Quote
"I can’t think of anything that demonstrates the sovereign nature of the self better than a blog.” - Doc Searls
About the Author
Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive,
and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative
and social technologies. His new blog is Message.
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Monthly Archives
January 31, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
In an article at GMToday of all places, I found some interesting stats re: teen use of IM: "According to research conducted by AOL (America Online) about 93 percent of 13-to-17-year-olds use some kind of Internet instant messaging system, and 73 percent say they use instant messaging more than e-mail."
...
"Also according to AOL’s research, when given a choice between television, telephone, instant messaging and radio, and told they could have access to only one form of communication for a month, 41 percent of teens chose television, 33 percent chose instant messaging and just 17 percent chose the telephone." Email is dying, and the teenagers won't mourn it.
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January 30, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Jabber Inc. announced today that the IETF has approved the XMPP protocol as a standard for instant messaging and presence. The standardization effort has been led by the Jabber Software Foundation [JSF], an independent group, who have been working with the IETF for the past year to bring the standard forward.
From the press release: "The JSF has been working with the IETF for just over a year to add security and internationalization features to the core Jabber protocols, which the JSF has contributed to the IETF under the name XMPP. XMPP now joins other IETF-approved protocols such as HTTP (the World Wide Web) and SMTP (email), thus positioning it as an Internet standard for instant messaging (IM) and presence. In addition, the Jabber community continues to develop specialized application protocols on top of XMPP.
XMPP is a real-time communications protocol, which allows people, devices and applications to instantly communicate and exchange streaming XML data, based upon dynamic presence and availability information. Network Computing Magazine recently recognized XMPP as a "2004 Standard to Watch."
"The contributions from the thousands of individuals involved in the Jabber community made this process look simple," said Peter Saint Andre, executive director of the Jabber Software Foundation. "IETF approval is crucial because it demonstrates to the Internet community that XMPP is a proven technology, an open and interoperable standard, and one that is being rapidly adopted."
"IETF approval is a cause for celebration throughout the Jabber community," said Tony Bamonti, acting-president of Jabber, Inc. "Jabber, Inc. wants to congratulate the Jabber Software Foundation for scoring a major victory for the cause of interoperable instant messaging." " So now that XMPP is an approved standard, some of the onus has been lifted. In the past, others have argued that XMPP was a proprietary protocol developed by the Jabber community and suitable only for their ends, unlike SIP, the contending standard.
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January 29, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Got email from the Orkut team: "We took orkut.com offline for a while to build some new features and do some general tweaking. We hope you'll keep sending your ideas to us, because we want to make orkut great for you. That said, we may need to take orkut offline again for short periods to update it, so please bear with us if it's temporarily unavailable. Hopefully the changes will be worth the wait. We'll see you on orkut soon...
stay beautiful,
orkut.com team" Now that they've asked so nicely for me to send suggestions, I will have to write down a few dozen.
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January 28, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
My newest Social Commentary column is live at Darwin Magazine.
[from The Barriers of Content and Context]
We can all just get along -- once we figure out how to find one another and what our groups are up to.
Social networking is suffering the curse of all attractive innovations in the modern era: As even the most winning innovations rise into popular consciousness, the backlash against them begins instantaneously. The traditional lag between initial adoption by a small percentage of hip, connected "innovators" and the later contact with the "majoritarians" that comprise the overwhelming bulk of the market has been squashed to an almost immediate effect. Just as truckers' caps begin to diffuse out to the average metrosexual a few weeks after becoming cool, the glitterati already declare them passé.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Stefanie Olsen reported Orkut's rise and fall, and how hot the service had become:
"As an illustration of the exclusivity of Orkut, an invitation to join the network was sold off for $11 on eBay's auction site this week."
I alerted Stefanie to the service being turned off, so she nicely lifted some of my tamer observations about the turn of events: "Stowe Boyd, an Orkut member and a technology consultant, suggested that the service had attracted too many people at once, overloading its capacity. "They had like 3 million page hits, so it may be that they just need to revamp the physical infrastructure," Boyd said.
Many people have put forward suggestions for changes to the network, "so I'm sure they are rethinking design," he added. Orkut offers a messaging system, among other features." Which messaging system had led to mindless email broadcasts to the entire community, so I am sure that will be fixed before relaunch.
