The unwillingness of Facebook and Google to share a public commons when it comes to the intersection of search and social is corrosive to the connective tissue of our shared culture. But as with all things Internet, we’ll just identify the damage and route around it. It’s just too bad we have to do that, and in the long run, it’s bad for Facebook, bad for Google, and bad for all of us. (BTW, Google also doesn’t show Twitter or Flickr results either, or any other “social” service. Just its own, Google and Picasa.)
- John Battelle, Search, Plus Your World, As Long As It’s Our World
Once again, Google steps in a pile of doodoo with its maladroit efforts in trying to absorb the social web. Unwilling to simply index things and offer them up as search results, Google wants to ‘socialize’ search. What this means is that search is just another battlefield for Google to fight the war for the future against Facebook, Twitter, etc.
On one hand, you have to admit that Google faces a new world, one that is increasingly social, and the search company has to get in there. But this is not the way to do it.
I continue to be amazed that Google doesn’t look at its email and calendar apps as a good place to build social, instead of dicking around with search.
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writing for each others and cross-linking through trackbacks and threaded comments — that communitarian vision has been superseded by other ideas of what is, or should be, happening, online.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:
- 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.
- Blog network companies — like Techcrunch, Mashable, and The Next Web — that are confronted with the invasion of major media companies, consolidation, and turnover.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
The internet creates a huge range of often-novel choices from which end-users construct their own adaptive behaviors. The important determining factors in personal friendships, marriages, and other relationships remain with the individual. Which isn’t to say the internet makes no difference. It does. The internet facilitates anti-social behaviors like identity theft, and positive behaviors like keeping in close touch with relatives in faraway places, to such a degree that they become almost unimaginable in the pre-Internet age. My sense is that, once you eliminate outliers and freakish behaviors, the internet will continue to bestow tremendous opportunities for social growth on most people, in most circumstances.
Internet connectivity maintains, expands, and enhances friendships: both strong and weaker.
How Americans view the internet’s impact on groups - Lee Rainie, Kristen Purcell, Aaron Smith
When asked to assess the impact of the internet on the ability of social, civic, professional, religious or spiritual groups to engage in a number of activities, Americans express generally positive views. Nearly seven in ten (68%) believe that the internet has a “major impact” on the ability of groups to communicate with their members, and roughly six in ten feel that the internet has a “major impact” on the ability of groups to draw attention to issues (62%), connect with other groups (60%), impact society at large (59%), and raise money (52%). For each of the nine group-based activities we measured in this survey, three-quarters of Americans or more feel that the internet has had at least some impact (if only a minor one) on the activity in question.
With poll numbers like that the internet should run for president.
n+1: Internet as Social Movement
The N+1 editors spend a great deal of time discussing the NY Times in a piece ostensibly about the rise of the web as a social movement, and not that much about the social movement side of things.
Facebook Is The New AOL
[originally entitled: Blogtalk 2010: Notes And Thoughts On The Social Future]
Galway is a lovely place, and I have always wanted to see where ‘the hills sweep down to the sea,’ so Blogtalk 2010 was fun. I saw old friends, and made some new ones. But this get-together reinforced a few thoughts, which wound up in my keynote, as well.
The era of blogging is over: its impact as a goad, a competitive force on print media has been felt, and deeply internalized. Meanwhile, most of the failures of 20th century journalism remain: notably, failing to create open social discourse, and becoming entrapped in the liturgy of journalism while failing to debunk lies and expose injustice. But print media have adopted the trappings of blogging, and have co-opted much of the heat — if any — of the blogosphere.
This has been relatively quick, partly because blogging is really ‘personal publishing’ — low-cost publishing, and lines up pretty well with the one-to-many dynamics of mass publishing. Comments and backlinks are pretty weak sauce when considered in the light of ‘social media’. Blogging, in the final analysis, ten years later, isn’t particularly social. Especially contrasted with social networks and other tools.
Facebook is the new AOL.
Blogtalk was filled with talk about social networks. A representative of Facebook spoke, and was almost orgasming as he related how great all the newest features were. Facebook and Twitter’s growth rates were repeated like kabalistic incantations throughout the event, and the unstoppability of Facebook in particular — its manifest destiny as the basis of all things social on the web — was generally taken as a given.
But social networks as realized today by Facebook and others are closed worlds, silos in which vastly different user experiences are managed. I heard presentations on a variety of approaches to federated and/or open identity management schemes, which could potentially support open and/or distributed social networking models, but these are only of theoretical interest to actual users.
