stoweboyd and the /messengers

Anne McCrossan makes some valid points about the power inherent in social belonging, and the challenges of creating for-fee walled gardens:

The Synaptic Fluid Of Social Business

Technology is a finite game. It will ultimately solve all the problems it’s capable of addressing, now matter how shiny and new it seems now. What’s a more infinite game are the opportunities of human connectivity, all the shades of creation that are possible to conceive collectively.

A very modern form of disenfranchisement, being denied a networked identity, may become the ultimate social sanction of this century. That kind of ban from the cloud may have the same tarnish as the casting out of convicts to the far flung reaches of Australia two hundred years ago, as just as far an isolation away from the heart of a new civilization. Do we want that especially at a time when of the biggest risks we create as we emerge from seismic change is a lack of education literacy that leads to us creating two societies, not one?

To help answer the question, Chris Brogan’s ‘The Third Tribe’ community launched this week. Chris Brogan, the man behind the move towards more human business, has a price for connectivity and membership to his tribe in the form of a monthly subscription. Subscription however doesn’t create a community, it creates a service, and with it comes a different ambience.

My friend Ed Brenegar’s put it like this ‘popularity in a free environment does not necessarily equate to value in a paid one’ and social connectivity means cost equations have changed. Purchase and purpose are more related, they come together via shared commitments, and purchase might take many forms and currencies – time given, attention focused, contributions made, as well as cold, hard cash.

The old school calls to consume don’t count for as much as they used to, whilst generative connections are growing in value.

I’ve paid upfront sight unseen for the value of being part of collaborative initiatives I believe in. There are causes that are redefining what participation in not-for-profit initiatives can mean and what it’s capable of achieving, and there are communities worth investing in heavily simply because of the quality of the leadership and freedom of connection.

Trust is the synaptic fluid of social business. In that context I think Chris Brogan, as a Trust Agent and because his stock in trade is his humanity, has erred. Trust is an intimate thing and monthly subscriptions are what we do when buying a network utility.

[...]

There are a number of industries where liberating co-created value is an increasingly important item on the agenda. The government burden of management in face of budget cutbacks, the healthcare requirement to develop insights that can make R&D cheaper, all business that benefits from streamlining business processes that can remove overhead, that knows that pump-priming marketing an increasingly expensive activity.

Old business models are yielding fewer returns. Generative listening is an antidote to the velocity of today’s overloaded information flows. The action potential contained within committed, visceral and trustworthy human relationships, that’s at the heart of the social connections, has never been more important. It’s the synaptic fluid of social business.

People have to make a living, and I see the justification for charging people to participate in online communities. And anyone with finely tuned sensibilities will heed whaat McCrossan is getting at, and would obviously not be seeking to ostracize or penalize those that couldn't afford entry. That's one reason that I think $27/month to join the 'Third Tribe' might be the wrong way to go. Perhaps they should adopt the Radiohead model, and let people pay what they want/can afford.

McCrossan's point, however, doesn't seem to be the size of the threshold to participate, but that change in social dynamics when there is a threshold at all, and the community is divided -- polarized -- into those that are paying to be there and those that are paid to be there. If this is all handled adroitly, it may not be much of an issue, but McCrossan seems to suggest that a subtle change is involved, one that could change everything.

The larger issue, to me, is one of appropriating social scenes. If Brogan and his partners pull themselves and their cadre of followers out of the open social discourse of the web and behind a paywall, what happens out here? What if hundreds of thought leaders opt to do the same? Would we have a fracturing of the web into pieces? Like a community that broke into hundreds of gated commmunities?

I understand that Chris & Co. want to make a living, and I do too. I have, for example, set up private blogs here on /Message that are invisible to the average person, but which are accessible to client companies' staff. I write supplements to the public topics, and interact with my clients on private matters, relating to their products, competition, and business plans. But I don't think that appropriates open social discourse, since so much of what goes on there is information that is sensitive or confidential: it is not pulling something out of public discourse, and charging a fee for it. 

In essence, Brogan and 'The Third Tribe' site is an acho of the paywalls that traditional media companies -- like the Wall Street Journal and the NY Times -- have in place or are planning to put in place. But the failure of large traditional media companies to provide a context for open social discourse is why we invaded the web in the first place.

So perhaps this is a natural progression. Brogan has become so large a force that he can act like a media company, and to be able to turn that into money he either has to charge for access or sell ads, or both. Totally understandable, but if enough of the bright lights on the web are pulled behind locked doors, it could be a much darker place.

Update on Monday, February 8, 2010 at 11:00AM by Stowe Boyd

I had fogotten the link to Anne McCrossan's post, now remedied.