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January 26, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I was trackbacked by since1968, who points out that the Orkut mushroom cloud indicates a lot about Internet society: "There are so many things to ponder with the rise of orkut (the death of the weekend, viral marketing, the pace at which language changes, etc.) but don't bother: why do I feel like we've been here before? Is this anything more than a high school clique driven by some clever technology and piggybacking on a resurgence of late-90s internet froth?
Maybe it's just sour grapes: I still haven't been invited to join." Yes, the whole space is bubblicious, but don't let that fool you. There is real meat to social capital, and we are determined to get there.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Like a hothouse flower, Orkut -- Google's social software experiment -- bloomed and faded, all in a few days. As other have noted. like Ross Mayfield and Marc Canter, there seemed to be an enormous upwelling of interest in Orkut, with millions of page hits, but the socializing aspect of the site was limited to making friends. There was no there, there.
After all, there should be some generation of emergent social capital in our interactions if these services are to add anything to other sorts of communication and community. People have to be doing more than adding friend to their rosters.
My dream is that some uber-FOAF-ish service will come along as a collection of javascript plug-ins we can all add to our blogs, and social networking will emerge where I live in blogspace. I am actively investigating the various services, but there nothing yet compelling enough to get me to move my center-of-gravity out of blogspace into an explicitly social space.
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January 25, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Like Liz and Clay at Many-to-Many, I have gotten a slew of friend invites for Orkut.
First Take
The interface seems primitive, and the questionaire is too involved for business purposes. Once again, the confusion that arises from lumping together the many different sorts of networks -- dating, business, culture, etc. -- and making all of us walk through the same antechamber.
The system doesn't have some of the niceties that are found in other solutions for expression and content development, but it is possible to create 'groups' and post bloggish entries associated with your profile. Looks like it has a long way to go.
The discovery by many that mass emailing is possible has led to -- guess what -- mass emailings about mass emailings. Until that settles down, the email system there will be useless, and we will all be deleting broadcasts with zero content.
Like Liz, I received an invitation to 'friend' with George Something, and then could not find George. Liz suspects the admins are deleting people and posts that suggest things are awry.
Starting to smell like an experiment going sideways.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Miki Tanikawa reports in International Herald Tribune on Keichu, a Japanese term for cellphone addiction: "A growing contingent of young cellphone users is described as having fallen into "Keichu," or cellphone addiction, acquiring an unstoppable habit of e-mailing or "texting" friends, playing games, and downloading pictures and music.
Chikara Kato, professor of linguistics and communications at Sugiyama Jogakuen University, in Aichi Prefecture, central Japan, said such addicts typically become restless and irritated when deprived of their handsets.
"Some college students going into the work force cannot kick the habit of e-mailing while at work," Kato said.
There are reports that some new workers, unable to quit phone e-mailing while at work, have lost their jobs, he said, adding, "This is serious."
Use of Internet-ready phones is challenging social customs, human relationships and even powerful modern pastimes such as comic books and television as people shift more of their attention and resources to the cellphone. NTT DoCoMo's 40 million i-mode subscribers, for example, send and receive 800 million e-mails a day. That compares to about 60 million short messages a day in a recent month in Britain.
Japanese on average spend over ¥6,300 a month [note: this is over around $55] on their cellphone bills, according to recent household spending data released by the government." I have worked in a lot of companies where people seemed to do nothing all day but email, and it didn't get them fired. Of course, they were generally emailing about work topics... even if it was mostly just hot air. [pointer from Smart Mobs]
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
A meme is making the rounds that "orkut" is slang for orgasm in Finnish [Thanks to Joho].
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
 Nokia has announced a new mobile device that might be a category creator:
"The Nokia 7700 Media Device should be available to consumers from 2Q/2004. It is Nokia's first "media phone", a new type of device with a completely new look, and bursting with properties. In fact it has so many tempting applications that it is almost a surprise to discover that it also serves as a phone, as Wasenius demonstrates. Amusingly, the 7700 must be turned on its side to perform this humble basic function.
The 7700's special application is the so-called "visual radio" function, of which more later. The media device is also the first mobile phone that has the technical wherewithal to enable viewing of digital TV transmissions, when it is hooked up with the Nokia Streamer, a mobile IP Datacast receiver using the DVB-H standard."
