/Message

links for 2008-01-20

• conference evaluation and network mapping « intelligent measurement
  Glenn O'Neil research shows that LiFT attendence doubled networks of attendees
  (tags: lift social+networks conferences glenn+oneil)

links for 2008-01-19

• Jeneane Sessum: Before There Was Content, There Was Conversation
  "I want my conversational legacy, I want to control it, I want to track it across media types and tundras, and I want you to know me. I want to give you a bridge to me now, then, and later."
  (tags: conversational+legacy yet+another+manifesto jeneane+sessum brian+solis)
• Economist.com - Debate Series on Education
  "Social Networking: does it bring positive change to education?" 2/3s in favor at this point.
  (tags: ewan+mcintosh danah+boyd economist social+networks)

Mac Users = Openness 5s

A recent study by Mindset Media suggests that Mac users are maybe not the sort of people you'd like to be stuck on a desert island with:

[from Is There a 'Mac' Mindset? 'Mac People' Found to be More Open and Superior Than Population at Large, According to Mindset Media Study]

According to Mindset Media, Mac enthusiasts descending on San Francisco in droves this week to see the latest Apple innovations are apt to have a lot in common with the open-minded, liberal population they will find there. The study, with a robust sample of 7,500 respondents, revealed that people who are highly open-minded or, in Mindset Media parlance, "Openness 5's", are 60 percent more likely than people in the general population to have purchased a Mac. These purchasers are also more liberal, less modest, and more assured of their own superiority than the population at large.

Mindset Media defines Openness 5's as those who seek rich, varied and novel experiences, believing that imagination and intellectual curiosity contribute to a life well lived. They are receptive to their own inner feelings and may feel both happiness and unhappiness more intensely than others.

I was asked about this press release by Diann Daniel at CIO.com (who is probably pissed that I am writing this up here. Sorry, Diann -- story is too good to pass up!).

I quoted David Pogue, who years ago stated that he was not a Mac bigot, but an elegance bigot. Bring on something with a better design, and I will switch, he said, more or less.

But the nature of the marketplace has led to a certain sort of person gravitating to Macs.

I dig the periodic chart look of the Mindset Media graphic. The open green rectangle is Openness.

Mindset Matters, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I am definitely an 'Openness 5', which is defined as the following collection of traits, along with a very strong preference for Macs:

• High Openness -- You are competitive and precise. You forgive and forget the failures of others less easily than others and may be prone to be righteous when opposed.
• Low Dogmatism -- You disdain so-called moral authorities, especially the conservative kind. You think that kids should be exposed to moral questions and allowed to draw their own conclusions.
• Low Modesty -- You believe you are an exceptional person. You may be considered conceited or arrogant by others.
• High Superiority -- You are an extraordinary person and are comfortable proclaiming your accomplishments from the mountain tops. You are no wallflower, preferring to direct others rather than be directed.
• High Perfectionism -- You want everything to be just so, not only because it pleases you but because the people put so much pressure on you to not make mistakes. Imperfections seem to glare at you, and even if others don't see them, just knowing about them stresses you out.

Well, at least I am not wishy-washy. And neither is David Pogue.

The Cult Of The CEO Gene

I am not a fan of most management books. Perhaps I overdid it in the '80s and '90s, with Drucker, Porter, Davenport, Handy, Senge, and company. Or maybe I just lost my belief in the management game: the centralization of decision making in a cadre of professionally-trained business managers, being churned out by the business schools.

Gary Hamel, one of the most well-known management gurus (#7 according to Accenture), has broken ranks with the core premises of management theory in his newest book, according to William Holstein, writing in the New York Times today. His premise is that American companies need to respond to new challenges in the global economy by rethinking how they are organized, in essence, allowing -- or encouraging -- power to migrate from the center to the edge. Sound familiar? Hamel holds up Wholefoods, W.L. Gore (the folks behind Gore-Tex), and Google as examples of a new take on management, increasingly based on self-organization.

The result? A resounding thud in managementland, whose denizens are not too eager to accept this heresy:

[from The Future of Management - Gary Hamel by William Holstein]

[...]

The implication of all this is that we don’t need as many managers in organizations. Yes, we still need some managers and some centralized processes to prevent an organization from spinning wildly in all directions. But the best organizations will be those whose employees have the power to innovate, not just follow orders from on high, Mr. Hamel says. In such an environment, the notion of a whole class of managers evaluating and re-evaluating each action of those below them in a vertical hierarchy becomes nonsensical.

[...]

If American companies could achieve the right balance between grass-roots initiative and centralized control, between the pursuit of noble missions and quarterly profits, the results could be a management system that would be very hard for competitors to copy. Chinese companies, for example, would find it much harder, if not impossible, to adopt management models that challenge their own brand of top-down management, a cross between Confucius and Mao.

As insightful as Mr. Hamel’s book is, it’s surprising that it has attracted so little attention since being published in October. One part of the explanation is that it represents an assault on business schools, which obviously specialize in training managers who go on to enjoy rich salaries. Mr. Hamel has the audacity to point out that some of the best, most innovative ideas in business these days are not coming from business schools, but from people who never went to B-school. Every hierarchy, it seems, scorns fresh thinking.

Peter Drucker once asserted that management is a necessary evil, and the organization should have no more of it than absolutely necessary. But in our management-besotted time, when CEOs are being granted astronomical packages, the cult of the CEO gene has grown with the number of commas in their paychecks.

I don't believe in this collection of folklore. And yes, while I do believe that organizational DNA is partly inherited from CEOs -- Steve Jobs and Bill Gates leap to mind -- the successful companies of the future will be increasingly egalitarian, with more control shifting into the hands of individuals, starting with daily decisions about everyday work at a project or transactional level.

At the same time, we are living in strangely neo-conservative times. The cult of the CEO is going to take a long time to degrade, like plutonium released by weapons testing. We will have to wait for two things to happen: the toxic sludge to slowly be covered by silt, and a new belief system to take over within organizations.

I believe that our tools will play a big role in this, as we come to operate around a new mindset about networks, relationships, influence, and distributed action. Change will come from what the management-obsessed call the bottom, and which we, the edglings, think of as the edge.

links for 2007-12-30

• Wikipedia warriors hit delete
  Is Wikipedia really open, or do the wiki-police cull too aggressively.
  (tags: wikipedia wikis pointer:steve+rubel)
• RIAA’s Target In 2008: You
  RIAA trying to argue in a court case that ripping legally purchased CDs for personal use -- like iPod -- is illegal. Horse pucky.
  (tags: riaa music ipod piracy)
• Will The iPod Kill Blockbuster? - Forbes.com
  Apple to take on Blockbuster and Netflix, renting movies from Fox
  (tags: apple fox ipod itunes blockbuster netflix)
• BBC NEWS | Technology | Web icon set to be discontinued
  AOL is shuttering Netscape Navigator, a classic example of fumbling the future. They recommend Firefox.
  (tags: netscape aol browser+wars firefox mozilla)

Matthew Ingram on Wal-Mart And Scalable Experience

Matthew Ingram gets to the core message from Wal-Mart's abortive attempts in downloaded movies, paraphrasing Ian Rogers of Yahoo Music:

Inconvenience doesn’t scale.

When providers of services structure user experience to be painfully annoying or unusable, people will stay away in droves.

What was Wal-Mart thinking? "We have 800K visitors a day, so..." They thought they could muscle their way in, and force a broken experience down the throats of dumb consumers.

Scalable experience -- like iTunes and Kindle -- will be about breaking down barriers to adoption and improving user experience by some quantum leap.

Google Reader Sharing: Getting Social Scale Wrong

Google's Chrix Finne (love the name!) posted about Google's attempts to correct the social scale glitch inherent in their new Sharing capabilities:

We've gotten a lot of helpful feedback about our new sharing feature. We'd hoped that making it easier to share with the people you chat with often would be useful and interesting, but we underestimated the number of users who were using the Share button to send stories to a limited number of people. We're looking at ways to make sharing more granular and flexible, but in the meantime there are several ways to share items without letting all of your Google Talk friends see them (you can also add or remove friends via Gmail or Google Talk).

The combination of Gtalk friends and the 'share' capability led to people actually sharing stuff with their Gtalk contacts. But prior to the inclusion of Gtalk buddies, people used the share mechanism as a 'star' replacement, never expecting people to find the URL. A lot of people have guffawed about this, like Paul Kedrotsky:

Paul Kedrosky: Google, Security by Obscurity, etc..

It was just a dopey feature, poorly implemented, and badly documented. In other words, it was normal software. And when Google finally, you know, made the Sharing feature share things -- it linked your sharing feed to your address book -- people got all pissy because a feature created to drive blind sharing of content with relative strangers began making it easier to blindly share content with relative strangers.

But the real issue is Google not understanding social scale. All people in my Gtalk list are not equal. I don't necessarily want to share everything with everybody. What is really necessary is a way to segment the contacts or the items to be shared or -- best of all -- both.

Their suggestion is to share items based on tags, rather than the items themselves: each tag or starred item will get it's own page and URL.

I think this is coming at things the wrong way. It's not the items, it's the buddies.

My recommendation: allow us to tag our contacts, as a means to controlling things short of making them fully public. If I tag Euan with 'social tools' I am implying that any Reader item tagged 'social tools' should be shared with him. And you don't have to make the pages public: you could require folks to login to see shared items that are not fully public. If I tag something 'secret' and have tagged no one 'secret', then no one would see it. Of course, I could choose to make 'social tools' fully public, but that is an escape from social scale.

As David Weinberger once commented, "every tag implies a community" -- meaning a community of people sharing the use of the tag. For Google Reader to start to have more of a community feel, the Googleites need to consider shared space: not just this sharing on a node by node basis. Tags could open that up, just as the Technorati folks have tried to do, based on authors tagging their own work. However, readers tagging is likely to be just as interesting. And, oh, Google could also pull the tags from the posts, if they wanted.

This is an example where simply merging capabilities from formerly unintegrated services leads to unintended consequences. Google should think long and hard about Reader, Blog Search, and GTalk integration, and do something big instead of blundering into this sort of kerfuffle.

links for 2007-12-21

• A Pause From Death - New York Times
  The countries in the U.N. against outlawing the death penalty as official barbarism: "The United States, as usual, lined up on the other side, with Iran, China, Pakistan, Sudan and Iraq. Together this blood brotherhood accounts for more than 90 percent of
  (tags: death penalty, united nations)
• PR Squared - The Bastardization Of Social Media by Todd Defren
  "I was beginning to smell a rat. [...] They didn’t want to be part of the conversation; they wanted to be the topic of the conversation."
  (tags: todd+defren social+media)

Vancouver 12 December

I am recording some shows for Leo LaPorte's TWiT this week, in Vancouver. Anyone want to have dinner Wednesday evening?

links for 2007-12-16

• Journalism.co.uk :: US local site adapts to Twitter format for breaking news
  The Web is reforming the greater world, 140 characters at a time.
  (tags: twitter, newspapers, sms)
• Kucinich: "I Hope That You're Going To Talk About More Than A Tongue Stud." - Horserace
  Kucinich's wife is gorgeous, and the tongue stud (or ring?) makes for some salacious journalism.
  (tags: dennis kucinich, elizabeth tongue stud, ring, quadrennium)

Google Reader with Gtalk Contacts

Chrix Finn announced a new feature of Google Reader, an integration with Gtalk:

[from Reader and Talk are Friends!]

One of my favorite uses for Reader is to share interesting stuff with my friends. I click "Share" whenever I find an interesting item, be it hilarious or serious. This way, all my friends can subscribe to my shared items (and I to theirs), and we can easily see if a friend has found something interesting. This can be inconvenient, as I have to distribute my shared items link to my friends and vice-versa.

So, we've linked up Reader with Google Talk (also known as chat in Gmail) to make your shared items visible to your friends from Google Talk. Once you've logged into Reader and been notified of the change, these friends will be able to see your shared items in the Reader left-hand navigation area under "Friends' shared items". We've provided an option to clear your shared items in case you don't want your friends to see what you've shared in the past. We've also added a Settings page so you can choose which friends you see and invite friends who aren't yet sharing to try it out.

Google Reader with Gtalk Contacts, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Well, I like to share too. This looks a lot like the Nerdvana project I was doing with AOL earlier in the year. I am very interested in what my network is reading and commenting on, so this is very interesting indeed.

The design is a bit strange: why give up so much real estate at the top of the shared items to Matthew's head shot, and the blurb to the right -- "You have been automatically ..." -- is a big waste of space. I would expand the buddy list area with the profile info, and a tiny 'hide matthew' controller that would Ajax in and out of existence by mousing over it.

T-Mobile Blocks Twitter: Enclosing The Commons

The news that T-Mobile is blocking Twitter, so that T-Mobile subscribers cannot update their status remotely, is bad news on several levels.

First of all, the immediate issue is the disruption of service, and the annoyance factor involved for those users.

The greater issue is the power play involved, where a cellular provider -- who has been granted a license to use our radio spectrum by our government -- believes that they can turn off a popular service without any debate or notice.

This is an example of enclosing the commons -- those in power abusing their position and limiting our access to shared resources that they have been designated to manage by the government. In Edwardian England, the gentry often turned the shared commons of villages throughout the country into farmland, displacing the rural citizens from an area from which they had gained food, wood, thatch, and other necessities. These well-off landowners became rich through war-time food production, while the yeomanry were displaced for a few shillings, and had to accept jobs on the farms, paid what the landowners determined adequate.

This is an example of an abuse of power that -- in principle -- we should look to the government to counter: specifically the FCC. However, with Bush II in the White House, we can expect no help from that quarter.

Nope. Just like the Facebook Beacon mess, this will have to be a public hue-and-cry: we, the Edglings, must speak truth to power.

T-Mobile: Whatever rights you think you have, you are abusing them. You are clueless. You will have to back down from this stupid policy before it becomes a public relations disaster. But you will never ever, no matter what actions you take now, get a nickel of my money, ever again.

Placely: A New Build, Cured At Least One Major Design Flaw

I got a message from the CEO of Placely through the service:

[via Placely]

Hi Stowe --

My name is Denis Khoo and I am the CEO of Placely. I wanted to personally extend a warm welcome to you.

We saw your comment about Placely on your blog, and took immediate action. We just released a new build last night, and you are the first to be informed of this. I hope you enjoy the latest build, and we appreciate any opinions and suggestions you might have. We want to do whatever it takes to make the application useful for frequent travelers such as yourself.

Happy travels!

Regards,
Denis Khoo

I had dissed the product, because, right off the bat, I determined that the only way to find upcoming trips was to wander through a month-by-month style calendar. Well; they have remedied that:

Placely ~ Travel Calendar, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

So now I guess I will have to take a deeper walk through the solution, and see what it offers in comparison to Dopplr and TripIt. As I recently wrote, I am using both of those apps now, for different and complementary reasons.

Knol = Unit Of Knowledge?

One errant thought about the Google knol announcement: they are suggesting that the work 'knol' represents a unit of knowledge.

[from Official Google Blog: Encouraging people to contribute knowledge by Udi Manber]

[...] a new, free tool that we are calling "knol", which stands for a unit of knowledge.

And by associating this 'unit' with authoritative articles, they implication is that the natural container for a pinch of knowledge is an article, or a post, as we bloggers might say.

I am not arguing too strenuously, but I think that knowledge is embedded in rich conversations, not in tiny little pills. The cross linkages that exist in the blogosphere is where the muses live, that's where the ghost in the machine is lurking: not in the nodes, but in the connections between them.

I recall that after Shirley MacLaine wrote about ESP and other parapsychological mumbo-jumbo, someone quipped that the unit of aura strength should be called 'MacLaines'. Couldn't the Google guys come up with a figure of great knowledge, like Plato or Einstein, to name the unit of knowledge after, like we did for physical units like watts or teslas?

Word Of The Week: Random Acts Of Traction

James Governor inspired Hugh McLeod to coin Random Acts of Traction as a description of breakthroughs in engagement with others.

Google Knol Attacks The Wiki Ethos At The Heart Of Wikipedia

One of the reasons I like blogs is that they are written by individuals: at least the good ones are. A specific perspective on some issue is presented, without the necessity for a review or editorial process, except for whatever the author wants to impose on his or her self.

This is also one of the reasons that I don't really groove on wikis: they are a collectivized, blendo kind of medium, where individual voice is ablated by the passage on many hands on many keyboards. While the result is interesting, it is seldom as clean or clear as the insights of an individual. I am not spitting on collective intelligence, note: just the wiki medium as the way to get there.

Google's newly announced knol is a direct assault on the collective encyclopedia model embedded in Wikipedia, and seems to be based, at least in part, on the same notions as my love for blogs and dislike for wikis.

[from Official Google Blog: Encouraging people to contribute knowledge by Udi Manber]

[...]

The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word "knol" as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we'll do the rest.

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

The lack of individual authority in Wikipedia, and the corresponding tyranny of the bureaucratic infighting around what is and is not true, is a problem that Google wants to counter in a Googlesque way: the most authorative authors of knols -- the articles that will comprise the knol system -- will get compensated by advertising revenue. Authority will be directly translated into cash, in a nearly frictionless knowledge marketplace, in the Google worldview, it seems.

Aside from implicitly challenging the primacy of the Wikipedia approach to amassing all the world's knowledge, Google has shot a fire arrow directly into the dreams of offerings like Squidoo and Mahalo, which attempt -- without Google's stature and search dominance -- to attract authors and indexers to make sense of the world for a fee, as well. But if you are going to write that authoritative post on social software or ancient Egyptian pornography, where do you think you'll get more traffic?

A second aspect of this announcement is the Google notion of "community tools", which are of the sort that support individual voice: comments, reviews, ratings. Not the 'surrender to the borg' tools of Wikipedia, where everyone can argue behind the scenes about what should or should not be included in the entry on Pork Bellies, but those arguments are not on the page, directly, and the process -- and its cadre of editors -- hold sway over the eventual content.

So Google is attempting to rejigger the fabric of the Web, and -- depending on your view -- to either correct a fundamental error in how knowledge is collected, found, evaluated, and distributed, or to undermine the encyclopedianist vision of Jimbo Wales and the Wikipedia minions.

The jury is out, but I hold in the social media vision best embodied by the blogosphere, where individual voices meet in a community framed by open discourse and open disagreement, not back-room politicking leading to a consensus realized in a Wikipedia entry.

Prior to Google stepping forward, no one with any real oomph has tried to challenge the Wikipedia orthodoxy.

Not that my participation will make a whit of difference, but I haven't spent any time crafting paragraphs in Wikipedia. However, I would certainly be interested in writing a few knols, that's for sure. And clearly, for knol to take off, a whole lot of people will have to feel the same.

Nick Carr concurs that this authorship dimension is the heart of the Google chalenge:

[from Google Knol takes aim at Wikipedia by Nick Carr]

The big distinction with Wikipedia is that Knol relies on individual authors rather than "the crowd." Each article, or "knol," will be signed and owned by the person who writes it, and articles on the same subject will compete with one another for viewer's eyes. In contrast, Wikipedia builds a single version of each article in a communal way with many edits by anonymous contributors.

A number of other thinkers I admire (Paul Kedrotsky, Matthew Ingram, etc.) see the economics of knol as potentially very destabilizing.

Umair Haque believes that Google's DNA will stop this project from really creating or serving a community, and therefore it will not challenge Wikipedia at all.

[from The Economics of Community, or How to pwn Google]

Udi thinks the problem is:

"...But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily discoverable."

Actually - that's the solution.

Because communities are deeply messy places: that's a deep part of how they create value. Denim lovers will never talk about, for example, their favorite jeans, in ways that will be "easily discoverable" - because the more you love something, the harder it is to fit your relationship with it into an algorithmically predetermined box.

In this messiness, funnily enough, they're not so different from markets. But where Google can harness the messiness of markets - it sees only disorder and chaos in communities.

That's unfortunate.

Because unless knol is a (true) market, network, or community - it stands absolutely no chance of competing with Wikipedia. It's economics are almost totally dominated - if not totally nonexistent.

Hmmm. I disagree. There is a large web world out here, with gazillions of people -- like me -- who are disinclined to play in the Wikipedia sandpile. While I agree that things can be messy, I don't think that the messiness of our understanding of the world is an implediment to Google's idea here. All that is necessary is people willing to author snippets within knol, and for others to read and rate them. That's the core dynamic of all social media-based activities on the web. Google is the just the first to be in a position to be able to make a credible effort to blogify human knowledge, just as Wikipedia has been working to wikify it.

I vote for blogifying, instead of wikifying.

Perhaps its going to turn out to be a fundamental split in human nature, like extroverts and introverts? Perhaps there's a place in the world for both models to work?

Playyoo Goes Live

Playyoo -- a new mobile casual game service -- has gone live. The service is free, although downloading games incurs fees from your cell provider.

[I have been consulting to the company on the product for several months, and I have both an emotional and financial relationship with the firm, so I am decidedly biased. We have some great things planned for 2008.]

There are many design features of Playyoo that are cool, especially the core design notion of a 'game stream' -- the sequence of rectangles across the top of the page -- which are filled by a combination of manual selection, friend's recommendations, or by selecting a blend of game types to automatically control new additions. David Mantripp, the principal designer of the service, has done a great job in this design, which is clean and uncluttered.

I have no friends on Playyoo yet, as I have just signed up. Please join me there.