Gartner has released a report that says the social tools are moving fairly quickly into the world of business, and they make five extrapolations based on what is going on today:

via email (password protected report here)

1. By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

During the next several years, most companies will be building out internal social networks and/or allowing business use of personal social network accounts. Social networking will prove to be more effective than e-mail for certain business activities such as status updates and expertise location.

The press release makes no mention of instant messaging, oddly, which is widely used in many industries. But email is still the monster for corporate blurbage, despite the fact that "email is where knowledge goes to die," as Bill French said.

I will wager that this will change as businesses shift to communications with their customers that are stream-oriented, and internal tools that are based on the open follower model: corporate publicy -- open information sharing behind the firewall -- will catch on in 2010 and 2011.

2. By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.

Gartner might be a bit conservative, but not too much in this case. However, the right app showing up could shift this balance dramatically. The 'business twitter' apps I have seen so far do not provide the features that would make a compelling case for business adoption.

3. Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.

When it comes to collaboration, IT organizations are accustomed to providing a technology platform (such as, e-mail, IM, Web conferencing) rather than delivering a social solution that targets specific business value. Through 2013, IT organizations will struggle with shifting from providing a platform to delivering a solution. This will result in over a 70 percent failure rate in IT-driven social media initiatives. Fifty percent of business-led social media initiatives will succeed, versus 20 percent of IT-driven initiatives.

Snap! The geeks in IT are historically disconnected to business realities, hiding in their server farms. Letting them drive these initiatives is risky. However, that means the vision for what need to happen -- both technically and organizationally -- will have to come from line of business thinkers, and Gartner thinks only 50% of those will succeed. I guess I would like to know how they generalize the notion of 'success'.

I am a real fan of failing fast, which I don't think Gartner is including in these measures. And it sounds like their recommendations are for big, soviet style monster deployments, instead of building small systems that work, and then growing them into bigger working systems:

Enterprises will need to develop entirely new skill sets around designing and delivering social media solutions. Until this happens, failure rates will remain high. A dearth of methods, technologies and tools will impede the design and delivery of social media solutions in the near term. But long term, enterprises will realize that social media is not a "hit or miss" activity naturally prone to high failure rates, and that a calculated approach to social media solution delivery must be an IT competency.

Except the IT guys are the wrong ones to be doing it, obviously.

4. Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.

This is a bit strange actually. iPhone and other mobile 'computication' devices (yes, computication is a new blend word: communication + computing) have had a major impact in 2008/2009. But in the near term we will be seeing augmented reality, widespread use of handhelds with video, and an obliteration of old 'cell phone' technologies like SMS.

But I don't really buy that this will reconstruct the user experience of social tools on desktops or other less mobile devices, except that people will likely adopt goggles (a la iGlasses) as a desktop aid, too.

5. Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

Social network analysis is a useful methodology for examining the interaction patterns and information flows that occur among the people and groups in an organization, as well as among business partners and customers. However, when surveys are used for data collection, users may be reluctant to provide accurate responses. When automated tools perform the analysis, users may resent knowing that software is analyzing their behavior. For these reasons, social network analysis will remain an untapped source of insight in most organizations.

Before undertaking a social network analysis, Gartner recommends that the organization ensure that it has the trust and buy-in of the people it hopes to include in the analysis in advance. Issues of privacy and confidentiality must be addressed and a determination needs to be made regarding how the information will be used and communicated. Establishing the ground rules upfront will encourage more open and honest participation and reduce the resistance to ongoing relationship monitoring.

Hmmm. I need to write a longer post on 'circles of trust' but for the moment let me agree that getting buy-in on social network analysis is a necessity. In some countries, some sorts of social analysis may be illegal. Leaving aside the need to some degree of candor in answering questions, reading people's emails and monitoring there instant messaging use -- which might be extremely helpful for evaluating trust networks for example -- can also stray into the surveillance of personal life side of things pretty fast.

Conclusions

I come away from these technological projections wanting more. Perhaps it's because I don't belive that you can discuss uptake of social tools without addressing the social impacts, because the value of these tools is measured by the changes they make in how we interact, not simply in speeding things up, or cutting costs. So if you don't explore those social changes as deeply as you do the technology underpinnings or the economics of IT decisions then you are missing the biggest part of the equation.

Craig Mundie, Microsoft's chief research and development officer, proposed that we may need to institute Internet driver's licenses for people and applications. The idea is that we can track people who are doing bad things, and potentially take their license to use the Internet away.

- Barbara Kiviat, Driver's licenses for the Internet

What Mundie is proposing is to impose authentication. He draws an analogy to automobile use. If you want to drive a car, you have to have a license (not to mention an inspection, insurance, etc.). If you do something bad with that car, like break a law, there is the chance that you will lose your license and be prevented from driving in the future. In other words, there is a legal and social process for imposing discipline. Mundie imagines three tiers of Internet ID: one for people, one for machines and one for programs (which often act as proxies for the other two).

