LinkedIn and Plaxo: Adapt or Die

Dan Farber’s scoop about LinkedIn’s plans to adapt to the new world that Facebook is making is almost anticlimatic:

[from � LinkedIn to open up to developers | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com by Dan Farber]

I talked to LinkedIn founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman on Friday at the Supernova 2007 conference about Facebook’s rapid growth and potential incursion into his territory. He told me that over next 9 months LinkedIn would deliver APIs for developers, ostensibly to make it more of platform like Facebook, and create a way for users who spend more time socially in Facebook to get LlinkedIn notifications.

One half of that message is just sensible: if you have a huge social network, why not allow others to build on top of it? The second half almost suggests conceding leadership to Facebook, as if Facebook is the really social social network, while Linkedin is some more functional thing that just so happens to work based on social relationships. Which is really what I have always thought was wrong with LinkedIn: it’s a bunch of business processes that are partially automated that rely on a large database of people’s relationships. It is, however, not the sort of place where you make or foster relationships. So, in a way, Reid is conceding nothing, since what Facebook is doing is intensely social, not just leveraging a big dataset of contacts.

In a similar fashion, Plaxo’s Ben Golub and I spoke the other day, and the ‘contact unmanagement’ company has released a beta of Plaxo 3.0: a real category shift, in many ways. Along with a long roster of synchronization options (like Google Calendar, Mac OS X Address Book and Calendar, Outlook, and especially, LinkedIn, which represents a whole new angle: syncing social networks (to be expanded in another post)), Golub and company have added a ‘Pulse’ feature that plants the product over in the camp of flow apps, like Twitter, Jaiku, and Facebook.

Plaxo Pulse

Pulse pulls new media traffic from your Plaxo contacts: photos from Flickr, blog updates, address modifications, and so on. I have already requested some kind of desktop tool (like Twitterific) for Pulse.

I find the Plaxo sync stuff sort of awkward, but that’s because I have my calendars and contacts spread out in a very unique way. I use Google Calendar as my actual calendar, and only sync to the Mac OS X iCal so I can sync to my phone. And I have addresses all over, primarily because I can’t sync between my Mac Address app and Google. If Plaxo fixes that I would be happy, but the Google address sync is still planned for the future.

I see Plaxo breaking into two twinned parts: synchronization of various sorts of coordinative data caught up in calendars, address books and to-do lists (yawn… useful, but so twentieth century), and a new (less boring) collection of services that are traffic-and-flow based.

Pulse is another run at the Nerdvana meme I have been pursuing for a long, long time. The basic notion of Nerdvana is that we want to have updates of all sorts from our contacts collated into a buddylist representation, which is where Golub tells be Plaxo is headed. I could see Brian Solis’ online presence, most recent status message, last five blog posts, and recent Flickr pictures, but linked to the buddylist icon for Brian.

[I can’t tell you how many IM companies I have have suggested this too, over the years, by the way. But again, we have to look to the upstarts to do the breakthroughs, I guess.]

If Plaxo heads this way, my recommendation will be to break Pulse out as a separate application, one that relies on data managed within the Plaxo platform, but sylistically and operationally separate. It has nothing to do with sync of data, and everything to do with media traffic flowing through personal relationships.

Both Plaxo and LinkedIn seem to be making serious business model adjustments, based on the new world.

Laurent Haug Joins The Attention Economists

Inspired by Steve Rubel’s recent post on the Attention Crash, now Laurent Haug (of Lift) has started to gripe about his attention as a ‘precious resource’ (although I do agree with him about dropping his LinkedIn account, for totally different reasons):

[from The Attention Bubble]

As our time becomes the most precious resource we have, the millions of web pages competing for our attention are becoming a problem. Early adopters – the canaries in the coal mine? – are reacting, arbitrating between all their time consuming actions. When I lost my mobile phone two month ago, I almost didn’t renew my subscription. It’s only after I got blamed by a client who was trying to reach me that I decided to re-order a mobile. Email? I am increasingly forcing myself to only answer them once a day. I let the flow of information get in anytime, but I stack all the answers together, trying to get in a more productive flow once a day to answer. Best practices are coming together to counter the overflow. We just need to create them.

