Rob Horning at Marginal Utility noodles on our bonding too closely with the individualism of the ‘social graph’ (a term he dislikes at face value, just as I do). He suggests that we may have painted ourselves into a corner by rejecting a class consciousness.
Go read the rest at underpaidgenius.
Anthony Ha via
Everloop, a social networking service aimed at children 8-13 years old (who are too young to use Facebook), just announced that it has raised $3.1 million in funding.
I wonder what the special sauce is for tweeners, aside from COPPA-compliance? Bully-proofing? Celebrities that tweeners care about? Social causes?
Anil Dash does a great job of framing the transience of Twitter, characterizing it as a ‘lossy’ system, where we don’t necessarily see every item and finding old tweets can be difficult if not impossible:
Anil Dash, If You Didn’t Blog It, It Didn’t Happen
THE PERILS OF A LOW STRESS ENVIRONMENT
Now, Twitter and other stream-based flows of information provide an important role in the ecosystem. Perhaps the most important psychological innovation of Twitter is that it assumes you won’t see every message that comes along. There’s no count of unread items, and very little social cost to telling a friend that you missed their tweet. That convenience and social accommodation is incredibly valuable and an important contribution to the web.
However, by creating a lossy environment where individual tweets are disposable, there’s also an environment where few will build the infrastructure to support broader, more meaningful conversations that could be catalyzed by a tweet. In many ways, this means the best tweets for advancing an idea are those that contain links to more permanent media.
KEEPING TIME
So, if most tweets are too ephemeral to reach their full potential as ideas, what do we do about it? Well, obviously, one big step would be to simply make sure to blog any idea that’s worth preserving. It’s perfectly fine to tweet about trivialities — I do it all the time! But if you’re tweeting about your work, your passion, or something meaningful to you, you owe it to your ideas to actually preserve them somewhere more persistent.
And, of course, I should make a pitch that this is part of the reason I am so enamored of the work the ThinkUp community is doing. A free, thriving, powerful, relatively accessible app that archives Twitter and Facebook updates with a mind towards incorporating them into more persistent and meaningful media is an essential part of the ecosystem. This is especially true as political, social and artistic leaders start to rely on these ephemeral media, without realizing the cultural costs to those choices.
Given enough time, and without substantial changes to the way the big social networks work, if you didn’t blog it, it didn’t happen. In fact, I first wrote about this idea a bit on Twitter a few years ago. See if you can find it.
I agree with Anil: anyone who wants to hold onto an idea, and build on it, should put it in a blog post. Sure; twitter out a link to the post, get it out into the stream, but anchor it to something fixed, accessible, and easily addressable.
The utility of streaming media — like Twitter — isn’t necessarily pegged to the lossiness of the system, though. That’s just an artifact of the technology being used, like pixelation on low res displays, or the fact that new paper money can give you a paper cut: it’s not a function of the meaning of money or computers.
Twitter doesn’t have to be a black hole for ideas. Better search tools or better clients could hold onto tweets we read, retweeted, liked, shared, or tagged. It’s the tools that are limited, not the stream medium.
And having better tools wouldn’t necessarily mean that Twitter would lose its streaming character. One of the pivotal characteristics of the streaming medium is not being an inbox: tweets fall off the end on their own, without me having to file them or delete them. But that doesn’t mean they fall into nothingness.
Streams could be made richer. I would like to imagine advances like these coming out in the near term:
Lurking behind Anil’s practicality are the more philosophical issues of time and transience. Yes, we don’t need to retain every tweet ever read or written. We can accept the fast and furious impermanence of most tweets, and the up tempo pace of the Twitter bloodstream. But we want to also operate at a slower pace, dealing with deeper and abiding interests, ideas, and connections. We need to be able to shift tempo without missing a beat.
Facebook is still talking through their hat in response to the open letter sent by privacy organizations on June 16. The ACLU checks the facts in Facebook’s claims. Guess what? Facebook continues to cover up the facts: they are either lying, or don’t know how their own technology works.
Some samples:
Facebook Says: It has heard the concerns of the privacy groups and plans to address them in an upcoming revamped data permissions model.
The Facts: The announced plan is an incomplete solution that does woefully little to resolve the app gap. Your personal information may still fall through the privacy cracks when your friends run apps because, by default, Facebook will continue to treats apps your friends run like it treats your friends themselves, giving those apps access to most of your information without your notice or consent.
[…]
Facebook Says: Instant personalization is “widely misunderstood,” and that there is no privacy concern because the only information that instant personalization partners receive from Facebook is public information.
