Social Networks (4th Week) - ModelMayhem and Matt Webb's Criteria

ModelMayhem is a networking community aimed at bringing models, photographers, make-up artists, designers and whomever-else-it-may-concern together. As far as representation of Estonian model photography related people is concerned, ModelMayhem has greater coverage than any of its competitors. It has been chosen as the subject study for this week's analysis as it will supposedly provide some diversity to the general flow of choices.

Identity.
Many users are encouraged to disclose their real names or their business names (e.g. Name Familyname Photography, Splendid Ideas Design) as their screen names by the fact that this provides the exposure general audience of the network is craving for. As far as persistence is concerned, ModelMayhem doesn't have an overly strict policy - one can change his/hers screen name up to 3 times (more with a paid account, naturally), though in the network at hand that doesn't appear to be of the uttermost importance as it utilizes an open (everyone's entitled to see others' code) numerical ID system to keep persistent references. I personally believe this to be a fair compromise between the overall usefulness of permanent displayed username and provision of the much needed freedom of self-expression and self definition, which happens to be time-dependent as individuals tend to evolve.

Presence.
ModelMayhem lacks any online presence representation whatsoever, unfortunately. It is impossible to know whether a given user, friend or not, is currently online - even the presence status of a user as a forum poster is not disclosed, even though such information is a available on the vast majority of forums by default.

Relationships.
The straightforward utilization of relationship representation encountered on MM is incredibly unsophisticated and simplistic - a network member may add friends, but no differentiation between friends is implemented. An owner of a paid account may mark favourite profiles, which are not visible for other members, but are an effective method of tracking individuals who are of significant interest. On the other hand, a crediting option is introduced as a particularly unusual method of establishing a relationship with another member - one can either have a list of people one has worked with on the main profile page (unclickable listing) or credit a person in under a portfolio image in a dedicated field(a click on such a credit would take you directly to the credited person's profile). Moreover, this functionality can also be regarded as a part of building a reputation, but more on that later. 

Conversations.
MM, sadly, does not propose any platform for dedicated real-time conversing apart from a crippled chat equivalent where one has to refresh the page to see if any new "Shouts" appeared. Moreover, the issue of lacking presence is omnipresent, one cannot see who's currently "in the shouting distance", neither can one address a person by a "shout" privately... which, I guess, makes sense, albeit its ridiculousness. Even messaging options are limited as members of different subscription plans have diverging number of personal messages they can send per day. Luckily enough, unlike some communities that undertake draconian measures and abuse moderation in order to prevent their members from communication by any other means than ones provided by the network itself,  MM doesn't restrict sharing of links, e-mail addresses and other identificators.

Groups.
There is no way to have a group distribution of ones friends or contacts, other than adding an image from their portfolio to a certain list (it must be noted, that only users with payed subscriptions are allowed to have such lists), which may have a group-identifying title, like "Models I would like to work with", "Favourite MM designers", "MUAs I've worked with". Portfolio images, however, are not permanently present on the site - should the portfolio owner decide to delete or replace it, it will vanish from all the lists it had been added to too. Therefore, it's plain to see that MM has no direct grouping of contacts and the roundabout method of categorizing them is extremely unreliable.

Reputation.
Establishing a member's reputation is not the most artless task for the onlooker as properties that it could be determined by are arguable. For instance, as far as networks are concerned the prevailing preconception states that the greater the number of one's friends (e.g. connections) is, the more popular the person is. The ModelMayhem reality begs to differ - an overwhelming amount of friends usually indicates that an individual sends out a whole lot of friend requests, rather than the extreme popularity of the person in question. The other notion is that active members, especially the ones wearing subscription badges, are more actively seeking exposure, and, quite naturally, getting more of it than a neighbour brilliant photographer or model who just isn't showing off consciously. The number of credits (a list of MM members the user at hand has collaborated with allocated as a separate paragraph on the profile page) and references (crediting a participant of the shoot below the portfolio image), however, may show the real-world activeness and reliability. There's also daily and weekly contests running for members of the community and those titles are striking and quite objective reputation indicators. Positive feedback in tags (MM equivalent of profile comments) can also add up to member's reputation.


Sharing.
The whole community is, in fact, built around sharing, sharing the results of ones work to represent their skills, features and artistic inclinations in order to land a paying assignment or an advantageous collaboration. Other than that members are free to share one link as their primary link (most often it's a link to a full scale portfolio or a website with contacts and rates built around a professional portfolio). Furthermore, owners of paid accounts may share a additional pictures and links in the self-introduction section of their profile. This is, however, pretty much all the sharing the community is limited to.