No, we need better techniques to live in the flow, not shut it down. We need to shift away from the web of pages to a web of flow, where what we need will find its way to us. By all means, throw away your RSS reader, spend less time in the email client: but not because of attention economics! Those tools are just really bad at treating time as a shared space.

The real problem underneath everything, the premise never examined, is that browsing the web and living in the email client are simply not where we should be. It’s not that we are overloaded with too much, its that the tools we use are doing a bad job of connecting us to the important things. They are bad tools.

We need to unseat email and browsing — Web 1.0’s linchpins — and move into the web of traffic and flow.

Unveiling the new Jaiku Client for Nokia - Part 2

Steve Rubel is following the lead of many others into Toffler’s “information overload is driving us crazy” tarpit. He’s in good company, joined by Herbert Simon, Tom Davenport, and Linda Stone: the Attention Economists.

[from Micro Persuasion: The Attention Crash]

We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.

[…]

With this philosophy in mind [Tim Ferliss’s 4 Hour Workweek], I have trimmed projects, RSS feeds and emails to hone in on the 20 percent that’s most important. It’s also why I am not trying every new site that floats in my inbox and deleting pitches that are clearly off topic w/o even reading them.

My attention has reached a limit so I have re-calibrated it to make it more effective. I think this issue is an epidemic.

No, I think we need to develop new behaviors and new ethics to operate in the new context.

Most people operate on the assumption that the response to increased flow is to intensify what was working formerly: read more email, read more blogs, write more IMs, and so on. And at the same time motor on with the established notions of what a job is, how to accomplish work and meet deadlines, and so on.

In a time of increased flow, yes, if you want to hold everything else as is — your definition of success, of social relationships, of what it means to be polite or rude — Steve is right: you will have to cut back.

Alternatively, we can start to shift everything, let go of a lot of the old ways, and operate on a new, pre-industrial, pre-agricultural footing.

  1. It’s OK not to respond to emails, vmails, or IMs. There is no possible way that you can live a public life, open to the world, and respond to every request that comes along. The same holds even if it is a friend, or colleague. People have to pick and choose: it’s a big world.
  2. It’s sensible to have a nomadic reading style: if something is important it will show up in a variety of places. Don’t be a slave to RSS readers: throw them away. (I have always hated RSS readers that emulate the email inbox, for exactly this reason: they make everything seem equally important… or equally unimportant.)
  3. Unlike Steve (or Tim Ferliss), I don’t know exactly how to trim out the 80% of everything that is junk, as Tim Ferliss suggests. I do fire clients that make things difficult, unpleasant, or unrewarding, but it’s not statistical. I constantly gravitate to projects and people that I think offer the greatest opportunities for growth, which means constantly leaving other things behind. But this is just another kind of flow, not a one-time triage: it is a constant attrition and acquisition.

Instead of the 4 Hour Workweek, though, I suggest that people read the Tao Te Ching:

9

Fill your bowl to the brim

and it will spill.

Keep sharpening your knife

and it will blunt.

Chase after money and security

and your heart will never unclench.

Care about people’s approval

and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.

The only path to serenity.

The answer is not becoming obsessed with attention as a limited resource to be husbanded, or thinking of our cognition as a laser beam to be pointed at only at what is important.

We need to unfocus, to rely more on the network or tribe to surface things of importance, and remain open to new opportunities: these are potentially more important than the work on the desk. Don’t sharpen the knife too much.

When gurus attack - Stowe Boyd gets defensive aboutLinda

Linda Stone has an odd way of responding to the comments I made recently about Continuous Partial Attention in my Reboot talk, Flow: A New Consciousness For A Web Of Flow. I guess she must have a google search bot running for Continuous Partial Attention, and it led her to Stephanie Booth’s post about my talk. Fine. But she left a comment there addressed to me, as if it was my blog, not Stephanie’s. But I don’t think Linda looked at my slides. She certainly wasn’t there for the presentation. I am not Stephanie Booth, so her paragraph is her own take on what I said. Here’s Linda’s comment:

Stowe,

I read your paragraph above regarding my continuous partial attention thesis. Once again, you appear to misunderstand my work. Check http://www.continuouspartialattention.com.