The company is running a contest with cash prizes for best games with a first prize of $10,000. If you are a game designer or a hobbyist, you might want to jump in. Playyoo includes a Game Creator, so you could craft a game online and win big bucks. Give it a try.

links for 2007-12-14

• Throwing Out the Social Media Rulebook - Media Bullseye
  Chip Griffin is an idiot, proven by having Amanda Chapel, that sock puppet, applauding as the first comment to this screed.
  (tags: old media, pr, dinosaurs, social media)

Open Web Awards: Final Categories

I have been so scattered over the past few days that I've done a bad job keeping up with the blizzard of other categories in the Open Web Awards. Here are the remaining ones:

Category: Video Sharing

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Category: Start Pages

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Category: Places and Events

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Category: Music

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Category: Social Shopping

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Category: Mobile

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Category: Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Bob Carlton on The 10th Anniversary Of Blogging

[via email]

Greeting[s,] fellow bloggers. Next Monday, we all have an anniversary - our tenth. According to Wikipedia:

the term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger (http://www.robotwisdom.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorn_Barger) on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May of 1999. As of September 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 106 million blogs.

All of us blog - some for the chance to make our voice heard, some for the chance to connect, some to journal - some do it for no apparent reason (I am still trying to figure out my why). But whatever the reason - we blog, posting text and images and video.

Martha Stewart (or other folks who track these things) would tell that for the "proper" thing to do on the tenth anniversary of a relationship are

• any thing silver or blue.
• any gifts that are tin or aluminum. The pliability of tin and aluminum is a symbol of how a successful marriage needs to be flexible and durable and how it can be bent without being broken.
• daffodils. Trumpet-shaped daffodils represent joy, cheerfulness, and happiness

Just as there is no one way to blog, there is no one way to celebrate this momentous anniversary. Here are 3 ideas:

• post on the relationship(s) you have with your blog
• spotlight voices on the edges, 10 blogs that may be outside the view of most readers
• reflect on your first "date" - the blogger who inspired you to blog and/or your own first post

Happy anniversary too all of you (and to Jorn Barger, where ever he is) - and thanks for all the gifts you give by blogging !

P.S. - for the last 2 years, a number of us have done a Top % retrospective of posts over the last year ( http://thecorner.typepad.com/top5/ ) - if you are interested in being a part of this, I am hoping this year we can do it as a fund raiser for a great group in New Orleans - just click here (http://thecorner.typepad.com/give5now/) to be a part of this.

P.P.S. - please forward this to any one you feel would be interested in either opportunity.

bob carlton
blog: http://thecorner.typepad.com/bc/

Chris Messina on DiSo And Inside-Out Social Networks

Chris Is trying to clarify the ambitious agenda he has for DiSo, the distributed social network project:

[from The inside-out social network]

I think the objective should not be to obviate Facebook or MySpace, but to build systems and to craft technologies that will benefit and make such sites more sustainable and profitable, but only if they adopt the best practices and ideals of openness, individual choice and freedom of mobility.

Sounds like Chris wants to structure things so that we hold on to bits of social information, and when we interaction with applications that are DiSo-aware, they would be able to access our 'social agendas' with our permission.

Shares similarities with the 'shared components' argument I made recently (see The Architecture Of Sociality: Building In Openness).

Blognation Is Dead

According to Mobilejones, Blognation has been shuttered.

Sam Sethi has thrown in the towel. There’s no place to take Blognation given the reality of zero funding and mounting debt. No bills were paid and the train wreck has run over Sethi. He announced today that he will not continue and steps down from Blognation.

Ugly, ugly mess.

Scoble Headed For Fast Company

Scoble has again proven that the rumor mills are grinding out the truth, just as they did the last time around when he denied he was leaving Microsoft until the last day (see Scoble Is Moving On). This time, he is leaving PodTech, just as everyone has been suggesting for months. He is headed for Fast Company, another foray in the public media marketplace. Podtech is apparently headed for the wayside, having burned $7.5M in funding.

I have suggested (see Scoble Is Imploding) that Robert would likely be happiest/most effective back in a corporate blogging role, but so far I guess the Fortune 500 are still ambivalent about having as prominent an omsbudsman as Robert around.

Robert, what does that mean for your planned activities at CES? There is nothing on your blog about any of this.

@Locals: Localized Twittered Chatrooms

Matt Terenzio has launched a neat Twitter app: @locals, which is a localized chatroom based on tweats directed to the '@locals' Twitter account.

I have set my Twitter account's location to 'Not LeWeb3' and will be sending along a few tweets to '@locals' during the day to try it out. Jump in if you want.

Matt Terenzio is the guy who I sold the podosphere.com domain to, and he recently jumped on 'edglings.com'! I should have bought it, I guess. I also discovered today that my pal, Jeremie Miller, has purchased 'edglings.org'. Hmmm. I guess I can be both flattered and pissed off, at the same time.

Terenzio suggests we should relaunch Edgeio with the domain. I have a few other ideas, better ones, I hope.

Enterprise Software Is Unsexy: Because It's Not About Individuals, But Groups

Scoble sparked an interesting torrent with hisWhy enterprise software isn’t sexy post, recently:

Bill Gates seems to bemoan the fact that enterprise software isn’t covered by blogs and journalists. Instead, he points out, that we like talking about consumer software.

It’s a good point, especially since business software like that from Oracle, SAP, Microsoft etc makes a TON of money.

So, why is it so?

In my case, the basic orientation of enterprise software is a generation behind so-called consumer software in one critical architectural dimension.

The basic orientation of 'consumer' software puts the individual first, at the center of the world. I have written and spoken about this dozens of times (Social = Me First, The Individual Is The New Group, and others). Think of the organization of Facebook, Dopplr, or Flickr, or a hundred other successful social apps.

Enterprise software starts with the premise that the user is an employee, or member of the marketing department, or a minion in the IT department. The users rights and capabilities are tied to membership, not to individual identity.

This may seem like a necessity, but I don't think it is. I am involved in the design of several work-oriented applications in which individual identity is still first, and membership in projects, universities, or companies is second.

I thnk we will see this design principle in more enterprise apps in the future, once people actually learn to see the difference. Today, I doubt that one in a hundred bloggers tracking the Web 2.0 space are aware of that distinction, so it's no surprise that people in the enterprise or the average Joe doesn't get it. Or Bill Gates.

Open Web Awards - A Bunch Of Other Categories

I was out of touch over the weekend (redeye flight Friday, family doings over the weekend) and I am just now getting caught up with the Open Web Awards. A number of other categories are now open for voting:

Category: Applications and Widgets

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Category: Social News and Social Bookmarking

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Category: Social Search

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Category: Sports and Fitness

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Category: Photo Sharing

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Vote soon, for each of these categories will be closing in a few days.

Blog Council Goes Blogless?

So, a bunch of corporate bloggers at "Major" corporations got together and formed the Blog Council. Ok, cool.

The Blog Council is where the people who run large companies’ blogs share best practices and new ideas. Most of what we do is in our member community.

I (and Brian Solis, at least) get a kick out of the fact they have no blog there. Maybe they just don't want to share with everybody else.

LinkedIn Intelligent Application Announcement: Too Little Too Late?

The folks at LinkedIn have announced a redesign and their API for developing APIs. Uh, wait a minute: they announced that months ago, didn't they? Well, I guess they are starting to know a bit more about how it will work, since they are playing nice with the Google Open Social repository.

I have lumped LinkedIn (along with Plaxo and Xing) into the "nice try, but yawn" category for so long that it was difficult to even contemplate logging in there. In fact, years ago, I asked LinkedIn to redline me, so I wouldn't even get invitations to join anymore.

Like Matthew Ingram, I think many folks who have LinkedIn accounts don't use the service actively, except when looking for a job:

[from LinkedIn and Facebook: Collision course?]

I know that many of my friends who are either looking for work or have been in the past say they get a lot out of LinkedIn, and I’m not saying it doesn’t have value — I think it does, although like my friend Mark Evans I rarely use it. It’s also good to see the network moving forward, even if most of what it is offering seems a little old (I mean, profile pictures? Come on). But the addition of things like a news aggregator for members and on-site messaging could make it more sticky.

I don't see Facebook as being threatened by LinkedIn trying to shrug off the cobwebs and get back into the battle for professional social network. It's going to have to be something better than this. Facebook doesn't have the right value proposition, yet, either, and maybe won't ever, but in the meantime they have a gazillion active users everyday and thousands of people building apps on their platform.

I like Anne Zelenka's comments:

[from LinkedIn Needs to ReachOut - GigaOM]

LinkedIn isn’t moving forward aggressively enough to unlock the value of their data and services; they need to bring them to the places where professional networking happens. “We’re taking a measured path because our audience is a professional audience,” Senior Product Director Adam Nash told me. But successful professionals know that the biggest risk you can take is to be too cautious.

Too little, and too late.

Queuing Theory: Eliminating Left-Hand Turns And Empty Cabs

The NY Times this week has their wonderful Annual Year In Ideas in the New York Times magazine. One that caught my eye was about UPS working to eliminate left-hand turns, in order to save both time and money, and indirectly, go gentler on the environment:

[from Left-Hand-Turn Elimination - New York Times by Joel Lovell]

[...]

Last year, according to Heather Robinson, a U.P.S. spokeswoman, the software helped the company shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and has reduced CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons. So what can Brown do for you? We can’t speak to how good or bad they are in the parcel-delivery world, but they won’t be clogging up the left-hand lane while they do their business.

Applying queuing theory in a green way may be simply good business.

As I was heading to the Oakland airport the other day by cab, I was thinking about the ecological impacts. I usually take the BART, but I was more pressed for time than usual. I asked the cabbie how often he drove there, and he replied only once or twice a day. When I had asked an Oakland cabbie a few weeks ago, he said he drove across the bridge to San Francisco four or five times a day. And then, in both cases, back to where they started, driving empty on the return leg.

I don't know the complete numbers, but I bet there are several thousand cabs in the Bay Area that travel once a day or more to other locales -- such as airports, hotels, business meetings, sporting events -- from which they are barred from taking return fares.

The rationale is that a densely populated city like San Francisco would be crushed with cabs from San Mateo, or Marin county, since the drivers would naturally gravitate to where the people are. So the many municipalities in the Bay Area have municipal laws to block outside cabbies from picking up -- but not dropping off -- in their towns. These laws were enacted in an era when the ecology wasn't a serious concern.

Now, of course, we care very much about all that carbon we are dumping into the air.

These laws have to be rethought, using the same sorts of queuing theory that UPS applies. For example, imagine a regional system where cabbies were licensed to work anywhere in the Bay Area. All the cabs would be part of an open network in which traffic information and other helpful data -- like average wait time for cabs at the airport -- would be made available, and each cab company could also have private infromation distributed to its drivers, like pick-up orders.

They would start their shift wherever they pick up their cabs, and would be free to dopr off and pick up anywhere within the region. However, they would have to follow rules designed to minimize congestion in denser areas, to keep cabs distributed, and to minimize empty cabs on the roads, polluting and increasing traffic:

1. Once a cab drops off a fare, they have to go to one of the three closest cab stands, and park, with the engine off.
2. If they do not get a pick-up or a walk-up client within some period of time (based on location and time of day), they would be directed to cab stand in another nearby sector of the region with a greater likelihood of business. And then, the rules of step one apply, again.

But, under no circumstances would we have thousands of empty cabs going from one municipality back to another. It's bad enough to pay $100 to take a cab from San Jose Airport to San Francisco, as I did a few years ago; but it's even worse to think of the empty cab driving back an hour and twenty minutes through rush hour traffic.

This is exactly the sort of thing that Swartzenegger is good at. I hope he turns his attention on it, uses San Francisco as a model, and exhorts the world to follow. Likewise Al Gore, who is is at least an occasional San Franciscan, should pound the lectern about this a bit.

And I bet the cabbies would welcome this, because they would make more money. They pay for their gas, out of their profits. The time they spend driving back from San Francisco to Oakland is factored into the meter, sort of. But the longer you are driving without a fare the odds that you will be stuck in traffic with the meter off goes up. So they would benefit.

In principle, some of the savings could be passed along to the consumer, as well, since there would be less time when cabs are burning gas, wearing out tires, etc., with the meter off. Some of that could be returned to consumers as lower fares.

This could be a true win-win-win: better for the cabbies, better for the consumers, and better for the environment in two major ways: lessened congestion and decreased pollution.

How come I haven't heard anyone suggesting this before? Does it require a master's degree in computer science to figure this out?

Please spread the meme, which I am calling No Empty Cabs.

links for 2007-11-30

• The Twitter Toolset: 50+ Guides, Hacks, and Scripts
  Christina Laun attempts to pull together a mazillion Twitter resources, and still manages to leave out Snitter and Tweetr.
  (tags: twitter christina+laun)
• Anne Truitt Zelenka » On Covering Web 2.0 for GigaOM
  Anne is a real person, no matter what Fred Wilson says.
  (tags: anne+zelenka fre)
• Competing for the creative class « Jon Udell
  "Is it elitist to focus on the needs of the creative class? I don’t think so. Every citizen cares about housing, transportation, safety, culture, and IT enablement. If cities do better in those areas in order to attract the creative class, everybody win
  (tags: jonudell)
• Failure Rates In Early Stage Venture Deals | Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing
  Fred Wilson runs the numbers on his own deals: surprise! He's smarter than the average VC.
  (tags: fred+wilson union+square+ventures vc)

Yelp: Leading The Way In The New Rudeness

I find this new model of having parties reprehensible. I guess it works like this: you invite 200 people expecting 150 to say yes. If 200 say, "Cool," you send emails out to 50 of them saying sorry: the party was oversubscribed. Maybe better luck next year.

Newest example is the Yelp SF party:

SF Party to undisclosed-recipients, date Nov 29, 2007 7:57 PM subject Update on Yelp Holiday Party mailed-by yelp.com hide details 7:57 PM (55 minutes ago) Reply Hi there,

Thanks for RSVPing for the Yelp Holiday Party and we apologize for the delay in getting back to you.

Unfortunately, we’ve reached capacity and therefore cannot add you to the final guest list. As you can imagine, we would have loved to have accommodated everyone that took the time to RSVP, but unfortunately due to space limitations and an overwhelming response, we filled up very quickly.

That said, we hope to see you in 2008, of course on Yelp, but perhaps even as a future member of our Yelp Elite Squad for whom we’ll have plenty of exclusive and more intimate events over the new year.

Happy Holidays,

Jessica T. and the rest of the Yelp team.

Aw! Blow me. Don't "invite me" if it's not really an invite, dickheads.

Google Experimental Search: Building On Co-op?

Google's existing dominance of the web rests directly upon the power of search. Most people honestly don't know that Google's search algorithm is based on a formula that includes text indexes (yes, the words on the pages matters), but also involves link count: the number of times people have 'voted' for the page by linking to it also matters.

In essence, the Google search machinery has always depended on the millions of individual links that people create in order to make sense of the Web. Now, they are involved in a new experimental project than might go much further in harnessing human grey matter directly into the architecture of search.

Google Experimental Search, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

This experimental search project, a search page from which is displayed above, employs Digg-like voting on results, user reordering of results, and user recommendations for better pages. At this time, these actions have only local, user effects. However, one can extrapolate that in the future, individual results could be consolidated and analyzed, leading to a user-augmented search result.

Duncan Riley at Techcrunch says If you saw this one coming, give yourself a very large prize. Ok, I confess that I saw it coming.

As recently as a few weeks ago, working with a social search start-up, I suggested that their plans were dubious since it was inevitable that Google would incorporate more and more social information into search, and that no start-up could catch them. I more or less said the same thing to the folks at Hakia, when they were showing me their semantic search tool at the Web 2.0 Summit.

And I don't think that this is out of left field, Duncan, since the fabric of the Web includes both the text analysis from indexing, and the links, which are purely social gestures left behind for Google's spider to find. Also, Google Co-op has been around for a few years now, it is all about user customization of search.

links for 2007-11-29

• A VC: I Don't Want To Consume Media That I Can't Interact With
  I'm with Fred, and Scoble, who he references. Which is a major flaw in Kindle.
  (tags: kindle amazon fred+wilson robert+scoble)

/Message Stats: Over 30K RSS Subscribers

Analyze :: Feed Stats Dashboard, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

And over 75K views in the past 30 days.

Zoho Writer Offline Via Google Gears

Zoho Writer - Online Word Processor - Offline Edition, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Well, I reinstalled an earlier version of Firefox because I couldn't seem to get much working with the 3.0 Beta.

One side effect is that I could reinstall Google Gears, and then test the offline capability recently announced for Zoho Writer. Seems to work like a champ.

Interesting that Zoho got their offline documents editor working earlier than Google.

Brian Solis on Social Media Press Releases

I was involved in a kerfuffle early in 2007 regarding the Social Media Press Release, sort of. I say sort of because initially my comments were not directed toward the SMR concept, but some not-very-insightful comments about social media in general that were made by advocates of the SMR (see Enough Already: Getting Social Media All Wrong, Social Media and Press Relations: The Press Release Is Dead, and then a cascade of other posts like The Perfect Example Of PR People Not Getting It, and then Shel Holtz Is The Perfect Example Of PR People Not Getting It).

Brian Solis, a guy who does get it, and who has transcended his PR roots, is laying it all out there. Although he doesn't state it in these terms, he's basically saying that for PR to be effective in the blogosphere, it not only has to be directed at the blogosphere, it not only has to look, taste and feel like blogging, it really has to be honest-to-god blogging. The Social Press Release is then just a way of saying, blog it.

[from PR 2.0]

The Social Media Releases I have experimented with look nothing like the original template [Tom Defren's, I believe - Stowe], but they help tell a story in a BS-free format without all of the spintastic hype, usual leadership posturing, and self-congratulating comments.

If press releases weren't so powerful, then we wouldn't have that stat of over 50% of IT customers sourcing press releases as their main source of information. Nor would we have two-to three of the top wire distribution services listed as top sources in the Techmeme Top 100 Leaderboard.

And let me ask you this. How many times have you made the front page of digg?

I'm with Brian, although I wish he would spit it out. SMRs as originally dreamed up are dumb, and smart PR folks are adopting blogging as a means of getting the stories out.

What I wrote in January in the argument with Shel Holtz still holds:

[From Shel Holtz Is The Perfect Example Of PR People Not Getting It]

[from Shel Holtz's comments on The Perfect Example Of PR People Not Getting It]

So, let me see if I have this right:

1) The only fodder for conversation in the blogosphere is other blogs, and no other media are worth talking about.

I only said that people in the blogosphere were using blogs to have a conversation. They could be conversing about anything, including the New York Times, last night's football game, or information received via press release. But the notion that companies are part of the conversation simply by pushing out press releases -- of whatever flavor: social or anti-social -- is just dumb. You don't join a conversation by shouting what you want to say over and over and ignoring what people are talking about. Sorry.

2) An employee blogging about something pertinent to his organization needs to (a) include all the boring information most people don't care about (but some do) in his post or (b) leave out information (that may be required by regulatory agencies) -- information that fit very neatly into the "dead" tool called a press release.

People can put whatever they want -- or are required by law to include -- in anything they publish. My point is that people should drop much of the crap that defines press releases -- third party voice, bullshit quotes that no one ever actually said, and so on. How come we continue to have this ongoing debate and none of the PR folks ever focus on these aspects of press releases? The basic tone and format is stupid, and no one will discuss it. Instead, they want to argue about my advocacy for blogs as being adequate to transmit information about companies to the world in a fast and simple (and perhaps better) manner, compared to news wire-oriented press releases.

3) The "press" -- all those local weekly newspapers and trade publications and mid-market TV stations and websites from media outlets like the New York Times -- can just find another way to get information despite the fact that the press release worked perfectly well for them because the press release has been declared "dead" by people who "get it" better than they do.

Newpapers are drastically diminishing in importance in the world. There are laying off people at a prodigious rate. Warren Buffett has declared that the industry is dead and just hasn't realized it yet. The argument that the press release is the right mechanism to transmit important information to the world because it works so well for newspapers, is something like saying that oats are what we should put into the gas tanks of cars because it works so well for horses. The same can be said for conventional TV, which just had the lowest viewer numbers, proportional to population, in decades.

4) Companies requiring an official statement of record can just invent something new because the press release is "dead" but a blog post won't satisfy that requirement.

I have made my argument in several earlier posts about the need for an identity broker service to validate comments made by company representatives. None of the PR folks have yet picked up that thread and discussed it. I guess they are simply stuck, and can't move into a possible future without press releases, while the rest of us can envision it with no trouble.

5) One tool -- a blog post -- fulfills every need, even if it means jamming a round peg into a square hole. If it ain't conversation, it ain't acceptable. (Bad news indeed for fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)

I never said that blogs fulfill every need, but it is a group of PR folks that are trying to socialize press releases, and bring them into the blogosphere. Perhaps there are some people in corporations that would like to have bloggers write about what they are doing?

6) There is no reason an organization should ever broadcast anything. Ever.

My point about broadcast is that people don't trust broadcasted messages anymore. Companies can do whatever they want, but I, and the rest of the world, now have the ability to get our information via other modes of communication: the power has shifted to the edge. They don't control the means of our communications. Companies may feel that they have good reasons for broadcasting messages: economics, expediency, whatever. In general, however, people will tune out or simply discredit such communication as a cheap attempt to manipulate the recipients of the "message" -- the "audience" -- without fully attempting to engage them in dialog.

So, there, I said it. Again.

And Brian did too, sort of.

Olof Werngren Breaks Up With Plazes

A sad day, when an old relationship with an inconstant application -- in this case Plazes -- comes to the break-up point:

[from Plazes Broke My Heart]

[...]

Also I know I’m worth something better and I don’t see a future with kids, dog, volvo and stuff together with Plazes. That’d just be sick.

Thanks for our time together, it’s not all bad memories. I’ll be collecting my stuff and removing the widgets from the blogs and staff pages now. Have a great life. Please don’t call me until you’ve sorted out your personal issues.

Also includes a description of where things went bad.