"Visual radio might just be a new killer application with which Nokia could grab a slice of the network-based distribution of music, and at the same time it could revolutionise the role of radio."
"With visual radio, the listener will get not just the sound signal but the ability to show images and text on the handset display screen. To take a practical example, let's say Kiss FM are playing a number by Finnish band The Rasmus, then up on screen there might be an image of the band's vocalist Lauri Ylönen, and the name of the piece, its current chart listing, and other short bits of information." And the radio station can offer users the ability to buy a song they just heard, or request more info about a product or service advertised.
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January 23, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Gary George has provided an interesting and in depth article at VMS3.info that analyzes a wide variety of social networking solutions using Mitchell Levy's Industry Analysis Value Framework Template. I hadn't -- prior to looking at the article -- known anything about Levy's Value Framework, but it seems to lead to a relatively sensible segmentation of many of the social networking offerings, including Classmates, Ryze, LinkedIn, Ecademy, Friendster, Friendzy, Huminity, Spoke, and LinkSV.
Scott Allen provides a detailed review of the article, where I got the pointer originally.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Socialtext today announced support for RSS for the company's Eventspace and Workspace products: "Socialtext's unique combination of user-controlled email alerts and choice-based XML syndication enables Socialtext customers to improve the productivity of users by giving them greater control over their information flow. At a low cost, it also allows loosely coupled integration with other systems.
Socialtext Workspace and Eventspace customers can now enable their users to subscribe to weblogs using news aggregators and RSS." The company plans to support Atom in the near term, as well.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Stefanie Olsen reports on Google quietly launching its own social networking solution: "The search company, which is expected to go public this year, is flexing its power with its Internet fans by constantly offering new services, including comparison shopping and news search. Orkut could be the clearest signal that Google's aspirations don't end with search.
"Orkut is an online trusted community Web site designed for friends. The main goal of our service is to make the social life of yourself and your friends more active and stimulating," according to the Web site, which states that the service is "in affiliation with Google."
A Google representative said that the site is the independent project of one of its engineers, Orkut Buyukkokten, who works on user interface design for Google. Buyukkokten, a computer science doctoral candidate at Stanford University before joining Google, created Orkut.com in the past several months by working on it about one day a week--an amount that Google asks all of its engineers to devote to personal projects. Buyukkokten, with the help of a few other engineers, developed Orkut out of his passion for social networking services.
Google spokeswoman Eileen Rodriquez said that despite Orkut's affiliation, the service is not part of Google's product portfolio at this time. "We're always looking at opportunities to expand our search products, but we currently have no plans in the social networking market."
Still, Google owns the technology developed by its employees, Rodriquez said." Interesting hedge -- not a product of the company, but owned by Google...
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Seb Paquet pointed me to an interesting piece: Transforming Information into Knowledge at the Portal by Bill French.
"On a daily basis almost every knowledge-worker reads news and other sources of business content and then creates comments and observations that other business associates, colleagues, customers, and vendors consume. The usual and customary method for creating annotations and observations is by e-mail. I have nothing against e-mail - in fact - my philosophical perspective is that SMTP and e-mail processes represent valuable collaboration tools for enterprises that cannot be discarded, but may certainly be optimized. However, the place where e-mail content comes to rest is problematic - e-mail is where knowledge goes to die." French goes on to detail his wishlist for how rich, collaborative media (such as blog networks) can support the modern information/knowledge worker better than email.
And I love that line: e-mail is where knowledge goes to die.
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January 22, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
A WSJ article today stated that FCC Chairman Michael Powell foreshadowed what may be an enormously important decision about internet telephony: "The FCC is expected to rule that Free World Dialup, a computer-based Internet phone service, isn't a telecommunications service under federal rules. That will free it from the fees that AT&T is fighting to have lifted. Free World Dialup allows consumers to download software from the Internet that enables them to make free phone calls from their personal computers to other Free World users anywhere in the world.
In a speech this month, FCC Chairman Michael Powell tipped his hand on the coming rulings. In likening Internet voice applications to e-mail and instant messaging, he hinted it would be defined as an information service, free from the labyrinth of regulations and fees related to telecom services.
