morganmissen: Caterina Fake cited this timeline to 50M users on why the worst thing a social network can do is force growth. “My perspective is it takes a while to grow this stuff,” she said to Liz Gannes in AllThingsD. “It takes time for the culture to grow. You need time to develop antibodies to spammers and trolls.” Adding user registrations at such a fast pace doesn’t leave enough time for a dedicated, engaged user community to organically create itself and establish norms, she argued.
Zoom

morganmissen:

Caterina Fake cited this timeline to 50M users on why the worst thing a social network can do is force growth. “My perspective is it takes a while to grow this stuff,” she said to Liz Gannes in AllThingsD. “It takes time for the culture to grow. You need time to develop antibodies to spammers and trolls.” Adding user registrations at such a fast pace doesn’t leave enough time for a dedicated, engaged user community to organically create itself and establish norms, she argued.

(Source: morganmissen)

Privacy Management On Social Media Sites by Mary Madden via Pew Social network users are becoming more active in pruning and managing their accounts. Women and younger users tend to unfriend more than others. About two-thirds of internet users use social networking sites (SNS) and all the major metrics for profile management are up, compared to 2009: 63% of them have deleted people from their “friends” lists, up from 56% in 2009; 44% have deleted comments made by others on their profile; and 37% have removed their names from photos that were tagged to identify them. How to read the ‘unfriending’ trend? One option: This rise in unfriending might not be about friendship, per se. People might be just throttling back the torrent of information that they are receiving in their social streams: stream overload. But the deleting of comments and removing name tags from photos would represent very different, and possibly more privacy-oriented motivations. However, if I delete a comment because someone writes something offensive, is that a privacy issue? Or is it a more of a cultivated image being publicly displayed? That would make it a publicy issue. I think we will have to get a lot more fine-grained in determining causality in these cases, and more attuned to the publicy/Goffman angle: the presentation of self in everyday online life.
Zoom

Privacy Management On Social Media Sites by Mary Madden via Pew

Social network users are becoming more active in pruning and managing their accounts. Women and younger users tend to unfriend more than others.

About two-thirds of internet users use social networking sites (SNS) and all the major metrics for profile management are up, compared to 2009: 63% of them have deleted people from their “friends” lists, up from 56% in 2009; 44% have deleted comments made by others on their profile; and 37% have removed their names from photos that were tagged to identify them.

How to read the ‘unfriending’ trend?

One option: This rise in unfriending might not be about friendship, per se. People might be just throttling back the torrent of information that they are receiving in their social streams: stream overload.

But the deleting of comments and removing name tags from photos would represent very different, and possibly more privacy-oriented motivations. However, if I delete a comment because someone writes something offensive, is that a privacy issue? Or is it a more of a cultivated image being publicly displayed? That would make it a publicy issue.

I think we will have to get a lot more fine-grained in determining causality in these cases, and more attuned to the publicy/Goffman angle: the presentation of self in everyday online life.

Change Is Sexy, Until it Costs - Amber Naslund via Brass Tack Thinking

Amber condenses discussions/emails with hundreds down to the quintessential social hedge:

I’d like to better use social to build my business.

But I don’t want to spend anything because we don’t have a budget, and we can’t cut anything else. I don’t want to have to hire anyone or spend any extra time on this, and no one else can take it on right now, so we’ll need to outsource it or perhaps put the intern in charge of it. We like our culture the way it is and don’t see anything wrong with it, and we’ve always done things this way so we’re not really keen to change any of our processes or people. Some rhetoric around developing a positive culture would be great, but we really don’t have any intention of putting any of that into practice if it involves significant effort or any kind of substantial change that might disrupt the way that we work or how we work with our customers currently.

So we’re really looking for some free strategy guidance, but we’d like to reserve the right to reject it outright if it feels uncomfortable or unfamiliar. We’d like some viral content that’s easy and cheap to create, and we’re really not interested in investing any time or people long term on this. Just looking for some some proven, guaranteed best practices that we can implement immediately, get immediate return on, set on autopilot, call ourselves “social” and not worry about integrating into the rest of our business because we’re looking for a quick win here that doesn’t really require much from us.

Can you help?

She goes on to point out that there is no social perpetual motion machine, and so anyone who wants to make social work for their company will have to spend money, allocate people to it and give them time to do the work, and prepare for a long-term and possibly difficult change process.

Years ago I was doing various presentations for the American Marketing Association on social media, but I finally gave up because it was so disheartening to be speaking to a room full of people who were trying to figure out how to do the least possible in social media, instead of looking for the biggest upside.

The End Of An Age, Or The End Of The Beginning?