Seriously, Plazes redesign is a mess, They need to get back to basic stuff.

I know that there were way too many maps in the N-1 version, but now there are none! Isn't have a map the point?

Yes, it was time to move past the association with Wifi routers, and allow folks to state where they are. But too much of what worked in the original is gone.

The direction that needs the most work -- I think -- is the social interactions of people around place. More of that, please. It's not enough to try to become Twitter, with a stream of updates. We have that already! We need something else, something at the interface between place and identity.

Call me guys, I would be happy to work with you on it.

Niche Social Network Nomination: Dopplr

I am an avid user of Dopplr (reviewed at length in Dopplr Case Study From Building Social Applications Workshop), a social networking solution for travelers. While everyone travels sometimes, this one is for the road warriors, like me.

So I will definitely by nominating this one for the OpenWebAwards in the Niche Social Network category.

Coffee Drinks Illustrated By Lokesh Dhakar

Coffee Drinks Illustrated | Lokesh Dhakar, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Great design, good informatics.

OpenWebAwards.com Nominations Are Open

Read all about it!

I am going to approach the nominations for the OpenWebAwards in an open, egalitarian, and lazy way: I am going to invite you -- whoever is reading this post, and your cousin, Mike -- to submit nominations.

I will also start doing a few, and over the next week, I will filter down to the top nominations, where top is loosely defined at ones with the most recommendations that I don't think suck.

Here are the categories:

1. Mainstream and Large Scale Networks
2. Applications and Widgets
3. Social News and Social Bookmarking
4. Social Search
5. Sports and Fitness
6. Photo Sharing
7. Video Sharing
8. Start Pages
9. Places and Events
10. Music
11. Social Shopping
12. Mobile
13. Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks

Let the commenting begin!

Proposal For BlogTalk 2008

Man. The Blogtalk conference has the most convoluted application process that I have experienced in many years. And why do I need to provide an entire 'paper'? Isn't that just a bit old fashioned for a social media conference?

I favor the approach that the folks at Reboot took this past summer, where people proposed sessions -- of their own or to be presented by others -- and other Rebooters commented, attributed and fooled with them in general. A big sloppy social mess.

Anyway, the proposal solution -- something called Easy Chair? -- was set up to require a paper to be uploaded, which I am just not going to do. However, here's the abstract for the talk I would like to give at BlogTalk, which I guess was lost in the submission process:

The Missing Touch Points In Social Media: Fragments And Conjectures

There are a lot of social touch points in the social media experiences, and most of them are not served by tools, or to the extent that they are, it is a fragmentary and disjoint experience. In my presentation, I plan to examine these touch points, and consider how today's tools do -- and don't -- cover the fabric of social interaction around social media. I plan to look at blogging tools themselves, as well as point solutions like Flock, me.dium, del.icio.us, and many others.

A conference like blogtalk should be more open and loose that it feels like to me. If the reviewers are inclined toward a proposal, they could invite the author to expand on it. Writing a two page document is a lot of work to throw into the sausage machine.

Zoho Writer Adds Offline Capability, I Think

Firefox, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I was alerted to the release of a new version of Zoho Writer that supports offline capabilities, via Google Gears. They had a version until today that only allowed read-only access to documents offline; today's release supports offline editing and sync. But I couldn't install the Google Gears add-on for Firefox, and it is incompatible with Safari.

So I guess it works.... Have to wait for someone in this value chain to fix things. Maybe I will have to go back to an earlier release of Firefox, and drop the beta 3.0b1.

Sigh. Demonstrates the issues with many moving parts, where Zoho relies on Google Gears: Zoho can't just release a new version of Gears, since it's out of their control, and Google could care less, really, about Zoho, who is a competitor.

Apple Censoring Negative Threads?

According to Tony Celeste, Apple's Leopard problems have led to censoring support threads:

[...]

There are a variety of other reports, including a Mac Pro becoming completely inoperative after a Leopard upgrade. One user asked, Is it me, or is Leopard just a mess?. Apple locked the topic, preventing replies. Another user echoed my sentiments at the start of this article by asking Is ANY part of Leopard ready for release? Worst product from Apple so far. Here's a shock, the entire thread was censored. And amazingly, despite all of the above, and everything else we've seen go wrong since Leopard debuted 3 weeks ago, at apple.com/mac/, an Apple ad on the left side of the page says "Leopard just works".

Ugh. Even at a seemingly enlightened company, people are afraid of open dialogue, and push marketing hype instead of interacting with users.

Blogging Is Still Primitive

I had decided some time ago that I wanted to write up the Dopplr case study from the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, which I finally completed yesterday (see here). What a pain it turned out to be!

I thought it would be straightforward: convert the 20 or so slides into graphics, upload them, write down more-or-less the words that I said at the workshop.

The conversion was easy. Everything else was a hassle.

First, uploading the graphics. I like to keep all my graphics on Flickr, so I have a single repository, and one that is independent of blogging platform, so I could move in the future if I want to. Flickr has a really nice Flash-based batch upload capability, which I can't get to work in Safari. So I uploaded the files using Firefox.

Flickr also supports posting an image to your blog, but not a batch of images. And cutting and pasting the URLs of a long series of images seemed like a drag. Principally because Flickr does not sequentially number the images being uploaded: they are randomly (for all intents and purposes) named.

Instead I bailed on the Flickr images, and manually uploaded the file in Typepad. I copied and pasted a single "img" link to one of the files and changed the number manually: they ranged from slide21 to slide42.

Anyway: one of the most obvious things to do on a blog, I would think, would be to embed a series of images (a vacation, a powerpoint, pictures of your flower bed, whatever) and comment on them. It turned out to be a pain in the neck.

The blog companies have a long way to go. Companies like Flickr have a long way to go supporting indigenous content like mine being distributed in some way aside from the basic models they now support.

Hugh MacLeod Goes Back To Basics

Hugh's story about his recent years is similar to mine. So I hear the echo in my head when he says that he wants to get back to the basic core, and refocus on his blog.

I have been rededicating myself to /Message in recent months. Like Gaping Void, it doesn't directly pay the bills, but it is the wellspring of everything else.

I will be continuing on with my various projects -- the Open University's Social:Learn project, where I have been leading the design effort for the past months , a new start-up in NYC, building another product of my design (about which I plan to start making real disclosures in 2008), and working with other interesting folks -- but I am going to make sure that I leave enough time in the mix to pursue my 'line of inquiry' here, at /Message. At several points in the past year I just took on too much, and my writing trailed off.

It's not a burden: it's constantly rewarding give-and-take. A wrestling match with my own devils, a friendly debate with friends, a marathon chase.

I was interviewed by some journalism student earlier this year, and when asked what was the single most important business decision that I had ever taken I responded "blogging." It has trumped every other action I have ever taken, including getting my master's in computer science, which I now consider second biggest.

So, as Thanksgiving comes to a close: Thank you.

Restoring Compress PDF In Leopard

Install Compress PDF, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Some helpful soul, called himself Steve Jobs, left the URL to a download that restores Compress PDF functionality in Mac's Leopard OS release.

Here's the link: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/compresspdfworkflow.html.

Dopplr Case Study From Building Social Applications Workshop

At the recent Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin I presented a revamped version of the Building Social Applications workshop that I had previously given at Lift in Geneva and the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. I have touched on parts of the workshop in other posts (here and here), but this post focusses specifically on the case study and group exercise.

[I guess I have been flapping my mouth too much in Europe... starting to be strange when I am used as the example of what a conference is not going to be:

[from European Tech Tour: Web and Communities Event in Montreux by Fred Destin]

ETT is not meant to be leWeb3. Or LIFT. You won't meet Stowe Boyd doing a podcast about lifestreaming :-). It is a venture focused conference designed to put venture capitalists and local entrepreneurs in touch, and it did that extremely well.

The Case Study

So, the case study walks through Dopplr, a social travel web application. Dopplr is the perfect sort of beast for this kind of dissection, because it doesn't do very much -- at least not yet. It's like a microbe with only 27 genes.

We walked through the entire app, and then -- applying the tools that we discussed earlier in the workshop (see Theory And Practice Of Conceptual Design) -- we broke into groups, acting more or less like design consultants, and formulating recommendations for Dopplr.

I love the pixelated picture that Dopplr uses when someone who doesn't have access to your info (or hasn't logged in) looks at your Dopplr page.

---

Bugs: Flickr, Firefox, Safari

Flickr bug, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Just the newest headache to arise from Flickr's approach to entering tags.

Flickr allows you to upload batches of pictures, and you can use the (better) approach of comma-separated tags when entering the tags for the pictures. You can also enter tags that will be applied to the entire batch. However, Flickr simply takes the batch tags, and adds them to the end of the list of tags for each picture... without commas between the multiple tags being added in a batchwise fashion.

So, I had uploaded six or seven pictures, and tagged the batch reston thanksgiving, then tagged the various photos with specific tags, like luigi bosca, wine, malbec. The result? The last tag applied to each photo was treated as if it was one multiword tag, and you see the result in the image.

I had to go through the series of pictures and fix the tags, manually.

Ugh.

The answer is simple: don't slam the batch tags on the last tag. Add them one by one as new tags. Lazy programming.

The big answer is to shift to comma-separated tags consistently throughout, and drop the bad convention of blank separated tags.

The uploading of pictures to Flickr also involves another headache: Firefox is so unstable that I have stopped using it, except for uploading photos to Flickr. Safari doesn't support the nifty-cool batch uploader -- a Flash bug? -- but Firefox keeps seizing up whenever I have used it for 30 minutes or so. I am ping-ponging back and forth. Man, I am in browser hell.

JP Rangaswami on Why Facebook Is Different

JP has started a several day series on why Facebook is different from other social networks, specifically Linkedin and Xing:

[from Some Friday evening ruminations around Facebook et al | confused of calcutta]

[...]

Why is Facebook different? I don’t quite know, but it is. Stuff like MySpace and Bebo are overtly narcissistic, it’s all about how you express yourself. Facebook, on the other hand, is about relationships and conversations. I guess you can say that about LinkedIn as well, but it’s not the same thing. LinkedIn is a very narrow one-dimensional conversation. If you’re not looking to hire or be hired, it’s not a place to go. I may have a few hundred connections on LinkedIn, but the reality is that it becomes a useful virtual address book for me, one that gets kept up to date by the person who owns the address.

So that’s my guess, that Facebook is a multidimensional conversation. Why is that important to the enterprise? Why is it important to work-life balance? These are questions I will seek to answer over the next two days. If you’re interested, keep an eye out.

I will be watching.

I also have discovered that Facebook is different, on many levels. A year ago, I was involved in a experiential marketing project for Xing -- then called OpenBC -- and the notion was that I would try to generate some consulting in Europe by using the network. I tried every trick in the OpenBC playbook and got zero leads. Literally: zero. Not a single nibble over a three month period. As a lark, I created a group in Facebook on Social Tools, and I got three leads in the first few days. The Social Tools group has now grown to over 3000 people, without any real work.

There is some dynamic at play in Facebook that has more juice than what is going on at Xing and LinkedIn. I will be interested in hearing JP's thoughts on where it is going for business.

Matt Asay on Microsoft's Achilles Heel

Matt Asay says something profound, buried in a post about a new competitor to Microsoft Office, Live Documents. I agree with his dismissal of that effort, and for the same reasons that he does:

[from Microsoft's Hotmail founder goes for the (wrong) Office jugular with Live Documents | The Open Road - The Business and Politics of Open Source by Matt Asay - CNET Blogs]

[...]

The future of the desktop is not an online desktop. It's getting rid of the desktop metaphor altogether. The future of an office suite is to dump the office and focus where people spend their time: email, IM, SMS, blogs, etc. We increasingly collaborate as we create rather than create so that we can then collaborate on what we've already done.

Look at Microsoft's idea of office collaboration. It's mired in the era of Flock of Seagulls and The Buggles. Microsoft is desperately trying to upgrade this vision with Sharepoint because its Exchange technology is so old and creaky that it can't support the innovation that would other ensure Microsoft's next two decades of dominance.

I completely agree. Microsoft is fighting the last war all over again. Stuck in a past success, like the CEO who said to me "We don't need to do the right thing, because we do the wrong thing so well."

Tim Berners-Lee on Social Graph: Ok, I Give

The term social graph is a catchy meme. The most recent manifestation of the spread of this viral term is Tim Berners-Lee who writes (in an absurdly disorganized and incoherent post) that he believes that the meaning of social graph somehow overlaps with his semantic web:

[from Giant Global Graph]

[...]

Its [sic: it's] not the Social Network Sites that are interesting -- it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected.

We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web.

I called this graph the Semantic Web, but maybe it should have been Giant Global Graph! Any worse than WWWW? ;-) Not the "Semantic Web" term has been established for a long time, I'm not proposing to change it. But let's think about the graph which it is. (Footnote: "Graph" also happens to be the word the RDF specifications use, but that is by the way. While an XML parser creates a DOM tree, an RDF parser creates an RDF graph in memory.)

So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That's just what the graph does for us. We have the technology -- it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer. If a social network site uses a common format for expressing that I know Dan Brickley, then any other site or program (when access is allowed) can use that information to give me a better service. Un-manacled to specific documents.

So Berners-Lee is trying to appropriate the social graph term to buttress up FOAF-ish notions embedded in the Semantic Web discourse. However, those concepts have not caught on in any serious fashion. Not like the premises of social networks, which is where the social graph concept has emanated. So, I don't think his attempt to muddy the social graph conversation with semantic web concepts will lead to a hybrid with any vigor. Tim, social graph has not been coined to rethink the web, but to try to refine the discussion around social applications.

I am not an advocate for the term social graph, but I am coming to understand the intent of those wielding it. They are trying to make a break with the term social network, which has become too broad, and too contaminated with the usage as 'an online, web-based service that links you to an explicit collection of other users of the service.' The rationale for a new term is -- as I believe Mark Zuckerberg was channeling, when he began to use it broadly -- that we have to consider the fact that people's actual social networks in the larger world -- offline and online -- include all sorts of subtleties about relationships; not the least being that some of our contacts do not use the web, and most are not all signed up to the same services. Or, stated more simply, every person has a social graph, and parts of their social graph may be represented within various online social networking applications, but the social graph in its entirety cannot be encompassed in any tool: it is too rich, broad, and open for that.

So... I have grudgingly come to understand the motivation for the social graph term. But I maintain that this decision to coin a new term is really not necessary, since the original social network has exactly the same meaning. But I guess I am just being an old curmudgeon, waving my walking stick at the young people, glaring at them through bifocals.

It's clear that the old term has become so tightly linked to the implementation of solutions like MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Friendster that it is increasingly impossible to use the term social network as originally envisioned by Granovetter, Milgram, Watts, and the other academics that have been doing important research on the subject for decades before we came along and appropriated the term. So be it.

I give. I yield to the inevitable. I will start to use the term as I have defined it above, which I believe was the motivation for it.

However, I also predict that the term will rapidly lose its delicious novelty and subtle distinctions, and will become synonymous with social network as people will apply it just as promiscuously as we have been with social network for the past five years.

links for 2007-11-23

• Facebook Is Almost 2/3 Women (and other stats)
  Counter to conventional wisdom. I guess someone will have to duplicate the research, though.
  (tags: paul+francis facebook web+demographics)
• Kindle sells out in 5.5 hours - Engadget
  Wow. Looks like a hit.
  (tags: kindle amazon digital+books)
• Social Design Best Practices - OpenSocial - Google Code
  A numbered list might not be the right way to represent this, but helpful in a weak way.
  (tags: opensocial google social+architecture social+design)
• Spam One-liners - a photoset on Flickr
  Linzie Hunter turns spam into art.
  (tags: linzie+hunter flickr pointer:tom+coates)
• Happy Thanksgiving, And The Gillmor Gang Is Back
  Arrington says the Gillmor Gang is back, but Gillmor says it is now something called Bad Sinatra. The whole things is tired, I think. There must be new voices somewhere.
  (tags: gillmor+gang steve+gillmor mike+arrington bad+sinatra)

Flickr Places

Flickr Places, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Fooling with Flickr's new Places geoloco service. Extremely cool way to put your pictures on the map.

Google Calendar Hack

I change time zones a lot. It is very easy to mess up calendar entries: I am in New York, thinking about a dinner in London, and my calendar is still set to SF time.

One thing that helps is to actually have the desired time embedded in the appointment title text. Then, even if the screwed time zone stuff puts your dinner down as starting at 4am, you can still salvage the original data.

The problem is that Google Calendar will take the '7pm' you stick into the text and use it to set the time and then delete it from the text. Helpful to set the time, unhelpful to delete the text.

I discovered a hack: you type the time as text in the 'what:' box (the text), and then, instead of typing the rest of the info in the 'what:' box, you click on 'edit event details'. Because the 7pm is the only word in the 'what:', Google does not delete it, and it still sets the time. I then add the other info to the 'what' field in the calendar details. Note that I generally have to open the 'edit event details' anyway, since I want to note where the meeting is.

AT&T Backs Away From Telework

In a world headed toward ecological catastrophe largely because of our abuse of fossil fuels, this shift away from telework at AT&T is more than bad news: It's immoral, and should be illegal.

[from AT&T calls teleworkers back to cubicle life by Ann Bednarz]

AT&T, a company that once was a poster child for telecommuting, is downsizing its long-running telework program and requiring thousands of employees who work from their homes and other virtual offices to return to traditional AT&T office environments, according to sources.

Apparently, various control freaks in the executive suite are more interested in facetime than commute time.

[pointer: Anne Zelenka]

Word Of The Week: Fairchise

I actually don't know how I stumbled on the BusinessClass.net site, but I did, earlier this week. BCN (as it is also known) started in Berlin, and I could have meet with Manu Kumar, the founder, if I had discovered it a few weeks ago while I was there.

BCN is a network of short-term workspaces. Currently, there are only two: HQ, in Berlin, and another just outside LA. There is a sort-of-fledgling social network in the site -- the various nomads that use the offices and retreats -- but aside from a general listing of profiles, there doesn't seem to be much you can do there, yet. (Maybe I can help, there, Manu.) Should be interfacing with Dopplr, I guess, too.

I hope to explore the LA facility in a few weeks, and will write more about that. Today, I am just blogging about the 'fairchise' concept that underlies the business model of BCN:

[from NuNomad: Planning the Trip, where Manu was interviewed]

Our basic concept of 'fairchise' is based on:

• no license fees (which we believe amounts to financing the franchise offerer)
  
• no expensive 'management courses'
  
• no inventory or equipment that must be bought from the franchise offerer
  
• no fixed monthly fees (for royalties, marketing, etc.)
  
• short franchise contracts (3 years)
• instant start-up (open a BCN-port within four weeks)

Manu hopes to have seven or more 'Ports' in the network by 2008. His organization provides the online presence (in various languages), some marketing, and the basic financial services (accounting, credit card processing, reservations, etc.).

Anyone want to help me start the BCN-Port for San Francisco?

Is?

Facebook | Stowe Boyd, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Looks like the "is" in the Facebook status is still there.

Arrington thinks the interest in this means we need a vacation. I just see it as a bad design decision that Facebook needs to rescind.

A Watershed At /Message: 50K+ Views In Last 30 Days

Analyze :: Feed Stats Dashboard, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Things have been exploding at /Message in the past few months. I noticed this morning (via Feedburner stats) that /Message has received over 50,000 views in the last 30 days, which is a new high water mark. Over 28K RSS subscribers, too.

Keep those cards and letters coming on in!

Also interesting that my other, non-tech blog, /Ambivalence, has 68 subscribers. I guess people like food porn and breathless political yammering.

Open Web Awards

I am glad to say that I am one of the partners in the Open Web Awards. This is the outgrowth of the former Mashable Awards. I will be serving as a judge, as well as working with the other partners on promoting the event, and of course, I will be attending.

I am joined by the organizer, Mashable's Adam Hirsch, as well as ten or more other bloggers, and more details about the competition will be forthcoming.

Nominations are not yet open, but that too is forthcoming. Sponsorships are being solicited. Contact me for more information.

links for 2007-11-21

• Comment Trolling Has A Psychological Explanation
  'deindividuation' -- where we feel a large distance from the person we are flaming online -- seems to be the psychological wellspring of troll behavior online.
  (tags: trolls community deindividuation)
• ALLIED by Jeneane Sessum: Best Tagline for Web App Gives Something Back
  Praises Skype for the "Take a deep breath" tagline, when companies are usually thinking "blow me."
  (tags: skype taglines jeneane+sessum)
• A VC: Social Media Requires Real People
  Fred Wilson laments the shifting power laws in the blogosphere makes it less like a village and more like New York City: more skyscrapers.
  (tags: blogs techmeme power+laws)
• The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) [dive into mark]
  Mark Pilgrim's attempt to skewer Bezos and Amazon on Kindle policies using their own (and others) words.
  (tags: orwell stallman bezos amazon mark+pilgrim kindle pointer:kevin+marks digital+books)
• Power in the cloud: The Juggler’s Paradox: how the OpenSocial Activity Stream facilitates "ambient communication"
  This guy is channeling me.
  (tags: jonathan+sapir ambient+communication ambient+intimacy jugglers+paradox continuous+partial+attention)
• ACME Pundit Saws | The Macalope: An Apple blog - CNET Blogs
  "The writings of Robert Scoble are like a thousand monkeys typing, short about 999 monkeys." Ouch.
  (tags: robert+scoble macalope)

Matt Biddulph on Jabber

Sounds like Matt Biddulph is trying to build something with Jabber open source, and is finding it tough going:

[from Twitter / Matt Biddulph]

yet again a vaguely interesting idea fails to make it from my head into code due to lack of decent jabber libraries. what is it with jabber?

