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Shame On You, John Edwards: The Exploitation Of Web Culture

It must seem like a small thing to the folks at John Edwards now-mothballed campaign for the Democratic nomination, but it pains me that the staff, and John Edwards, simply dropped out of the Twitterverse without even a parting goodbye.

'His' last post from five months ago (I put 'his' in quotes, since he probably was a proxy, sock puppet, phoney-baloney, old marketing identity, anyway):

Twitter / johnedwards, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

So, you opt to try to exploit the edglings by signing up to Twitter, and writing a blog, and all that newfangled web stuff, trying to mine the potential there with ersatz involvement and cheesy, inauthentic participation: cramming old one:many messaging into a conversationally rich environment.

Then, you drop out. And proof that it is totally bogus, you just stop. Bam. No 'thanks for the memories', no 'see you in the funny papers', and certainly no ongoing involvement, since after all, there really was no involvement involved.

Proof of old politics wolf in new politics sheep's clothing: they assume the ways of the new social web revolution as a means to come into contact with us, but when they lose (and maybe when they win, as well?) they drop the pretense of involvement, and go back to whatever they really believe in. Which is clearly not this new emerging whatever-the-hell-it-is on the web.

They will try to exploit web culture for their own purposes, but they aren't really engaged here.

What will Barack and Hilary do if and when their time comes, I wonder?

I haven't tracked Edwards closely since he dropped out. I had endorsed him early on, but really don't have much of a handle on him now, since among other things 'he's' not updating me via Twitter, and he's not on the op-ed pages any more. I know he hasn't endorsed a candidate -- perhaps angling for some deal with Obama and Clinton -- but no word to his former followers on Twitter.

Well, why should he: we are only 4,544 people. He's probably got more major contributors than that, who he called up and personally thanked them, etc., after giving up the race.

And it's not that I would believe that a tweet from John Edwards was authentic, really, if 'he' sent one. Something like 'Thanks for your efforts on my behalf. I am going to do XYZ now, and I hope to keep in touch.' Or something. Or something, 'John'.

So, I am not really surprised I guess, but I feel used, like having someone wipe their greasy hands on my tablecloth after I invited them to dinner in my house. Or a friend who moves away for a new career in a distant city, and then never, ever calls.

Just bad manners, at the best, and at the worst, a profound callousness and insensitivity to the mores of our teensy weensy web culture, here on the edge of everything.

I will post a link to this on Twitter, addressed to @johnedwards, but I don't believe he will read it. They've moved on, packed up the bumper stickers and pins, the banners and the posters; but we are still here, twinventing something based on true voice, and involvement, and a deepening sense of global commitment. Perhaps the pins and posters and banners are all a barrier, a sideshow, a distraction from something more important, anyway. But even if it was all shadowplay -- a closet drama -- I wanted a better ending. We deserved a better close to this chapter than that.

Beyond Blogs: The Conversation Has Moved Into The Flow

Loic Le Meur is only the most recent person to notice that the conversation online has moved away from the blogs that once seemed the nexus:

[from Loic Le Meur Blog: My social map is totally decentralized but I want it back on my blog]

[...]

The challenge for Friendfeed and the like is that while I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service.

I think that day is done.

Basically, conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of conversation -- the comments thread on blog posts -- to a more dynamic and fast form of conversation: into the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to where is is most social.

Personally, I don't think the genie can be put back in the bottle. Twitter et al are simply more compelling a conversational medium than blog comments. While the close relationship of blog posts and their associated comments may seem like a positive attribute, it is actually very limiting and closed. In general, people have to blunder into an interesting comment thread by moving to the post, opening the link to the comments, and manually scrolling down through them. A lot of time and effort, all based around the metaphor of wandering around in the web of pages. It's like a trip to the library.

Twitter and other similar apps are based on the web of flow: information of interest comes to us, not the other way around. And it flows through people, through relationships: it's not a bunch of clicks on URLs, scrolling, and so on. It's a move away from hunting and gathering and into relationship agriculture: information grows in our flow applications instead of us spending time hunting it down.

So, what are blogs going to be when the conversation moves away? They will be the place where we archive our posts, so that people can find them when they need to search, which still is a necessity.

But today's blog technologies were not designed with flow in mind: they are based on Web 1.0 principles, and although they have helped to engender a revolution in sociality and flow, they don't support it very well. This opens up an important new are for competition in the marketplace, perhaps, but more importantly, a new way to think about the role of social media. (Note: In the Workstreamr application, which is based on social media at a fundamental level, we have also architected flow into the solution at an equally fundamental level.)