Continuous partial attention is not something that I judge to be “good” or “bad.” EVERY attention strategy has a place and matches to an activity, a desire. CONTINUOUS continuous partial attention, that is — operating in a constant state of vigilance, high alert, always on, is stressful to the body. It creates an adrenalized fight or flight state, cortisol floods the body. The bottom line: continuous partial attention some of the time can be a great thing. Continuous, continuous partial attention — or continuous partial attention ALL the time, is a contributing factor to insomnia, obesity, and stress-related diseases.

Cheers,

Linda

Ok, again Linda asserts that I don’t understand what she is saying. First of all, you superficially state that you don’t think CPA is good or bad, but then she tries splitting a hair by asserting that its only CONTINUOUS continuous partial attention that’s bad, leading to obesity, insomnia, and dandruff. CONTINUOUS continuous? Isn’t continuous once enough?

She seems to be saying CPA isn’t bad so long as you don’t do it CONTINUOUSLY. Isn’t that the whole point?

Sure — I accept the notion that at some times it may be attractive to close the door, turn off the music, and only listen to the tiny voices in your head. But I believe that the value of that sort of disconnected time is over-rated: it’s not a given of human psychology, it’s a cultural, learned behavior.

I don’t think that CPA leads to your adrenal glands being in an uproar, unless you have grown up in an environment where CPA is foreign, like baby boomers. Modern homo sapiens is content with constantly scanning, constantly grooming tribe members, constantly remaining connnected, constantly juggling. I don’t have insomnia.

Here’s the slide I used in my talk, which I pulled from something she wrote back in 2002:

Linda Stone on CPA 2002

In the talk, I lumped her and her anti-CPA screed (Yes, Linda, that’s how I interpret it, and please stop telling me I don’t understand you. I understand you better than you do.) along with Toffler’s Information Overload (it’s driving us crazy, he asserted) and the Attention Economy mavens (free information leads to attention scarcity). I don’t buy any of it.

Here’ the Contrarian View to CPA:

Contrarian View (To Linda Stone)

One of the points I made at Reboot is that we will be in a war with the folks that want to tell us that flow is bad for us:

The War On Flow

(Yes, that is Instant Messaging Barbie. If anyone out there has one, I would love to buy it!)

Linda and many others will tell us it will rot our teeth, disrupt family life, and lead to hair on our palms. I for one am not eager to turn off my devices and pay all my attention to one thing at a time, one moment at a time. There are too many targets on the horizon, too many members of the tribe, and too many jaguars lurking in the shadows for that. In my tribe, we don’t do things that way.

/Talkshow: Felix Petersen of Plazes, 10:30am PT Thursday 14 June


Felix Petersen of Plazes, will be on /Talkshow this week at 10:30am PT Thursday 14 June. We will be talking about the new Plazes release and the role of geolocation in a world of flow.

Options: You can access the streaming audio at the time of the show (but not before, grrr), you can call in to participate via phone (718 508-9560 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              718 508-9560      end_of_the_skype_highlighting), or skype me at stoweboyd to join a skype chat.

Fooling With Facebook

I have been exploring a bunch of the new stuff on my Facebook account.

Question: Why does Facebook only allow me one blog to be imported? I write three, and they represent different sides of my character. This is a show stopper in the long run. I will move to Jaiku permanently, if they don’t fix this flaw.

I like the app integration. Here’s the results of a recent question I put up using the “My Questions” app:

My Question app

Kind of fun. Not as critical as embedding Twitter, maybe, but offers completely new functionality.

What I really want is a Twitterific-type desktop app that takes my Facebook stream, and pops new stuff via Growlr. Or, alternatively, a richer notification system: I can’t get notified when new material is posted to a group that I administer, for example.