I wonder if (suppose that) Matt's working on Jabber integration into Dopplr? Would be a smart protocol to build some sort of streaming on, even if you didn't want instant messaging per se.

Misreading The 'Customer' Reviews On Kindle

Rob Beschizza at Wired's Gadget Lab and Mary Jane Irwin at Link: Valleywag jump to the conclusion that low ratings for the Kindle at Amazon mean that customers don't like the device.

On the contrary. If they had taken a few seconds to read the positive and negative reviews they would have learned that, in general, those that have used the device like it. A lot. And those that are giving it low marks are angry about the price being "too high for middle class people" or pissed about the DRM. So they are not dissing the product's design or usability. They represent a segment of the market that may not buy it, however.

This is a lot like the buzz about iPhone: too expensive, locked, bitch, bitch.

I'm With Nick Carr On This One

[from Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The Luddite dream of Jeff Bezos]

[...]

The only thing that will keep books great is respect for the individual author, the individual reader, and the sanctity of the book as a closed container. When that respect goes, the book goes with it.

I don't think this is a Luddite perspective, but one that is one of respect for artists.

In principle, the advent of Kindle should allow a larger number of artists to have their art -- writing or other forms of flat art -- enjoyed by more people. The long tail economics will continue to lengthen as books get digital, since costs of production will go down along with the existing decrease in the costs of distribution that Amazon already pioneered.

We don't need a new model for creativity, we just need to make it cheaper to produce copies. That's what Kindle + Amazon may do.

Amazon's Kindle: Another iPod, Or Another Newton?

The jury is split on the Kindle, Amazon's big foray into the digital media world.

At face value, Amazon looks to be in the perfect place to create an iPod/iTunes revolution in the digital print media world, where so much failure has come before.

To me, the design looks pretty cool, but I haven't yet fooled with an actual device to get a sense of the software and display.

The biggest hurdle for digital book devices has been the need for a computer, which Bezos has neatly sidestepped by building in cellular connectivity, like the EVDO cards people use (like me) in their laptops. This means that books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs (yes blogs) can be downloaded to the device at basically any point in time. The wireless capability can also be turned off to conserve battery life, which seems pretty robust.

Others argue that the device is badly designed, and others that the effort to charge for blogs -- $0.99 per month per blog -- is a step back from web norms:

[from First Look: Amazon’s Kindle Reader: The Gap Between Description and The Device by Joseph Weisenthal]

Bottom line: Although Amazon’s been working on this for awhile, this is very much a first-generation product. It’s not going to revolutionize the industry overnight, though it sounds like Amazon is going to take this business seriously and continue to invest in it. It seems safe to guess that in a couple years, the top-of-the-line Kindle will be a much-improved product. The concept is definitely sound. Bezos’ speech had most of the audience pretty enthusiastic about the device—the problem is the gap between the description and the device itself. With some improvements to the display and a more intuitive navigation system, it could become an attractive product, even at the price.

[from www.twitter.com/gapingvoid by Hugh MacCleod]

$0.99 for a month subscription to a blog on an Amazon Kindle. Losers. Assholes.

Techcrunch's Erick Schonfeld seems interested in the possibilities of books that are written with being digital in mind:

[from Kindle: First Impressions]

The fact that it has a functioning Web browser, though, means that you can follow links in the feeds you subscribe to. More importantly, it opens up the world of linking to book authors. Now books can have links, and not just for citations. Authors who take advantage of the electronic book format will start to include hyperlinks for curious readers to follow, and books could become more tightly interwoven with the culture of the Web in general. Reading a book will no longer need to end with the final chapter. Rather, it could literally open up a whole world of information on the Web, just as blog posts or online news article do today.

A remaining hurdle in the business model is the finances:

[from Amazon Reading Device Doesn’t Need Computer by Saul Hansell]

“The big challenge, of course, is that it is still relatively expensive,” he added. “You have to be a very committed book person to get a repay on that investment.”

The publishers themselves are concerned about return on investment; most have been spending a great deal to digitize their libraries for electronic readers, with little to show for it so far.

“If it does contribute to the many millions of dollars we have invested as an industry, that’s great,” Mr. Young said.

Amazon and the publishers declined to discuss the specifics of their financial arrangements. But several publishing executives said the industry practice was to sell an electronic version of a hardcover with a list price of $27 for about $20. While deals vary, the wholesale price of a $20 e-book is about $10, and most retailers have been selling them for about $16. The publishers said Amazon was paying about the same wholesale price as Sony and other e-book vendors.

By offering best sellers for $9.99, Amazon is leaving no profit margin, and it will have the expense of paying Sprint for the data transmission. Amazon says it hopes to make money on older titles that have better profit margins.

A truly grand experiment. I wish I had been able to attend the press conference, so I could have made off with a Kindle to fool with.

I did travel off to the Kindle site at Amazon, after being alerted by the nice folks at Federated Media Publishing that /Message is included in the list of 308 now available for download there:

I personally don't expect that blogs will make any money on the device, especially since the Kindle can browse the web directly. But, unlike Hugh, I don't think Bezos is an asshole for trying to make a nickel out of easily downloading blogs onto the device. On the other hand, its a different story if he starts trying to block access to the blogs he's selling.

No one is blowing the green, green, green trumpet here, but at least with regard to newspapers and magazines the Kindle could lead to very significant ecological impacts, if and when Kindles become as ubiquitous as iPods are. And if not this device, then someone's. We should be eager for such an advance to work, if only for the sake of Mother Earth.

On a purely personal note: I am tired of waiting for the damn New York Times to be delivered, anyway, since I get up a lot earlier than the newspaper delivery guys do in either of my neighborhoods. So for the sake of the planet and to avoid having to wait for my delivery guy to get to my place at 7:30am here in Reston VA, I should probably get one. Maybe I can weasel one from Amazon: I am one of their authors, after all.

links for 2007-11-20

• A VC: The Social Graph In The Second Inning
  Fred Wilson wants more: much more.
  (tags: fred+wilson social+networks social+graph facebook twitter)
• blackrimglasses.com » Blog Archive » TinyURL Outage Illustrates the Service’s Risks
  Ethan slaps ReadWriteWeb for sensationalizing the TinyURL outage. It's not proof the Web is fragile, its just a point solution going down.
  (tags: ethan+kaplan readwriteweb tinyurl)
• Kogswell Cycles - The Fork (IS) The Frame
  Going green for a lot of folks means carrying bigger loads -- groceries, etc -- on a bicycle, so we need ones that are designed for it: porteur bikes.
  (tags: green bicycles porteur)
• The death of e-mail. - By Chad Lorenz - Slate Magazine
  When I predicted the death of email at Supernova in 2005 I was almost ripped to shreds. Now it's the title of a piece in Slate.
  (tags: chad+lorenz slate the+death+of+email email+delenda+est)

Another Clue To 'Old Time': Pre-Industrial 'Old Sleep'

I maintain that our sense of time will change as one side effect of stream-based communication tools. When people ask me how could such a thing happen I often use the example of 'old sleep' -- the way pre-industrial people spent the dark hours of the night. It is so different from our modern concept of night time that people simply don't believe me when I tell them about it.

Buried in a Sunday Times piece about modern mattresses and sleep, Jon Mooallem relates some of the findings of A. Roger Ekirch, a professor of history at Virginia Tech:

[from Sleep - Insomnia - Beds and Bedding - Medicine and Health - Stress - Drugs - Science - New York Times]

[...]

Ekirch reports that for many centuries, and perhaps back to Homer, Western society slept in two shifts. People went to sleep, got up in the middle of the night for an hour or so, and then went to sleep again. Thus night — divided into a “first sleep” and “second sleep” — also included a curious intermission. “There was an extraordinary level of activity,” Ekirch told me. People got up and tended to their animals or did housekeeping. Others had sex or just lay in bed thinking, smoking a pipe, or gossiping with bedfellows. Benjamin Franklin took “cold-air baths,” reading naked in a chair.

Our conception of sleep as an unbroken block is so innate that it can seem inconceivable that people only two centuries ago should have experienced it so differently. Yet in an experiment at the National Institutes of Health a decade ago, men kept on a schedule of 10 hours of light and 14 hours of darkness — mimicking the duration of day and night during winter — fell into the same, segmented pattern. They began sleeping in two distinct, roughly four-hour stretches, with one to three hours of somnolence — just calmly lying there — in between. Some sleep disorders, namely waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep again, “may simply be this traditional pattern, this normal pattern, reasserting itself,” Ekirch told me. “It’s the seamless sleep that we aspire to that’s the anomaly, the creation of the modern world.”

In fact, many contemporary, nonindustrialized cultures contentedly pass portions of the night in the same state of somnolence, says Carol Worthman, an anthropologist at Emory University who is one of the first to look at how other societies sleep. Sleep and wakefulness are rarely seen as an either/or, but rather as two ends of a wide spectrum, and people are far more at peace with the fluidity in between. Among the Efe in Zaire, and the !Kung in Botswana, for example, someone who wakes up in the middle of the night and cannot sleep “may begin to hum, or go out and play the thumb piano,” Worthman and a colleague have written. Others might wake up and join in. “Music or even a dance may get going.”

Worthman says, “In our culture, quality sleep is going into a dark room that is totally quiet, lying down, falling asleep, doing that for eight hours, and then getting up again.” She calls it the “lie down and die” model. “But that is not how much of the world has slept in the past or even sleeps today.” In some cultures sleep is more social, with crowds crammed together on little or no bedding, limbs entangled, while a steady traffic comes and goes. And while it all sounds unbearable, Worthman notes that science has never looked empirically at whether our more sophisticated arrangements actually benefit us. For children, learning to sleep amid all that stimulation may actually have developmental advantages.

Still, we can’t afford the same equanimity about not sleeping through the night as the Efe and !Kung; the flipside is that men and women in those cultures are content to pull a cloth over their faces and doze off during the day if necessary. Our peculiar preference for one well-organized hunk of sleep likely evolved as a corollary to our expectation of uninterrupted wakefulness during the day — as our lives came to be governed by a single, stringent clock. Eluned Summers-Bremner, author of the forthcoming “Insomnia: A Cultural History,” explains that in the 18th century, “we start overvaluing our waking time, and come to see our sleeping time only as a way to support our waking time.” Consequently, we begin trying to streamline sleep, to get it done more economically: “We should lie down and go out right away so we can get up and get to the day right away.” She describes insomniacs as having a ruthless ambition to do just this, wanting to administer sleep as an efficiency expert normalizes the action in a factory. Certainly all of us, after a protracted failure to fall asleep for whatever reason, have turned solemnly to our alarm clocks and performed that desperate arithmetic: If I fall asleep right now, I can still get four hours.

Nevertheless, while it may be at odds with our history and even our biology, lie-down-and-die is the only practical model for our lifestyle. Unless we overhaul society to tolerate all schedules and degrees of sleepiness and attentiveness, we are stuck with that ideal. Perhaps the real problem is that we still haven’t come to terms with the unavoidable imperfection of this state of affairs.

We become so enculturated that we can't even sense the line between what is a habit, engrained in use through repetition and training, and our innate drives, which we may be completely out of touch with.

Modern Westerners' reaction to the concept of 'old sleep' is first incredulity and then dismissal. Like Mooallem, the author of the piece, who suggests that we couldn't possibly go back to 'old sleep' as a model today. Note, also, that he never investigates the idea that modern perceptions of sleep problems could be caused by our cultural norms that push us to 'lie down and die'.

But streamlining everything for the sake of work is an enemy to the spirit, and corrosive to social relationships. Even our sleep time has been invaded by Taylor and his stopwatch-carrying efficiency imps.

I maintain that we really don't know much about a lot of things the mind does, although we are surrounded by all sorts of conventional wisdom that does unchallenged.

Attention, for example, is really not well understood. Cognitive researchers don't know if it is one center in the mind, or many, or what regions of the brain are directly involved. But there are gazillions of life coaches hectoring people to pay attention in various ways to get ahead, do better in school, whatever.

Our sense of time is one of these seemingly basic notions, which are actually quite slippery. I believe our perception of the world and our place in it is similarly slippery, and fluid.

We know that when we are exposed to different media our cognition changes. I believe that when we are exposed to streaming media, our sense of time -- and maybe how we sleep and dream -- will be shifted in subtle but significant ways. Just as there is an 'old sleep' that we have lost, but perhaps could recapture, there is an 'old time' lurking deep within our minds, behind the reasoning, below the cultural. Maybe we will find that again, too, once we learn to flow.

Your Button Here! (Yes, I Am Whoring My Cap.)

Cap With Button, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Yes, I am doing it again. I am going to be auctioning off wearing people's logos again this year, like I did in the 'Clothe Stowe' promotion of 2006. However, this time, I intend to do something less annoying that wearing t shirts with logos, but at the same time something that matches my personal 'look' pretty well.

I will be auctioning off wearing buttons -- like that shown above (one designed by Swiss Miss) -- on my hat. As most of you may be aware, I wear a cap every single day (Yes, it is a cap on backwards, not a beret. And yes, I have a bunch of them.). And I am not going to switch buttons every day, like I did with the tshirts. The lucky three winners will have me wearing their logos for the entire year of 2008 on my trademark cap.

I will be auctioning off the advertising opportunity of a lifetime, starting on 6 December, on eBay. The specific rules of the auction will be on the page at eBay, and I will post the link on 6 December or earlier. Basically, I will set it up so that there are three button slots auctioned, and no one will be able to buy more than one. The minimum bid will $500, and the winning three companies will have to send me at least 10 buttons (they do get lost), which can be of different designs. I reserve the right to refuse anything ugly. The buttons have to be approximately 1 inch in diameter.

My goal is to buy a a second 30" HD Mac monitor. (I moved my original one to SF, so here in VA I am suffering with a 24".) But I hope to make more. Last time I received $3600 for auctioning off 240 days of tshirt billboard status. I hope to do better this time, especially with the dollar falling!

Leave a comment if you have questions.

OpenSocial Has Been Appropriated By Assholes

OpenSocial Factory-Social Networking Application Development Company, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Don't do business with these assholes. They keep putting spam in posts at /Message. And the email they left behind was bogus.

Maybe Valleywag Is Right, Just This Once...

I was reading some heckling at Valleywag about Salim Ismail, the honcho at Yahoo's Brickhouse, and discovered he had a blog. Clicked though, and noticed the Eastern Philosophy category.

"Hmmm," I thought, "Maybe 'he learned the power to cloud men's minds in the Orient' like Lamont Cranston, The Shadow."

I clicked on the category link, and...

I guess not.

He's too busy to keep his blog up, with very few posts on any sort of philosophy. Perhaps that's why Valleywag seems so determined to beat him up. Although the incessant attack on Salim is just so unrelenting, I start to wonder if there is more than just the usual Yahoo bashing going on.

Hey, I am always first in line to complain when Yahoo seems out of focus on its strategy, when I don't understand a product or company acquisition (where's the integration plan, guys?), but Valleywag's vendetta against Salim seems mean-spirited and petty, at the best, and an outright witchhunt at the worst.

It they complained about the lack of insight into his plans -- and Eastern philosophy -- at his blog, I would agree. I would like him to be more open and detailed about his plans. But they seem bent on character assassination, which is a completely different matter, and one that I think lessens our community rather than strengthening it.

<update>I managed to somehow delete this post while editing it last night. Luckily I now syndicate my posts at Facebook, where I was able to recapture it.</update>

Mutating Beyond "Internet Evolution"

I was writing a series for CMP's Internet Evolution (see Internet Evolution). But I am too much of a web mutant to fit in there. My DNA has been too changed by exposure to the web to tolerate the wrong sort of atmosphere: I would die like a fish out of water.

I guess I started with a bunch of preconceptions, since the initial idea was introduced to me as a 'group blog'. And I was deeply ambivalent about having another blog, anyway. "How to decide where to put what?" I thought. Even after I decided that Internet Evolution could be the place to write a series of posts as the ramp-up to a book I was still concerned about splitting my focus.

Independent of my personal concerns, I started to have doubts about the basis of the project when the editor, James Johnson, told me that I would be submitting my posts by email instead of via some blog interface. When he edited one of my first posts, pulling out the links to my existing blogs, I started to get really worried, but when a recent post was truncated by about 40% of its words and several major concepts, I said, "Whoa!"

I guess I have evolved past this sort of journalism, where editors trim and clip to make an 'article' more attractive to the 'audience' or to meet some editorial policies about 'article length' or whatever.

And maybe my ego is too big to be red-penciled that way. Maybe it was just a badly written piece. Fine. Tell me to clean it up, to clarify some fuzzy prose. I have had good collaboration with editors in the past, at Darwin, Knowledge Management, and Cutter. But I don't like my writing being greatly revamped -- rephrased, recast -- in the name of some policy.

So, I quit. And I asked them to take the last piece -- in its edited form -- down, which they have kindly done.

</aside>I am posting the piece I wrote , here: Web 1.0: The Old Web = Ten Million Catalogs. I am not sure if I will pursue the project as I had envisioned it. Maybe I should find a sponsor, and include some interviews: turn it into a video series. I don't know. More to follow.</aside>

There are still a long list of smart people writing at Internet Evolution, and it looks like the numbers are going up. It could well be the Tech sector's Huffington Post in the making.

But I doubt it.

I have taken a few runs at that brass ring. At Corante, Hylton Jolliffe and I shared a vision of a tech-oriented network of blogs, but we disagreed on execution, so we parted ways reasonably amicably. Corante has never really fulfilled its early promise, and now seems like a deserted movie set. Its peak impact was just prior to my leaving, and it has tumbled since:

<aside> Alexaholic isn't plotting multiple lines on its graphs anymore? Is this another Leopard bug?</aside>

Now I am advising b5 media (see The b5 Advisory Board), and I hope that we can rekindle some of the old, old dreams I've had about supporting a global community of people interested in science and technology through social media.

I'd like to see a means to bring the best writers together in one place, to provide them better ways to collaborate than comments and trackbacks, and to leverage ideas like sociality, shared tags and memetracking. There just doesn't seem to be a real media-led fusion of great writing and technical innovation anywhere. My work with AOL earlier in the year hit the shoals, as part of the great AOL self-cannibalization, where all the innovators seem to be fleeing (see Marcien Jenckes Out At AOL). I thought Internet Evolution might do at least some part of that, but it is really old school thinking made palatable by really great contributors.

But content isn't king, anymore. Or, maybe better said, the social revolution means that nothing and no one is 'king'. It's a world turned upside down, turned inside out, going counterclockwise. It's about deep participation, not mass messaging. It's about involvement and community, not one-sided policies and audience targetting. It's about us: the Edglings, the people living in these social networks online, not about them: the media companies trying to weather a social revolution that will completely invalidate their business models.

<update>Mike Arington mentions information that suggests Google may be devising technology that will let people create customized printed 'journals' from indigenous content. Might be part of the answer.</update>

Web 1.0: The Old Web = Ten Million Catalogs

The name 'World War I' was only applied to the war once called 'The Great War' after World War II commenced; once people of the time needed a term that would distiguish the new bloodshed from the historical carnage that had been referred to "The War" for the previous decades.

In a similar fashion, the first era of the Web has been diminished by the arrival of new blood (figuratively speaking), and many have adopted the rubric Web 2.0 to distinguish this new era from the first, and at the same time, many suggest that it's all one big experimental brew, and the version numbering is at best a trick to capitalize on faddishness and at the worst some sort of fruadulent metaphor mixing.

In this installment in my ongoing series -- The Social Web: What's The New Web Worth -- I intend to poke at a number of shopworn metaphors of the Web 1.0 era, and use that as a refection of the aspirations and challenges of that time. My principal goal is not technoid nostalgia, but to set a context for what is happening today, in the New Web, commonly known as Web 2.0.

Certain aspects of the Web 1.0 metaphors are still with us without seeming antiquated. Search, for example, as currently exemplified by Google, is the mainstay of today's web, and reflects perhaps the most fundamental unification of core Web 1.0 style technology carried to the Nth degree, such as the gazillions of server farms Google manages all over the world (and could have almost come from 1960s science fiction stories where a global computer netwrok becomes sentient and decides to exterminate humankind). However, the reliance on a core social artifact -- links that people create to web pages -- intermixes a social glue into the algorithmic alchemy of Google. This means Google is at once the leading Web 1.0 company, and one very likely to remain at the head of the pack as we move into the New Web.

The Web Of Pages

The basic metaphor of Web 1.0 is the Web Of Pages: the Web is envisioned as a giant, ever-growing network where the nodes are HTML pages and the arcs are hyperlinks. While this view has an element of dynamism -- pages are endlessly being added, for example -- it leaves out a whole lot.

Most especially, the social dynamics are totally implicit: Why are people creating pages? How do they find them? What are they doing on the pages and what sorts of information are on them? How do they share what they find? The answers to those sorts of questions motivated all sort of Web 1.0 innovation, while Web 2.0 is moving ahead with a better metaphor: The Social Web. I am deferring more discussion of the Social Web and the revolution it is engendering till my next post; in the remainder of this post I want to saunter through the Museum of Tired Metaphors.

E-Commerce

E-commerce originally positioned the Web as a giant emporium, where every part, product, and service can be catalogued, priced, weighed, bought and shipped. Amazon, for books (and later other consumer products), and eBay, for collectibles (and later for all sorts of goods, new or used), are perhaps the best examples of this trend. Various other giants have emerged in niche areas: Monster.com for job search, CraigsList for classifieds, and Expedia for travel.

These services are based on a catalog metaphor, where sellers can offer goods or services, and buyers (generally consumers) can find them and acquire them. The volume and low overhead of online services hollowed out the markets in most areas thet they touched, for example, sideswiping brick-and-mortar bookstores, blowing up the travel agent business, and strongly cratering the head hunter marketplace.