The way I am getting tugged to blog posts is increasingly as a mention within a conversational bite in Twitter or Friendfeed. I then click out of the flow to see the larger post, and offer my view in the flow -- not on the blog -- and then I return to the flow, where I will be spending most of my time.

This makes sense: I want to talk about the blog post with the person who brought it to my attention, more so that with some group of strangers at the blog, or even the author, who I may not know at all.

I also don't think we can expect the fragmentation of the social experience to slow down: it will get a lot worse before it gets better.

We can expect new tools and technologies that will take advantage of this new dynamic to emerge almost immediately. I have more ideas on this topic, so more to follow.

Action Streams And The Next Cycle In The Social Revolution

Got email from David Recordon of Six Apart yesterday, alerting me to some news:

[from Six Apart - News and Events: Time for Action: What We’re Opening Next]

Today, we're shipping the next step in our vision of openness -- the Action Streams plugin -- an amazing new plugin for Movable Type 4.1 that lets you aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web. Now of course, there are some social networking services that have similar features, but if you're using one of today's hosted services to share your actions it's quite possible that you're giving up either control over your privacy, management of your identity or profile, or support for open standards. With the Action Streams plugin you keep control over the record of your actions on the web.

David Sippey and Byrne Reese of Six Apart also add some insights:

[from Blogging Evolved by Byrne Reese]

But this plugin is not just about activity aggregation, it about control.

But this plugin is not just about activity aggregation, it about control. Because if there is one thing to learn from the one service that even remotely capable of performing this service for you, is that control and privacy is not just important, it is paramount. That is why this plugin:

• is 100% free and open source


• is available for a 100% free and open source blogging platform


• allows users to select which events are public and which are private


• allows users to select which services to aggregate and show activity from


• utilizes open standards to collect and publish data


• and allows users to distribute and do with this data what they please

You can see this plugin in action in a number of different places:

• on the front door of my blog, and on an archive I created
• on Sippey's, Mark's and David's blogs
• on Movable Type dot org's web site to collect and aggregate activity for the entire MT dev team
• and more places to come I am sure.

But no matter how "cool" I think this is, the single most important thing to me is that Action Streams has helped majordojo return to its original purpose: to act as a central aggregation for all of my activity online, and to do so in a way that just works that doesn't require me to do any extra work. Just use the tools I like to use, and let it do the rest.

Never, never put cool in quotes, man!

Michael Sippey Action Streams, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

So, a neat plugin. Yes, people would like to coalesce their myriad streams into something, but I don't think directing that into a old-fashioned blog -- into a publishing metaphor -- is really what people are dreaming of. Yes, I would like to have an archive to search against, although a tree of published pages is not really the best for that: that's what databases are for.

The real issue is that real control will have to be incredibly fine-grained, and the blog publishing approach has been too coarsely-grained in general for that purpose. Blogging is grounded in the 'everything is public' and 'everything is a page' model, and the technologies all reflect that to a great extent.

So, it's not blogging evolution that we need, but a new fusion of the concepts of social media reflected in real social context and the nature of the current web. Like many others, I believe we have to draw on what we know about social networks -- not just their current implementation on the web in Facebook or socially networked services like Flickr or Dopplr -- but real-world social networks: the ways that people share and don't share things with each other.

We are moving to a fragmented world of cascading streams: del.icio.us bookmarks, twitter updates, blog posts, Google reader recommendations, Basecamp milestone updates. Just like the old days of American wireless telephony, the various services don't interoperate well, and a variety of gasketry is emerging to bridge the various services in what turn out to be frustrating and partial solutions.

I get an RSS stream from Dopplr, for example, and plug it into my blog as a widget. However, the blog technology knows nothing about it, and the various trips that Dopplr is streaming don't flow into my blog's RSS feed. And should they? After all, Dopplr has a well-defined sharing model within the application, which allows me to share trip information in a controlled fashion. Exporting it outside of the context of Dopplr means that those controls are lost. I have opted to allow that info to be public, but others wouldn't.

In a sense, I am moving from a higher level of control to a lower one. Like many lowest common denominator approaches, this leads to something getting lost.

If we are going to bring down all these socially rich opportunities for sharing down to the level of open publishing we are going to lose a lot. We will bleed out all the social subtleties. We need to devise tools and technologies -- and the social expectations -- that will allow us to bring much more socially rich interaction into the context of social media.

One of the things I am focused on these days is a startup where my partners and I are are actively exploring these topics. Without revealing too much of our plans, I can characterize the world we see changing and that we hope to midwife. As we move from the 'web of pages' metaphor -- based on hypertext and publishing metaphors -- and enter a 'web of flow' -- based on information streaming through interpersonal relationships -- we will have some major disruptions.