Jeremiah Owyang wants to declare the end of the golden age of tech blogging, or, even more portentously, he says

The tech blogosphere, as we know it, is over.

This could be interpreted in a number of ways, but at face value — and leaving aside for the moment the specifics of his argument — I agree. The ‘blogosphere’ — that mid ’00s concept of a community of bloggers writing for each others and cross-linking through trackbacks and threaded comments — that communitarian vision has been superseded by other ideas of what is, or should be, happening, online.

However, I don’t want to adopt the metaphor that is used by people that fear the future, and long for a halcyon past. I won’t go along with the ‘golden age’ rhetoric, which is generally employed by those arguing a fall from a better past into a less virtuous present. (The concept comes from ancient Greek mythology, with its Golden, Silver, Bronze, Iron ages, and then the present, debased age.)

I prefer Winston Churchill’s trope:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Winston Churchill by Yousef Karsh

Churchill was, of course, referring to a turning point in the struggle with Germany during World War II, while we are discussing the transition from a more primitive and less social phase in the web revolution, into something more complex and, ultimately, more rewarding.

The points that Jeremiah makes to support his argument are very tactical, not looking at the strategic changes going on technologically or societally. His ‘trends’ aren’t really trends, but narrow extrapolations from recent events masquerading as business advice. They are these, in brief:

Trend 1: Corporate acquisitions stymie innovation

Trend 2: Tech blogs are experiencing major talent turnover

Trend 3: The audience needs have changed, they want: faster, smaller, and social

Trend 4: As space matures, business models solidify – giving room for new disruptors

These observations are interesting as far as they go, but aside from the ‘faster, small, and social’ I don’t think these are major, in any sense.

I’d like to offer a few trends that may be implied by Jeremiah’s lists or by the comments of various bloggers that he cites, but aren’t really characterized very well in his post.

It’s obvious that Jeremiah is caught up in the issues confronting three groups of web denizens posting their contributions posting on technology platforms based on a now well-established model of web publishing, which we call blogging. This is unexamined in his piece, but the model of a website made up of chronologically ordered posts with comments in a thread on each piece, and a variety of navigation or advertising widgets in the margin may be getting tired, and may not gibe with other modern advances in online media dynamics. At any rate, Owyang’s concerns seem to be directed toward three constituencies:

  1. Independent authors or analysts, who may find it harder to operate in a changed media world, or to make a living from blogging, if indeed very many did so.
  2. Blog network companies — like Techcrunch, Mashable, and The Next Web — that are confronted with the invasion of major media companies, consolidation, and turnover.
  3. And last, the ‘audience’ — by which Owyang means everyone else. I will put to the side that social media was supposed to be about the end of the audience — Jay Rosen’s famous ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ — and simply state that Owyang and the others groups he appears to be concerned about have largely internalized a media-centric worldview, while mouthing mostly empty platitudes about the power of social media.

He doesn’t seem particularly concerned about the problems of major media companies, which continue to be deadly serious, nor does he refer to the notable advances that media companies like The Atlantic have accomplished. Nor does he spend much time talking about the technology companies — like Tumblr, Twitter, and Flipboard — that are involved in the tectonic changes going on today; changes that make the ebb and flow of small-potato business models surrounding tech blogging look like the scrambling of ants underneath the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Yes, we are veering into a new era of web media; and it’s about goddamned time.

Here’s a few of the most powerful trends, in summary:

  1. The rise of the web of flow, and the fall of the web of pages — Ubiquitous and highspeed connectivity and the emergence of a new breed of ‘genius’ mobile devices have led to a web in which information is perceived as and designed to be experienced in motion. The user experience has shifted from wandering around, searching for information, moving via URLs from page to page. Increasingly, information flows to us through the agency of solutions like Twitter, Tumblr, and Flipboard, mediated by social and algorithmic ‘engines of meaning’, as Bruce Sterling styled it. We are no longer experiencing the web as exploring a library, but more like a drinking from a fire hose.
  2. The social revolution and social tools — While a lot of the discussion about the rise of blogging talked about social media, the technology involved wasn’t particularly social. However, the emergence of network-based social tools — notably Facebook, Twitter, and thousands of other niche offerings — have led to a dramatic and unprecedented change in information transmission: increasingly, people are getting their news and insight via social networks, channeled through other, known individuals. The simplest proof of this state change is that Twitter is now the emergency broadcast system, the canary in the coal mine, the first place that the most important information appears. These tools form the bloodstream and the nervous system for the connected world we now inhabit. And the blogs and other media tools that were principally about publishing pages in the previous era, are now primarily oriented toward pushing links and summaries into the social nervous system.
  3. Social learning, innovation, and curation — As the population online grows, piling into world-spanning social networks, there are a number of systemic changes. As Stalin is supposed to have said, quantity has a quality of its own. As the online population and social density online goes up, there are phase transitions involved, and I believe that somewhere in the past year or two, we passed through a threshold. As Mark Pagel argues, our level of social connection has grown to the point where new ideas can travel much more quickly and economically: this includes all ideas, not just those involved in tech blogging, but tech blogging too. The best ideas — and their originators — will rise to the top more quickly, and as a result, Pagel maintains that we have a lessened need for innovators, and at the same time we are learning more quickly than before. I believe that this is the complementary trend allied to the increased perceived need for good curators: the value of discernment — which ideas are more useful — has gone up, while the value of creating new ideas has gone down. And, of course, you can substitute ‘write yet another post about iPhone apps or the Zygna IPO’ wherever I wrote ‘idea’ or ‘innovation’.