The Facts: When you visit an ordinary web site, the site doesn’t automatically know who you are. But when you go to an “instant personalization” site while logged into your Facebook account, the site knows exactly who you are, including your real name, profile picture, and other public information on your Facebook profile.
It’s like entering a store that automatically scans your wallet or purse when you walk through the door and then links everything you do in the store to your personal information—without first asking you for permission.
[…]
Facebook Says: Its social plugins are just like every other widget on the web.
The Facts: Social plugins are different from other widgets on the web because they can connect your online activity to all of the personal information attached to your Facebook account, creating an even more detailed profile of you. Facebook can track every time you visit a page with a social plugin, even just a “like” button, and connect this activity to your Facebook account—even if you don’t use the plugin or click on the button at all. Web site developers who don’t recognize this distinction may be violating their own principles or privacy policies unknowingly by using the like button and other social plugins.
[..]
Facebook Says: It has taken away privacy settings for information like name, profile picture, and network because “it has been [its] experience that people have a more meaningful experience on Facebook if they share some information about themselves.”
The Facts: Facebook’s refusal to give you control over every piece of information that they share is inconsistent with its stated principle that “People should have the freedom to decide with whom they will share their information, and to set privacy controls to protect those choices.” Not allowing users to choose for themselves is simply contrary to this policy.
[…]
Facebook Says: It imposes no restrictions on users that prevent them from exporting the content that they have posted themselves on Facebook and has open APIs that permit applications to export this information.
The Facts: Facebook does not provide its own tool to automatically export your data. Thus, if you want to port your data from Facebook to another service, you must rely on workarounds involving some “approved” automated third party application to export your own content and connections — or get Facebook’s permission to create your own tool to do so.
[and everytime someone invents such a tool, they block it.]
It’s time for the Justice Department to take a look at Facebook’s continued malfeasance.
I have written a great deal about the rise of streams — also called microblogging, activity streams, and other names — and the application of streams in the business context, but yesterday’s ‘Microsharing’ panel at the Enterprise 2.0 conference demonstrated that there is widespread disagreement, confusion, and even antipathy about streams in business. So I thought I would collate a few thoughts into something resembling a business case for streams, and throw it out there. (Note that this is also a dry run for a section of the upcoming Microstreams In Business research report: see www.stoweboyd.com/research.)
What Is A Stream And How Is It Different?
One thing Marcia Conner might have wanted to do yesterday might have been to actually define what a stream is.
A ‘stream’ is the implementation of a social model of interaction, relationship, and communication. Social tools are generally based on the idealization of social networks, in which people connect to other people in many ways. John might connect with Mary, who also connects to Ahmed, but John may not know or connect to Ahmed.
Streams are based on directed networks, where John ‘follows’ Mary but Mary may not ‘follow’ John back. This is derived from the public blogging model, where authors publish their work freely and anyone may choose to read those works, or to subscribe to a feed from that blog. In a sense, streams are an extension, or advance, on the basic publiching model of blogs. This is why some have chosen to call streaming ‘microblogging’, focusing on the similarity of publishing involved, and making a distinction between long-format blogging and short-format ‘microblogging’. This distinction may not be the most productive one, especially in the business context.
So, streams are based on directed networks that emulate or parallel social networks. Relative to any user, there are upstream contacts (those that the user follows, ‘following’), and the downstream contacts (those that are following the user, ‘followers’). Note that a follower can be followed, as well.
Streaming tools have two sides, too, matching the directional nature of their structure:
Sending — This is the collection of features that support a user in the creation and publishing of a stream element. As a simple example of the posting side of things, consider the an editor for Twitter like Tweetdeck that allows a user to type characters, create retweets, shorten URLs, embed photos, and so on.In the business context, users can post a wide array of different sorts of message types, depending on the tool’s ability to support them. For example, a user might post a structured request for a meeting to one or more downstream contacts by name, or using other features — hashtags, defined project names, user lists — to bring the request to the attention of specific individuals.
Receiving — The set of features that help a user make sense of the aggregated stream of posts from all those that she follows. This can include search, filtering, and expansion of post elemenst, like displaying an image that is embedded as a shortened URL. The receiving side also includes the ability to learn more about the individuals behind the posts, and to create or modify relationships with them, such as following a user you have discovered by a retweet made by one of your upstream contacts.
There are a number of other aspects of the streaming model that bear examination, and which may vary across implementations:
Profiles — Generally, users create profiles with bits of information, like name, physical location, and whatever else is socially or contextually relevant. This may include the user’s followers and following, which makes the social network accessible, a node at a time.