Left-Handed Social Commerce

We are all used to the norms of real-world commerce: I want to buy something, say a fold-up bike, so I have to find out what bike stores have such goods in stock, and I drive all over town checking them out, and trying to get a deal.

The web (1.0) changed that dynamic. I can search for fold-up bikes online, compare prices, search for reviews, and then order the bike of my dreams online. Cool.

But I am doing all the work, and even if others help me along the way with advice or recommendations, they don’t get anything for it. And the information that I accumulate along the way usually just dissipates as soon as the transaction takes place: the myriad activities are never bundled together and published for others.

Web 2.0 tools exist to better this situation, but in general, they all fall short of my dreamscape, which I refer to as left-handed social commerce.

The solution I envision will be based on a social media/social networking platform, such as Facebook. I would be able to collate various observations and recommendations made by my contacts or me, as a sort of portfolio associated with the object of my desire: in this case, a fold-up bike. Once I have boiled down what it is I am after — either a specific make-and-model or a bunch of features, like number of gears, size, price range, and so on — I want to be able to post my buy. By posting my buy I mean offering the deal to the world of vendors out there.

In some way, I would like to have the platform anonymize my request for offers so that I can avoid being pestered, and I can filter out offers that don’t satisfy my concerns. For example, I only want offers from bike stores in the San Francisco area, because I want them to be able to fix the bike if it has problems. And I only want offers from highly rated sellers, and sellers that have been in business 3 years or more. Or sellers that at least some of my contacts have recommended. And so on.

But the real flip here is having the offers flow to me, as opposed to me wandering around in the web 1.0 world of pages, following links, like a rat in a maze. Sure, the rat is smart, and can solve the maze. But I don’t want to be a rat in a maze anymore. I want everything to flow to me.

And it’s not like I am consigning the vendors to running a maze: after all, the same platform could flow opportunities to them. A San Francisco bike shop carrying a variety of fold-up bikes could tag themselves appropriately within the hypothetical left-handed social commerce system, and my deal would flow to them. They could add a few parameters — prices, models, etc. — and flow it back to me.

We’d all get out of the maze.

Ebay is a big maze, where buyers have to do the work. Amazon. Whatever. Its all designed to make things easy for the retailer or the auction house. And we run the maze everytime we buy something online.

It’s interesting that I have had this discussion — more or less — with dozens of entrepreneurs in recent years, but I have yet to see a real solution emerge based on left-handed commerce and flow principles.

I also envision that I should get credit — reputation and commissions — based on the folio I develop on fold-up bikes. In a long-tail economy, a really good folio researching the alternatives could get hits for years. I could pass along some small discount to buyers who want the same thing I bought, as well as pocketing a small commission. Why not? When this sort of thing moves to the edge — for example in a social network platform like Facebook — and out of managed sites like Yelp, why shouldn’t we get the tips?

New Models Of Work: The Individual Is The New Group, Reprised

I have been talking with a wide range of companies recently that are developing business “Web 2.0” apps. I put the word in scare quotes, because not many of the core principles (or at least what I perceive to be the core principles) of Web 2.0 are showing up in many of these apps.

How many web apps have I seen so recently that provide some sort of intranet, supposedly for small/medium businesses? Way too many, and with way too little differentiation, and hardly any new thoughts about business.

First of all, I believe that because of the way that we live and work the individual is the new group (see my original post on this from January). Stated differently, apps that purport to help us order our work should start by solving the problems of the individual, realizing that one of the issues involved in work is sharing with others.

So, I am amazed to see how many apps continue the old, old ways, where membership in groups is the primary (if not only) notion at work. All of these apps that support projects as a collection of folders into which we move documents and people get access to them through group membership.

Yawn.

Not that this model doesn’t ‘work’. Obviously we have been able to get work done, and to share things, using this model. It’s been around for decades.

But I am more interested in bottom-up organization schemes, both at the interpersonal level and at the tool level.