Obviously, Owyang and those leaving comments on his post weren’t necessarily treating these trends. The post was ostensibly about the changes in the world of tech blogging, after all. But I don’t see how you can meaningfully explore that niche without the larger context.

Brian Solis sees the larger context as necessary as well:

I recently wrote about my thoughts on the state and future of blogs, which is of course far grander than the world of tech blogging. And as you can see, blogging is alive and clicking.

Yes, micromedia, video, and social transactions/actions are breaking through our digital levees and causing our social streams to flood. And, yes, Flipboard, Zite, and the like (get it?), are forcing our consumption patterns into rapid-fire actions and reactions. You have a choice. You are either a content creator, curator or consumer. You can be all of course. But, think about this beyond the mental equivalent of 140 characters. What do you stand for and what do you want to become known for? The answer is different for each of us. But, content, context, and continuity are all I need to learn, make decisions and in turn inspire others.

I don’t buy the consumer angle — after all, every person is curating for at least one person, themselves — so I consider it a cardinality distinction: curating for one is not appreciably different than curating for two or ten. All curators — of whatever degree of discernment — started by curating for themselves. But Solis clearly gets the big picture, and I agree totally that what is bubbling up today will make the web a place where we continue to come to learn, make decisions, and connect with — and perhaps inspire? — others to do the same.