Gestures — Actions that users take other than actively posting can also be pushed out to the stream, like posts. So, when a user decides to follow (or unfollow) another that social gesture can be streamed. Likewise, users may indicate that they ‘like’ (or ‘dislike’) users posts. In a similar way, in a business context, more structured posts can be implemented, like appointments to meet, and acceptance of a request to meet is another sort of social gesture.
These are the basic elements of the open stream model, and given a wide variablity of understanding about it and experience with it, it is always helpful to lay it all out so that we can share terms and avoid confusion.
How Is This Different From Email, And Does That Matter?
Email is not predicated on social networks, except to the extent that the users of email are networked. The premise is that there is a universe of individuals (and perhaps named groups) to who messages can be directed. And they can send messages to you, if they know your email address.
Like streams, email has sending and receiving contexts, but there is no notion of writing an email message without addressing it to a specific list of people.
Email is addressed, stream posts are released.
Email is private, and the distribution of messages is determined by the author at the time of writing. Individuals may decide to block my messages, but they can’t opt to see all of them. This means that the effective use of the information in the message is based on the premise that the author knows who should read it.
Streams are public (within some defined ‘public’), and the distribution of messages is determined by the actions of all the members of that public. Individuals decide who they will follow, and the collective streaming of information is the result of the affiliation of all the members of the public.
In the context of business, this means that email is selective: the author selects who should read the message. Streams are elective: the eventual recipients of messages elect to receive them. And this election is principally based on the individual, not the topic, per se, although different tools may implment that very differently.
Relative to email’s selection orientation, streaming is based on the premise that individuals might be more effective if they can elect to receive information flows that are potentially useful to them, and therefore, they should be able to make the determination for themselves as to what are the best sources of information.
Looking at this as a ‘wisdom of the crowds’ sort of issue, it is more likely that information will be best distributed within any given group if each person can decide what information sources are likely to provide good information for themself, rather than leaving it up to the sources of information to decide who should have access to it. This is the argument for openness in open societies, as well, and it has an immediate and obvious analog in the workplace.
So, whenever the discussion comes around (once again) about how we already have email, and that all this streaming malarcky is nothing new, please remember that the models are quite different, and at least in some ways are an inversion of each other. Email is inherently more centralized and top-down, while streaming is inherently more distributed and bottom-up.
When we hear arguments against streaming in the business context they are often the same arguments that are made against distribution of decision-making and the value of top-down controls. I won’t go into the counter to these arguments here — they are out of scope — except to point out that bottom-up and distributed business organization is often linked to agile and resilient businesses, ones that are more likely to thrive in challenging and fast-changing circumstances.
Last Thoughts: What We Can Learn From Corporate Email
We are at a juncture in the rise of streams which is similar to the rise of corporate email. People today don’t recall the controversy about adopting corporate email in the ’70s and ’80s, and then again, web-based email in the ’90s.
One lesson to learn is that ROI studies will be asked for prior to roll-out. However, later on, when the entire company and then the world has shifted to email, senior management will realize that there is no return to a pre-email or pre-stream world, and therefore most companies will simply opt not to calculate whether the return was realized. It will be moot. (See Lee and Sproul, Connections, for a detailed examination of this around corporate email.)
The second lesson is interoperability and standards. Corporate email led to a a Cambrian explosion of email products that were largely non-interoperable. It took years to get different systems to intercommunicate, so large companies often had three or more unintegrated email solutions, based on acquisitions, or different groups in different countries making differently local decisions.
We need to start thinking about interoperable streams, from the outset. For example, I have been advocating interoperability of the tumble blog model for some time, which is a specific subset of the more general streams model. Since we have some much innovation going on, this is likely to turn out to be like the SQL standard, which was the intersection of the leading implementations of the SQL model of databases. At any rate, businesses looking to roll out streams in their companies should definitely put pressure on the vendors to commit to interoperability in the next few years, before this gets away from us.
Bruce Nussbaum nails a criticism of Facebook’s pathological business model, basically saying that strip-mining user’s social relationships will not work. Users will reject this as an affront.
Facebook’s Culture Problem May Be Fatal
Facebook is wildly successful because its founder matched new social media technology to a deep Western cultural longing — the adolescent desire for connection to other adolescents in their own private space. There they can be free to design their personal identities without adult supervision. Think digital tree house. Generation Y accepted Facebook as a free gift and proceeded to connect, express, and visualize the embarrassing aspects of their young lives.