I believe that Facebook represents the high water mark of social networking, as we understand it today, a time dominated by social networking applications, as if our social interaction is something best managed in a single enormous database, whose rows and tables are designed by a small group of developers in one company.
Facebook is the new AOL.
Facebook is managing the chaos of social interaction on the web, normalizing it and standardizing it for us, just as AOL made the web neat and tidy. That seemed a winning proposition in the late ’90s, which led to astonishing valuations for AOL. They acquired Time-Warner using that wealth, and in 2002 Time-Warner wrote off $600M as AOL started to fall. Now, AOL has been spun out, and has no central role in our experience of the web. 10 years is a long time. Time-Warner is now the second largest entertainment company in the world.
The moral of this story is that you can make a business out of simplifying what is chaotic and confusing, but only at the outset. As people become habituated to what at first was scary and headache-inducing, they will move away from controlled experience to more personally managed negotiation of the world.
‘But, all my friends are on Facebook!’ That was true in 1999 about AOL, too. All my friends had AIM accounts, so it was the best place for instant messaging. Until Yahoo and MSN offered audio and then video, and blogging broke loose. And then everything changed with broadband.
And what is going to be the equivalent of broadband for sociality online? What is going to come along to destabilize the Facebook stranglehold on our ‘social graphs’? Simple: sociality has turned out to be the most interesting thing to emerge from the past decade of the web. It’s not all the servers, the cloud computing, the data, or even the explosion of materials online: its the social dimension, and the tools we have built to explore that.
At the same time, we are witnessing an almost unprecedented era of invention around new devices, form factors, and operational premises for computing and communications. Smartphones, tablets, app stores, and the emergence of activities like geolocation, massively parallel gaming, social TV, and so on. These are leading to a deep rethinking of the operating environments we rely on, in our PCs, mobile and gaming devices, and formerly internet-deaf devices like TVs and appliances.
The next generation of operating environments will be social at their core. Our current operating environments are based on standard understanding of things that programmers care about, like files, directories, and access controls. The average person could care less.
We will see social operating systems where following people’s activities, or creating likes, or publishing profiles will all be built-in. These will not be features of apps, or managed as metadata in walled silos. The primitives that structure our social connections will be built into the fabric of the next generation of operating environments, just like file systems, URLs, and HTTP are well-integrated into today’s.
As a result, actors like Google, Apple, the Linux community, and Microsoft — as well as upstarts that don’t even exist yet — will be the implementers of the next generation of social web, with social interaction built into its DNA.
Imagine that I will turn on my next generation iPad, a few years hence, and I’ll be presented with various applications that show views over the streams of information finding their way to me based on my social relationships. But those relationships are not based on application managed information, but related to my device connecting to the web, like getting an IP address today. I would get a social IP, and ping out to all the other entities online, so that information from those that I follow would find me, just as email is routed to me today independently of what email application I choose to use.
There will still be a place for applications to present and augment the basics of social interaction, but they will not be what Facebook is today: a huge social scene whose rules and regulations are managed by the owners of the application, for their own interests.
Clearly, The New York Times, ABC and Apple don’t want to hand the future of our social connection over to Facebook, or any other cabal of software companies. The answer is not in copying Facebook, which seems to be the goal of Google’s Me project. Inevitably, the way ahead is to take the social dimension — at least the core features that have emerged in the social web to date — down into the operating platforms. Actions like following, liking, posting, and reposting have become the core of our social existence. And these core activities should be core to the platforms, not peripheral.
Based on common protocols, vendors of different platforms could still compete based on how they manage these new social primitives along with the other things that devices must do. But just like today’s files — which can move from Mac, to Windows, to Linux, to GameBoy — we would have the ability to network effectively; although in this case, to network socially.
It remains to be seen how quickly or smoothly this transition will be. And in the meantime the dominance of Facebook will make billions for investors. However, the fastest growing segment on Facebook is the 55+ crowd, which suggests that the young and the hipsters will start to defect to alternatives, just like they fled MySpace when the phonies and fogies came in.
Social music and social TV are the two areas that suggest the greatest pressure for a solution at a fundamental — not application, or application framework level.
Facebook’s management may be aware of this, as well. Imagine the scenario where Facebook’s valuation is so high, and the prospects seem so grand, that Facebook acquires an apparently fading Microsoft, and works to fuse Facebook into some version of Windows. Like the AOL Time-Warner merger, I bet it this would lead to smoke but no bang.