Nerdvana: A Better Tool For Communication (I Can Dream, Can’t I?) [originally posted on Get Real] I have used literally thousands of communications tools over the past 20 years, and although there has been an increase in commmunication speed and media, we have yet to see the “nerdvana” of tools that I have dreamed about for so long. I have long championed other media as inherently being better than email, such as instant messaging, so, as you can imagine, the tool I am dreaming out incorporates the basic metaphor of IM: the buddy list. But it goes beyond IM, as I will show you. How can I so baldly state that other media are better than email, in such an absolute way? Simple. Email is designed as a lowest-common denominator communications system, where everyone is treated equally. All emails, more or less, are the same (leaving aside issues of rich text v HTML and so on, which is not the thrust of my argument), which is stupid. The reality is that my relationships with people — whether I know them or not, how well I know them, and how involved we are at any given time in regular communication — is foremost in my mind when involved in communications, and as a result, the various artifacts of communication should be treated differently based on the context for their existence. Basically, email is pretty good at communicating with people when you don’t know them well, or people you don’t know at all. All you need is their email address and your emails will be treated pretty much like anybody else’s. But as a result, email doesn’t really do very much to help with the highest valued communication: communicating with the known. That’s where the paradigm of buddies, and the gated communities of instant messaging networks excel. But even technologies that I think are more useful in remaining in close contact with your circles of friends and colleagues don’t necessarily work together very well, if at all. So I am forced to read and write emails in one tool (yes, I do email, despite my dislike for the medium), IMs in another (actually, two IM clients), and read blogs in yeat another. Coordinating appointments and to-dos that involve others is managed in yet another app. And an address book app is used as the repository of some of the information about people (like email address, IM handles, and phone numbers), while their blogs RSS feeds are stored elsewhere. So, I decided to mockup an example of what a good unified client might offer someone like me, so I could sit in one tool all day long, choosing the appropriate communication, collaboration, or coordination channel based on the context. The Nerdvana Client Just for laughs, I have dubbed the mocked up client “Nerdvana” after the Dilbert strip where Dilbert proclaims, after he’s cleaned up his PC’s desktop, compacted his drive, and deleted unnecessary files, that he has reached “Nerdvana”. Basically, Nerdvana takes the IM concept of a buddy list and extends it to include all sorts of media. I have chosen to partition my world into three groups, Inner Circle (folks I interact with daily), Outer Circle (folks I interact with regularly), and The World (everyone else). This is largely for simplicity: there could be dozens of groups. And, oh, by the way, contacts can appear in multiple groups, and groups can include subgroups with no limits on level of nesting. In the first image, I expanded only the Inner Circle — note I did not include any icons to represent expand/contract because I am a lazy designer. I have a small number of contacts in this group, although in the real world my Inner Circle category is more like a dozen folks. Each contact has four numbers associated with them, which represent ‘of interest’ blog entries, emails, IMs, and appointments, respectively. By ‘of interest’ I mean whatever the preferences are currently set to: for example, I may have configured things to display unread blog entries, unread email, open IMs, and future appointments, to suggest only one reasonable group of settings. Also note — since this is all in the world of conjecture, so I can get whatever I want — that the Nerdvana tool is extensible, so is possible to add on as many services as you’d like. For example, the IM service could expand to be Jabber, AIM, and Yahoo. Or completely different services could be included, like podcasts, to-do lists, geolocation, and web conferences. Presence is indicated by the green/yellow/red lights on the contacts. In the second graphic I have expanded Greg Narain’s content, and see various categories of communications going on. In the third graphic, I have fully expanded Greg’s content, showing the blog entry’s title, the subject line of the emails, the title of the IM session, and the subject of the upcoming appointment. This is displayed two different ways, based on two different sets of preferences or different commands used to expand the content: with and without category headers. Clicking on any of these fields could lead to extremely variable behavior, based on what sort of client you think Nerdvana should be. In a open API sort of environment, clicking on any of Greg’s content could lead to opening the appropriate tool of choice for that sort of interaction. So, for example, clicking on an email could lead to popping that email in Apple Mail (I am running OS X), and likewise, selecting the IM topic could pop the active IM session running in Fire (the multiheaded IM client I run to stay in contact with Jabber, Yahoo, and MSN users). Clicking on the blog entry could lead to either opening the entry in the browser or popping an RSS reader on my desktop, depending on configuration settings in Nerdvana. In a totalitarian software world, Nerdava would include all the functionality needed: it would be an email client, RSS reader, IM solution, and calendar tool. But such tools are generally not best at any of the things they aspire to be, and wind up discarded as a result, because users want some cool feature in their mail or IM client, or just don’t want to imagine dropping their chosen RSS reader. Obviously, my preference is the former: for Nerdvana to act as a primary organizing interface for existing communication tools, taking the buddy list concept as the core principle for all communication strategy, and supporting cross tool integration. For example, your IM solution might not support the concept of an appointed time to start an IM session, but with Nerdvana you can do so: Define a time and a subject for an appointment, using the Nerdvana interface, but actually managed in your native calendar app, like iCal. After it exists, select the appointment in Nerdvana, and create an association with some other sort of communication — in this case an IM session. When the appointment occurs, Nerdvana will create the pending IM session. The same technique can used to link writing an email with an appointment, or queueing up future blog entries. Alternatively, you could imagine a structure where important communication events — such as long IM sessions, or time spent reading blog entries — could automatically be journaled on your calendar, as a means of tracking time, or simply being able to use the calendar as a way to search back for communication activities and content on a timeline basis. Conclusions I have always maintained that if you are going to dream, dream big. So I have big hopes for Nerdvana. Maybe someone out there is trying to do something along these lines — at least in part — and if so, I want to hear about it. There is lots of innovation going on in the various specialized communication areas: better RSS readers, IM clients, and innumerable social networking apps. But I haven’t seen much going on in bringing it all together, based on something like the buddy list metaphor. I could also start in on how Nerdvana could play in an open social networking system — where the aggregation of communication channels, like blogs, IM, email, with specialized services like Flickr, Last.fm, Plazes, and so on, for photos , music, and location — could not only lead to multifaceted digital identities, but a coherent way of bringing together the disparate threads of identity into a manageable tool framework. This starts to look something like Mark Pincus has been looking into in his PeopleWeb thoughts. But I will leave that for the next installment of the Nerdvana series.
Zoom