Now, there are, of course, a number of obstacles to making such a scheme be reality. Even here in the mountains of Switzerland I can hear the worldwide scream go up: “But we’re entitled to anonymity on the Internet!” Really? Are you? Why do you think that?

Mundie pointed out that in the physical world we are implicitly comfortable with the notion that there are certain places we’re not allowed to go without identifying ourselves. Are you allowed to walk down the street with no one knowing who you are? Absolutely. Are you allowed to walk into a bank vault and still not give your name? Hardly.

Being an American, Mundie thinks of driver's licenses as our state-issued documents, and which allow us to drive cars. But the more apt analogy may be passports, which are issued by nations, and which we already use to cross sovereign borders.

But the dark side of a scheme like this might be worse than the ills that it seeks to cure.

In the name of getting malefactors off the web, and maybe fined or imprisioned -- spammers, phishers, and Nigerian princes -- we would be putting into the hands of -- who exactly -- the ability to monitor what we do and where we go on the web. And basic access would require us to petition a government, or a government licensed company, for a passport. Which obviously could be denied.

This is another situation where we would be concentrating power in the hands of the government in an area where we aren't even sure what our rights are.

Would we have the right of free assembly? Free speech? The right to wag our fingers at the government?

Despite the fact that I believe we are moving into the decade of publicy -- when privacy will be overshadowed by growing openness and transparency -- anonymity remains absolutely essential to a free society when our livelihoods can be denied by companies or organizations who may deem our passions and pleasures unwholesome or illegitimate, and who may retaliate by firing us, outing us, or blacklisting us.

Living life openly on the web -- publicy -- is a choice, and must remain one a choice, freely accepted by individuals. If we are required to live online with no possible privacy then we will make the web a prison, or a police state. Publicy compelled is not freedom or openness, but instead, the worst sort of oppression and tyranny.

Recently, David Carr wrote a piece called Why Twitter Will Endure, in which he expressed some surprise at his own conversion to Twitter advocate:

On Twitter, anyone may follow anyone, but there is very little expectation of reciprocity. By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.

The most frequent objection to Twitter is a predictable one: “I don’t need to know someone is eating a donut right now.” But if that someone is a serious user of Twitter, she or he might actually be eating the curmudgeon’s lunch, racing ahead with a clear, up-to-the-second picture of an increasingly connected, busy world. The service has obvious utility for a journalist, but no matter what business you are in, imagine knowing what the thought leaders in your industry were reading and considering. And beyond following specific individuals, Twitter hash tags allow you to go deep into interests and obsession: #rollerderby, #physics, #puppets and #Avatar, to name just a few of many thousands.

The act of publishing on Twitter is so friction-free — a few keystrokes and hit send — that you can forget that others are out there listening. I was on a Virgin America cross-country flight, and used its wireless connection to tweet about the fact that the guy next to me seemed to be the leader of a cult involving Axe body spray. A half-hour later, a steward approached me and said he wondered if I would be more comfortable with a seat in the bulkhead. (He turned out to be a great guy, but I was doing a story involving another part of the company, so I had to decline the offer. @VirginAmerica, its corporate Twitter account, sent me a message afterward saying perhaps it should develop a screening process for Axe. It was creepy and comforting all at once.)

Like many newbies on Twitter, I vastly overestimated the importance of broadcasting on Twitter and after a while, I realized that I was not Moses and neither Twitter nor its users were wondering what I thought. Nearly a year in, I’ve come to understand that the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.

Not that long ago, I was at a conference at Yale and looked at the sea of open laptops in the seats in front of me. So why wasn’t my laptop open? Because I follow people on Twitter who serve as my Web-crawling proxies, each of them tweeting links that I could examine and read on a Blackberry. Regardless of where I am, I surf far less than I used to.

At first, Twitter can be overwhelming, but think of it as a river of data rushing past that I dip a cup into every once in a while. Much of what I need to know is in that cup: if it looks like Apple is going to demo its new tablet, or Amazon sold more Kindles than actual books at Christmas, or the final vote in the Senate gets locked in on health care, I almost always learn about it first on Twitter.

Carr's piece stirred some yowling in the commentariat, in particular a post from George Packer that casts Twitter as the worst part of a world moving too fast:

- George Packer, Stop The World

The truth is, I feel like yelling Stop quite a bit these days. Every time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop. The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell. I’m told that Twitter is a river into which I can dip my cup whenever I want. But that supposes we’re all kneeling on the banks. In fact, if you’re at all like me, you’re trying to keep your footing out in midstream, with the water level always dangerously close to your nostrils. Twitter sounds less like sipping than drowning.