Meanwhile, the world will lurch chaotically forward. If cable and entertainment companies develop standards around social TV, and allow experimentation by entrepreneurs to develop social apps that augment TV, we will see some real interesting stuff arise, and the defection of viewers from non-social TV will slow, and reverse. Facebook will see its numbers falling as people start watching basketball, reality shows, or movies with friends online. Likewise, Apple could lead to similar experimentation around social music by exposing social APIs in a future socialized version of iTunes.
This will take years, if not decades, to roll forward. But I maintain this will happen, and that, as a result, Facebook is not the future, but just a very temporary present.
Eric Schmidt Confirms Google Is Off Track
Last week it was Peter Norvig admitting that Google has missed the opening rounds of the battle for the social web (see Google’s Biggest Mistake: The Rise Of The Social (Post Search) Web), and this week his boss confirms that Google is still off in algorithm land instead of understanding the social dimension of the web:
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.: Google and the Search for the Future
The day is coming when the Google search box—and the activity known as Googling—no longer will be at the center of our online lives. Then what? “We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is,” Mr. Schmidt acknowledges. “I mean that in a positive way. We’re still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.”
“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”
Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.
Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn’t know you wanted to know. “The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically,” Mr. Schmidt says.
The idea that machines will tell us what to do next is chilling, rather than liberating. Yes, we will use social tools that harness the millions of activities of our social circles and scenes, but our affiliation with others is where we will find meaning, not some functional result served up by Google or Facebook or Twitter.
Meaning is the new search.
Better Social Plumbing For The Social Web
My recent talk from the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, which I retitled “Better Social Plumbing For The Social Web” instead of ‘Better Media Plumbing…”. I include the notes that I prepared, with minor tweaks.
My topic is not new — in the sense that I started writing about it a year ago. But I think it is of growing importance.
The basic premises that underlie social media — the fundamental relationships that link authors to the community of readers — are changing in the face of new and different social tools. In a sense, I am chasing the elusive question about where community resides, once again.
In this presentation, I plan to explore the root causes of today’s social media plumbling — the stuff that makes it social — and to outline the stresses that new social metaphors are creating. Lastly, I wave my hand at where it might all be headed.
I am best known these days for my writing (and the thinking behind it) at /Message and other blogs at www.stoweboyd.com. I have been involved with the development of various interesting ideas, like social tools, flow applications, workstreaming, web culture, edglings, microblogging, and new localism. I have spoken at dozens of conferences in the past ten years, like Lift, Reboot, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Defrag, Supernova, Under The Radar, Mesh, Next, and many, many others.
I work with a lot of start-ups building social tools, and larger companies trying to make sense of them.
Apologies. It was blogging that did this to me. No neat conclusions. A barrage of conjecture, wisecracks, and one-liners, disguised as a presentation.
My work is social tools, but my goals lie beyond.
We have inherited the Web 1.0 vision of the Web as a giant network of documents, linked to each other, where you can wander forever.
Where are the people? Oh. It’s the authors. They are people. They create links, but there are not in the immediate foreground. It’s documents, all the way down.
So in the Web of Pages — Web 1.0 — pages are more important than people.
And why are we here? “I must be here to read about things and follow links” since that’s what is the most natural thing to do, not to interact with people.
The Web of Pages wants us to be hunter/gatherers. We search, find a link, click it, see if it’s want we want, if not, we keep following leads.
It exploits the spatial sense in our minds.
People create the links that connect pages, asserting relationships between the info on the pages, and by extension, relationships between the people reading and writing the various pages. But it all seems pretty far away from human conversation. You write something, I find it, and write my own thing, and point at yours…. Its more like sending letters than conversing.
Yes, Google builds its page rank based on people’s actions — creating links and the identity of who created them — but all that seems way down in the subbasement, far far away.
Links are obliquely social, but direct conversation — through chat, social networking messages, and (most central to our subject today) blog comments — is where web media really become social media.
Asynchronous in nature, but can be near real time.
A blog is a long-lived repository of discourse, a place to ask questions, contend, agree, make suggestions, enlist support, and offer counterpoint. Nearly every possible sort of conversational interaction can be shoehorned into the lowly comment thread.