Then Gen Y grew up and their culture and needs changed. My senior students started looking for jobs and watched, horrified, as corporations went on their Facebook pages to check them out. What was once a private, gated community of trusted friends became an increasingly open, public commons of curious strangers. The few, original, loose tools of network control on Facebook no longer proved sufficient. The Gen Yers wanted better, more precise privacy controls that allowed them to secure their existing private social lives and separate them from their new public working lives.
Facebook’s business model, however, demands the opposite. It is trying to transform the private into a public arena it can offer advertisers.
It is exactly this change that dooms Facebook. Users’ expectations are being overturned.
Twitter — which has been based on a publicy model from the outset doesn’t have this problem. Facebook is in trouble because of forcing people form privacy to publicy without their agreement.
Yes, Facebook may back out of this last cycle of abuse, but there may be no happy medium.
So much has happened in the past ten years under the title ‘social media’ that it is nearly impossible to determine what is going on. Add to that all the so-called social media experts, who blur the picture more than clarifying it, and it’s obvious we need to cut through the chatter to try to figure out what has happened, and where this is all headed.
I would like to offer an analysis that is well-suited to a 15 minute presentation, meaning that it overly simplifies a great deal, but reveals a lot, too: an attempt to make sense of the social media blur.
Early social media — blogs — weren’t really very social. They owe more to the earlier metaphor used to describe them — personal publishing — than to what we are now coming to understand as social. But this was the first — and necessarily first — stage of social media, the democratization of media, that led to the defection from mass media of many millions: a fact that has profoundly reshaped mass media and other mass institutions, especially in recent years as those organizations that formerly lectured about the evils of social media have turned about to embrace it.
The rise of social networks — the second phase of social media — changed perceptions about what mediated social interactions could be, and sparked an explosion in what has been called ‘user generated content’ — although that term is itself deeply embedded in the thinking of the publishing world. The ‘users’ involved aren’t ‘users’, they are participants, citizens, collaborators. They aren’t ‘generating content’, they are inhabitants of a social sphere where emitting observations, questions, and answers are the core elements of creating a shared identity.
The emergence of real-time streams — microblogging or microstreaming — is the third phase of social media, and one that builds on and reworks the foundation of blogs and the social layer of networks. It seems that people will naturally gravitate to a conversational medium — especially based on the open follower or asymmetric follower model (a la Twitter). These contexts are wired on top of open social networks, and their fast tempo leads them to be the metronome of social interaction on the web. They in effect set the clock speed of social interaction at a faster pace than previously. Just as importantly, in the context of real-time streams changes the role of blog posts (and other long-format media) from being contexts for social interaction into social objects: items that are discussed in the stream by participants. This is leading to the movement of many comments from blogs and non-streaming social networks into the stream.
Now, we are headed into the fourth phase of social media, where the growing market impacts of streams will begin to impinge on computing in general, so we will see streams become primary design elements of operating systems for computing and mobile devices. As this advance spreads, the premises of the earliest phases of social media can begin to be considered as layers in an architecture. Old school blogs and other publishing models that create static web pages will increasingly be treated as an archive, or as a source for social objects referenced by URL, but where the URL is used to fetch the content and display it in the stream, just as today photos are being resolved in Twitter clients. In the near future, all media types will be resolved in place, in the stream. This will create interesting issues with advertising revenues and other media control issues, but in the long run, ads and other metadata will be pulled along with the context-free slow media into the socially-embedded context of streams.
In some recent writings and presentations, I have explored the topic ‘Time Is The New Space’:
from 10 Minute Sprint from 140 Characters Conference: Social Business
We are not sharing space online, although it the conventional wisdom says we are. We are sharing time. Time has become a shared resource.
Our time is increasingly not our own, in a good way, as we move into a streamed model of connection.
Individual time becomes less of a reality, and a shared thread of time will become the norm — shared with those that are most important to you and those that reciprocate. This will change the basic structure of work.
Time is increasingly less linear, less mechanical; but more subjective and plastic.
Individuals will choose to trade personal productivity for connectedness, as voices in the stream ask for help, pointers, and introduction. Connectedness will trump other obligations, specifically timeliness.
I want to build on one aspect of this topic: to the degree that we rely on real-time streaming as the basis of our work interactions, we will sense that we are sharing time, not documents, or other artifacts. Interaction in real-time forms the context of our interactions, and displaces many prior social objects.
In particular, this means the end of documenting status by reports: moments are what we share, not memos.
The elements of the memo are atomized into a scattershot of micro status updates, which, like macro blogging before it, has thrown away the stucture of beginning, middle and end. We are always at the start, middle, and end. Not everything fits into a 140 character Twitter post, but long form writing won’t necessarily look like memos, but a slightly slower stream made up of larger chunks.