Netflix, a relatively late entrant, but still a decidely Web 1.0 company, has caused major damage to the brick-and-mortar video chains: Movie Gallery, the #2 chain after Blockbuster, recently filed for bankruptcy citing pressure from brands like Netflix.

As new web notions start to percolate, the dominant players have worked to incorporate what they can. Amazon is harnessing its huge community to create tens of thousands of (free) book reviews. eBay has devised a not-tremendously-sophisticated, but absolutely central, reputation system based on user reviews. Netflix has rolled out a 'friends' capabilities so that people can share movie recommendations.

Still, the core architectural premises of the online catalogue define the user experience of these solutions, and also determine their limitations.

Information Portals and Extranets

The initial rise of Yahoo was due to the difficulties in the early Web in finding things. So many new sites were being launched, and in the absence of comprehensive search (Google wasn't around yet), a huge human-based index of web sites seemed like a great idea. It fell to pieces when the rate of growth went exponential, and the editors at Yahoo couldn't keep up. Google came along with a triumphant bottom-up mechanistic approach that demonstrated that top-down manual techniques were dead.

But the idea of human editorship making sense of an exploding Web seems to never die. (In a sense, that's what Internet Evolution is: a specific group of people blogging about technology, instead of a random collection of information about technology offered by an information appliance like Techmeme or Technorati, Web 2.0 information sieves.) We saw the rise and fall of the Information Portal notion, where media companies dreamed of setting up the definitive website for Weddings, or Digital Cameras, or Photo Sharing. Largely, these portals have been superceded by New Web upstarts based on social technologies or just by the explosion of the blogosphere.

Likewise, the 1990's metaphor of extranets -- online websites that would operate more or less as web versions of a shared drive on the company's intranet -- led to the rise and fall of hundreds of now largely outdated companies. The emergence of Web 2.0 offerings like Google Documents, Slideshare, and Basecamp has invalidated the extranet model, and inverted the dynamics of online sharing away from 'web as storage' to 'web as operating system.'

Museum of Tired Metaphors

So, looking back, the thing we most can afford to lose from the Web 1.0 era is not the plumbing -- which we still rely on as a foundation for the New Web -- but rather the tired metaphors. It's not a bunch of tubes, as Senator Ted Stevens famously remarked, the old Web is a bunch of outmoded ways of thinking about our relationship to communication and community. We are moving past broadcast media and e-commerce based on ginormic catalogs. Portals and extranets have lost their sizzle (if they ever had any).

We are searching for better ways to think about the Web and our relationship with it, and through it to ourselves. The new Web is -- among other more tangible things -- a collection of innovative ways to view our social engagement, and the tools that are engendering a revolution.

A Futures Market For Business Networks

Bernard Lunn picked up on my skepticism about LinkedIn's future dominance in business/professional networking in a recent post (Links for 2007-11-18):

[from Poll: Will You Have More Business Contacts in Facebook than LinkedIn, in 6 Months? by Bernard Lunn]

Most of the comments and trackbacks from my post on LinkedIn confirmed that LinkedIn has momentum as a business social network. However some Facebook fans believe that LinkedIn is only enjoying a temporary time in the sun.

For example Stowe Boyd, a man who knows a thing or two about social media, had this to say:

Bernard Lunn thinks LinkedIn is in a great spot because 80% of his contacts are there, and Facebook isn’t real for business yet. Wait six months, Bernard.

I am not sure what Stowe is predicting in six months. However I am interested in prediction markets, so how about we define a specific prediction and then revisit it in six months? If Facebook and/or LinkedIn were public companies, we could test our predictive powers in the stock market with real money. However because they are private companies (for now), we can just do this for fun and bragging rights. Anyway public companies are now all boring, predictable enterprises; we have to recreate the fun in the private markets.

So the prediction, we think, from Stowe is this:

In 6 months Facebook will have more of your business contacts than LinkedIn.

We'll check back in 6 months whether that prediction comes true. But for now we'll run a poll to see whether RWW readers think LinkedIn can hold off the Facebook challenge in business networking. Please take a moment to vote in this poll:

Please visit Read/Write Web to participate in the poll. It does not exactly conform with my personal beliefs -- which are broader that just Facebook spreading into professional spheres very quickly over the next six months -- but the specific question is relevant.

Basically, I think that both solutions have some legacy issues: both are too fixed on supporting specific social touch points -- introductions, in the case of LinkedIn, and hooking up, in the case of Facebook -- but the platform model of Facebook is much more adaptable, and puts a great deal of possibilities into the hands of entrepreneurs. That ecology will bulldoze right past LinkedIn.

links for 2007-11-18

• LinkedIn and The Future of Business Networking
  Bernard Lunn thinks LinkedIn is in a great spot because 80% of his contacts are there, and Facebook isn't real for business yet. Wait six months, Bernard.
  (tags: linkedin facebook bernard+lunn fred+wilson business+networking social+networks)

Internet Retreads

Mark Hendrickson comments on a recent survey conducted with 862 real estate, mortgage, and financial workers who have responded to the shakeup in the housing markets by planning to start new businesses.

[from Will the Credit Crunch Inflate the Internet Bubble?]

[...]

56.2% of the respondents claimed that they were “seriously considering starting a business within the next 6 months” and 13.4% claimed that they “are [already] in the process of starting a business.” Out of this whopping 70% of workers who have or intend to become entrepreneurs, 42.1% gravitate towards starting something tech-related (”Internet/Web/IT/Technology”). Assuming this survey is representative, almost 30% of this demographic can be expected to try their hand at the Silicon Valley Dream over the next year.

Yikes.

Why does starting a successful Web business seem so simple that even a failed real estate agent thinks that its an easier way to make money than shilling split levels in San Mateo?

Do these people know anything about software? About design? About marketing?

Mark goes on with some basic advice for this cadre of Internet retreads, basically get smart as fast as possible, and get some help.

I guess it's potentially good news for folks like me who advise start-ups, but I don't know how many naive well-meaning first-timers I can stomach, honestly.

Umair Haque on Microsoft

[from Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab]

[...]

Look. Microsoft is lame. The Zune sucks blows.

But those are superficial issues. The real question is: why? Why does a company with so many resources suck so much, to totally, so unfailingly?

The fundamental problem is that Microsoft is playing massconomy games in an edgeconomy. Coercion doesn't work; closure doesn't work; and, most definitely of all, evil doesn't work.

And those games are wired into it's DNA. Microsoft will never - ever - pioneer new market space, explode a value proposition, or redesign a value chain.

What it will do is imitate others who have done so - Apple, Google, Nintendo - and try and coerce their buyers, suppliers, and customers to it's own platform.

And that's all Microsoft's DNA - the sum total of how the firm sees, judges, imagines, and thinks strategically about the world - lets the company be capable of.

So there's nothing to fear - this particular shark is now a fish out of water.

[pointer Fred Wilson]

Why isn't Umair Haque more widely appreciated?

Theory And Practice Of Conceptual Design

I have been spending the last few days working on the design for a new social application (still hush-hush project), where I am working with some outside designers.

I recently presented a workshop in Berlin called Building Social Applications, and one section dealt with an approach that I use for designing social applications. The full presentation can be found at slideshare, here. (Wow: just looked at Slideshare to get the link, and the presentation has been viewed 1095 times in the week since I uploaded.)

An Approach To Design

I have a bunch of fairly invariant design principles, that generally hold. For example, simplicity: given two alternatives, the one with fewer 'moving parts' -- ideas, design elements, or whatever -- is likely better. I often don't write these down, but when I am working with large groups of people in the early stages of design, I make them explicit so that we can have a shared language for talking about design and the design process. When I am working with small teams made up of very savvy design folks, that is less necessary. (I wrote recently that small design teams are best: Getting To Design.)

Being a lazy sort of person, I try to use the same techniques over and over in all my projects. I have a fairly consistent approach to design applications, summarized in these slides.

After nattering around for a bit, thinking about the high level notions of the application (like "a social commerce application for fashionistas" or "a social network search application"), I start by trying to capture various key concepts that the inventors (or me) have in our heads, prior to any systematic approach to product concept development. (In the slide, I am displaying the concept of streams and traffic -- as in Twitter or other stream-based applications -- which I am using in several applications right now.)

Some people want to pretend that they start with a totally clean slate at the start of every design, and that the final concepts that emerge from the design process are purely the outcome of user requirements analysis. Bull. I don't try to fool myself or my clients about that. I generally have two or three big chewy ideas prior to doing anything systematic, or my clients do. So I try to capture that.

The next step for me, generally, is to identify a small number of archtypal users: personas. The examples above are from the Social:Learn project with the Open University. The idea is to blanket the social space involved in the use of the application: to identify all the touchpoints where people interact.

The problem is that you don't know if you have enough people, or the right people for the personas until you cycle a bit. You define the personas a bit, and then quickly iterate into small stories about the people interacting, which I call vignettes. Vignettes are ultimately elaborated into scenarios, which are more elaborate versions of the vignettes with specific references to design elements. The first time through the stories, you have no (or very little) design to refer to.

The the magic begins. You need to start to think about the vignettes and concepts, and start devising elements of the design. My best design innovation comes with small teams of other designers, whiteboarding and brainstorming. The slide above shows a horrible sketch I did at a working session a few months ago, and a rendered Omnigraffle wireframe I later made for it.

The process leads you back to the vignettes, recasting them with actual references to the wireframes. After more iterations, the persons become more elaborate, and the vignettes slowly become full scenarios, where every social touchpoint supported by the tool is detailed in terms of design elements in the wireframes and described in the scenarios. The scenarios and wireframes together can be considered, collectively, as the user narrative for the application's conceptual design. It's conceptual since we are not actually designing the software, we are just characterizing the operational contours for the application. (Note the example above is hard to see at the resolution of the image. If you click through, it will take you to the Flickr photo, and you can see it at higher resolution. It's an example from an AOL project I started earlier this year, which was shelved, showing a wireframe and a concise user narrative.)

The final attribution of fine-grained design elements -- like the Ajax edit delete controller highlighted in the graphic above -- completes the development of a full definition of the user experience. This include color schemes, icon design, moving elements around on the pages, etc. While the early wireframes are meant to be functionally useful, the final design are meant to be as close to an implementation as possible or practical.

This is one of the many reasons I want to have other, more user experience oriented designers on my teams, because I am not really gifted in this aspect of design.

Last Thoughts

So, I am slowly elaborating the various parts of the Building Social Applications workshop. I hope this has been helpful. I decided to take the time to write this down today because the same ideas were rattling around in a project I am working on right now, in a meeting this morning. So, I am killing several birds with one stone, here. Again, proof of my consummate laziness!

Sometime next week, I will roll out the Dopplr case study from the workshop presentation in a similar fashion to this post.

Placely: Dopplr And TripIt Are Safe

Placely ~ Travel Calendar, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Yikes.

I took a look at Placely, a new social travel site. Failed the first glance test: shouldn't my trips be arrayed in a list, somewhere? Either in my profile or a trips folio?

With Placely it looks like I have to click through pages of a calendar view to find trips I have planned?

I won't even invite a friend to fool with this one, because it seems pathologically (mis)designed.

Is Twitter Down?

Is Twitter Down?, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Last night, I was hoping to twitter with others watching the Democratic Presidential Debates, held in Las Vegas. No dice. Twitter was down.

A Republican plot? Or do the Twitter folks have secret Republican leanings?

At any rate, I weathered the event, but it had a curiously one-sided feel, as I sat in a darkened room alone, watching TV (a rare occurence), without being able to talk to others. I don't go for 'rivalrous' media anymore: I want to talk in the movies, twitter during the debates, backchannel the conferences, IM during meetings. I am a part of the hive mind, and when I am disconnected, I get disoriented: like a fish without a school, or a bird without a flock.

I really wanted to post some questions to my twitthren, but I was reduced to talking out loud, like a hermit in a cave.

Word Of The Week: Social Casting

Social casting is the term that is coming to be used for media companies sending their content through social networks.

A diverse group of companies are going to be bucketed by this term, like Intercasting and other mobile social tools, and video chat tools like Paltalk:

[from (iverson's) currentbuzz: The Future of Media, con't. "Social-casting comes to Sports Talk Radio".

[a broken link to a Chicago Tribune piece on sports talk radio]

The new technology was created by Paltalk, which calls itself the "premier real-time, video-based community pioneering the social-casting movement."

[pointer Deb Schultz]

links for 2007-11-15

• Presenters Failing the Social Media Communications Test | stuart henshall
  Great advice to speakers and conference organizers about the social media revolution by Stuart Henshall
  (tags: stuart+henshall social+media events conferences speaking)

Steve Rubel Is Wrong About "How The Portals Will Win the Social Networking Wars"

As we catapult headlong into a social revolution, it's reasonable to ask how various players will play. Steve Rubel has decided that the major information portal will win because they own the 'trusted' communication channels that we have come to rely on:

[from Micro Persuasion: How the Portals Will Win the Social Networking Wars]

[...]

The portals own the glue that keeps many of us connected to our structured social networks (e.g. Myfaceborkutspace) and the looser ones - e.g. a personal network of contacts. And that glue is a trusted communication system that works with every person and social net.

No matter which social network(s) you participate in, even if you float, you're going to turn to your trusted communication system to manage it all. This will include any or all of the following: a) web-based e-mail, b) instant messaging (which is nowadays integrated), c) RSS and d) telephony tools like Grand Central. And who dominates those? Yup. The portals - all of them. They have a pretty good lock in, especially as they give you all the storage you need.

This is not going to change. The big blurring of work and home technologies is allowing people to achieve greater flexibility in thieir lives. Webmail and IM are big drivers here. We're hooked but good because we use these four tools to also manage our interactions on social nets. I expect the portals will eventually build in new features that make this even all the more efficient.

Even if his premises were right -- that the portals 'own' these channels, that they are 'trusted', and that we require such channels are a primary need -- this argument would have suggested that the established media companies would have become the dominant players in Web 1.0, which didn't happen.

Back to countering his premises, which are based on old media notions, I think:

1. Channels of communication change very fast, when innovation appears. Cell phones, texting, fax machines, instant messaging, and now social media have all been immensely destabilizing, with people shifting the ratio of their communication appetites to incorporate newer, faster technologies. As the web starts to permeate everything it touches -- particularly media and mobile, right now -- the nature of the Web will naturally redistribute control and power away from centralized media and portal companies.
2. I don't think these organizations are 'trusted' in the way that people 'trusted' AT&T, in its heyday, or how trusted the major three networks during the Eisenhower administration. In fact, people distrust large organizations like never before, and the younger the group are the more distrust there is. As a result, they distrust commnications controlled by large, out-of-touch organizations perceived as running their own -- perhaps antithetical and inimical -- agendas.
3. Social networking may not turn out to be some spun into every site, like HTML or Web 2.0 design esthetics. The social scale and reach issues that dominate social network dynamics make it unlikely that people will participate in seventy three social networks, happily enrolling on one on every Web 1.0 style e-commerce site.

I think Steve is mistaking the actions being taken by the gazillions of Web 1.0 style websites -- who may be trying to build community via social networking technology into their information portals -- with what is likely to emerge in 2008 and beyond.

Google's recent moves in the open social vein suggest a different story. A federated concept of distributed networks interoperating. Ten thousand focussed apps, sharing common services, all enriching the value that others contribute. Winning solutions always add value as they scale, and we will be drawn to the solutions that most quickly create value for us.

The network -- the Web -- belongs to us, the indigenous people of the Web: the Edglings. We belong to us. Our words and creations, the indigenous content (or "user generated content" as they like to call it, casting us as users instead of creators) that the information companies are hoping to strip-mine, is for us, by us. We, and our creations, will never belong to them -- the large corporates -- ever again. There is no going back.

Our natural center-of-gravity will lead us to adopt the tools and technologies that suit our needs, not the agenda of the dinosaurs. This will reward the smaller, agile players who are attuned to what we are up to. And so, even if Steve is right about the wants and desires of the Oligarchs, he has discounted our needs and aspirations. Never underestimate the effects of a network coming into contact with itself.

links for 2007-11-14

• jooce.com - power to the people
  signed up for the Jooce beta: virtual computer desktop
  (tags: jooce social+networks collaboration pointer:orli+yakuel)
• Murdoch: WSJ.com Expected to Be Free: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance
  "News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch said Tuesday he intends to make access to The Wall Street Journal's Web site free, trading subscription fees for anticipated ad revenue."
  (tags: wsj rupert+murdoch wall+street+journal paywall)
• blackrimglasses.com » Blog Archive » Mainstream journalism, blogs, exclusives and the techmeme effect
  Ethan Kaplan deplore the "new" journalism of tech blogs + tech meme + formulasim
  (tags: formulaism ethan+kaplan tech+blogs techmeme new+journalism)
• I’m Starting a Company at Climb to the Stars (Stephanie Booth)
  Stephanie Booth is starting a compny. Not products or consulting.. maybe media?
  (tags: stephanie+booth start-up entrepreneurialism)
• Box.net Blog » Blog Archive » If the Web is the platform, then Box is the file system
  Box.net announces a cross-service file platform.
  (tags: box.net, zoho, autodesk)

David Weinberger on Facebook

[from Twitter / dweinberger]

Just had a Berkman discussion about Facebook's new ad system and privacy. Short version: Yikes.

/Message Is Third On Google

Wild. /Message comes before the Merriam-Webster's definition of the word.

Dinosaurs 2.0: Don't Listen To 'Advocates' Like These

Something appeared in my email today, alerting me to a conference on Social Computing and Collaboration in a week or so, by the Gilbane folks.

I don't know anything about these people, and the only speakers I see that I know are David Weinberger (one of the greats) and Ismael Ghalimi (of Office 2.0 renown). Those guys I would like to see.

But the guy organizing the conference is Geoffrey Bock who writes a blog called Collaboration Blog. Aside from his very infrequent posting (nothing in November, last three posts dated 31 Oct, 24 Oct, and 28 August), he seems to a reluctant advocate for Web 2.0 at best (my comments in square brackets]:

[from Wither Web 2.0? Come To Boston]

[...]

Perhaps it's cyclical -- like the long Indian summer we've been having here in the Northeast. The Web/Enterprise/stuff "2.0" buzz has died down (for now) [it has?] and we seem to be into the hard business of real application development. Perhaps this is a good thing -- running on hype does little to transform businesses or pay the bills.

Certainly there's been a lot of excitement around Facebook as a collaborative platform for digital natives (and fellow travelers). Yet the long-lasting innovation, I think, is around the APIs and the notion of "open platforms." Of course Google was first to open the komono [sic: kimono] with its wildly popular Web services API into Google Maps. Now we're trying to make mashups of social networks.

I'm curious but not convinced. Facebook is building out its community -- Google is not far behind, pursuing the notion of social graphing. So far we can do all kinds of useful things in the consumer space. My favorite this week is friend finding -- which also leverages GPS technology. But business applications? I haven't heard of anything really compelling, yet. I'm still looking.

I don't think this is the man to lead the curious to the Enterprise 2.0 social computing wonderland.

Facebook Business Pages: The End Of The Corporate Blog?

As services like Facebook (and soon, umpty-ump others) provide a simple, rich and easily accessible environment for corporate networking, will corporate blogs tail off?

In my particular case, I have a not very active blog, /Messengers, where in principle I talk about my work, and publicize the sorts of things I might do for clients. In fact, /Message is where I expend my (considerable) writing energies, but I would like to have a more public interaction with the community of people interested in my business side.

So I think I will try an experiment. I will retire /Messengers -- maybe permanently -- and set up shop on Facebook. The existing content at /Messengers will be migrated to /Message, and some bits of it might be repurposed for the new page at Facebook for Stowe Boyd And The /Messengers. Go take a look.

Unlike Fred Wilson, I am not buying ads, but I am interested to see if my biz presence fans out through fans. Fan me!

I also think that many of the Facebook groups that were formed in the past should be shuttered, and converted to Facebook business pages, since many are thinly disguised business presences.

I'm For F2F, Too: And Everything Else

A Vodaphone UK research study on UK communication patterns suggests that face-time is still the most importnat in business, although telephone is losing out to online techniques among younger professionals:

[from Face-Time Or Online?]

[...]

New research released by Vodafone UK suggests that business people tempted to spend too much time online ‘social networking’ are in danger of losing out to those that mix old methods with the new.

Despite the hype surrounding social networking sites, they are not the most favoured means of business communication. Popular meeting places include top restaurants where clients would expect to be treated to lunch (47%) or drinks at a private members club (26%), while more than one in ten still prefer to tee off a relationship on the golf course. Pubs are also a popular networking venue, with almost a third making the most of their lowered inhibitions.

The research also shows that while the telephone is still the most dominant networking tool (59% use it to network), phone usage with clients has also dropped by almost a third (30%) in the space of a generation when comparing those under and over forty. In fact, the thought of dealing with clients over the phone is so daunting that almost half of entrepreneurs in their twenties prefer to network online only.

The research, which surveyed over 1100 business people across the UK, also suggests that an online approach to client communication should not stand alone. One in five managing directors would not do business with anyone they hadn’t met face to face, over a quarter would refuse business to anyone they hadn’t at least spoken to over the phone and only a third have successfully managed to secure business using email alone.

[...]

My take is that the UK is very different from the US, especially with regard to the pub numbers. In London, there seem to be three pubs on every corner, and at the end of the workday they are bursting with working people -- of every stripe -- socializing in a work-related context. This is much less of a phenomenon in the US.

I also have found folks in the UK a bit less likely to adopt Web based communication technology. I gave a talk a year or so back where I used the example of IMing during a meeting with a client. Most of the people in the session would not have even brought a laptop to a meeting -- it would be considered rude to do so, they said -- let alone use IM during the meeting.