This is one of the reasons that the blogosphere has gone from a fringe phenomenon in 1999 to mainstream in 2009, where the leading print media outlets of the pre-web world have embraced the blogging paradigm at a fundamental level.
Social media is distinct from pre-social media in many ways — web based, individual voice dominates, etc. — but it is the social dimension that defines the difference. Social media is contrived (at least the best instances are) around the premises of open discourse between individuals.
While the publishers of blogs retain (in general) the ability to moderate comments, largely the model seems open. And the authorship — based on the identities of the bloggers and the commenters — makes the relationships that seemed so oblique in web 1.0 much more obvious and direct.
The heart of social tools is the individual, which is why I say social = me first. In the world of blogging that translates — not too well, actually — into ‘bloggers first, commenters second.’
The current baseline of blog technology puts very strong controls into the hands of the blogger, and hardly any in the hands of the commenters.
What sort of sociality is going on in a comment exchange? It’s a strangely unequal forum, where the blogger has nearly absolute controls, and the commenters — even in some sort of collective fashion — have no power. The blogger can delete any comment, or mark it as spam, while the commenters can’t change a single comma in the blog posts they comment on. (Of course, some commenters become bloggers themselves, and then the comment exchange becomes slower and distant, cross-linked by trackbacks or URLs, but pulled out of the comment stream.)
This asymmetry in control and ownership — who gets the revenue from the blog ads? — has ramifications throughout the web. For example, the page rank for a blog is attributed to the writing skills of the blogger, but it is the links that make the rank, not what is on the page. What is on the blog — the posts and the comments — are what lead to strong reputation for a blog, and that is due to the commenting — the sociality at the blog — but the author claims all the benefits, including all the revenue.
It’s interesting that social media is often heralded as proof that companies have lost control of their ‘message’ but at the same time that blogging keeps so much control in the hands of the blog publisher.
And there is the ‘comment dispersal’ problem, where very active commenters wind up with their participation spread all over the web, and no collation of their contributions.
This is one of the reasons that solutions like Co-comment and Disqus have been making ground, because an individual’s stream of contributions can be pulled together somewhere, and in a sense ‘owned’ by the participants and not just the blog publisher.
The seed for the change in the blogosphere was a seemingly small advance.
RSS feeds are a way to receive the posts from blogs without visiting them. Instead, using an RSS reader, a webhead can instead have posts from any number of blogs deposited into an RSS tool, like Google reader. This is a sort of out of body experience, since the user doesn’t hunt and gather anymore, wandering around looking for new information by search and following links. Instead, a steady diet of bite sized morsels simply appear. And generally without the comments.
So the shift to RSS by the most technically hip websters meant that
- they were seeing posts out of social context, without the conversational interaction that made the blogosphere a third place, and not just forty million people standing on soapboxes, and
- over in the RSS reader the former participant — now a reader — is at least one and maybe more clicks away from adding comments. And of course there is a subtle devaluation of comments because they are read less often and harder to get to.
So, people find it easier to take other actions using tools outside the blogs, rather than comment. For example, creating shared bookmarks a la Delicious may seem of higher value for the individual and that individual’s network of friends than writing blog comments.
And right on the heels of RSS feeds, we began to see the rise of other social tools where conversation was the centerpiece, not the sidebar.
And these tools rely on our sense of timing, not a spatial sense. We are not wandering around looking for things to read: instead, things to read just show up in some regular timeframe.
Tools like Digg and Techmeme share a few key characteristics, and define two ends of a continuum. There is a stream of new information that finds its way to the pages of the website: in the case of Digg this arises from individuals recommending pages for others’ attention, and in the case of Techmeme an algorithm looks are the clustering of a short list of A list bloggers to see what is getting the attention of many. In both cases, the user is presented a stream of information, ordered by the observed actions of others.
Here we find the key attribute of all important social tools going forward: the collective actions of some group of people shape — order, filter, embellish — a stream of information. One sort of embellishment is a comment, like the comments traditionally left on blog posts or in bookmarks. But these comments never find their way back to the blogs, if they were sparked there.
Also, the way the sites work feature emergent properties from the community, collectively, that can’t happen on a single blog all alone. On Digg things rise (or fall) relative to others; and on Techmeme stories rise and fall by clustering of authors. In this regard, the evaluation of the value of a single blog post is one of the outputs of Digg and Techmeme.
