stuff and chatting.” Is Grouper a safer alternative to Kazaa? “I’ve never heard of Kazaa,” she says.
Mason isn’t alone: Grouper is part of a new generation of peer-to-peer sharing services that are attracting a whole new audience. As JD Lasica, author of Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation (www.darknet.com), notes: “I think young people will be the ones who drive legitimate uses of peer-to-peer technology forward.” Increasingly, people aren’t just sharing things they’ve found; they’re sharing things they’ve created themselves. Services such as Grouper and imeem (www.imeem.com) are designed to help them do this and are best described as instant messaging with shiny knobs on. In the case of imeem, those knobs are blogging, photo sharing, video/music sharing and group chat. It’s a terrific service, but it’s one of many such platforms: Yahoo!’s purchase of photo sharing site Flickr and Microsoft’s purchase of sharing service FolderShare, show that the giants are taking sharing very seriously.
Lasica believes that much of that sharing will occur on darknets – relatively small networks of people who trust one another rather than the giant, globe-straddling peer-to-peer systems we’re more familiar with. “This is a sea change in how media is delivered,” he says. “We’re now in the first phase of it, with songs and films as the low-hanging fruit. But once the tree blossoms with millions of works created by users, there will be much more of ‘our’ content added to the mix. We’re entering the sharing age; an era of social media in which media gains value the more it’s shared.”
As Lasica points out, you can see the phenomenon everywhere – even on Bittorrent. “At first, torrents were created only for big entertainment content: movies, television shows, games,” he says. “Today we’re seeing more and more legitimate sharing on Bittorrent [and] Hollywood is now working with Bittorrent’s founders to create a legal marketplace for movies. The same pattern will follow with darknets, as more creators and artists discover they can easily share and collaborate on video and musical works. Once an easy-to-use remix capability is added to the mix, we’ll see thousands of works created not by individuals but by teams and groups. When that happens, the potential of darknets will become evident.”
The invite-only internet won’t replace today’s open forums and mailing lists but supplement them – and it’s an attractive option for anyone who wants to share their files or creative efforts without letting the whole world listen. It’s good to share, but it’s even better to share selectively.
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Comments
hammoud leila / 04/12/2006 / 12:22
what goes around comes around
Mathew Browne / 15/06/2007 / 10:46 / http://www.mbwebdesign.co.uk
Bermondsey Travelodge has to be the most spectacular nom de plume I've ever heard of.
SJParvati / 28/06/2007 / 07:12
Thank God, some thing make sense out here. However, it did seemed wrong when i started to read, hmm ..thats probably why i love the idea so much.
MEGGGGgSSSSS / 04/02/2009 / 19:46
can you just tell me if social networking is effective and how advertisers use it? I really seriously do not feel like reading all this stuff. k. thanks :)