Nerdvana: A Better Tool For Communication (I Can Dream, Can’t I?) [originally posted on Get Real] I have used literally thousands of communications tools over the past 20 years, and although there has been an increase in commmunication speed and media, we have yet to see the “nerdvana” of tools that I have dreamed about for so long. I have long championed other media as inherently being better than email, such as instant messaging, so, as you can imagine, the tool I am dreaming out incorporates the basic metaphor of IM: the buddy list. But it goes beyond IM, as I will show you. How can I so baldly state that other media are better than email, in such an absolute way? Simple. Email is designed as a lowest-common denominator communications system, where everyone is treated equally. All emails, more or less, are the same (leaving aside issues of rich text v HTML and so on, which is not the thrust of my argument), which is stupid. The reality is that my relationships with people — whether I know them or not, how well I know them, and how involved we are at any given time in regular communication — is foremost in my mind when involved in communications, and as a result, the various artifacts of communication should be treated differently based on the context for their existence. Basically, email is pretty good at communicating with people when you don’t know them well, or people you don’t know at all. All you need is their email address and your emails will be treated pretty much like anybody else’s. But as a result, email doesn’t really do very much to help with the highest valued communication: communicating with the known. That’s where the paradigm of buddies, and the gated communities of instant messaging networks excel. But even technologies that I think are more useful in remaining in close contact with your circles of friends and colleagues don’t necessarily work together very well, if at all. So I am forced to read and write emails in one tool (yes, I do email, despite my dislike for the medium), IMs in another (actually, two IM clients), and read blogs in yeat another. Coordinating appointments and to-dos that involve others is managed in yet another app. And an address book app is used as the repository of some of the information about people (like email address, IM handles, and phone numbers), while their blogs RSS feeds are stored elsewhere. So, I decided to mockup an example of what a good unified client might offer someone like me, so I could sit in one tool all day long, choosing the appropriate communication, collaboration, or coordination channel based on the context. The Nerdvana Client Just for laughs, I have dubbed the mocked up client “Nerdvana” after the Dilbert strip where Dilbert proclaims, after he’s cleaned up his PC’s desktop, compacted his drive, and deleted unnecessary files, that he has reached “Nerdvana”. Basically, Nerdvana takes the IM concept of a buddy list and extends it to include all sorts of media. I have chosen to partition my world into three groups, Inner Circle (folks I interact with daily), Outer Circle (folks I interact with regularly), and The World (everyone else). This is largely for simplicity: there could be dozens of groups. And, oh, by the way, contacts can appear in multiple groups, and groups can include subgroups with no limits on level of nesting. In the first image, I expanded only the Inner Circle — note I did not include any icons to represent expand/contract because I am a lazy designer. I have a small number of contacts in this group, although in the real world my Inner Circle category is more like a dozen folks. Each contact has four numbers associated with them, which represent ‘of interest’ blog entries, emails, IMs, and appointments, respectively. By ‘of interest’ I mean whatever the preferences are currently set to: for example, I may have configured things to display unread blog entries, unread email, open IMs, and future appointments, to suggest only one reasonable group of settings. Also note — since this is all in the world of conjecture, so I can get whatever I want — that the Nerdvana tool is extensible, so is possible to add on as many services as you’d like. For example, the IM service could expand to be Jabber, AIM, and Yahoo. Or completely different services could be included, like podcasts, to-do lists, geolocation, and web conferences. Presence is indicated by the green/yellow/red lights on the contacts. In the second graphic I have expanded Greg Narain’s content, and see various categories of communications going on. In the third graphic, I have fully expanded Greg’s content, showing the blog entry’s title, the subject line of the emails, the title of the IM session, and the subject of the upcoming appointment. This is displayed two different ways, based on two different sets of preferences or different commands used to expand the content: with and without category headers. Clicking on any of these fields could lead to extremely variable behavior, based on what sort of client you think Nerdvana should be. In a open API sort of environment, clicking on any of Greg’s content could lead to opening the appropriate tool of choice for that sort of interaction. So, for example, clicking on an email could lead to popping that email in Apple Mail (I am running OS X), and likewise, selecting the IM topic could pop the active IM session running in Fire (the multiheaded IM client I run to stay in contact with Jabber, Yahoo, and MSN users). Clicking on the blog entry could lead to either opening the entry in the browser or popping an RSS reader on my desktop, depending on configuration settings in Nerdvana. In a totalitarian software world, Nerdava would include all the functionality needed: it would be an email client, RSS reader, IM solution, and calendar tool. But such tools are generally not best at any of the things they aspire to be, and wind up discarded as a result, because users want some cool feature in their mail or IM client, or just don’t want to imagine dropping their chosen RSS reader. Obviously, my preference is the former: for Nerdvana to act as a primary organizing interface for existing communication tools, taking the buddy list concept as the core principle for all communication strategy, and supporting cross tool integration. For example, your IM solution might not support the concept of an appointed time to start an IM session, but with Nerdvana you can do so: Define a time and a subject for an appointment, using the Nerdvana interface, but actually managed in your native calendar app, like iCal. After it exists, select the appointment in Nerdvana, and create an association with some other sort of communication — in this case an IM session. When the appointment occurs, Nerdvana will create the pending IM session. The same technique can used to link writing an email with an appointment, or queueing up future blog entries. Alternatively, you could imagine a structure where important communication events — such as long IM sessions, or time spent reading blog entries — could automatically be journaled on your calendar, as a means of tracking time, or simply being able to use the calendar as a way to search back for communication activities and content on a timeline basis. Conclusions I have always maintained that if you are going to dream, dream big. So I have big hopes for Nerdvana. Maybe someone out there is trying to do something along these lines — at least in part — and if so, I want to hear about it. There is lots of innovation going on in the various specialized communication areas: better RSS readers, IM clients, and innumerable social networking apps. But I haven’t seen much going on in bringing it all together, based on something like the buddy list metaphor. I could also start in on how Nerdvana could play in an open social networking system — where the aggregation of communication channels, like blogs, IM, email, with specialized services like Flickr, Last.fm, Plazes, and so on, for photos , music, and location — could not only lead to multifaceted digital identities, but a coherent way of bringing together the disparate threads of identity into a manageable tool framework. This starts to look something like Mark Pincus has been looking into in his PeopleWeb thoughts. But I will leave that for the next installment of the Nerdvana series.
Zoom
