Last week after Web 2.0 I spent a sunny Autumn morning wandering around in Brooklyn, including a stop at a favorite thrift store in Williamsburg. Pouring through their collections of old photos and postcards, a friend found something rather strange.

Amidst the christmas cards and “wish you were here” messages from Hawaii or Bali to friends or family were these funny post cards with call signs on the front and brief, almost functional messages on the back:

It turns out what we had stumbled on was a collection of QSLs, postcards sent back in the day from one shortwave radio operator to another to confirm that they had heard the transmitter’s station.

Before there were oodles of us pouring our conscious thoughts into the ether, whether by blog or 140 characters at a time, there was a smaller set of dedicated hobbyists creating soap boxes from radio antennas. And the fascinating part (at least to me) is how similar the emergent social gestures were. When one radio operator grok’d another’s signal, they’d fire off a postcard letting their new friend know their message was being heard.

As I imagine most shortwave operators would have, Ed Heger (@KA2HNO) collected his postcards as a sort of follow list. When lined up you can see he even checked each one off in the top left corner, perhaps as he logged them in a homemade database.

There is something definitively human about wanting to know your signal is being received, particularly when you’re casting it out into the void…

The experience was a great one for me personally — I haven’t done many speeches to that size or critical an audience — but I do find myself wondering what the benefits of giving a keynote at a conference ultimately are. I know this is a trite subject for those who frequent the conference circuit but it still gives me pause…

Gratuitous, marginally-related image used to make an all-text post look more appealing

Art Fritzon, Senior VP at Booz and patron of Hello, offered an anecdote about changing mindsets around social software that is just too good not to share. I’m paraphrasing here, so forgive me Art if I mess up a detail or two:

We had an older senior partner at Booz Allen who didn’t understand what we were up to with our social intranet project and thought it was a waste of time, or perhaps a fad.

“Go check out Wikipedia”, I told him. “I want you to find the article in there on Booz Allen. And when you do, I promise you you’ll find something wrong in it. When that happens, I want you to press the ‘edit’ button and fix it. Then come back and talk to me.”

Sure enough, the senior partner went out, tried the little experiment, and came back a changed man. “This”, he told me, “this is the future of our business.”

It’s easy for those of us who live in the middle of this social media revolution to forget what a mind-bending paradigm shift our first experience with social software was. Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia — these things joggled our minds the first time we interacted with them. Social software is funny in that way — it simultaneously wants to fit into existing cultural norms while breaking rules about what is possible.

Ooh – somebody tweet that last sentence. That was a good one. Wait – too long. Dammit.

Social software paradoxically wants to fit into existing cultural norms while breaking rules about what’s possible.

There. That’s better.

If you’re visiting from the Core77 article, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that this is an experimental work in process. I would love for this site to be the home of a rich converstion about the joys and sorrows of social interaction design, but it’s going to take some help from you to shape it so that such a conversation can take place. I know a blog isn’t the right format for fluid conversation, and a forum isn’t quite right either. So to begin, I’ve tried to set this up as a sort of blog/forum hybrid.

On the home page you’ll see a set of initial questions — stuff I’d personally love to hear your thoughts on. But if none of them strike your fancy, that’s OK too because you can ask a question of your own. Use the button on the top right of every page to create a new question. It should be on the home page as soon as you’re finished.

Finally, use the “like” buttons to help surface the best questions and comments. Over time if this takes off we can use that to filter the stuff worth talking about…

Looking forward to your thoughts.