The reluctance of UK managing directors to break with f2f interactions is what I would expect, actually.

Personally, I am all for f2f. I want that, and everything else, too.

It's very generational though: "More than two thirds of British businesspeople prefer to network face to face (67%) where possible, but amongst businesspeople in their early twenties, 47% prefer to network online."

We Make Our Tools And They Shape Us: Presentations From Berlin

I gave the following in Berlin, as a 50 minute talk.

| View | Upload your own

I guess I should really record audio, because the slides don't say anything.

I found the cultural differences in Germany pretty significant. Very few women in the extremely nerdish attendees, and while the group seemed oriented toward building and using web apps, the German web culture is jammed with German language knock-offs of English language applications. As a result, it seems relatively insular, inwardly focussed. The same seems true of their blogging community.

Perhaps its just me getting burned out on the lecture circuit, again.

Here's the preso from my workshop, which is equally useless without audio or crib notes, I think:

| View | Upload your own

I am more than willing to do my 'Building Social Applications" workshop, but I think in the future I will limit the size to 50 participants, make it a full day, and charge a lot. The combination of too many people, 3 hours, and not paying much makes for a strange chemistry. In Berlin, 1/3 of the group -- more or less -- just opted out of the group exercise in the workshop, and sat in alienated silence, reading email or surfing the web.

I had one disaster at the show, when I was asked to participate in '5 great ideas in 10 minutes'.

I created a speedo Lessig sort of presentation, one word slides that I was going to flash past at blinding speed. The well-meaning but techno-challenged folks at the conference screwed up the slides. At the last minute they were gathering files on a USB drive from the various participants, like me and Tom Coates. Knowing how PPT can screw things up, I actually checked how my slides looked on the PC. Looked fine. Then someone collapsed all the slideshows into one file -- to make things 'easier'. So I lost all my styles, including the fact that my titles were in dark blue on a light blue semi-transparent rectangle above the images. Instead, I had black text, no rectangles, on top of images. In fact, even up in front I couldn't even read some of the slides, and I know others couldn't.

When I asked the unfortunate soul who had smooshed the presos into one file whether she had looked at the result, she said yes, and that mine had looked pretty bad. "Did you look back at the original?" I asked. No, she didn't have time. (Note that I sent her a copy in the afternoon, but her email had overloaded, so she couldn't receive it.) So 700 people (or more) heard me wave my hands around in front of an unreadable presentation. At least it was only 2 minutes long.

Oh, by the way, the last slide, that I couldn't read? It said "Discovery" -- which is what users of social tools are really after.

<update>6:04 am
In my email this morning was a message from my friend Tina Kulow -- who I hardly got to talk to in Berlin -- about a new study of German companies adoption (or lack of adoption) of Web 2.0 technology. You can download the report here. Basically, Germany is not adopting these technologies very quickly, and only half of those that are aware of Web 2.0 (about half) believe it will be beneficial.
</update>

links for 2007-11-13

• BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Glam: The success of the network
  Jarvis dissects the success of Glam: it's a social network that looks for the best contributors and rewards them.
  (tags: indigenous+content glam+networks jeff+jarvis)
• Al Gore joins famed Silicon Valley venture capital firm - Yahoo! News
  Al Gore is going to help Kleiner invest Green
  (tags: al gore, kleiner perkins, green ventures)

What Do Giselle Bundchen and Stowe Boyd Have In Common?

Aside from good looks? Euros.

As recentlyreported, Giselle is apparently asking for future contracts to be in euros, not dollars.

Starting a few weeks agao, I rejiggered various contracts with Europeans to be pegged to the exchange rate as of 1 May, which was 1.35 euros to the dollar. So now I have to go through two calculations: if I bid the project in dollars, so I have to convert to euros as of 1 May, and then back to dollars at todays rate (1.45). In the future, I will simply bid projects in euros, at least with Europeans.

My /Message Template, Typepad, Feedburner, and Ads

I have rejiggered my /Message blog template, and those of /Ambivalence and /Messengers, as well. My basic goal was to make things less busy, so I went to a two column format, making the single sidebar 350 pixels wide.

Among other things, I wanted to experiment with Feedburner ads on /Message, since I really don't seem to fit the market for Federate Media Publishing. No offense to John Battelle and company: I just don't have the traction of the monster meta-blog sites like Techncrunch, and their service is oriented toward that.

So I thought I would give Feedburner a try, since they are putting ads in my feed anyway, and to host their ads in the sidebar, I needed 350 pixels.

There is a support post at Typepad about changing the CSS for a Typepad blog to change the size of the columns, without converting the templates. So I have adopted this CSS:

.layout-two-column-right #alpha { width: 580px; }
.layout-two-column-right #beta { width: 300px; }
#container { width: 920px; }
#banner { width: 910px; }

And hacked it a little to make the right column 350px, now 300px (see #beta, above). What I really want is to have the #alpha, or left column float freely. But when I drop the #alpha definition, nothing works. Recommendations from the CSS heads out there?

I also had to cheat a bit. Typepad theoretically works with Feedflare -- it says so in Feedburner's literature and in Typepads -- but Typepad's UI has been changed, and as a result you can't make it work as described. Neither party seems very forthcoming, so I presume there is an unresolved battle over revenue.

However, if SixApart wants to control ads, please, get something going so I can do it.

In the meantime, I took the code for the ad insertion, and hacked it to work in my blog now. Since I have standard templates I don't have access to the inner guts of Typepad magic. So I can't use code like this:

<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/stoweboyd/wpeL?i=<$MTEntryPermalink$>" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>

So what I did was to create a Typepad Typelist, called Feedburner Network, and place a single entry in it:

<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/stoweboyd/wpeL?i=http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>

I then added that Typelist to the new fat sidebar, and, presto: Feedburner ads appeared.

I may be screwing up the ad counts, since many of the clicks might be taking place on individual pages, but I am limited in what I can do if I don't want to convert my templates.

Seems only to be displaying ads intermittently, though, so... I may have screwed something up. But when it works, it looks pretty good.

The strange thing is the on-going silence from Typepad and Feedburner customer support folks, who insist that Feedburner and Typepad do work together. However, whenever I run down the steps of getting it to work, there is a mythical "add feedflare" option in the Typepad Select Content page. But it's not there for me! Anyway, that method may be designed just for text ads at the footer of each post, while I want to put the big graphical ads in my sidebar.

<update>12:05pm

My pal, Paolo Valdemarin, debugged the CSS:

.layout-two-column-right #alpha { width: auto; padding-right: 150px;} .layout-two-column-right #beta { width: 350px;} #container { width: 1000px; } #banner { width: 1020px; }

</update>

Compress PDF: First Leopard Headache

I have found my first toe stub in Leopard: I no longer apparently have the option to make a compressed PDF in the print dialog. Which is a pain, since services like Slideshare have a 30MB limit, and my presentations are mostly images these days. So now I have to save a version of the PPT with compressed images, and PDF that. Ugh.

<update>Tuesday 13 Novemeber 2007 5:00am ET

Well, it seems there is a workaround. The Leopard Preview tool can create compressed PDF.

[from MacNN Forums comment by Rickey939]

Found this from Leopards "Help "menu....

Compressing a PDF file
Large PDF files can be difficult to archive or email. Using Preview, you can compress a PDF file so it’s easier to share or store.

To compress a PDF file:

Open Preview, in your Applications folder.

Choose File > Open, select the PDF file to compress, and then click Open.

Choose File > Save As, choose Reduce File Size from the Quartz Filter pop-up menu, and choose a name and location for the new PDF file.

Click Save.

This process compresses the images in the file. The compressed images look the same as the originals when viewed onscreen, but may appear to be of lower quality when printed.

An additional step, but perhaps more effective that the compressing via Powerpoint, which did not get my PDFs below the 30M line, so I couldn't upload to Slideshare. This actually works.

However, the images are so compressed that they look like mud. Sigh.

Of course, this is all caused by me using an odd font. If I caved into just using Helvetica or some such, I could just upload the stupid PPT file.
</update>

Yedda Acquired?

Question: Why would AOL buy a social Q&A company, specifically, Israeli start-up Yedda?
Answer: Trying to hold onto a promising start in the indigenous ("user-generated") content arena?

Congratulations to Avi Nissenbaum and Yaniv Golan reported in Paidcontent.org.

I have to confess that I met with Avi and Yaniv a few months back, when I dispensed some not-particularly insightful advice over coffee. Basically, I find Q&A narrow compared to other indigenous content, like blogging. I have not been charmed by the Q&A sector -- like LinkedIn's Answers service -- but I will keep my eyes on it since media monsters like AOL think it has legs.

links for 2007-11-12

• Michal Szklanowski Blog: Web 2.0 Expo: Day 1
  Comments on my workshop, and complains that Tim O'Reilly screams to much. Tim almost made me wet my pants, at one point. Tom Coates and I each jumped a foot.
  (tags: web20expoberlin web+2.0+expo berlin tim+oreilly tom+coates)
• mosoci β » brand 2.0β
  Stuart Henshall and Dina Mehta's new obsession.
  (tags: brand+2.0b stuart+henshall dina+mehta mosoci)

Cult Of Productivity: We Know He's Lying, But Who Cares?

I love this piece about the technoids all aswizzle over Timothy Ferriss: the 4 Hour Workweek author. Andreesen and a host of others are mentioned as acolytes.

[from Too Much Information? Ignore It by Alex Williams]

[...] After reading Mr. Ferriss’s recent best seller, “The 4-Hour Workweek” (Crown), Jason Hoffman, a founder of Joyent, which designs Web-based software for small businesses, urged his employees to cut out the instant-messaging and swear off multitasking. From now on, he told them, severely restrict e-mail use and conduct business the old-fashioned way, by telephone.

“All of a sudden,” Mr. Hoffman said of the results, “their evenings are free. All of a sudden Monday doesn’t feel so overwhelming.”

One of the Ferriss' premises is that you should just turn off communications to simplify your life. And all the hyperconnected folks seem to find this an attractive alternative. Just stop answering emails, shut off the IM, let the phone ring.

Like Linda Stone, Ferriss preaches that "it's the dose that makes the poison" not being connected itself.

I believe this is the backlash of connectedness: a distant echo on the war on flow. Or perhaps just another form of the dream of wealth.

In a world where technical folks dream of hitting it big, and becoming wealthy, 'fuck you' money may translate directly into throwing the blackberry off the Golden Gate Bridge and moving to the top of a hill in the Cascades.

In a different time, people dreamed of the impact of wealth as having servants, or nice clothes, or a big house. Today, the psychological attraction of wealth may be the freedom to ignore all the information out there.

Despite my advocacy for flow, I also believe that people should minimize sources of information. In particular, I anticipate that more of us will see our personal network as the primary source of information. So, I am closing down the mass media channels. Years ago I turned off the TV. Now I don't read magazines. I still am addicted to the New York Times, but increasingly that is the last mass media hold out for me.

But, in this piece, Ferriss doesn't distinguish between being connected to people or being on the wrong end of a fire hose of media bilge being spurted on us: the info porn. I think that distinction is critical: drop all the mass media stuff, and make more time for connection with people.

Still, whenever I get into this discussion with people, they say something like "I only watch documentaries, but there is some good stuff on there. Did you see last week's Heroes?"

My concern isn't whether or not Masterpiece Theater is worthwhile, or whether Jerry Seinfeld was the high water mark of televisioniana. My point is that TV is a social acid that has corroded social capital. Activities that reconnect people are countering the effects of decades of TV poisoning. Turn that shit off, sure: but why do I need to disconnect from the people most important to me?

Finally, I am saddened that Andreesen et al can be so taken with a guy who is obviously a huckster, lying his ass off. As related in the Williams piece, the guy is working 15 hour days, trying to become the Tony Robbins of the 21st Century.

Why do smart people get duped by a con artist? Because he is playing on the archetypal daydream of success, and for many, throwing that Blackberry away and heading for the hills would be the quintessential success scenario.

Facebook Ads

Yesterday, I was reading A VC, where Fred Wilson couldn't figure out how to create an ad. (Today, he posts about his success in doing so.)

After reading his post yesterday, I figured out how to create an ad in Facebook. First, you have to create a company profile. Here's me setting up a 'Stowe Boyd and The /Messengers' page.

.

Then a new item shows in the applications list at the upper left: the page manager. When you click it, it opens this page:

At the bottom, I am invited to create an ad campaign to boot traffic, and a button at the upper right starts the ad creation process. I select it, and I can drive ads to the new page I have created for my company in Facebook. I could also direct the traffic elsewhere: to my blog for example.

The selection of interests and demographics seems pretty minimal:

Shouldn't this be a lot more fine-grained? If you have millions of people in the group, shouldn't I be able to winnow it down based on something a bit more particular than 'Technology' and 'Web design'? I really want to reach entrepreneurs building web apps: no one else really matters to me. So, I would have expected a lot more flexibility in this area. As it is, it seems geared to consumer products, or very large demographics based on age and geography -- 24 to 35 year-old women in San Francisco, for example -- rather than targeting profiles based on profiles.

Of course, reading profiles and traffic in the Facebook streams is an iffy proposition on a privacy basis, anyway. However, the basic demographics are potentially just as irksome if you feel that your age, geography, and sex are something you are opting to share with friends, not with advertisers.

I ran into some snags with my ad, since the ads cannot contain '=' or '/' -- so I had to edit the copy (although it looked fine in the preview!):

The next step is to figure out a budget, based either on an amount to pay for clicks or for views:

I opted not to buy my ad, when confronted with the inevitable credit card form:

Since I can't really target entrepreneurs who might be interested in my help, I would be tossing money into a goof, not really chasing real leads.

Conclusions

It was easy to do, and for some products and services -- dare I say 'mass market'? -- it could be workable.

But I wonder about the broad spectrum ads that has something like this pushed to me, and my network:

What kind of targetting is that? Here I am, a guy that dresses like an unmade bed and who thinks that suits are a symbol of a class-obsessed society, getting ads to H&M high fashion galas. Really bad matches.

Why can't I tag myself with truly meaningful identifiers, so that appropriate information can find me? It's only then that ads become information. This is just social spam: another form of junk mail.

Brian Solis Goes Graphical

Even my buddy Brian Solis has succumbed to the "social graph" meme:

[from Lifestream of Brian Solis]

Social Graph = Your relationships and the relationships of others within Social Networks.

I guess this trend proves that the term 'social network' has become so shopworn that we need something else to refer to the relationships between people instead of 'social network', even though that exactly what social networks are. It's like the guy Todd Luiso plays in Jerry McGuire who doesn't want to be called a nanny: "Nanny? I prefer child technician."

All the color has been pushed out of 'social networks' by their success, like the carpet in a Las Vegas casino.

links for 2007-11-11

• OUseful Info
  Tony Hirst on privacy in online learning
  (tags: tony+hirst open+university)
• Web2Summit: Flickr Places Announced
  I missed this: Flickr Places is coming.
  (tags: flickr flickr+places geoloco)
• PicoCool - Post: Geek Chic Jewelry
  earrings with play and stop icons
  (tags: jewelry geek+jewelry picocool)

Digital Telepathy: Business In A Box

We all know that consultants often approach what they do in a cookie cutter fashion. So I get a kick out of Digital Telepathy's new push to respin what they do from a PR business into a service:

[from Digital Telepathy Helps You Build Your Web 2.0 Startup by Duncan Riley]

[...]

Digital Telepathy offers three design my business options with varying service levels based on the length of each plan. The 15 day plan provides a wannabe startup with market research, strategic alignment, scalable revenue model, instruction manual for project completion and a concept summary delivered as a “Biz in a Box”. The 45 day plan offers (in addition to the 15 day plan) “initial buzz building,” and a range of design services including basic prototyping, usability testing, blueprints, concept mapping and other design services. The 90 day plan adds development services including full scale back-end development for beta release, front end development, private beta invites, feature development and more.

The Biz in a Box service isn’t for those already in the industry, or those with a lot of experience, although Digital Telepathy also offers services for existing startups looking for advice on taking their business to the next level. I know when I was previously involved in a startup it was difficult to know where to start, and who to get advice from. Even when you do find someone it’s often not a cheap experience either, the consultant I dealt with previously charged 6 figures to basically guide us in the right direction, without providing any development services.

Digital Telepathy is passionate in helping startups they believe in. DT’s Sarah Carr described the change of direction to me as follows: “It’s pretty cool because we are basically saying to our clients, to the Internet/social space, and to the entire WORLD that we are going to actually DO what we love to do and just get rid of all the crap that bores us to death.” I asked CEO Chuck Longanecker about the cost and he responded “the most important thing for us (dt) is to work on projects that we are passionate about and enjoy doing. The second most important thing is to eventually get paid for what we do, so that we can keep doing it.”

Prices range from $15,000 through to $250,000, although each project is calculated on a per startup basis. It may sound like a lot of money, but it’s a lot of service for your buck, and it is competitive.

Wow.

I agree that services are more palatable to clients when laid out like products: like boxes of cereal on the shelf. However, the way that this whole story is swallowed, unexamined, baffles me.

How can a company offer a turn-key business-in-a-box service without regard for the specifics? By taking a common denominator approach, and not paying a lot of attention to the client's need for differentiation, I bet.

This reminds me of the era in the last bubble when everyone's logo looked the same, with an electron swooshing around the name of the company.

Now, everyone will wind up with the same business plan, disgorged by the same process, sitting in a similarly crafted unique position.

Full disclosure: I have had no contact with DT, and I am not knocking their intentions. Hell, they may even have people specifically asking them to do what they are doing. And, yes, in a sense I am a competitor, since one fringe of my consulting work at The /Messengers touches on marketing, although my major work these days is product strategy and application design.

Here's my own extremely helpful diagram, detailing my unique way of working with clients in 15, 45 and 90 day engagements. Nothing like a visual to clear things up.

I wonder if Digital Telepathy used their own 15 day process to come up with this business model?

links for 2007-11-10

• Apple Tablet PC is real, says Asus - Crave at CNET.co.uk
  Can the Apple design wizards make a tablet PC for the rest of us? Yes.
  (tags: apple tablet+pc asus)

Lighthouse

I have used and reviewed a long list of social media-based work management solutions, including Basecamp (see Basecamp and the Federation of Work), IBM Quickr (see In The Time Of "Me First": IBM Slowr?), GoPlan (see GoPlan), and recently Huddle (see Todoist and Huddle: This Week's Work Management Tools).

Now, I have bumped into another contender, a lightweight but extremely usable tool called Lighthouse, from ActiveReload.

In basic form, the now familiar Basecampish model is reused: major project information silos being directly mapped to tabs, a right hand panel to select from various projects, a dashboard summarizing status of all projects.

Here we see the dashboard:

Here is a project overview:

Note the various (garish) colors indicating different types of information added to the project. (I have recommended a different color palatte.) Each project has its own secure RSS feed. I find the secure limitation a problem, as I am less security conscious than most. They should make it a toggle.

Basic 'messages' (posts) are used for project collaboration:

Files can be attached to messages (and to tickets), and once they are uploaded, the files appear in the right sidebar when viewing the messages (or tickets). Unlike Basecamp, there isn't a separate 'Files' silo, and no versioning is supported.

Strange that Lighthouse doesn't support tags on posts, but they do so on 'tickets' which are Lighthouse's version of tasks. It is in the area of tickets that Lighthouse really shines:

Note in the above that tickets can be associated with milestones (like Basecamp task lists), have a status (open, resolved, invalid (?), and on hold), and have comments.

Once milestones are created they appear as tabs, and clicking these tabs opens a panel with any associated tickets. A 'prioritize' feature allows reordering.

There is an extensive integration with tickets and email that I have not explored, but in essence the status of ticket can be updated by replying to system generated emails. New tickets can be created by emailing Lighthouse, again somethign I have yet to experiment with, but which looks promising.

Conclusions

Lighthouse lacks a number of features that Basecamp offers, such as writeboards, Chat, and time ranges built into tasks.

However, in my case, I never use Basecamp writeboards, because Textile is annoying, and is applied inconsistently across the application. My collaborator, Marjolein Hoekstra, tried the Lighthouse mark-up language, and found it perhaps equally painful, but I generally stick to text and HTML, which seems generally to work in Lighthouse, such as links. (I did encounter a headache with 'blockquote", which is styled with a leading quote. Would be good if Lighthouse allowed us to redefine the CSS style sheets.)

Re: Campfire style chat -- I use so many other tools for chat, like Gtalk and AIM, that Campfire has never been a big draw for me. Others, of course, swear by it.

Re: time tracking -- My work is based on relatively large time chunks (days, generally, not hours) so collecting time from tasks or tickets is not a real need. However, this is an area where a small tweak -- adding another field for time expended -- could add a lot of value.

So, for me, Lighthouse implements the subset of Basecamp that I actually use. It hasn't countered some of the flaws in Basecamp -- the lack of federation, the orientation toward desktop docs not web docs, etc. -- but it has simplified things a bit.

Considering the slimmed-down nature of the app, however, the price is not slim:

Because of Lighthouse modules that support integration with other applications (like Subversion), their support for user-accesible APIs, and the opportunity to support public projects (where anonymous users can create tickets and track their status), the product is really not intended as a lightweight replacement for Basecamp, as I have tried to pigeonhole it. It is really a straightforward issue management tool which happens to overlap in part with Basecamp.

I would really like tags on messages, so that I could bring up both messages and tickets related to an issue, but I can live with it as it is. (At least for a little bit, while I am waiting for the millennium...)

