Social networks and mobile devices

Mobile devices are starting to be used in conjunction with or as part of social networks. For this reason I'm beginning to do some research into how mobile social networks work and what they consist of to inform design.

J Donath and d boyd have written a longish and interesting piece about what social networking sites currently are and how they compare to real social networks.

Blog post
The article: Public displays of connection in pdf

The paper is more theoretical than ethnographic, but provides some thought-provoking discussion on what effect social networking sites are having. A limitation of these high-level observations of behavior, as well as the detailed observations of ethnography, are that they focus on the present. I've been thinking about how different research methods focus on different temporalities of usage and how people co-create new technologies. The problem with observing current behavior is that it is partially a response to existing technology. A difference between existing social networking site structure and physically-mediated (some would say "natural") social networks doesn't mean the service will fail. It is definitely worth examining current behavior in detail, but people will adapt their behavior to the new system and redirect it for their own purposes. These observation methods are inherently conservative because they always use "what we do now" as a basis to inform the design of future activity. This doesn't necessarily promote visionary thinking. I don't have an answer for this, although there are research methods which allow more of a glimpse into the future (see above links).

via Smart Mobs