The most frightening picture of the future that I’ve read thus far in the new decade has nothing to do with terrorism or banking or the world’s water reserves—it’s an article by David Carr, the Times’s media critic, published on the decade’s first day, called “Why Twitter Will Endure.” “I’m in narrative on more things in a given moment than I ever thought possible,” Carr wrote. And: “Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people.” And: “The real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice … the throbbing networked intelligence.” And: “On Twitter, you are your avatar and your avatar is you.” And finally: “There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.”

Nick Bilton responded to this post, trying to counter Packer's points one by one, in The Twitter Train Has Left The Station:

[...] Mr. Packer’s misgivings seem to be based entirely on what he has heard about the service — he’s so afraid of it that he won’t even try it. (I wonder how Mr. Packer would feel if, say, a restaurant critic panned a restaurant based solely on hearsay about the establishment.)

“Twitter is crack for media addicts,” he writes. “It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it.”

Call me a digital crack dealer, but here’s why Twitter is a vital part of the information economy — and why Mr. Packer and other doubters ought to at least give it a Tweet.

Hundreds of thousands of people now rely on Twitter every day for their business. Food trucks and restaurants around the world tell patrons about daily food specials. Corporations use the service to handle customer service issues. Starbucks, Dell, Ford, JetBlue and many more companies use Twitter to offer discounts and coupons to their customers. Public relations firms, ad agencies, schools, the State Department — even President Obama — now use Twitter and other social networks to share information.

There are communication and scholarly uses. Right now, an astronaut, floating 250 miles above the Earth, is using Twitter and conversing with people all over the globe, answering both mundane and scientific questions about living on a space station.

Most importantly, Twitter is transforming the nature of news, the industry from which Mr. Packer reaps his paycheck. The news media are going through their most robust transformation since the dawn of the printing press, in large part due to the Internet and services like Twitter. After this metamorphosis takes place, everyone will benefit from the information moving swiftly around the globe.

You can see that change beginning to take place. During the protests in Iran last year, ordinary Iranians shared information through Twitter about the government atrocities taking place. That supplemented the reporting by professional journalists, who faced restrictions on their movements and coverage. More recently, after the earthquake in Haiti, Twitter helped spread information about donation efforts, connected people to their loved ones, and of course, spread news from inside the country — news that reprinted in this publication.

Bilton's reasonableness completely misses the point, because Packerisn't really concerned with Twitter's relative merits, or even it's potential utility to him as a journalist: he is lamenting the decline of a passing intellectual world in which criticism and long-form writing were the zenith, a pinnacle to which he had aspired and succeeded. In this rebuttal to Bilton's piece, Packer makes this clear.

- George Packer, Neither Luddite Nor Biltonite

It’s true that I hadn’t used Twitter (not consciously, anyway—my editors inform me that this blog has for some time had an automated Twitter feed). I haven’t used crack, either, but—as a Bilton reader pointed out—you don’t need to do the drug to understand the effects. One is the sight of adults walking into traffic with their eyes glued to their iPhones, or dividing their attention about evenly between their lunch partner and their BlackBerry. Here’s another: Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic’s very good politics blogger, was asked by Michael Kinsley to describe his typical day of information consumption, otherwise known as reading. Ambinder’s day begins and ends with Twitter, and there’s plenty of Twitter in between. No mention of books, except as vacation material via the Kindle. I’m sure Ambinder still reads books when he’s not on vacation, but it didn’t occur to him to include them in his account, and I’d guess that this is because they’re not a central part of his reading life.

And he’s not alone. Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest—including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books. It’s no less true of me, which is why I’m trying to place a few limits on the flood of information that I allow into my head. The other day I had to reshelve two dozen books that my son had wantonly pulled down, most of them volumes from college days. I thumbed idly through a few urgently underlined pages of Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” a book that electrified me during my junior year, and began to experience something like the sensation middle-aged men have at the start of softball season, when they try sprinting to first base after a winter off. What a ridiculous effort it took! There’s no way for readers to be online, surfing, e-mailing, posting, tweeting, reading tweets, and soon enough doing the thing that will come after Twitter, without paying a high price in available time, attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the immediately surrounding world. The Internet and the devices it’s spawned are systematically changing our intellectual activities with breathtaking speed, and more profoundly than over the past seven centuries combined. It shouldn’t be an act of heresy to ask about the trade-offs that come with this revolution. In fact, I’d think asking such questions would be an important part of the job of a media critic, or a lead Bits blogger.

Instead, the response to my post tells me that techno-worship is a triumphalist and intolerant cult that doesn’t like to be asked questions. If a Luddite is someone who fears and hates all technological change, a Biltonite is someone who celebrates all technological change: because we can, we must. I’d like to think that in 1860 I would have been an early train passenger, but I’d also like to think that in 1960 I’d have urged my wife to go off Thalidomide.