"Plain old telephone service ... sets up a telephone call from point A to point B," Mr. Powell said. "A voice application [over the Internet] can do that, but it can do so very much more."" Like presence and availability management, which just can't be retrofitted into the POTS, but which is the real killer ingredient of instant messaging.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
T-Mobile announced adopting OZ technology for mobile instant messaging: "T-Mobile USA has officially adopted OZ Communications' Mobile IM Gateway to enable wireless instant messaging on mobile devices. The Gateway is already deployed and in use by T-Mobile subscribers across the USA.
A new generation of IM-capable mobile phones operate on the Open Mobile Alliance specifications for Instant Messaging and Presence Services (IMPS), which was once knokwn as Wireless Village, meaning T-Mobile's operation will be standards-based around a single interface."
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing got twigged to Eurekster, and experienced social networking backlash: "I haven't played around with eurekster yet, and I mean no disrespect to whoever built the project. But if one more website asks me to "invite all of my friends," I swear I'm gonna fucking throw up. Invite your own damn friends, you website" Xeni was turned on to the service by Marc Canter, who did sign up, despite Xeni's nausea.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Love.com released results of a survey about online dating, finding that 1 in 10 unmarried adults have tried online dating sites: "The survey also found that men and women not only use the Internet to flirt and chat with other singles, but to search for prospective dates. In fact, one in ten single adults who have Internet access have conducted an online search for someone before they have gone out with that person. Some good news for those who are searching for that special someone: 88% of those surveyed say they do not lie when describing themselves in their profile with 6% saying they only used a few white lies." Some of the other findings: "-- Far more men admit to Internet flirting than women (31% for men versus 15% for women).
-- More than one in ten single adults with Internet access (12%) say they flirt with others by instant messaging or e-mail during the day.
-- Sixteen percent of men say they flirt online during the day, compared with 8% of women.
-- Flirting via e-mail or instant messaging is also much higher among those 18-24 years (33%) than those who are older (19%).
-- About one in ten unmarried adults with Internet access (9%) customize their instant messages and/or e-mails with colorful wallpaper or icons so they are more flirty. Fourteen percent of 18-24 year olds do so, compared with 7% of older adults.
-- Nearly one in ten unmarried adults with Internet access (9%) have asked someone out by instant messaging them. Men are far more likely than women to have done this (14% vs. 4%).
-- Those who ask someone out via instant messaging spend an average of four weeks flirting online before asking to meet them offline for a date.
-- Thirteen percent of single adults who have Internet access have entered an online chat room for dating.
Other findings
Searching for love...
-- One in ten have conducted an online search for someone before they have gone out on a date. Twelve percent of men have done so versus 8% of women.
-- About one in four of those who have tried an online dating service (24%) say they instant messaged or e-mailed other people's profiles around to their friends to get their opinion of prospective dates; 8% say they always did this, while 16% say they sometimes did.
-- Most of those who have used an online dating service (82%) say it took them about an hour or less to write their online profile; 52% wrote it in about 20 minutes.
-- Men are far more likely than women to have visited dating chat rooms (18% vs. 7%).
...even in the wrong places...
-- Nearly half of those who have tried an online dating service (44%) have come across an online profile of someone they know, such as an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend, when they were surfing through profiles.
-- One in three of those who have tried an online dating service work in an office where they are supervised by a manager. Of these, 10% say they have been caught by their boss or manager while surfing or responding to online profiles.
-- Most of those who have used an online dating service (66%) check their online dating account once a day for new messages; 10% check it once in the morning and once in the evening, while 9% check it three times a day and 2% admit to checking it "constantly."
...and finding it.
-- Five percent of unmarried adults with Internet access have fallen in love with someone they met online. Men are more likely to have experienced this than women (7% vs. 3%)."
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
According to Credit Cards Magazine, there has been a big uptake in the use of credit cards in Eastern Europe, and to seom extent that has been led by the use of SMS text messaging to counter rampant credit card identity theft:"The biggest obstacle that credit card marketers had to overcome in Hungary was fear of fraud. But consumer concerns about the safety of their cards has led to an important security innovation made possible by the explosive growth of mobile phones in Hungary.
Each time a card is used, the cardholder immediately receives a text message on his cell phone confirming the transaction and advising him of his balance. Initially developed in Hungary, the messaging system is widely used in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It is now being introduced to countries in Western Europe."I wish they would set this up here.