Nerdvana: A Better Tool For Communication (I Can Dream, Can’t I?) [originally posted on Get Real] I have used literally thousands of communications tools over the past 20 years, and although there has been an increase in commmunication speed and media, we have yet to see the “nerdvana” of tools that I have dreamed about for so long. I have long championed other media as inherently being better than email, such as instant messaging, so, as you can imagine, the tool I am dreaming out incorporates the basic metaphor of IM: the buddy list. But it goes beyond IM, as I will show you. How can I so baldly state that other media are better than email, in such an absolute way? Simple. Email is designed as a lowest-common denominator communications system, where everyone is treated equally. All emails, more or less, are the same (leaving aside issues of rich text v HTML and so on, which is not the thrust of my argument), which is stupid. The reality is that my relationships with people — whether I know them or not, how well I know them, and how involved we are at any given time in regular communication — is foremost in my mind when involved in communications, and as a result, the various artifacts of communication should be treated differently based on the context for their existence. Basically, email is pretty good at communicating with people when you don’t know them well, or people you don’t know at all. All you need is their email address and your emails will be treated pretty much like anybody else’s. But as a result, email doesn’t really do very much to help with the highest valued communication: communicating with the known. That’s where the paradigm of buddies, and the gated communities of instant messaging networks excel. But even technologies that I think are more useful in remaining in close contact with your circles of friends and colleagues don’t necessarily work together very well, if at all. So I am forced to read and write emails in one tool (yes, I do email, despite my dislike for the medium), IMs in another (actually, two IM clients), and read blogs in yeat another. Coordinating appointments and to-dos that involve others is managed in yet another app. And an address book app is used as the repository of some of the information about people (like email address, IM handles, and phone numbers), while their blogs RSS feeds are stored elsewhere. So, I decided to mockup an example of what a good unified client might offer someone like me, so I could sit in one tool all day long, choosing the appropriate communication, collaboration, or coordination channel based on the context. The Nerdvana Client Just for laughs, I have dubbed the mocked up client “Nerdvana” after the Dilbert strip where Dilbert proclaims, after he’s cleaned up his PC’s desktop, compacted his drive, and deleted unnecessary files, that he has reached “Nerdvana”. Basically, Nerdvana takes the IM concept of a buddy list and extends it to include all sorts of media. I have chosen to partition my world into three groups, Inner Circle (folks I interact with daily), Outer Circle (folks I interact with regularly), and The World (everyone else). This is largely for simplicity: there could be dozens of groups. And, oh, by the way, contacts can appear in multiple groups, and groups can include subgroups with no limits on level of nesting. In the first image, I expanded only the Inner Circle — note I did not include any icons to represent expand/contract because I am a lazy designer. I have a small number of contacts in this group, although in the real world my Inner Circle category is more like a dozen folks. Each contact has four numbers associated with them, which represent ‘of interest’ blog entries, emails, IMs, and appointments, respectively. By ‘of interest’ I mean whatever the preferences are currently set to: for example, I may have configured things to display unread blog entries, unread email, open IMs, and future appointments, to suggest only one reasonable group of settings. Also note — since this is all in the world of conjecture, so I can get whatever I want — that the Nerdvana tool is extensible, so is possible to add on as many services as you’d like. For example, the IM service could expand to be Jabber, AIM, and Yahoo. Or completely different services could be included, like podcasts, to-do lists, geolocation, and web conferences. Presence is indicated by the green/yellow/red lights on the contacts. In the second graphic I have expanded Greg Narain’s content, and see various categories of communications going on. In the third graphic, I have fully expanded Greg’s content, showing the blog entry’s title, the subject line of the emails, the title of the IM session, and the subject of the upcoming appointment. This is displayed two different ways, based on two different sets of preferences or different commands used to expand the content: with and without category headers. Clicking on any of these fields could lead to extremely variable behavior, based on what sort of client you think Nerdvana should be. In a open API sort of environment, clicking on any of Greg’s content could lead to opening the appropriate tool of choice for that sort of interaction. So, for example, clicking on an email could lead to popping that email in Apple Mail (I am running OS X), and likewise, selecting the IM topic could pop the active IM session running in Fire (the multiheaded IM client I run to stay in contact with Jabber, Yahoo, and MSN users). Clicking on the blog entry could lead to either opening the entry in the browser or popping an RSS reader on my desktop, depending on configuration settings in Nerdvana. In a totalitarian software world, Nerdava would include all the functionality needed: it would be an email client, RSS reader, IM solution, and calendar tool. But such tools are generally not best at any of the things they aspire to be, and wind up discarded as a result, because users want some cool feature in their mail or IM client, or just don’t want to imagine dropping their chosen RSS reader. Obviously, my preference is the former: for Nerdvana to act as a primary organizing interface for existing communication tools, taking the buddy list concept as the core principle for all communication strategy, and supporting cross tool integration. For example, your IM solution might not support the concept of an appointed time to start an IM session, but with Nerdvana you can do so: Define a time and a subject for an appointment, using the Nerdvana interface, but actually managed in your native calendar app, like iCal. After it exists, select the appointment in Nerdvana, and create an association with some other sort of communication — in this case an IM session. When the appointment occurs, Nerdvana will create the pending IM session. The same technique can used to link writing an email with an appointment, or queueing up future blog entries. Alternatively, you could imagine a structure where important communication events — such as long IM sessions, or time spent reading blog entries — could automatically be journaled on your calendar, as a means of tracking time, or simply being able to use the calendar as a way to search back for communication activities and content on a timeline basis. Conclusions I have always maintained that if you are going to dream, dream big. So I have big hopes for Nerdvana. Maybe someone out there is trying to do something along these lines — at least in part — and if so, I want to hear about it. There is lots of innovation going on in the various specialized communication areas: better RSS readers, IM clients, and innumerable social networking apps. But I haven’t seen much going on in bringing it all together, based on something like the buddy list metaphor. I could also start in on how Nerdvana could play in an open social networking system — where the aggregation of communication channels, like blogs, IM, email, with specialized services like Flickr, Last.fm, Plazes, and so on, for photos , music, and location — could not only lead to multifaceted digital identities, but a coherent way of bringing together the disparate threads of identity into a manageable tool framework. This starts to look something like Mark Pincus has been looking into in his PeopleWeb thoughts. But I will leave that for the next installment of the Nerdvana series.
Zoom