Bilton’s arguments on behalf of Twitter are that it’s useful for marketing and “information-sharing,” and that I, as a journalist, ought to understand the value as well as anyone: “Twitter is transforming the nature of news, the industry from which Mr. Packer reaps his paycheck. The news media are going through their most robust transformation since the dawn of the printing press, in large part due to the Internet and services like Twitter. After this metamorphosis takes place, everyone will benefit from the information moving swiftly around the globe.”

If there are any journalists left by then. Until that promised future, American newspapers and magazines will continue to die by the dozen, and Bilton’s Times will continue to cut costs by asking reporters and editors to take buy-outs, and the economic basis for reporting (as opposed to information-sharing, posting, and Tweeting) will continue to erode. You have to be a truly hard-core techno-worshipper to call this robust. A friend at the Times recently said he doubts that in five years there will be a print edition of the paper, except maybe on Sundays. Once the print New York Times is extinct, it’s not at all clear how the paper will pay for its primary job, which is reporting. Any journalist who cheerleads uncritically for Twitter is essentially asking for his own destruction.

Bilton’s post did prompt me to seek out a Tweeter, which provided half an hour of enlightenment, diversion, and early-onset boredom, at the end of which I couldn’t bring myself to rue all the Twitter links and restaurant specials and coupon offers I’ll continue to miss. It’s true that Bilton will have news updates within seconds that reach me after minutes or hours or even days. It’s a trade-off I can live with. As Garry Trudeau (who is not on Twitter) has his Washington “journotwit” Roland Hedley tweet at the end of “My Shorts R Bunching. Thoughts?,” “The time you spend reading this tweet is gone, lost forever, carrying you closer to death. Am trying not to abuse the privilege.”

[all emphasis mine.]

Here, Parker drops the curmudgeonly pretense of the first piece, and starts chewing the furniture. He makes clear that he believes Twitter is the archangel of a dark future, an appliance that will make us stupid. Twitter and other web tools take us away from grown-up activities like reading and walking slowly through museums. These are dangerous toys, he says, that could blow off your prefrontal cortext if you aren't careful. And he's an attention economist, saying we don't have time to mess with this junk when there is so much to do! You can almost hear him yelling, "Get back to work, slackers!"

Then he attacks all those that smirked and called him a Luddite, calling us cultists and intolerant. (Well, I admit I am intolerant of people that call me an intolerant cultist.)

Parker also suggests that Bilton is a traitor to his calling, supporting the use of technologies that are directly leading to the erosion of old media. He has a point, since time that people spend using tools like Twitter does cut into traditional media, like TV, radio, and newspapers. But the media folks should take the rap for that, since they are losing us exactly because they failed to provide open social discourse. We moved onto the web to have what they failed to produce, and we are doing it ourselves, and to the degree that old media figure that out, the more they will change.

But beneath all this is fear: fear of the future, fear of change, and fear of the new.

Packer senses a world he loves slipping away. A world in which rereading Kirkegaard is seen as a noble end, and not just escapism or a mere hobby.

He makes Twitter a demon, and calls us cultists, worshipping technology. This is the war on flow, yet again. Packer and his ilk will say what we are doing is illegitimate, immoral, immature. Any slight merits these tools may have are overbalanced by the harm they do. While they may give their users pleasure, those pleasures are like drugs, gossip, or masturbation. We should put these dangerous mind-altering toys aside, and invest ourselves in grown-up activities, like quality face time with a small circle of 'real' friends, or reading.

Critics like Packer always miss the social dimension of these tools. They focus on their informational use, or talk about them as if they were communication devices like phones. Or compare them to drugs. But they are much more than that. Those of us online are deriving community and involvement from participating in these social settings, a sense of being connected that may have been missing in many people's live before the web.

Sociality on the web is subversive, and it does alter the established role of media, which directly threatens Packer and other journalists. But mostly I think Parker is suffering a sort of future shock, a fear of the future, and the loss of a precious past, a time in which he knew what was right and wrong, what to do and say, and which way was up.

I might feel the same way if I thought the web was going to come to an end, and all that I have come to rely on -- friendship, connection, and membership in a community of other minds -- were to go away. But I think the web is here to stay, and if something new comes along, I would probably jump on that, anyway.

Based on his experience with the iPad SDK, Mike Mayo is wondering about what it means for Mac OS 11:

- Robert Scoble, Rackspace’s iPhone developer reveals what’s inside the iPad SDK

“I feel like it’s most likely a glimpse into what eventually will be MacOS 11 and in some ways that’s scary,” said Mayo. “If this becomes OS 11 and we have to go through Apple to publish any app—that’s really scary, but I do like the idea of regular people using a computer without having to think about file systems.”

And more importantly, spending their time and energy thinking about work, or drawing, or music: not files and folders.