As a result, participants’ behavior can change when exposed to these tools. It becomes more fun to Digg a blog post than to comment on it. As a reader of Techmeme, you find it unprofitable to comment on blog posts — even of posts currently active on Techmeme — since a/ comments don’t show there, and b/ the comments have no influence on the Techmeme algorithm.
So, there are now dozens of streaming applications — Digg, Facebook, Jaiku, Pownce, Twitter, Social|Media, Threads, Friendfeed, and more — where the social dimension is people interaction in (potentially large scale) open discourse via the ‘follower|following’ model, and without recourse necessarily to blogs.
Once a person begins to experience the dissociation of blogs and commentary — once commentary moves to these streams away from blog comments — it seems odd to go back. Like using a computer that is not connected to the web.
My hypothesis is that people will find it most natural to have the most active conversation where the flow feels fastest: meaning, where there are many people so that any given topic or link creates a great deal of commentary in relatively short order. However, this is an added incentive to comment directly in the streaming app like Digg, friendfeed or Twitter.
There is a cost to leaving behind the community of commenters on a blog, but if a core group defect en masse to some flow app, that community can remain largely entact, with even the blogger coming along.
For example, someone I follow on Twitter posts a Tweet with a link “someone Wrote a new post on XYZ topic. See www.tinyurl.com/y78YD889Ww.” My natural reaction is to click it, and then write a comment in Twitter to @someone, like ‘@someone have you considered the writing of Borges?”
And from the point of view of Twitter use, I am keeping the covenant: I received the message there, so I respond there. But from the blog-centric view, I am breaking faith, since I read the post that was published there, but I am merely treating the blog as a repository for posts, not a centerpoint for community.
So we are seeing a second wave of defection that defines a new era in social media. We defected from traditional mainstream media, where they broadcasted to us as passive members of an audience. And now we are defecting from the Web 1.0 model of social media, where the blog publisher hold all the power, and the world is a feudal patchwork of blog-based communities. We are moving into a era of flow, where blog posts will just another bit of conversation streaming in the flow.
Since there are dozens — and perhaps soon hundreds — of these streaming apps, each with different although overlapping communities, what can we expect in the near, medium and long term?
Near term — tower of Babel as more people find value in one or more streaming conversational tools, the conversation — the third space — will be subdivided ten times over. And less and less conversation will happen on blogs.
Medium term — Comment tools — like Disqus and IntenseDebate — provide a way to pull the commentary from streaming apps back onto the blog posts. I write a blog post, and a handful of people comment on it at Social|Medium (for example), and my future commenting solution would display those comments as if they had been made on my blog, along with comments from other streaming tools and native one from my blog. This fills a gap in the plumbing, but doesn’t really change the experience of people in each of the streams, since they will only see a subset of the total comments.
How does this feel from the perspective of the individual at the micro level?
Once you adopt the flow attention model, things change.
Here’s my desktop, or one part of it. I usually work with my laptop plugged into a 30” monitor, and I do my ‘work’ — blog posts, email, writing, reading — on the 30” monitor. I keep the laptop screen for flow apps. Here, from left to right I have Snackr (an RSS newsticker app), Twhirl (a twitter client), Friendfeed’s RealTime Beta, and Flickr’s new Activity Stream. Another stream I use is Backpack’s Journal.
I am not saying that everyone is going to become me, but the flow model — where pertinent information is filtered by my contacts and finds its way to me instead of me finding it — is simply better, simpler, and less time consuming, so long as you can make the shift from manual to automatic transmission.
In the long term the static inequalities in blogging make it hard to fit into the coming web of flow. We need a world in which comments, posts, bookmarks, and recommendations are really different aspects of the same thing. Why have we devised a web where posts and comments are so different? Or so different from a bookmark?
All of these ideas share core principles: a person authors a post, comment or bookmark. It is created in some context, probably represented by other open windows on the screen or selections on those screens. (For example, a ‘bookmark’ is the storing of a URL for a page, plus a title, a note, and some tags. The same information could be created as a blog post, right? Or a comment is based on some open post or comment, and has a link to the post or comment. And so on.)
In today’s world, the URL associated with anything created on the web is in effect it’s unique ID, but it is a physical location not just a logical handle. Imagine a web in which the physical location of things was simply an archive, a place to access the definitive data and metadata, but otherwise was used principally as a unique identifier. Imagine all these sorts of conversational particles bouncing around the world through a gazillion streaming apps that use various sorts of social and algorithmic models to order, filter, and aggregate the particles in various ways. These bits could flit from one streaming app to another, or users could create a post in one, a comment in another, and see them come together in a post+comment form in a third. In this world, the bits float around and are experienced in the flow apps, and people might never go back to the original URL associated with the bits.