Nerdvana: A Better Tool For Communication (I Can Dream, Can’t I?)

[originally posted on Get Real]

I have used literally thousands of communications tools over the past 20 years, and although there has been an increase in commmunication speed and media, we have yet to see the “nerdvana” of tools that I have dreamed about for so long.

I have long championed other media as inherently being better than email, such as instant messaging, so, as you can imagine, the tool I am dreaming out incorporates the basic metaphor of IM: the buddy list. But it goes beyond IM, as I will show you.

How can I so baldly state that other media are better than email, in such an absolute way? Simple. Email is designed as a lowest-common denominator communications system, where everyone is treated equally. All emails, more or less, are the same (leaving aside issues of rich text v HTML and so on, which is not the thrust of my argument), which is stupid. The reality is that my relationships with people — whether I know them or not, how well I know them, and how involved we are at any given time in regular communication — is foremost in my mind when involved in communications, and as a result, the various artifacts of communication should be treated differently based on the context for their existence.

Basically, email is pretty good at communicating with people when you don’t know them well, or people you don’t know at all. All you need is their email address and your emails will be treated pretty much like anybody else’s. But as a result, email doesn’t really do very much to help with the highest valued communication: communicating with the known. That’s where the paradigm of buddies, and the gated communities of instant messaging networks excel.

But even technologies that I think are more useful in remaining in close contact with your circles of friends and colleagues don’t necessarily work together very well, if at all. So I am forced to read and write emails in one tool (yes, I do email, despite my dislike for the medium), IMs in another (actually, two IM clients), and read blogs in yeat another. Coordinating appointments and to-dos that involve others is managed in yet another app. And an address book app is used as the repository of some of the information about people (like email address, IM handles, and phone numbers), while their blogs RSS feeds are stored elsewhere.