A long-time Microsofty has outed the jungle-fighter culture of Microsoft as the root of its innovation woes:

- Dick Brass, Microsoft's Creative Destruction

Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason. Its image has never recovered from the antitrust prosecution of the 1990s. Its marketing has been inept for years; remember the 2008 ad in which Bill Gates was somehow persuaded to literally wiggle his behind at the camera?

While Apple continues to gain market share in many products, Microsoft has lost share in Web browsers, high-end laptops and smartphones. Despite billions in investment, its Xbox line is still at best an equal contender in the game console business. It first ignored and then stumbled in personal music players until that business was locked up by Apple.

Microsoft’s huge profits — $6.7 billion for the past quarter — come almost entirely from Windows and Office programs first developed decades ago. Like G.M. with its trucks and S.U.V.’s, Microsoft can’t count on these venerable products to sustain it forever. Perhaps worst of all, Microsoft is no longer considered the cool or cutting-edge place to work. There has been a steady exit of its best and brightest.

What happened? Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.

[...]

Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence. It’s not an accident that almost all the executives in charge of Microsoft’s music, e-books, phone, online, search and tablet efforts over the past decade have left.

As a result, while the company has had a truly amazing past and an enviably prosperous present, unless it regains its creative spark, it’s an open question whether it has much of a future.

In the past, I argued that Microsoft was doomed to fail because -- like the Roman Empire -- it opted to fight on too many fronts. Market dominance in Windows and Office led it to games, phones, tablets, [fill in the blank].

Now it appears that it is failing because the many product line heads are fighting for control, instead of pulling together.

In my territory, Microsoft has never even made a blip. There has been no serious Microsoft innovation in social tools, with the exception of OneNote. Instead of OneNote, however, the company should have been working on making Office social -- and I don't mean Groove (acquired along with the lackluster Ray Ozzie) or SharePoint.

Microsoft could have easily built, or knocked off, Basecamp, and figured out how to build that into and around Office. But now its too late. Web professionals have largely moved away from Office and its document-centered world view.

The death of documents will mean the end of Microsft as we know it.

Let me explain, before you think I have been gargling alphabet soup.

Recent research suggests that the most important people in social networks, relative to actually transmitting ideas, viruses, or moods, might not be the folks with the most followers, but instead might be people that are connected to a large number of individuals through shorter paths than others have.

- ARVIX blog, Best Connected Individuals Are Not the Most Influential Spreaders in Social Networks

The study of social networks has thrown up more than a few surprises over the years. It's easy to imagine that because the links that form between various individuals in a society are not governed by any overarching rules, they must have a random structure. So the discovery in the 1980s that social networks are very different came as something of a surprise. In a social network, most nodes are not linked to each other but can easily be reached by a small number of steps. This is the so-called small worlds network.

Today, there's another surprise in store for network connoisseurs courtesy of Maksim Kitsak at Boston University and various buddies. One of the important observations from these networks is that certain individuals are much better connected than others. These so-called hubs ought to play a correspondingly greater role in the way information and viruses spread through society.

In fact, no small effort has gone into identifying these individuals and exploiting them to either spread information more effectively or prevent them from spreading disease.

The importance of hubs may have been overstated, say Kitsak and pals. "In contrast to common belief, the most influential spreaders in a social network do not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people," they say.

At first glance this seems somewhat counterintuitive but on reflection it makes perfect sense. Kitsak and co point out that there are various sceanrios in which well connected hubs have little influence over the spread of infromation. "For example, if a hub exists at the end of a branch at the periphery of a network, it will have a minimal impact in the spreading process through the core of the network."

By contrast, "a less connected person who is strategically placed in the core of the network will have a significant effect that leads to dissemination through a large fraction of the population."

The question then is how to find these influential individuals. Kitsak and co say that the way to do this is to study a quantity called the network's "k-shell decomposition". That sounds complicated but it isn't: a k-shell is simply a network pruned down to the nodes with more than k neighbours. Individuals in the highest k-shells are the most influential spreaders.

(via @karllong)

In network theory, these two cases are both example of centrality: ways of assigning values to individual nodes in a network based on how each node relates to the others.

The most connected people in a social network -- those with the highest number of incoming and outgoing connections -- have high eigenvalues. These eigenvalues can be calculated -- like Google's PageRank algorithm -- by weighting the value of each connection based on the eigenvalue of the originator.

But this research suggests that a different way to measure the centrality might be more useful in determining how much throw weight a person actually has. Betweenness is a measure of how short are the chains that connects a person to the totality of the network. Like PageRank, betweenness is recursive: the people with the highest betweenness are likely to be connected to other people with high betweenness.