Also in this world, the bits might be owned by the author, no matter where they are streamed. So if I want to, I can put an ad in every post, bookmark, and comment I make. Likewise, when a service creates new value from aggregation, algorithm, or emergent property of some social sling, they should be able to have their own ads in that context, but they should also honor the ads embedded in the bits. Basically, it’s a fractal world, where ownership is associated with the smallest bits, and larger aggregates. But these can travel — even the aggregates — from one streaming context to another. We will need standards for this, of course, but they will arise to meet demands.
So imagine the following scenario: I post an observation about, say, the future of Web 2.0. A few others see this floating past in various streams and create comments linking to my post, or Digg it — which means it shows up in the Digg stream and several others, like a future friendfeed or social|medium. All of these people add their own ads, and when Digg streams voting results (with associated comments) that has Digg ads embedded. A future version of Techmeme notices that my post is collecting a lot of heat, so it creates a story ‘cluster’ around my post and other posts and comments linking to my post (including in the future, the digg object pointing at my post), and Techmeme drops that into its stream, with an embedded ad, too.
While it might be possible to go down, down, down to the URLs associated with these objects, who ever would? Why leave the flow, where the live things are, to look at the river bottom, where all the dead things fall?
“The Internet doesn’t know what it is doing” - Clay Shirky. It isn’t build to push just one sort of thing around, but all sorts of things.
I think this generation of flow apps will move past a static and deterministic model of what sorts of conversational particles exist, how they should be related to each other, and what apps can show which ones — to a much more fluid model, where all sorts of new associations can be made.
We need to agree on the metaphor of the web of flow — of the bloodstream — and then people can create all sorts of particles that can be streamed through it, and we can get to a more egalitarian social medium that we have now, one that is firmly in the Web of Flow, past the Web of Pages.
There have been a few posts by various folks who heard the talk (here, here, and here), and I think a recording will be posted at http://dogearnation.com/ on Monday or Tuesday. The slideshare.net version can be accessed, and the comments at the Web 2.0 Expo site, too.
The Social Revolution: Why The New Web Matters
[I gave this talk at the Next08 conference a few weeks ago, in Hamburg.]
What is the web worth?
How would you go about valuing it, if you had to? Is it worth all the tea in china? If Google wanted to buy the whole thing, what would it cost? Every blog post, spam comment, Wikipedia entry, and hyperlink: what would we charge if Martians arrived and wanted to buy it?
The hardware involved is incalculable, and no reliable numbers exist. We can’t even begin to estimate how much we have spent on it. IDC calculated that 27 million servers had been deployed by the end of 2005, growing at an increasing rate of 3 or more million per year.
Some have estimated that something on the order of 8 B USD was spent powering the servers alone, worldwide. This was about the same as we spend for powering televisions, globally, and growing much faster.
On a crude level, we might compare it to television, which is telling. In the US, every hour that people spend online, is an hour not spent watching television. But this transcends an advertising-based valuation of clicks and eyeballs, because the web is not being created like television shows: it’s not being developed by hollywood.
It is being built by us, for us. And it is being built without blueprints, without any centralized approval, without even any general agreement on what it is for.
The big story of the web isn’t the props - the servers, networks, ten trillion web sites, and all the information lying around in databases and in HTML - but what people are saying to each other and how we have been changed as a result.
We are creating the Web to happen to ourselves.
Apologies. It was blogging that did this to me. No neat conclusions. A barrage of conjecture, wisecracks, and one-liners, disguised as a presentation.
My work is social tools, but my goals lie beyond.
Giant borgesian hypertext document, where we wander by clicking links, flitting from place to place like the flying dutchman. An endless labyrinth where you can wander endlessly, never knowing the sum of the uses that are being made of the materials. How could you know?
Where’s the juice? Where’s the life? Where are the people?
Perhaps a fitting vision for Tim Berners-Lee, as a way to manage research papers. The email and webpage era of the Web.
We could simply count the pages and the number of users, and look at web 1.0 from the perspective of hypothetical research efficiency: finding snippets of information, and clipping them, and then getting back to our work in the ‘real world’ offline.
