"Strong Ties" and the Design of Social Communication Apps

In my earlier posts, I've outlined an on-going project focused on improving our conversations and relationships with the people most important to us - the people we consider our "strong ties".    

I believe there are plenty of applications nurturing our connections with our "weak ties".  Increasingly, we will see new user value found in applications and devices that improve our connections with our "strong ties".   

As a result of the project, I'm continually looking for market validation of the strong ties concept.  Thanks to this FastCompany article by Addy Dugdale - I came across the ON Service developed by Orange Vallee (a subsidiary of the Orange Group).  

I found the TED Global 2010 presentation by Giles Corbett extremely helpful and reinforced my product hypothesis that "strong ties" will continue to emerge as a design focus for new social communication applications and devices.

We're seeing similar conceptual maps of "strong ties" emerge from the social research completed by Orange Vallee and Google's Paul Adams'  work on real life networks.

Here's how Orange maps out the strong ties concept:

and here's how Paul Adams at Google maps out his view of the relationship of our "strong ties" to our friends and "weak ties":

(btw - watch for Paul's new book "Social Circles" )

So, the good news - for users and for the "strong ties" project - is that we're seeing players like Google and Orange market test the "strong ties" concept as a design principle for new social communication applications and devices.

Comments

[Valdis Krebs]

Bruce,

We have always zeroed in on strong ties to see emergent structures in organizations. Started doing this in SNA projects in the early 1990s.

See this recent client -- small manufacturing firm -- with strong ties between locations/plants/main office. We have hundreds[thousands?] of examples like this.

http://twitpic.com/29vevu

Valdis