Nova Spivack on Web 3.0

Confirming that the 'Web 3.0' meme is inextricably linked to product hucksterism, Nova Spivack offers up his 'best official definition', explicitly reprising Jason Calacanis' similarly heavyhanded official definition, that I explored here. Once again, a impresario is positing a shiny new web in which his patent nostrum is the quintessential centerpoint of a glorious unfolding future:

[from Minding the Planet: Web 3.0 -- The Best Official Definition Imaginable]

[...]

Web 3.0, in my opinion is best defined as the third-decade of the Web (2010 - 2020), during which time several key technologies will become widely used. Chief among them will be RDF and the technologies of the emerging Semantic Web. While Web 3.0 is not synonymous with the Semantic Web (there will be several other important technology shifts in that period), it will be largely characterized by semantics in general.

Web 3.0 is an era in which we will upgrade the back-end of the Web, after a decade of focus on the front-end (Web 2.0 has mainly been about AJAX, tagging, and other front-end user-experience innovations.) Web 3.0 is already starting to emerge in startups such as my own Radar Networks, but will really become mainstream around 2010.

I have to say that I would like to play with Spivack's new shiny Twine app, independently of the Web 3.0 mumbo jumbo.

Pointer from Richard McManus, who is also unmoved by the Web 3.0 psychobabble:

I should note that Nova's definition of web 3.0 is self-serving, because his new product Twine is an "intelligent web" product that uses semantics. Also I am not a proponent of continuing the version numbers - just as 'dot com' is the term for the first era of the Web, and 'web 2.0' the second, there will be a new term that bubbles up at the right time to describe the next era (perhaps 2-3 years from now).

The people that will invent new stuff that will leapfrog Web 2.0's social revolution will not be web 2.0 retreads, but radical newbies: five girls in a rock band in an Illinois high school now, or some guy in South Korea working on 3D games, or a loose collective of Estonian graphic designers that invent a composite document metaphor. They will call it whatever is on their minds, not Web 3.0.

Corante Has Lost Its Domain?

Whois Corante.com, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

AndrewHires left a comment on my recent complaints about the blog spam taking over at Corante, where I used to write Get Real, saying that Corante.com has become an apartment hunting site.

Sure enough, if I visit Corante.com the place is a mess, although it looks like the old Corante with a bunch of broken RSS plumbing. But when I click on any of the links to specific pages, including my old blog at getreal.corante.com, here's what I get:

Looks like Hylton forgot to pay for the domain name.

And, so, the passing of a once proud name in new media...

<update>6:11pm ET -- Looks like Corante managed to get its domain back!
</update>

Internet Evolution: What's the Web Worth?

My first real post at Internet Evolution is up:

[from What's the Web Worth? by Stowe Boyd]

[...]

This is a world beset by disease, riven by war, melting under the sun, poisoned by hate and fear, pinioned by the tug-of-war between contending ideologies, tribes, nations, and religions. Maybe we should exchange the tiny and swindling sliver of what is good and bright in the world for the Web. There is so little of that, and so much that is dark. Maybe our only hope is to rework our notions of happiness, rethink our connections to each other in light of the Web, and put aside even the apparent good that comes from a world divided and turned against itself.

Let's give the Web to ourselves, in exchange for what we held dear before.

The Web is uncountable, not infinite, but for all intents and purposes, its size and costs are unknowable. It's changing things like never before, just as if we were rewriting our DNA. We can look back, and try to measure how far we've come, or look ahead, to how far we have to go, but ultimately, the value of the thing called the Web will be measured by the changes in ourselves, and what we make of ourselves through it.

I am hoping that the result of my thoughts at Internet Evolution will start to feel like at least the echo or shadow of a book, so I am eager for feedback. The working title is The Social Revolution.

Dave McClure Is Wrong, Continued: Social Graph v Social Network

Dave McClure responded to my recent post about the redundant and unhelpful 'Social Graph' meme. I maintain that the 'Social Network' term -- which is in wide use and well-understood -- is fine. Dave doesn't agree:

hey stu -

of course you're entitled to your opinion, however i'd still suggest that 'social graph' is more specific & nuanced than 'social network' -- specifically the idea of a graph (from mathematics graph theory) is a series of nodes connnected by directed vertices with weights/attributes. this is not the typical definition of a social network, which altho similar, is usually just described as my list of friends.

i made the analogy with XML & RSS, as i believe this is a similar situation -- RSS is a more specific & nuanced implementation of XML, that emphasizes a standard for content publishing (rather than a more generic structured data standard).

so i disagree the 'social graph' term is more confusing -- in fact, quite the opposite: it's more specific.

i can understand why some folks feel it's the same thing, and prefer to use the earlier 'social networking' term instead. that's fine & i don't have any problem there... it's still accurate, just not quite as specific in some cases.

that said, i don't agree with Winer that using the term 'social graph' is somehow incorrect or confusing, or that we should do away with the term... any moreso than we should do away with using RSS.

my .02,

- dave

[Note: the 'Stu' thing is a small joke, since I introduced him as 'Doug McClure' at the Office 2.0 panel session I chaired. Apologies for that, again, Dave.]

The notion that 'Social Graph' is more 'nuanced' that 'Social Network' because the former term comes from the study of mathematics is just fluff. The term social network comes from decades of research -- in anthropology, sociology, and related fields -- and is supported by a corpus of articles, books, and a rich collection of mathematically-defined terms. The study of social networks has been going on for over a century, and the term has been in use since the '50s. The work of dozens of social network theorists, like Mark Gronovetter, Anatol Rapoport, Stanley Wasserman, and Duncan Watts has supported the richness of our growing understanding of social networks and network theory.

The biggest weakness of McClure's comments is that a Social Graph is "a series of nodes connnected by directed vertices with weights/attributes. this is not the typical definition of a social network, which altho similar, is usually just described as my list of friends." However, the basis of social network study is all about the relationships between individuals, modeled as nodes in a network (a form of a graph), with specific sorts of attributes, many of which are weighted in various ways. For example, a few terms that I love for their poetry and precision:

[from Wikipedia entry on Social Network]

Betweenness

Degree an individual lies between other individuals in the network; the extent to which a node is directly connected only to those other nodes that are not directly connected to each other; an intermediary; liaisons; bridges. Therefore, it's the number of people who a person is connected to indirectly through their direct links.

Closeness

The degree an individual is near all other individuals in a network (directly or indirectly). It reflects the ability to access information through the "grapevine" of network members. Thus, closeness is the inverse of the sum of the shortest distances between each individual and every other person in the network.

Centrality Degree

The count of the number of ties to other actors in the network. See also degree (graph theory).

I liked Centrality as a term so much, I used it as the name of a blog I worked on for several years, sponsored by Visible Path.

It makes me think that Dave hasn't read any of the basic works on social networks, and maybe not even the Wikipedia entry. Or maybe he was confused, and typed in www.wikipedia.com/social_graph which directs you to the entry on Social Network, since there is no entry for Social Graph.

I agree that social network theory is related to the mathematical study of graphs, which is a support for what goes on in human social networks. However, these can be used to define a wider range of phenomena, such as the behavior of computer networks, ecological relationships of organisms, and problems posed by topology.

The most generous interpretation of his argument -- that social network has become conflated with a buddylist -- may have a speck of merit. But I think that the generally accepted and understood use of social network includes a great deal more richness. People understand the six degrees of separation concept, and the Kevin Bacon game is a commonplace. I don't buy it.

Finally, it is just wrong to advocate dropping the use of a richly described and rigorously researched term like social network for a less constrained and not particularly relevant term like social graph. It is just nuts, without some strong rationale. If someone could make a case for the application of a specific insight from graph theory to social networks -- like Cayley's work in theoretical chemistry, or the Four Color Problem in topology -- would at least create some rational for considering a new term, or redefining the old one. Or arguing that the body of research that has been called social network theory lacks some critical elements that only a new study, social graph theory, explains some real-world phenomena better would at least be worthy of discussion.

However, simply stating that the 'social graph' meme holds some nebulous mystical significance is not science. It's not even good logic. It's just some kind of sketchy marketing mumbo-jumbo that benefits no one except the advocates who might derive some ripple of attention while the term is passed around.

I am no respecter of persons, as those who have read my work can attest, so I am not making this case for the sake of a bunch of academics. I am an advocate for clarity and simplicity in discourse, however, so I will continue to make the case that 'Social Graph' is at best a synonym for 'Social Network' and at the worst is a marketing ploy or a publicity stunt.

In this fissile age, where a ideas can become money in next to no time, we have seen several extremely profitable and beneficial conferences rise through the introduction of models (and associated terms) that describe new agencies and forces at work in the tech landscape. The stunningly successful Web 2.0 conferences, that generate millions now every year, and the younger Office 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 events are all good examples. However, the memes that motivate the shows actually help us to understand things better, because metaphors can be powerful tools for understanding the world. (Making a case for Social Networks 2.0 could have been a possibility, but one that was rejected or didn't occur to the advocates of the Social Graph meme.)

On the other hand, metaphors are not magic. They can be unhelpful or just dumb. While building a conference around 'Social Graph', as Dave has done, does not doom the event to failure just because the metaphor is unhelpful. On the contrary, I think the upcoming conference -- focused specifically on Facebook's growing ecology -- is a great idea. I will be attending. Likewise, I plan to attend the next Social Graph event, schedule for 2008, now an O'Reilly event. But the success will come without the metaphorical help that Web 2.0 and its derivatives have offered us.

I recommend that Dave and O'Reilly consider a debate on the term, at one or both of the eponymous events, since they now are the term's leading proponents. I would be happy to be one of the voices on the other side, and I am sure that others would be glad to join in.

Chris Messina on Twitter 'Tracking' and #Hashtags

A comment from Chris that should not be buried in the comments:

[from /Message: Twitter Supports 'Tracking' But Not #Hashtags?]

Hey Stowe, thanks for your continued support on this. I completely agree with your assessment about the "declarative" or intentional nature of hashtags. This is something that I argued debated with Jack about, but ultimately lost out.

I do like the elegance and implementation of the "track" feature, but I don't like how it still misses things that go unsaid but are otherwise related to what I want to track (again, pointing to the purpose of hashtags -- a means of meta-describing your content).

My biggest disappointment with the track feature is how anti-social it is. Whereas @replies allowed you to eavesdrop on conversations, track words are, so far, explicitly private, meaning that people can spy on words (or users) while no one benefits from that knowledge.

I thought I was pretty clever in tracking the terms 'earthquake' and 'quake' but no one else will know because the feature as implemented never gives me the chance to share them with the world.

Ho hum.

Yes, the social dimension -- begin able to share tags, to participate in the community implied by a tag -- is absolutely lost with Twitter 'tracks' as implemented. I guess the Twitter viewpoint is more like a communication tool, pushing info to your cell phone, and not a community model. But isn't that the opposite of how Twitter feels?

Weird.

Remember The Milk, Redux

Ran Barton commented on a recent post about Todoist and Huddle:

As an avid user of Remember The Milk, I wanted to offer two quick suggestions:

RTM has a GMail extension, too - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5339

Also, RTM can be run in the sidebar via their very powerful Google gadget. I do this everyday - it's great.
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/help/2222/

Hmmm.

So I took a look, and in a few minutes, I switched to Remember The Milk, and quickly decided to drop Todoist.

Todoist is based on the project metaphor: every task must be in a project, which annoys me, and complicates the interface and experience. RTM, on the other hand, better supports my bottom-up mindset: I create tasks and tag them with as many terms as I like, so I can display everything tagged 'London' or 'cash'.

I favor the chronological orientation of the RTM sidebar, and the ease with which I can pull down the controller on each task to set the status to complete, or to postpone or edit the task.

Here's the web site, which opens when you click on a task in the sidebar, or select edit:

The list is fine, but I seldom spend much time adding tasks in this view, except to add notes to tasks.

The integration with Google Calendar is totally great, and it the primary integration point that sells me on RTM:

The hack creates a new calendar which contain RTM tasks in some sneaky way (I say sneaky, because you can't see the tasks when you try to subscribe to that RTM calendar). By clicking on the check icon associated with each day, you see any that day's tasks, plus any others that are still pending from earlier days. These can be edited or completed just as in the sidebar, and new tasks can be added, and tied to the day selected. Very cool.

The integration with Gmail is not as clean and direct as with Todoist: when you use the "Add to RTM" button that gets placed at the bottom of Gmail's emails, it pops a window:

It you want to add tags or set the date for the gmail-linked task, you have to edit the magic words in the email that is generated, and which is later sent to your Remember The Milk account. Later, if you want to bring up the email that was linked, you have to go through two steps:

1. You click the task in the sidebar to open the task info in the web page
2. In the information associated with the task, the URL area holds the URL, which you click to open the email.

So it's workable, but I favor the more direct one-click approach that Todoist provides. RTM's team should do something along those lines.

However, I have found the switch worthwhile, and I am very happy with RTM's look and feel, especially the tag-based organization into taggings, not projects.

Alexandra Samuel also commented on the earlier post:

Stowe, you make a compelling case for ToDoist over RTM, though I have been pretty happy with RTM -- except for the basic nightmare of having tasks split between RTM and Basecamp. I just blogged how we're using Basecamp (http://www.socialsignal.com/basecamp-workflow), despite the fundamental problem that we have with Basecamp's lack of task due dates or task annotation.

What I'm curious to hear -- and a little reluctant to take on the hard way, i.e. by personally testing yet another project management tool -- is whether your Todoist plus Huddle approach would offer any major improvement in task management integration, compared to our Basecamp plus RTM solution. It sounds like you are still in the same pickle of needing to keep tasks in two places. Does the non-secure RSS setup at Huddle let you export your tasks in some more usable form (e.g. the kludgy approach of placing them on an iGoogle homepage, next to an RTM widget, so you can at least lay eyes on all your tasks in one place)? Or would you, given the overhead of switching a team to a new tool, wait for some more revolutionary, hint hint, solution?

Yes, I am still divided between a task management tool -- RTM -- and a social work management tool -- Huddle -- which both have task management capabilities, and which are unintegrated. I use RTM to manage my personal debris: telephone calls, posts to write, email to follow up on, planes, trains, and automobiles. This follows my personal patterns pretty well.

Of course, I could use RTM's shared tasks with others, in principle, but I am a soloist playing in many orchestras, so trying to get my colleagues in the various companies where I am consulting to use RTM seems a bit too complex, since all it offers is task management. So, I invite my colleagues to use Huddle to manage the conversations around our work, and any project-related shared tasks. Or they invite me to use Basecamp, which happens frequently, or Clearspace, or some other tool. And I just flex, because there is so little leverage from having all your work in one of these contexts, anyway. They are just big collections of projects chatter, useful for collaborating on concepts and coordinating work lists, but not particularly geared to supporting the flow of work.

Yes, I have dreams of a more revolutionary solution, but that's all you'll get out of me today, Alexandra. In the near term, I have provided a list of recommendations to the folks at Huddle, and they are at work on some of them. Most importantly, I want things like having comments on Huddle posts (which they now call 'whiteboards' for no good reason) finding their way into the RSS feed. And, yes I would like tasks to show up in the RSS feed as well.

Greg Willows tried to drag my attention back to Wrike, which I reviewed months ago:

Stowe, not everybody uses Gmail. Does Todoist integrate with other email applications? Wrike does. I use it everywhere and can check a project updates even from my BlackBerry. I've read your review, looks pretty tough. But it was almost a year ago, Wrike guys have done a lot and the tool is now very efficient. I signed up only in May and I don’t know how it was in the beginning, but Wrike is full-fledged now. And besides, you can share all your tasks in Wrike. I have a small business and my whole team is working in Wrike. If I want to get an overview of my whole project work I use timeline, which is very handy. This tool doesn't need "integration" with Huddle or any other tools. So probably you should take a look at it once again?

Well, I do use Gmail, so that matters to me, a lot. I really don't like the Wrike model, which is -- once again -- tied to a "project as container" metaphor. Wrike's timeline view is a nice feature, but it's not important enough to me in general to justify the tool.

When Greg wrote 'I use timeline' I thought he meant another external tool. I hadn't heard of Timeline, which is a widget for visualizing time-based information. That looks cool, although you have to manually generate the Timeline dataset, right? Too much work, in general. Maybe someone will build an exporter from RTM and/or Huddle, and I could get timelines whenever I needed one.

Facebook -- In The Works: Groupings, I Hope, Not Groups

Facebook has 'groups' in the works:

[from Facebook | What's New]

In the Works

Sort out your friends.

We’ll let you organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what.

Please don't do this the wrong way: subdividing into discrete collections, where someone is either a Work friend or a Play friend, but can't be both. Those are 'Groups'.

What we want is 'Groupings" where we can tag our friends with as many associations as we like, such as 'work', 'play', 'bowling league', and 'san francisco'. That way we can share things in the most flexible ways possible.

Balancing The Ideas Of Many With The Decisions Of Few

I am a lazy, lazy man. One of the characteristics of a productive laziness is that I try to do things the same way all the time, so I don't have to expend energy dreaming up new ways to do the same old things. On one hand, I am aware that clients sometimes think that their brainchild, and the issues surrounding getting it to market, is totally unique, but when they think about it they usually are not offended that to me it is just another unruly beast trying to get out of its cage.

I have a relatively fixed notion of starting an engagement with clients: specifically, I like to have a full day with the full management team to dig into the companies plans and status. I have relaxed that rule a few times in the past year, with disastrous results. In a recent post, Rules of Engagement, Revisited, I recount the downside of relaxing the requirements for a full initial day and a full management team.

By 'full management team' I mean including anyone who could be in a spoiler position for anything new coming out of the consulting. Don't be swayed when they say that Jane doesn't need to be there, she's only the CFO. But later on, it will turn out that she controls allocation of money, so she can veto everything. It's easier with a small start-up, in general, but in two recent cases small start-ups largely involving very young entrepreneurs both involved much more senior heads of marketing who were both working part time on a more or less consulting basis, and in both cases, these marketing heads were far too busy to attend a full day of meetings on the future of their product. And in both cases this led to downstream turmoil when the marketing hired guns reinserted themselves back into the project weeks later, derailing progress.

This is how I try to structure the day. It seems loose, but if you actually dig into the particulars, its fairly tight.

1. Introductions -- quickly go around the room, and do the short version in a few minutes.
2. Tell me about your company (history, status, tech, plans) - 1/2 day

   I want to hear the story: the whole story. How was the company conceived? Who was involved at the start? What were the original aspirations, and how have they changed? What are the backgrounds of all of the people? Who is in charge of what, and if everybody is in charge of everything -- which seems fairly common in small start-ups -- what is the process of decision making? What is the product, and what is its status? What is the product plan, and if the product has not been released yet, the current go-to-market plan? Who is the chief architect or product visionary? Let's go through the powerpoint. If there are wireframes, let's see them all, in detail. If there is a working application, let's see it, and fool with it. If there is beta feedback, what is it? If there is customer data, what is it? Who are the competitors? What are they up to?
   

3. Let me tell you about your company - 1/2 day

   I want to tell the ending of the story: a new, better story. Working from the ideas, perceptions, and realities uncovered in the first half day, we dig into reinforcing what's strong and rethinking what's weak. A lot of this involves the team's distribution of skills, and filling gaps. My emphasis is on social applications -- I hardly deal with anything else -- so a large number of common themes appear time and time again. I encounter a lot of applications that are dominated by domain-specific functionality where the social dimension is an afterthought. These can require a significant rethinking of the user experience, which is why every member of the management team needs to be there, so everything can be put on the table, and considered. The final output is some sort of a recommended action plan, so I want to walk through that plan with the team, and work to get buy-in and some agreement as to who should do what.

I sometimes say my role is software psychiatrist, where I ask the application to tell me about its childhood. This is really close to reality, since the relationships between the various 'parents' -- the management team -- has enormous impact on the product's design and implementation.

One of the truths about product design is that larger teams generate more ideas that small ones, but small teams do the best job of weeding through ideas to get to the best ones. The hardest balancing act is walking the line between the first stage involvement of a larger group in brainstorming -- like the entire management team, possibly including investors who have to remain confident in the company's plans, and the occasional part-time greybeard marketing guy -- and the whittling down to a small core product team to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. All too often, everyone wants to be one of the small core team.

I believe the best design comes from incredibly small teams: one, two, or at most three people. Even three can get into a nest of group dynamics.

So one of the things I try to work through is to coax the team as a whole into figuring out who is on that team. Obviously, this is also a place where I can write myself out of the script if I come to believe that I will have problems working with the clients, or the product is no good, or the group lacks a center.

In general, my strongest role is chief architect or as an advisor to the chief architect. But I can't just meet with Betty, the product visionary, or Bao, the CEO. I have to get in the mix with the whole team, and feel their interactions flowing, to see what's going on, to see how their baby is shaping up.

It takes at least a day, and I discount the day heavily so that the money isn't the barrier. Even so, I get pushback from some people about allocating a full day and getting the full team together. It seems strange to me to hear that, when in principle getting the product right is the single most important thing for product companies. That's just another warning sign, though. Just like hearing that everyone (or no one) is in charge of the design, or learning that there is no coherent design description, just a list of features and a programmer.