But something happened…
“Our specialist and fragmented civilization is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanical bits into an organic whole. This is the new world of the global village.” - Marshall McLuhan
We began to use the web as a means to shape ourselves, to shape our culture, to change our aspirations and as a place for their realization.
The shift in time and space: McLuhan knew that our perception of the world is based on the properties of the media that we use to make sense of it.
The original vision of the web was a document, the web of pages, but what has come on top of that is a web of people, connecting to each other, conversing in blogs, social networks, video and photo sharing sites, dating services, forums, and a seemingly infinite and inexhaustible number of new ways to commune and communicate.
People have found each other, person to person. And even though mass media outlets have moved onto the web, their influence and power is waning.
Newspapers, mass media journalism, the pre-web music business, all of the established media have been hollowed out by the defection of the people formerly known as the audience, us, who have streamed onto the web, and away from the forms of old.
We have created something altogether new, cobbled together from bits of the old, like a marauding tribe of nomads using the bricks from an ancient, deserted temple to make the foundation of a new city.
All the media that matter are being built on a new basis: the participation of the inhabitants. They are mashing up what came before, and spinning new magic from the old, like a giant mosaic assembled from bits of broken china.
As you wander in the new web, you can move into any corner of it and find people directly interacting with other people, making sense of their own concerns. Knitting, lute playing, whether Hilary will or won’t, or how best to help the stricken in [fill in the name of the most recent disaster]. In every nook or cranny, there are people talking, writing, making muxtapes, cross-fertilizing, and making a mess of the place. This is the sprawl at the edge of the web, and increasingly, its starting to look like all edge.
As the edge grows, the center dissolves. Mainstream journalists begin to act like bloggers, editors begin to drop the veneer of objectivism, and immediate, first person voice becomes the standard not some radical minority.
And the world, once the subject of conversation, is itself changed when so many have changed their beliefs, either explicitly or at a level below awareness.
I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections
It’s mostly connections
Network economics
“on the Web everyone will be famous to 15 people” - David Weinberger
Trends: fragmenting as innovations increase, and specialized networks get deeper. We are going to be connected to everyone, but we will have to switch contexts like traveling across town by subway, bus, taxi, and skates.
Albert-László Barabási’s Linked, the author explains that the origin of the “six degrees of separation” notion that underlies all social networking theory was the brain child of a Hungarian writer, Frigyes Karinthy. In 1929, Karinthy published his forty-sixth book, a collection of short stories entitled “Everything Is Different” (Minden masképpen van), which is now out of print and apparently lost to us.
This is the world that instant messaging networks presaged,even back in the late 90s when hundreds of millions of users are logging into a service like AIM and sending billions of messages everyday, it became clear to some of us that we were moving rapidly into a world where the web was going to be the human bloodstream, where everything that was important would show up first.
And we are moving toward a time of even faster growth, with a growing fragmentation of worlds. We are not going to see a single AOL reality nor Google: but tens of thousands of lesser, overlapping, and mutually self-reinforcing small worlds. People have dozens of sorts of personal affiliations, and that characteristic of human connection will lead to the topology of the web, just like the properties of wind and water shape the face of the Earth. The form of the wiring in our heads — the way we interact, how we track who is important to us, and the ways we pass information through human networks — turns out to trump the protocols of the Internet hardware.
Once again, the Web is a solution to the problem we pose to ourselves: we have made it to invent ourselves.
A world of bottom up belonging, radiating outward, from person to person
Good title, got people pissed off. The paradox is that to connect with others, through whom we define ourselves, we have to start by asserting who we are, what we like, need, want. It seems selfish, but it is aspirational as much as anything else. We may seem self-obsessed on the web, but at the core, we aren’t really there to talk about stamp collecting or photography, we aren’t there for the places we seem to inhabit online, and not even — in the final analysis — for the specific others that we connect to. We are searching for a reason to be, to be linked into relationships where it would matter if we stopped coming back, where we can become ourselves through others.
It’s a net, not something neat and clean. There is a wonderful swing to human interaction on the Web, but it’s not democratic at the core. No one is in charge, but a small number of people have huge — perhaps even unjustified — influence.
It’s a village world, where reputation matters, and affiliation is tribal.
There are all the downsides of tribalism, too. There is a “us and them” aspect of bottom-up belonging that needs to be checked with a sense of universalism, a need for universalism. That is why the Web is terrifying to corrupt and controlling nation states: it is inherently non-national, but global and local at the same time. Glocalization is a tribal perspective on the world, that naturally arises from neo-tribal web culture.
