The best teachers learn most from their students, and Clay Shirky is one of them: It all started when he'd told his students the little we know about social network software and then challenged a roomful of people breastfed on Internet 'to support some form of group interaction'.

And what they did was to open the teacher's eyes to the bare truth of modern software -- boiled down to a soundbyte, Shirky calls it 'Situated Software', programming in-the-small, inside the membrane, and dragging us old-guard monster-site architects into a bold new world where there are no programming jobs because everyone is a programmer (or they know one), a world-view where utility takes precidence over 'correctness' ...

And then Clay introduces his class to some seasoned old-school colleagues who arrive to 'critique' the young minds ... and hilarity ensues.

Changing Ground

Once again, while we've been obsessing with the figure of the international-scope billions-served Web School service targetting every everyone, the ground beneath our services has been changing, not only in the urban cores, but everywhere, even in remote places like Sauble Beach ...Written on the Subway Walls

While easy to overlook, I'd believe these observations would be second nature to Shirky's students. For those of us seeking to build the social networking tools, the radical paradigm shift is recognizing what I had noted before on the empirical reality of the actual users of the ASN.

I think Clay puts his finger on a big reason why:

• if you are under 35 or make more than $35,000, you are probably online.
• if you are both, almost everyone you know is probably online

That's maybe an exaggeration for any neighbourhood outside a prosperous minority middle-class Euro-American urbanity, but I will grant that this is increasingly true, and may even have passed the mid-point. For example, while almost entirely still dialup subscribers, in my own local Wiarton Lions club well over three quarters of the members are now receiving our mailing list.

Debunking The Myth of Scale

There is no longer any a priori need to bridge distances with this internet thing. We now can expect a critical-mass involvement in local-community applications, and with that, we no longer such a need to seek out (and then need to trust) strangers from away. What's more, as Shirky's students show, it's easier to get local neighbour involvement, as I said about the ASNs, it's easier to take your existing social network online than to grow a brand new one entirely in cyberspace ... and all the existing successful ASNs are my proof.

Thus there is no requirement to be global in scope, and we already know that it's better, more robust, cheaper and safer to be de-centralized; instead of one massive ASN to rule them all, the practical solution need not be monolithic. It can be a patchwork of local near-fits, scattered plurabilities, unhemmed as they are uneven.

Besides, not to be xenophobic, but just bare pragmatics that local world software is a lot cheaper to build than the global sort, and thus these in-the-small circle-of-friends apps are more likely to be built. It's like I said of the embedded computer, there's a useful analogy in knowing that, pound for pound, there are more insects on this planet than animals.

Situated Software Frameworks

But reading Clay's paper, it struck me that there is, just sitting there under-utilized, an ideal framework toolkit for constructing these next-generation situated applications, and even for allowing a small community of users the freedome to construct their own, page by page, leveraging the framework but for applications undreamed of by the website owners.

I posted my thoughts to the Drupal Developers ...

I'd thought like Clay, always looking to create the Next Big Thing, and, even when I had all the marketing power of Bell Canada behind me, never really succeeding -- we seek to hold the whole sky, but we never can.

but we can build a rides-board, apartment hunter's hot-tip service, or a shopping pool, or a writer's peer review club ...