In everyday, more prosaic terms, I am betting that the operational documents that flowed, sluggishly, through the interoffice mail of companies in the ’90s, and as email attachments in the ’00s, will simply not be created in the ’10s. Instead, people will simply aggregate others’ streams — both micro and macro — ordered by time and topic. Or simply remain aware of what folks are doing in an ambient way, sharing time. A fully streamed world, not batched.
My slides and notes from today’s talk at 140 Characters Conference in LA. It was a ten minute sprint, so I didn’t get to elaborate the various points very deeply.]
I want to paint a quick picture of what I believe we will see emerge over the next five to ten years, as the impacts of real-time social tools and the emerging web culture trickle through into business.
Today we are only that the start, one side of a bridge leading over to a dramatically different way of doing business.
In voluntary and open social networks, the individual has replaced the group as the basic, irreducible particle.
In these contexts, our rights and responsibilities do not derive from membership in groups: they are unalienable.
Of course, individuals in social networks immediately begin to create relationships — based on the nature of what the social tools allow. This is why I have characterized social tools for over the past 10 years as ‘tools that shape culture.’
And it is through other people that we are made human.
The social business will be much more a village than an army.
They aren’t really structured to conquer other villages, and they won’t operate like football teams.
Mostly, businesses will be more fluid and less solid, with people cooperating and competing for resources, making deals and agreements, exchanging goods and services, dating, raising families, building and tearing things down, and lots of comings and goings.
And bigger businesses can scale from this social scale belonging. But it’s a fractal sort of scaling, where the same sorts of organizational principles are at work in the large and in the small, which is how most bottom-up things work.
As in a village, professional reputation will be more important than titles, connections more important than rank, and authority will be derived from connections not control.
This is based on the maxim that I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections.
The salient attribute of real-time conversations is that they are brand spanking new: the new ones were typed moments ago.
The interesting thing about real-time isn’t that what’s important is fleeting. No, the salient attribute is that what’s breaking is brand spanking new: the newest Tweets were typed moments ago.
At the beginning of some rising trend (critical to some business) is a single tweet, and a small number of followers who read it and then pass it on. The point where the pebble hits the surface of the pond, and the ripples start to spread.
We are trying hard to hear the earliest whispers of things that are critical. Small talk is big again.
Abundance economics means that we won’t rely on search: search is based on scarcity.
Imagine that all critical information is available, publicly, and the most important breaking news is a few seconds (at most) away. In this world the problem won’t be finding what you want, but minimizing the torrent so that you have a small number of things to look at.
This is as true inside of a 1000 person company as in the open web.
Increasingly, we will switch to a social connection mode to filter and find for us. Our networks will become engines of meaning, as Bruce Sterling said.
Everything we want to find has been found, and will find us through our social connections. Like head colds and happiness.
We are not sharing space online, although it the conventional wisdom says we are. We are sharing time. Time has become a shared resource.
Our time is increasingly not our own, in a good way, as we move into a streamed model of connection.
Individual time becomes less of a reality, and a shared thread of time will become the norm — shared with those that are most important to you and those that reciprocate. This will change the basic structure of work.
Time is increasingly less linear, less mechanical; but more subjective and plastic.
Individuals will choose to trade personal productivity for connectedness, as voices in the stream ask for help, pointers, and introduction. Connectedness will trump other obligations, specifically timeliness.
The real-time flow of social tools like Twitter, and the myriad vertical apps that will adopt the open follower model, will become the bloodstream of social business.
The flow is where everything critical appears first, and where everyone will congregate.
Flow will become the dominant motif of all important social tools in this next era of the Web. This will be the ‘still point of a turning world’: paradoxically, the place where the stream runs hardest will be where we are most at rest.
The nexus for all the imploded bits of the previous web of pages, where the flotsom of links, messages, pats on the back, questions and alerts all jumble together.
That’s where we’ll be. We will be the engines of meaning, sorting, passing things along, choosing who to follow and who to forget, transmitting ideas, decisions, and recommendations.
This is where business will be done, plots will be hatched, and deals will be done. This will be the center of everything.
Building this won’t be easy. But we are moving into a new, post-industrial world, and new ways will have to be designed so that business can thrive.
This is like pressures that drive us to build new infrastructure in the real world, or the societal pressures that lead us to make basic changes: like universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and child labor laws.
Whatever else social business comes to be, it has to be based on how people operate when they feel most free, most creative, most engaged, and most needed. We have to build a way of working where the people doing the work matter as much as the work.
Whatever else, social business must be that.
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
My work is social tools and their impact on media, business, and society.
I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections.
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