This means people are influential because they are connected to many influential people. But influence doesn't seem directly linked to how many people you are connected to. It's a function of being connected to others who have short chains to many other people with high betweenness. Or, looked at differently, betweenness is a measure of how many social circles, or social scenes, a person is connected to.

So, it's not who you know it's where you know. It's where you are situated in the network, and not just in the limited sense of how many immediate contacts you have.

The subtle, dark-matter mystery of social networks is that influence is oblique, and not easily determined by the sorts of tools we have today.

It is not your follower count, or who you follow, per se. But, instead, do you have short paths into other social scenes, both incoming and outgoing? That is the deep structure of being truly connected: bridging over different social scenes, acting as a conduit, a vector, a filter and amplifier for ideas good and bad, the best insights, and deadly viruses.

Today, in New York, I heard Clay Shirky talk two times -- midday at the Betaworks monthly Brown Bag Lunch, and this evening at the New York Tech Meetup -- on the same topic. He is extrapolating in very interesting ways from the research of social scientists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler on the social dimension buried in the data of the Framingham Heart Study.

In a nutshell, it turns out that the activities of the 'third neighborhood' influence you in ways you may be completely unaware of.  These are people that you do not know, but are (dis)connected to you by two removes: the friends of your friends' friends. Christakis and Fowler found that obesity, smoking, and many other medical factors strongly correlated with the prevalence of corresponding activities in these large social scenes:

- Clive Thompson, Are Your Friends Making You Fat?

Christakis knew about the Framingham Heart Study and arranged a visit to the town to learn more. The study seemed promising: he knew it had been underway for more than 50 years and had followed more than 15,000 people, spanning three generations, so in theory, at least, it could offer a crucial moving picture. But how to track social connections? During his visit, Christakis asked one of the coordinators of the study how she and her colleagues were able to stay in contact with so many people for so long. What happened if a family moved away? The woman reached under her desk and pulled out a green sheet. It was a form that staff members used to collect information from every participant each time they came in to be examined — and it asked them to list all their family and at least one of their friends. “They asked you, ‘Who is your spouse, who are your children, who are your parents, who are your siblings, where do they live, who is your doctor, where do you work, where do you live, who is a close friend who would know where to find you in four years if we can’t find you?” Christakis said. “And they were writing all this stuff down.” He felt a jolt of excitement: he and Fowler could use these thousands of green forms to manually reconstruct the social ties of Framingham — who knew whom, going back decades.

Over the next few years, Christakis and Fowler managed a team that painstakingly sifted through the records. When they were done, they had a map of how 5,124 subjects were connected, tracing a web of 53,228 ties between friends and family and work colleagues. Next they analyzed the data, beginning with tracking patterns of how and when Framingham residents became obese. Soon they had created an animated diagram of the entire social network, with each resident represented on their computer screens as a dot that grew bigger or smaller as he or she gained or lost weight over 32 years, from 1971 to 2003. When they ran the animation, they could see that obesity broke out in clusters. People weren’t just getting fatter randomly. Groups of people would become obese together, while other groupings would remain slender or even lose weight.

And the social effect appeared to be quite powerful. When a Framingham resident became obese, his or her friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese, too. Even more astonishing to Christakis and Fowler was the fact that the effect didn’t stop there. In fact, it appeared to skip links. A Framingham resident was roughly 20 percent more likely to become obese if the friend of a friend became obese — even if the connecting friend didn’t put on a single pound. Indeed, a person’s risk of obesity went up about 10 percent even if a friend of a friend of a friend gained weight.

“People are connected, and so their health is connected,” Christakis and Fowler concluded when they summarized their findings in a July 2007 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, the first time the prestigious journal published a study of how social networks affect health. Or as Christakis and Fowler put it in “Connected,” their coming book on their findings: “You may not know him personally, but your friend’s husband’s co-worker can make you fat. And your sister’s friend’s boyfriend can make you thin.

Obesity was only the beginning. Over the next year, the sociologist and the political scientist continued to analyze the Framingham data, finding more and more examples of contagious behavior. Smoking, they discovered, also appeared to spread socially — in fact, a friend taking up smoking increased your chance of lighting up by 36 percent, and if you had a three-degrees-removed friend who started smoking, you were 11 percent more likely to do the same. Drinking spread socially, as did happiness and even loneliness. And in each case one’s individual influence stretched out three degrees before it faded out. They termed this the “three degrees of influence” rule about human behavior: We are tied not just to those around us, but to others in a web that stretches farther than we know.

This research brings to mind the obsrvation of Blaise Pascal, "The heart has its reasons that the mind knows not." It appears that negative behaviors like overeating and smoking are in some hidden way transmitted through our social networks, even when we are not in contact with those others who are influencing us. Likewise, it turns out that happiness is spread in a similarly diffuse and oblique fashion.

Getting back to Clay: he wonders what this means for the way that modern social tools work, like Twitter, for example.