Just some examples of these ideas, and a few notes about tools I have been trying to use:

  • Contrast the notion of Gmail’s ‘labels’ — which are essentially tags — and the typical use of folders and categories in these intranet solutions. In Gmail, I can tag any email with dozens of tags, if I want, so I can aggregate and find it in a variety of ways. An email from a particular client is denoted with the company name, a location, and perhaps a project, task, or issue. As a result, I can pull up all emails related to London, specific project, or the topic of ‘conceptual design’ independent of project. With folders, things are put in one place, and can’t be sliced in other ways.
  • Parts versus Wholes — I favor (in principle, since no one has built something like this) treating everything I am fooling with as miscellaneous (thank you, Dr Weinberger, wherever you are), basically a big pile of parts. Here’s a picture, here’s an email, here’s some notes on some topic, here’s a to-do item, and here’s a file (which has parts inside, like slides or sections or spreadsheet pages). What I’d like to be able to do is define assemblages of all the things wearing some tag, or defined by some tag algebra. Imagine pulling together an on the fly assemblage of all the bits in my heap that are tagged ‘conceptual modeling’ and ‘public’, and creating a workspace with that. At the same time, many of those public bits on the topic of conceptual modeling might be included in private assemblages, but they would still be public.
  • Flow, Traffic, and kinds of Parts — The explosion of interest in Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, and related flow apps turns certain premises on their ear, but even most users seem unable to articulate what is going on here. One factor is the shift to information flowing through defined social relationships in an asymmetric fashion, away from the symmetric and closed groups of the pre-2.0 era. Another factor is the flow of various parts, not wholes, thought the apps. For example, Facebook does not embed my blog as an element in a portal presentation. Instead, new posts appear as they pop into my RSS feed: a flow of parts instead of embedding the whole. Now, a gazillion sorts of bits are starting to flow through Facebook’s traffic: new slideshows, new answers to questions, new events created, and so on. And we see a similar emergence of types of traffic in Jaiku and Pownce.
  • Mobile versus Stabile — The other shift (very early) is toward pulling information from the traffic of these flow apps, and doing appropriate things with it. (I have appropriated Calder’s terms based on the different kinds of statuary: those that move and those that don’t.) If someone updates an event that I am interested in, and that I have added to my calendar. I think what I want is not automated updating a la iCal subscription, but instead seeing the change go by in a highlighted way, allowing me to acknowledge it or reject it. For example, a smart desktop companion app could be reading my Facebook traffic just looking for event information, and I might get a Growlr update popping on my desktop. I want to stay still, working, and have things of interest find their way to me. The world of browsing, where people are mobile and information is stabile, looks very 20th century.
  • So a wish list, of sorts:
    • Work Management tools that start with individuals and bits, and work outward to assemblages and networks.
    • Tools that allow us to be stabile and make more and more critical information mobile, not vice versa.
    • New models of access and visibility based on networks and tags, not groups and folders.
    • Agreed upon conventions for flow apps to be able to interoperate, not just platform plays like Facebook. I don’t necessarily want one platform with ten thousand services streaming through it. I want to be able to use best of breed solutions, and have them stream together the way I want. As an example, I use Dopplr now to define where I will be geographically, and I stream that information into a specific calendar in Google. I might want to stream things so that my planned travels to various locations would lead to postings in Facebook local networks, and I would like to stream responses from those networks back to the trips in Dopplr. Obviously, this sort of gasketry is impossible today, but given enough interest by the community, and motivations among the developers for maximum network effects might push things in this direction.

At any rate, I am amazed that no one has started to move away from folders and documents in the intranet space, and I am amazed on the other hand that consumer-oriented frenzy in these flow apps hasn’t translated manifested itself in a new metaphor for work based on flow. I guess it’s going to take a while, and perhaps a couple of index apps, before these ideas can get off the ground.

If there is anyone out there pushing these ideas — and I don’t mean just another ‘dead easy to use’ old school intranet app — please contact me. I am willing to believe.