The proliferation of hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of highly specific social applications that will produce streams derived from people's activities, writings, and media is leading to a fragmentation of web identity and social connection.

There is no hope of 'one ring to bind them' at least in the near term. There is no standard, no app, no movement that is going to head off the next few years of chaos as various contending models are dreamed up and tested in the marketplace of ideas as applications, platforms, or widgety glue.

I am betting on a step-wise process, and the announcement from Six Apart is an example of that. We will see increasingly sophisticated widgetry being created, leading us one step at a time up and away from the page/ publishing model toward a new world of socially constrained streams. It will take years, but new standards will emerge, either de facto or de jure, that will allow us to control access to information flowing through a sprawling web of flow based on social controls. Whatever form this takes will certainly require the controls -- to some extent -- being pushed into the information that is flowing. The updates, photos, notes, recommendations, and videos that we will share through these streams will have to be locked (encrypted) so that only those to whom we have given the keys can open them.

We will need a federated identity system as the core of this, but just as important is the basic notion that a vast conglomeration of interoperating applications would have to share the metaphor of streams as the basis for everything, and move away from pages. We will need to federate the identity of the applications in exactly the same way that we will validate our human identities, so that applications can stream information on our behalf. A project management tool might serve a user the status update from a friend that was created in a Twitter-like app of the not-too distant future, and vice versa, the status update of that first user could travel out to the Twitter-like app, and be propagated to anyone allowed to see it. For this to work, the lock has to be in the stream droplet, and every application will have to allow us to slide in the key to open it.

Ultimately the ability to create a published page at a specific URL on the web will be something like the ability to dump the bits stored at a specific location on my hard drive: occasionally useful, but not the way that we generally interact with the information there.

I believe this is as profound a change as the movement from text to windows-based UI, or the movement from disconnected computing to the Web.

The final completion of the social revolution will be, not surprisingly, wiring the sociality that connects us together into the architecture of the platform we will be standing on.

The Costs Of Being A Creative

I was sitting here, at 6:45am PT, having just gotten off a conference call about the design of my greatest obsession, Workstreamr (about which more is forthcoming in a few weeks, I promise), and I happened upon a tweet from my dear friend, Hugh McLeod. Hugh has a written a post on the the costs of being a creative (which, no surprise, includes the backhanded appreciation of the benefits of such a life, as well).

Among other points, Hugh makes the case for the 10,000 hour rule: it takes 10,000 hours of practice to attain mastery of any human craft. In Hugh's case:

"Creativity" is extremely time consuming. My cartoons didn't get any good [to me, at least] until I had spent well over a decade working obsessively on them. Hell, I'm still not there yet.

Three hours per day, 330 days per year for ten years gets you to 10,000 hours.

I had the same sense that Hugh did about his cartoons about my writing after two decades of regular writing, particularly honed during a 5 year stint writing a monthly newsletter and then a few years of blogging.

He makes the point that this leads to having 'no life' during that period. That three hours comes after work, after studying and eating. It cuts into the contemporary norms of life: television viewing for example, or keeping up with the Braves, or weekend camping trips.

It eats away at the dividing line between personal and work life:

When you get into the "creative" zone, the lines between "work time" and "off time" start getting blurry. And the deeper you get into that zone, the blurrier the lines get. I often work from seven in the morning till midnight and think nothing of it. A very smart friend of mine who works over at Blip.tv once told me, "I only work 3 or 4 hours a week,. The rest of the time, I'm playing." Working eighty hour weeks is much easier when seventy six of those hours is playtime for you.

It's only work if you have to make yourself do it. If you have to hold yourself back, it's play.

This life calls us, we don't pick it. And it has an austerity to it, since the majority of the time spent practicing our craft, perfecting the art, is time spent alone. In Hugh's case, feverishly drawing cartoon after cartoon, or a young software developer designing better abstractions, or a writer grappling with grammar and intention. Being creative entails a great deal of solitude.

(As a result, creatives can overdo when they are not off sharpening their skills and working their magic, but that's another post.)

Hugh points out that creativity comes from the work:

A sense of purpose only comes your way usually because you've been working your ass off over a long period of time, intensely cultivating it. And yeah, sometimes that will appear to more mainstream people as "Having no life". To hell with them. They don't know or care about you. Successful people get that way by doing the stuff unsuccessful people aren't willing to do. Harsh but true.

Paderewski, the physicist Polish creative, once said, "Before I was a genius, I was a drudge." There is a lot of slogging involved. And others, generally, will not understand: especially before you have invested the full ten years. "You'll never sell a book!" "You call that music?" "That's the dumbest design I have ever seen!" "Keep your day job."