The long tail changes economics everywhere, but also changes our conceptions of involvement and value.
When the costs of connectedness drop — when it becomes possible to remain connected with hundreds not dozens of people, and to remain cognizant of their backgrounds, location, moods, relationships, and positions on matters of importance — does the world become a deeper place or have our feelings become shallower?
The long tail is not just about availability of obscure books at Amazon. It is about the spectrum of relationships that we can afford, and the depth of our awareness and involvement.
Another tribal trend: more shapes of relationships with more people as more channels for involvement come online, and new ways to discover and experience others become prevalent.
The experience and sense of time says more about a culture in a shorthand way than almost anything else.
Industrial time is falling away in the Western world. The idea that time is a sequence of instants, seconds ticking on a never varying clock, is falling away. We all know that in different hours of the same length our productivity, creativity or efficiency varies wildly; but in many ways we pretend that they are all equal, which is a white lie at the core of much of the value of work.
Time is inconstant, and we sense this mostly as things seeming to speed up. Time dilates or contracts based on what we are doing. And we see the conflict in how we value time; that we are willing to slip from one activity to another, to help a friend to make progress by answering a text message while in a meeting, we are shifting to a time-shifted sense of time. We are adopting continuous partial attention, and reseating our timesense as a result. We are changing our perceptions by the activities and tools we use, just like exposure to flight simulators or martial arts training changes our situational awareness in all aspects of our lives. Learning to juggle is a new state of consciousness that has other benefits/impacts over and above the juggling itself.
One way that people talk about this is moving onto a ‘real-time’ basis. But real-time isn’t any realer than slow time. However, that visceral in the guts sense of increased velocity of the world gets across the potentially disorienting impact of being pushed into a new world that demands new patterns of thinking to understand. Many will feel behind the power curve. But if you look to the youngest among us, you can see that the future is here already, it’s just not equally distributed (Gibson).
We are seeing the next web start to appear today, away from the heavily annotated and mashed web of pages that is the primary reality today. The first glints of that new web is starting to emerge from the lineage of instant messaging and RSS feeds: the development of tools and technologies on top of ubiquitous connectivity that allow the artifacts of conversation between us to flnd us instead of us having to dig through the archives of the web of pages. I call this the web of flow.
We are seeing an explosion in flow applications — the Facebook minifeed, RSS streams, Friendfeed, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and my own Workstreamer project (coming soon) — where that timeshifting — not zipping ahead to cut out advertiselments, but a freeing of time, the possibility of time dilation — will be the norm.
A simple example: the business executive of 2000 would reading every email and then analyze all the information to decide what is important, and what actions to take. But the business executive of 2010 has been pushed to the point where there is no such thing as reading all the email: in fact, there is no hope there. Instead, the future business leader will allow his network to filter and highlight what is critical and important. The crucial things will rise to the top in a darwinian struggle for share of time, or mind, and this will all be managed in a flow model, where s/he spends little or no time filing, opening, or searching. The flow of relationships and information made meaningful through relationships becomes that bloodstream of this brave new world, of society, of the enterprise and the marketplace.
These new realities offer tremendous opportunities and challenges in all sectors, from the mundane questions of business etiquette — is it ok to instant message during a meeting? In a meeting with a client? — up to new modes of marketing and connection with markets. The impact of the social web on traditional media has been completely disruptive, and we can contemplate similar impacts on other, less directly implicated industries. But if you connect the dots, inevitably similar revolutionary change is coming.
On the personal and individual level, these trends will lead to a basic identification of ourselves as humans living together on Spaceship Earth, as Buckminster Fuller called it, and a movement away from ideologies that divide us based on language, religion, caste, gender, or ethnic background. As antropologist and ethnographer Claude Levi-Strauss said, in a 1972 interview,
“ A well-ordered humanism does not begin with itself, but puts things back in their place. It puts the world before life, life before man, and the respect of others before love of self. This is the lesson that the people we call “savages” teach us: a lesson of modesty, decency and discretion in the face of a world that preceded our species and that will survive it.
We need to put things back into place, although the configuration that web culture will make of all this is brand new. Much of the sensibility of our time will seem like a return to things that were put aside at the start of the industrial revolution, although much will be completely new. But at the core, Levi-Strauss’ checklist — world, life, people, the respect of others, self — seems like a pretty good starting point.
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