I have come to anticipate any of the most common 'software company in distress' configurations, and I try to apply the appropriate response for each:

1. One Man Band -- A strong CEO, perhaps successful in previous projects or lines of work, gets an unfinished idea in his head and starts a new company. He hires others to be on the team, but they do not exactly share his vague product notions, and he never relinquishes final authority about product decisions while remaining only partly involved. The hired hands feel unappreciated and powerless. The only solution is to convince the CEO to either act as chief architect -- a role they are seldom suited for -- or to hire a chief architect strong enough to demand and get product control.
2. The Band Of Brothers -- A pair (or trio, or combo) of friends start a company, in a fairly (or overly) egalitarian fashion. They 'design' a product without necessarily agreeing on design principles, a process, or any explicit decision making process. When the partners don't have obviously complementary skills -- like one is technical and the other is the marketer -- you find the 'everything is everything' result: all features find their way into the product because no one wants to tell Joe that his pet feature is dumb. On a setting where everyone has a veto, products are badly designed and bloated, and change is sl-o-o-o-w. The solution here is to put someone in control of the product design, and to carefully unthread the gathering of ideas (brainstorming) from the narrowing of ideas (design).
3. The Band-Aid -- A weak CEO with a random team of principals, generally people with little social capital between them, recently hired into the start-up. The CEO has decided to focus the company on a promising corner of the market, but doesn't have a real product vision, just a collection of platitudes masquerading as principles, like "so easy even my grandmother could use it", or "the MySpace of X" where X is some noun, like grandmothers or Idaho. The collection of principals -- I won't call it a team -- can't cohere without a catalyst, and suffers violent mood swings: from a marketspeak buzz campaign, to a rework of the design based on a new competitor, to a rethinking of the target customer based on new market research. The group hopes the next superficial notion will save the day, but it's just a series of band-aids. The real solution is to fire as many of the ronin VPs as possible, and keep the one (or two) obsessed with building the product rather than endless meetings and powerpoint exchanges.

In a sense I seem to be countering Tolstoy, since he wrote in Anna Karenina that "All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I think that successful products emerge from happy families, that are alike in critical ways: they balance the ideas of many and rely on a few to make the key design decisions. But I have come to see that the unhappy families in these software design tales are alike, in some ways, as well.

There are patterns in the mess, and those can act as paths that can lead the unhappy toward something better. But in every case, getting the right balance -- and separation -- between the ideas of many and the decisions of few turns out to be the critical factor.

CrunchGear Futurist: Web 2.0 Is Doomed By Laziness

This is the weakest argument against Web 2.0 yet:

[from The Futurist: Will Human Laziness Burst The Web 2.0 Bubble? by Seth Porges]

[...]

Right now, the bubble that the Web exists in is not so much a financial bubble as it is a time bubble. There is still a novelty for a lot of people associated with finding friends on social networking sites, Digging their favorite stories, updating articles about the history of pinball, and leaving comments on their favorite blogs. But that will wear off. People will revert back to the things they used to do: like Minesweeper and work. And without millions of generous mouse-clickers, most of Web 2.0 is weakened, if not entirely useless.

Whenever it gets here, Web 3.0 may be bigger and better than what we have now, but you can bet that it won’t be foolish enough to rely on the unreliable. And there is nothing more unreliable than human nature.

So, if I understand this, the Web revolution will grind to a halt because people don't really want to be connected to others, it's just a fad. No, they want to go back to playing Whack-A-Mole and Day-Trading.

Better stick to writing about personal electronics, Seth.

Twitter Supports 'Tracking' But Not #Hashtags?

It looks like Twitter has been quitely upgraded, and includes a new feature:

[from Tracking Twitter]

[...]

Today we're releasing a tiny feature to do just that, and we're calling it "tracking." If you've set up your phone or IM on Twitter, you can send a command like:

track NYC

When someone (anyone who updates in public) mentions "NYC," you'll get it on your device in real-time. From there you can send "whois username" to find out more about that person, or "follow username" to follow his or her updates. Don't want to receive anymore about NYC? Toggle it off with:

untrack NYC

You can create as many of these as you want, so send "track drinking tea", "track iphone", "track walking san francisco" and you'll receive matches for all. Want to get a list of what you're currently tracking? Send "track" alone (or "stats"). Turn them all off by sending "track off".

We love this technology, and hope you do too. We're continuing to refine and play with it, so please send your feedback!

What will you track?

So this lines up with Chris Messina's #hashtags, in a way, since I could track interesting #hastags. But, a few questions:

1. Why not on the basic interface? Why only on IM or SMS?
2. I don't necessarily want to be alerted, I want a place to go look, or an account that I can subscribe to.

#Hashtags are declarative and imply a community. If I tag things with '#travels' I would expect there to be a place where I can see the aggregated stream of all people's posts with '#travels' in it. But I don't necessarily want to see every post with the word 'travels' in it, do I?

I think they need to rethink this a bit.

Peoplejam

Peoplejam gives me the creeps.

It feels like the Reader's Digest of social networking. Perhaps that swarmy ambiance is inevitable when the place is teeming with coaches and experts, breathlessly explaining how we should be self-helping ourselves into a lather.

But who knows? There may be people who really want a coach to help them find their inner underling.

links for 2007-09-27

• shopmodi - restless
• 15 Excellent Examples of Web Typography. Part 1 | i love typography
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Transacting friendship
  It's not "bureaucratization", it's openness that scare people, I think. It's like free love: if is not managed its not real, they say.
  (tags: nick+carr social+networks New+Atlantis Christine+Rosen)

links for 2007-09-26

• Leigh's Blitherings: Mybloglog's Been Yahoothanized
  I am saving this just for the "yahoothanized"; although I agree that Yahoo's model -- no real integration between apps, but a single login ID forced on you after you have been using Flickr or MyBlogLog for years -- is painful.
  (tags: yahoothanized yahoo flickr mybloglog leigh+himel)

links for 2007-09-25

• Dead Paradigms in Applications | socialwrite.com
  Jevon collects some dead things
  (tags: jevon+mcdonald dead+paradigms)
• The Facebook economy - Aug. 23, 2007
  Business 2.0? Didn't they close down?
  (tags: facebook business2.0)
• CleverClogs: Podcasting Professionals : Advanced News Radar using Grazr
  Marjolein has built an amazing site with Grazr
  (tags: grazr marjolein+hoekstra cleverclogs)
• Microsoft Is in Talks To Buy Facebook Stake - WSJ.com
  Rumors swirling: $10B-$15B valuation; MS wants 5% stake.
  (tags: facebook microsoft social+networks)

Free Ad-Sponsored Cell Connection

Several announcements in the ad-sponsored cell connection area today. Myspace is launching a free ad-based service:

[from Myspace to launch ad-supported cell phone - Yahoo! News]

[...]

The social networking Web site MySpace is launching a free, advertising-supported cell phone version Monday as part of a wider bid by parent News Corp. to attract advertising for mobile Web sites.

Fox Interactive Media, which oversees News Corp.'s Internet properties, said it also plans to roll out versions of FoxSports.com, the gaming site IGN, AskMen and its local TV affiliates in the coming months that will work on cell phones that can access the Internet.

The company said it also plans to offer a mobile version of its Photobucket picture sharing site in coming months.

The company already offers premium, subscription-based versions of MySpace through AT&T Inc. and Helio wireless services. Those versions include special features integrated into specific handsets, such as uploading cell phone photos directly to a user's profile page.

The new version set to launch Monday will work on all U.S. carriers and will allow users to send and receive messages and friend requests, comment on pictures, post bulletins, update blogs, and find and search for friends.

So, users will see the ads, but will be able to communicate with pals on MySpace gratis.

In today's New York Times, the Blyk service was reviewed:

[from Getting Free Cellphone Calls for Ads by Eric Pfanner]

British cellphone users will get their first look Monday at a new mobile service called Blyk, which will offer subscribers some free calls and text messages in return for their agreeing to accept advertising on their phones.

The idea behind Blyk is not new; Virgin Mobile in the United States started a similar service last year. But the introduction of Blyk in one of the most competitive and technologically sophisticated mobile markets means the service will be scrutinized as a test of mobile advertising’s viability.

Compared with the hundreds of billions of dollars that mobile operators generate annually in fees from callers, text-message users and other network users, mobile advertising remains a tiny business. Analysts estimate that it will generate $1 billion to $2 billion in revenue worldwide this year.

Yet activity is heating up, not just on the consumer side with services like Blyk, but also behind the scenes, as network operators, Internet companies, advertising agencies, technology start-ups and even phone manufacturers seek a piece of the action.

Why are so many people trying to get into such a small business?

Analysts say that spending on mobile advertising could surge, with estimates of the market ranging from $5 billion to $11 billion within five years.

So, are we seeing a watershed, where cell connection with swing to a TV advertising model? Or will this targeting be limited to the cost conscious youth market only?

I spoke to Marko Ahtisaari about Blyk -- he's 'responsible for brand and design' there -- and he clearly believes that the youth market is susceptible to this, but that others could fall in too. But Blyk is targeting the young, exclusively.

So, what happens when this works for the young? Won't the ads themselves become socialized? Won't they become just another shared space on the web-in-the-phone? Why wouldn't the same appeal to the sports crowd -- men and some women in their teens through to aged -- who want to communicate about sports? Casual gaming? Technoids? Why not everybody?

I see this as two major threads:

1. Ads will drive the Web onto the cell devices faster than any other mechanism. The sort of independent life that cell networks live today, with second rate browsers and kludgey IM clients, is going to go away real fast. Cells will become just another device tapping into the Web, and those billions of ad dollars will underwrite that shift.
2. The meme I am calling Social Everywhere will dominate the dynamics of the ad-augmented cell experience. Everything will be a way to stay connected to buddies on the phone: the apps, the OS, the ads... even charging your phone will be broadcast as an update to your pals.

Just like the bottom third of CNN TV broadcast screen is dedicated to other information streaming by about breaking news, weather, upcoming shows, more and more of the pixel footprint on cellphone screens will be dedicated to socializing. The sociality footprint will get larger and larger.

links for 2007-09-24

• Blonde 2.0 » Blog Archive » Have We Forgotten How to Sustain Deeper Relationships Due To Web 2.0?
  Blonde 2.0 zigs into the negativist camp by suggesting that web 2.0 social network tools decreases our social skills. I don't buy it.
  (tags: social+networks social+skills facebook twitter blonde+2.0)

Todoist and Huddle: This Week's Work Management Tools

I have tried seventeen dozen apps to help manage work: maybe more. I have recently bumped into two apps that some some interesting features.

Todoist

The first, Todoist, I am actually using as my primary work management tool these days. At first glance, the app (at www.todoist.com), looks like just another todo list manager with the usual Remember The Milk features.

But, the integration with Firefox and Gmail make it a standout.

There is a Firefox hack that takes a bookmark to todoist.com, and opens it as a sidebar:

You can select various projects to work with, or -- using the 'controller' -- you can select today's tasks, overdue tasks, or all sorts of combinations. Likewise, Todoist supports tags, so you can pull all tasks tagged '@hot' for example.

There is a 'Delegate to Todoist' bookmarklet that integrates with Gmail in a great way:

Once I hit the bookmarklet, while looking at a piece of mail in Gmail, Todoist creates a task in the project of my choice, allowing me to link to the email, tag it, add more info to the title, whatever. Later on, when I take care of the task, I can bring the email back with just a click, and reply to it, or reread it for critical information.

I find that I have moved away from using the Gmail 'labels' (really are tags) to organized mail since adopting Todoist. The tags are really only relevant for the lifetime of some project or activity -- like a trip to London, for example -- but in Gmail I often never get around to cleaning them up. In Todoist, however, the addition of notifications and the time dimension means that I clear things up as a matter of course. And when the trip to London is over, I delete the project and the links to associated emails. Of course, the best would be an actually integration with Gmail's tags, and Gmail itself. This is an obvious candidate for Google acquisition and could be the bridge that shows the obvious points of integration between Gmail and Google Calendar. Todoist could be the missing task manager for Gcal, and demonstrates that email needs integrated reminders.

One missing side of Todoist is the social: there is no sharing of Todoist tasks. I can't assign a task to another party, so this makes it a totally solitary tool. This is an area that the Todoist folks need to focus on.

Huddle

Huddle is a social media-based project management tool, one that lines up against Basecamp and Goplan. A user creates projects into which you can place files, posts (they call them 'whiteboards' for all the wrong reasons), tasks (but not events like meetings or milestones?), and other users. A slenderized Basecamp, basically.

Personally, I generally only use Basecamp for the posts, tasks, and file sharing. I find the 'writeboards' too rudimentary and the snags in the mark-up language annoying. So Huddle is a convenient (and free) replacement for me (at least until something revolutionary comes along. Hint. Hint.)

Here's the blog post interface:

Here's the task creation interface:

Note that Huddle does not support automatic SMS or email notifications of tasks, but manual email notification is supported, and a generalized RSS feed is supported for each project. And the RSS is *not* secure, which makes it more attractive to me: I have found Basecamp's secure RSS a real pain in the neck. But then, I am relatively unconcerned about security, in general.

Here's the file upload interface:

I really like the built-in document review notion, since 99% when you upload a file you want various people to look it over. But the notion of putting files into 'drawers' is too retro for my tastes, and only serves to remind me there is no notion of tags in the app. What I would want (and expect) is tags across the board: for files, posts, and tasks. Then I could select everything tagged 'conceptual design' or 'finance' within a project.

I also found it strange that I could attach a document to a task but not to a post. Why not?

Huddle also incorporates an across-the-board comments model, where comments can be attached to tasks, posts, and files. Strangely, though, the comments do not show up in the project dashboard or the RSS feed, which is dumb, and should be fixed.

So, I intend to wean myself away from Basecamp as quickly as is practical, since Huddle is minimal, cleanly designed, and free. And I have hopes that when I make product requests there is some likelihood they could find their way into a new version.

Final Thoughts

I would like to see these apps integrated, honestly. The Gmail integration of Todoist makes it almost seem like Google has finally implemented task management, which is likely at some point, anyway. How should Huddle integrate with that? There will obviously need to be some sort of sync between Google Tasks and other apps that create and publish tasks. I hope that Huddle and Todoist contact each other to get that working, right away!

links for 2007-09-23

• stamen design | big ideas worth pursuing
  Great graphic representation of complex ideas and info sets
  (tags: graphics design stamen+design pointer:bokardo)
• gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards": thoughts on microsoft
  "The future of Microsoft, and how Microsoft talks to people in the future, are one and the same. Yes, Virginia, the future of Microsoft is "Conversation."" Hmmm. Is this the same microsoft, Hugh? Aren't they sort of clueless?
  (tags: hugh+macleod microsoft cluetrain)
• URBAN TAILGATE
  Social network for sports fans.
  (tags: social+networks sports)
• Elmer Fudd and Google at Churbuck.com
  David finds the "Elmer Fudd" language option in Google. I should twy it.
  (tags: elmer+fudd google)
• Church of the Customer Blog
  Visionaries actually use the vision centers of the brain more than most people.
  (tags: visionaries brain)
• The Republican-American Mom defends daughter's right to blog speech
  High school student calls school administrators "douchebags" in her personal blog. Court rules that the school can sensor her blog. Appeal to follow.
  (tags: freedom+of+speech first+ammendment blogging dooced)

Word Of The Week: Pre-Mortem

[from Analyzing Failure Beforehand]

“A pre-mortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so the project can be improved rather than autopsied,” Mr. Klein explains in The Harvard Business Review.

In the pre-mortem, company officials assume they have just learned that a product or a service they are about to introduce has “failed spectacularly.” They then write down every plausible reason they can think of to explain the failure. The list is then used to eliminate potential flaws before the new idea is actually introduced into the marketplace.

I really like this technique, and I plan to use it more explictly in future client engagements.

I Agree With Dave Winer (For Once)

Dave McClure has introduced the infelicitous term "Social Graph". But We should just keep on with "Social Network" which is a synonym, as Dave Winer points out:

[from How To Avoid Sounding Like A Monkey]

[...] before we talked about social graphs we called them social networks, and you know what -- they're exactly the same thing, and social network is a much less confusing term, so why don't we just stick with it? (Answer: we should, imho.) So if you don't want to sound like an idiot, call a social graph a social network and stand up for your right to understand technology, and make the techies actually do some useful stuff instead of making simple stuff sound complicated.

Hear, hear.

[Update: Looks like Michael Arrington has adopted the social graph term hook-line-and-sinker in this breathless post about a Google move against Facebook.]

links for 2007-09-21

• A Company that Matters - r21
  Christopher Alden is new CEO and Chairman of Six Apart. How'd I miss that?
  (tags: christopher+alden six+apart social+media)
• Dynamist Blog: 8 Random Facts, with a Kicker at the End
  Virginia Postrel starts treatment for breast cancer next week. My thoughts are with her.
  (tags: virginia+postel breast+cancer)

links for 2007-09-20

• Making a New World — Doc Searls' Open Sources II chapter
  There 's a reason that Doc is a Berkman Fellow, and this might be the proof
  (tags: doc searls, the because effect, pointer:jp+rangaswami)
• Silicon Alley Insider: HuffingtonPost Hires "Citizen Journalism" Editor
  Marc Cooper joins HuffingtonPost to head citizen journalism project
  (tags: artisan+journalism huffingtonpost marc+cooper)
• Purdue to test the limits of text messaging
  When we need to send an emergency message, time is the most critical factor. We have seen reports of messaging rates as low as 200 to 300 per minute in some environments, while we have some vendors making unbelievable claims of thousands per second,” Ks
  (tags: texting emergency+2.0 disaster+2.0)
• textually.org: Directions Are a Cellphone Call Away
  "Dial DIR-ECT-IONS works as it sounds: You dial the word "directions" into a cellphone (347-328-4667) and speak the address, name of business chain or event to which you need directions. Step-by-step directions are instantly sent to your phone via SMS."
  (tags: texting)

Tempo

A cool hard drive gizmo, TEMPO, from cagninadesign, copies files as they are deleted, and LEDs on the side light up from the bottom as the drive is getting filled:

Can also be used as a more conventional external hard drive.

Hash Tags = Twitter Groupings

Chris Messina has outlined (in a fairly voluminous way) a proposal for the use of hash tags (strings like "#tag") as a way to help make sense of the noise within Twitter. He enumerates different sorts of "groups" that could be supported in Twitter, and then takes my concept of 'groupings' -- ad hoc assemblages of people sharing a common interest implied by a tag -- and runs with it:

[from Groups for Twitter; or A Proposal for Twitter Tag Channels]

[...]

The type that I’m most interested in, and am prepared to offer a concrete proposal on, is actually of a fourth kind, most closely related to Stowe’s “groupings”, but with a slightly different lean, primarily in the model of how the grouping is established. In the cases presented above, there are very explicit approaches taken, since it’s somewhat taken for granted that groups imply a kind of management. Whether you’re dealing with public groups that you create, join and then promote or contact groups that you ultimately must manage like any kind of mailing list, they imply an order of magnitude of work that would ultimately work against the adoption of the whole grouping premise and thereby minimize any benefits to a select group of hyper-dedicated process-followers.

I’m more interested in simply having a better eavesdropping experience on Twitter.

I support the details of Chris' spec. My sense is that tags in Twitter, as elsewhere, define shared experience of some kind, involving all those using the tag. And the use can be either actively putting a hash tag (like "#hashtag") into a tweet, or more passively opting to follow a stream of tweets related to a tagged theme.

This accords exactly with the idea of groupings. I am increasingly uninterested in traditional groups in social apps: where members 'join', perhaps following a required invitation, and someone 'owns' and 'manages' the group. Groups have their place in the work context, but are less relevant in open socializing of individuals. Groupings can be wonderful for serendipity: consider the grouping of all people within Last.fm who have listened to a particular musician recently, or the clutch of people who have tagged a blog post with the term 'Twitter'.

Just in passing: the failure of Technorati to make something out of the millions of groupings lost within their map of the blogosphere baffles me. I hope that some enterprising entrepreneurs begin to think about the meta-groupings that could be found across these various applications, across these apparently unrelated social media streams. A new angle for MyBlogLog, perhaps?

Tagspaces could be interesting and rich shared experiences, but no one seems to be really exploring that side of their existence. Del.icio.us has trained us to think of tags as metadata for bookmarks, and blogs have trained us to view them as metadata for posts. But tags imply communities, and no one is doing much to let those communities find themselves. Twitter hash tags could help.

[PS I looked, and the domain "www.twittosphere.com" is already taken, damn it.]

links for 2007-08-26

• Welcome - Learn More about the MarketWatch Community - MarketWatch Community
  Marketwatch launches a social media 1.0 network: looks like a good set of features, but can closed silo networks compete with the open blogosphere?
  (tags: marketwatch social+networks social+media social+tools)
• The Obvious?: Accountable in accounts
  Euan Semple can't get the BBC -- his former employee -- to pay him for work done over 12 months ago. Big fat bloated organizations that supposedly know what they are doing...
  (tags: euan+semple bbc the+edge+dissolves+the+center)
• Web Worker Daily » Blog Archive Managing Time with a Midweekend «
  Notes toward a post on bottom-up shift to ten day week = 3 off 2 on 2 off 3 on
  (tags: workweek)
• Micro Persuasion: Identity Through Online Lifestreams
  Lifestreams, next workstreams
  (tags: lifestream steve+rubel workstream)
• A VC: The FPhone
  not the iPhone, the Gphone -- google could change everything
  (tags: google iphone apple fphone)

Chris Messina on Twitter Tags

Chris Messina suggests the use of the hash character ("#") to precede Twitter tags... which are not supported by any tools yet:

[from yeah, I'm proposing that we use the hash (#) for tagging or grouping...

He then goes on, in his next tweet, to use the hash, making a startling(?) announcement:

Ok, leaving Citizen Space. Relocating probably to work more. #citizenspace

But I bet he doesn't mean permanently moving out of his Citizen Agency office because he needs to accomplish more work: I bet he's just leaving for the evening.

Anyway... I support the #tag convention.

Tom Coates Kicks PR In The Nuts

Tom expresses the feeling that most well-known bloggers share: a learned avoidance -- if not physical disgust -- of PR folks who bombard us with PR.

[from This is not a brothel...]

It really pisses me off that press people consider me an ou