Another good reason to work apart from others, so you don't have to hear all that negativity. Close the door, and sharpen your pencil.

Like making a fire from rubbing sticks together, creativity's heat comes from work. Work requires dedication. Dedication involves sacrifice, specifically of time and the absence of what might have been done instead.

Lurking behind Hugh's words is the implicit message that it is worth it, that the time spent apart in pursuit of purpose and the outcome of that pursuit -- in cartoons, writing, music, or working software -- balance the costs, that the juice is worth the squeeze.

It is for me, anyway. And obviously, for Hugh. How about you?

The Individual Is The New Group

Spread throughout my recent writing, a certain latent idea is lurking, incompletely articulated, which I summarize in the title: the individual is the new group.

About a decade ago, the one of the then-current terms of art for social tools was groupware, and the term was intended to impart the core metaphor: groups need to collaborate, and tools need to be defined with that in mind. As a result, we saw the rise of application platforms like Lotus Notes, intended to counter the flaws of operating systems and applications that were organized around an earlier, less group-oriented metaphor of use.

The central motif of groupware solutions was the need for groups to have a shared repository for online documents, and a collection of communication and collaboration tools to enable a distributed team to collectively accomplish goals. These tools included email, group calendaring, discussion forums, shared to do lists, and real-time support, in the late 90s and early 00s, for instant messaging, chat rooms, and web conferencing.

This model of group collaboration has become the basic form factor of work in many large organizations. However, I have come to believe that this model is being eclipsed by a new epicenter of social context: the individual, rather than the group.

Contrasting group forums with blogging is a good example in which to make the distinction between group- and individual-oriented social tools. In group forums, members of a closed group can post threads and comment on them. It is a closed model. When individuals blog in the open web, trackbacks and comments allow discussions to take place that are -- in many cases -- logically equivalent to forums, but since each individual blogger decides where to turn their focus, and what other blogs to comment on, bloggers are members of many groups at the same time. More importantly, the structure of blogging supports that model directly. In a group forum, you are a member of that one group, and not a member of any others: the fact that you may be a member of other groups is not explicitly supported.

Another driver of this change toward the individual is the rise of instant messaging. I have said many times recently that "the buddy list is the center of the universe 2.0" -- meaning that the presence and real-time proximity of the most critical individuals in our lives is the center of our social interaction. The fact that a particular contact on my buddy list is the member of several groups in my life is less relevant than our social connectedness, individual to individual. While I am IMing a buddy about work related issues, I may veer off into personal issues. I am constantly switching context while in communication with individuals, and real-time communication supports that directly: it's natural to do so.

So the groupware model of collaboration, where neatly partitioned worlds are created, and individuals are made to shift context in order to shift from one social thread to another, seems unnatural to me. The primacy of groups and group membership in old-school groupware is outmoded.

The shift to the individual changes everything, and in revolutionary ways. Moving from groupware premises to "soloware" shifts the dialog about standards and interoperability. In the old groupware model, a company would buy a groupware platform and applications, and roll it out across all the users. It was standardized because everyone was using the same rev of the same product. When the issue of interoperability and standards were brought up, it was approached from the perspective of inter-company communication, or different sites within the same company. But in the soloware model, individuals may be using completely different tools, and share nothing in common but certain standards. But the glue that connects the dots in the soloware world are standards like RSS, IM interoperability, and blog trackback conventions: standards that allow individuals to do their thing, but to allow bottom-up aggregation of their artifacts along social connections. The groups are there, but latent, implicit in the gestural relationships of crosslinking, tags, comments, and blogrolls.

I envision a time where even in the largest organization, our lives as individuals will define the norm for computer-assisted work. The model of  soloware will displace the 90s ideals of groupware in exactly the same way that the pre-groupware assembly line models were dethroned in the 90s. In our work lives, even in the largest, most conservative companies, we are instantaneously involved in dozens of projects, with teams of people that are constantly changing, with outside consultants and partner companies, and there is no end in sight. When everything fractures away from stable, long-lasting, closed teams toward the exact opposite, what is left are individuals in contact with each other, through soloware: individual needs first, group needs second, by extension.

We are, first and foremost, individuals. The concept that whenever we do something it should be intentionally in the context of a specific well-defined group is outmoded, and was always an approximation of what is really going on, socially. We are involved in social relationships, and what we do with others is always social, but not necessarily part of a group, or only of one group. So, let's put aside groups, and focus on the individual. The groups will follow.

tags: soloware, groupware, the+buddylist+is+the+center+of+the+universe+2.0, the+individual+is+the+new+group