So, I decided to mockup an example of what a good unified client might offer someone like me, so I could sit in one tool all day long, choosing the appropriate communication, collaboration, or coordination channel based on the context.

The Nerdvana Client

Just for laughs, I have dubbed the mocked up client “Nerdvana” after the Dilbert strip where Dilbert proclaims, after he’s cleaned up his PC’s desktop, compacted his drive, and deleted unnecessary files, that he has reached “Nerdvana”.

Basically, Nerdvana takes the IM concept of a buddy list and extends it to include all sorts of media. I have chosen to partition my world into three groups, Inner Circle (folks I interact with daily), Outer Circle (folks I interact with regularly), and The World (everyone else). This is largely for simplicity: there could be dozens of groups. And, oh, by the way, contacts can appear in multiple groups, and groups can include subgroups with no limits on level of nesting.

In the first image, I expanded only the Inner Circle — note I did not include any icons to represent expand/contract because I am a lazy designer. I have a small number of contacts in this group, although in the real world my Inner Circle category is more like a dozen folks. Each contact has four numbers associated with them, which represent ‘of interest’ blog entries, emails, IMs, and appointments, respectively. By ‘of interest’ I mean whatever the preferences are currently set to: for example, I may have configured things to display unread blog entries, unread email, open IMs, and future appointments, to suggest only one reasonable group of settings.

Also note — since this is all in the world of conjecture, so I can get whatever I want — that the Nerdvana tool is extensible, so is possible to add on as many services as you’d like. For example, the IM service could expand to be Jabber, AIM, and Yahoo. Or completely different services could be included, like podcasts, to-do lists, geolocation, and web conferences. Presence is indicated by the green/yellow/red lights on the contacts.

In the second graphic I have expanded Greg Narain’s content, and see various categories of communications going on.

In the third graphic, I have fully expanded Greg’s content, showing the blog entry’s title, the subject line of the emails, the title of the IM session, and the subject of the upcoming appointment. This is displayed two different ways, based on two different sets of preferences or different commands used to expand the content: with and without category headers.

Clicking on any of these fields could lead to extremely variable behavior, based on what sort of client you think Nerdvana should be.

  • In a open API sort of environment, clicking on any of Greg’s content could lead to opening the appropriate tool of choice for that sort of interaction. So, for example, clicking on an email could lead to popping that email in Apple Mail (I am running OS X), and likewise, selecting the IM topic could pop the active IM session running in Fire (the multiheaded IM client I run to stay in contact with Jabber, Yahoo, and MSN users).
  • Clicking on the blog entry could lead to either opening the entry in the browser or popping an RSS reader on my desktop, depending on configuration settings in Nerdvana.
  • In a totalitarian software world, Nerdava would include all the functionality needed: it would be an email client, RSS reader, IM solution, and calendar tool. But such tools are generally not best at any of the things they aspire to be, and wind up discarded as a result, because users want some cool feature in their mail or IM client, or just don’t want to imagine dropping their chosen RSS reader.

Obviously, my preference is the former: for Nerdvana to act as a primary organizing interface for existing communication tools, taking the buddy list concept as the core principle for all communication strategy, and supporting cross tool integration.

For example, your IM solution might not support the concept of an appointed time to start an IM session, but with Nerdvana you can do so:

  1. Define a time and a subject for an appointment, using the Nerdvana interface, but actually managed in your native calendar app, like iCal.
  2. After it exists, select the appointment in Nerdvana, and create an association with some other sort of communication — in this case an IM session.
  3. When the appointment occurs, Nerdvana will create the pending IM session.

The same technique can used to link writing an email with an appointment, or queueing up future blog entries.

Alternatively, you could imagine a structure where important communication events — such as long IM sessions, or time spent reading blog entries — could automatically be journaled on your calendar, as a means of tracking time, or simply being able to use the calendar as a way to search back for communication activities and content on a timeline basis.

Conclusions

I have always maintained that if you are going to dream, dream big. So I have big hopes for Nerdvana. Maybe someone out there is trying to do something along these lines — at least in part — and if so, I want to hear about it. There is lots of innovation going on in the various specialized communication areas: better RSS readers, IM clients, and innumerable social networking apps. But I haven’t seen much going on in bringing it all together, based on something like the buddy list metaphor.

I could also start in on how Nerdvana could play in an open social networking system — where the aggregation of communication channels, like blogs, IM, email, with specialized services like Flickr, Last.fm, Plazes, and so on, for photos , music, and location — could not only lead to multifaceted digital identities, but a coherent way of bringing together the disparate threads of identity into a manageable tool framework. This starts to look something like Mark Pincus has been looking into in his PeopleWeb thoughts. But I will leave that for the next installment of the Nerdvana series.