In social tools, we are each the center of our own universe, and we are connected to our friends (who are each the center of their own universes, too). We are aware that our friends have friends we don't know (or are aware of in the most insubstantial of ways). And these friends of friends likewise have friends, which are unknown to us as well.

But despite their anonymity and distance from us, they are influencing us, as Christakis and Fowler showed. But out tools, like Twitter, don't allow us to deal with this mass of people -- which is likely to be on the order of a million people, plus or minus -- in any way at all. It is not addressible, or searchable, or filterable. I can't find out what TV my social scene is watching, or what music they like, or how they voted in the last election.

Shirky points out that it is easy to find out what my friends are doing, or what the world as a whole is doing, but what the world is doing is fairly 'bland' as he puts it. The world's combined interests lead to the dropping out of all the odd and eclectic, and you are left with Lady Gaga and Obama. BIg surprise.

But my social scene -- the group that actually influences my thinking, moods, and buying behavior -- in completely untapped and untappable by out tools today.

However, its clear that it could be tapped: just as in the Framingham Heart Study. It's possible (and not even very technically challening) to create the swirling, dynamic, and ever-changing opinions and activities of your one million closest 'friends', only a few hundred that you know well and perhaps a few thousand that you 'know of'. We are all surrounded by 'dark matter', the next ring in the social cosmology out past those you know and the friends of those you know: a million people exerting an invisible influence on those that influence those that influence you. If that group is down on smoking, you will be getting social cues to not smoke. If they are crazy about Korean food, you will be served kim chi at dinner parties. If they are into country and western music, you will find yourself shopping for cowboy boots with your cousin.

Shirky clearly states that he doesn't know where this will lead, even if he is right. But I think that it is obvious that we would like to explicit see and measure the influences in our unverse (each in their own overlapping universes), so on a personal level this may be a tremendous adjunct to the filtering, amplifying, and serendipity that we all want social tools to help us with. And perhaps just as much as a possible driver of technical experimentation in this sector, companies would like to know how influence is channeled and how it impacts individuals. The underbelly of this is exactly that: that marketers would like to tap into this social juju, and influence us through social ties that we can't even touch directly.

But it is always the brightest light that casts the darkest shadow.

It comes as no surprise that there is value -- and power -- in identifying the wellspring of our desires and the foundation of our apsirations. Social scenes may turn out to be the crux of this transitive and reflexive influence that we exchange in ten thousand ways, every day. If it turns out that our place in the world -- our position in an invisble sphere of one million almost friends of ours -- defines strongly who we are, what we love, and who we hate, would we be surprised? Not me.

This may be just the face of tribalism, proven through scientific observation. I am choosing to use the term 'social scene' though, because tribalism has so many connotations and associations that could take us off the track. Also, it was Brian Eno that coined the term 'scenius' to represent the positive side of a social scene:

via Kevin Kelly, quoting Brian Eno

Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.

We are a result of the accumulated sum of influences that are being tallied behind our backs, and behind the backs of all those that we know. Apparently, we are impacted by a hidden calculus in which we are the integral of the specturm of influences on all those we hold dear.

The Bantu people have a saying "Through people we become human," and ever aspect of our identity and psychology is shaped by the cultural milieu in which we are part. I have said for years, "I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections,' alluding in a recursive way to these hidden network dynamics. And of course we want better tools to bring these indistinct and indirect forces into high relief. Clay is right about that.

Chris Dixon quotes Ron Conway on the exploding NY Tech scene, and then enumerates the VCs here or who have moved here:

The pace of innovation in the New York area is very impressive right now. Some of the top entrepenuers in the country are building and scaling companies in the NY ecosystem - Ron Conway, yesterday in an email to me (published with his permission)

 

The NYC tech scene is exploding. There are tons of interesting startups. I’m an investor in a bunch and started one (Hunch) so won’t even try to enumerate them as any list will be extremely biased (other people have tried). I will say that one interesting thing happening is the types of startups are diversifying beyond media (HuffPo, Gawker) to more “California-style” startups (Foursquare, Boxee, Hunch).

In terms of investors, NYC now has a number of seed investors / micro-VCs:  IA Capital Partners, Betaworks, and Founder Collective (FC – which I am part of – has made 7 seed investments in NYC since we started last year).  The god of seed investing, Ron Conway, who I quote up top, has recently decided to become extremely active in NYC. One of the nice things about having small funds is we don’t need to invest millions of dollar per round so we all frequently invest together.

I heard Conway speak in the late fall at a Betaworks brown bag lunch (I am on the train right now, en route to another). He said that by that point in 2009, 25 or the 37 investments he had made in the year were in NYC-based companies. The previous year he had made one. And none in preceding years: all of his earlier investments were West Coast.