[pointer from Gizmodo]
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
I heard Jeffrey Rosen, of George Washington University, speaking on the Diane Reem show about his new book, The Naked Crowd. I haven't read it yet, but it sounds like a fascinating view of the encroaching of real-time surveillance in our wired world.
I found an interesting review at sp!ked-IT by Sandy Starr: 'The risk-averse democracies of the West continue to demand ever-increasing levels of surveillance and exposure in a search for an illusory and emotional feeling of security.' This is the provocative charge levelled by Jeffrey Rosen, in his new book The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age. Rosen, professor of law at George Washington University and legal affairs editor of The New Republic, argues that risk-aversion - particularly since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 - is eroding our freedom. He sees 'politicians, the media, interest groups, and an adversarial legal system' all contributing to an unhealthy climate of panic, and calls for us to 'overcome the paralysing fears that threaten our liberties...rather than demanding salvation from judges or technologists or other illusory protector.'
The Naked Crowd takes in sociological, psychological, technological and legal perspectives on the relationship between risk and freedom. It opens with an unsettling account of a world where surveillance intrudes unchecked into every conceivable public space, and where society's predominant emotion is suspicion. No, it isn't some far-fetched science fiction dystopia - it's a case study of the UK.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
David Deans has a number of perceptive insights about the wackiness of mobile messaging players, and their lack of marketing around mobile IM and SMS email services.
"We still find most people don't know that every U.S. wireless subscriber has a unique e-mail address that corresponds to their mobile phone number. Therefore, they're unaware of basic SMS business applications such as the potential for creating individual short e-mail notes sent to employees, customers and business partners mobile phones (directly from MS Outlook, as an example). As a result, most businesses aren't thinking about the incremental potential to utilize a productivity tool already at their disposal--wireless e-mail distribution lists." [pointer from SmartMobs]
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Antepo has announced the release of Open Presence Networks (OPN) System 4.0, the company's new platform for enterprise and carrier instant messaging.
Antepo has long been an advocate of interoperability, and OPN is XMPP-based but also has a SIP/SIMPLE gateway to support interconnection with SIP networks, such as IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Live Communication Server platforms.
OPN 4.0 Server operates in UNIX, Windows and LINUX environments on wide variety of hardware platforms, and the company has developed clients for a wide variety of devices, including Windows, Microsoft Pocket PC(TM), Java(TM)-based phones, and other mobile devices.
Antepo OPN 4.0 integrates with a wide variety of authentication and directory models, including corporate authentication and directory systems based on Microsoft Active Directory, Sun, Identity Server, Computer Associates, eTrust Directory and other implementations of LDAP. OPN 4.0 goes beyond that to provide IM management and control services, to enforce policy and regulatory restrictions on IM use.
First Take:
Looks to me that Antepo has serious ambitions for the enterprise IM market, and has developed an offering that meets the enterprise need for interoperable and federated instant messaging, squarely competing with Jabber, Sametime, and Live Communications Server. Antepo's OPN 4.0 looks like it can even be a competitor in the IM management space, with competitors like IMlogic, Facetime, and Akonix.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
A recent MIT survey reports that the cell phone is the invention most hated, but that we can't live without. "Americans are ambivalent about their cell phones, TV sets and the like. The rely on such everyday technology, but it drives them nuts.
At the top of the list? The cell phone.
An annual Massachusetts Institute of Technology survey, known as the Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, found that among adults asked what invention they hate most but can't live without, 30 percent said the cell phone.
Alarm clocks were a close second, with 25 percent, followed by the television with 23 percent and razors with 14 percent. Microwave ovens, computers and answering machines also earned spots as detested technology."
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Recent research by Ferris reported suggests that while instant messaging spam, or spim, is rising, it is still inconsequential. "Officials at America Online, which runs the popular Instant Messenger service, and Microsoft, which runs MSN Messenger, say they've seen an increase in the amount of IM spam. Messaging and collaboration research firm Ferris Research estimates that the quantity of such solicitations doubled from 2002 to 2003, reaching 500 million last year. That's fast growth, though it's nothing compared with the 800 billion pieces of E-mail spam caught by just one anti-spam provider, Brightmail Inc., in 2003. Ferris Research president David Ferris dismisses the phenomenon. "Let's say there are 200 million IM users at the moment. So 500 million is just one every three or four months. It's just trivial." Still primarily a phenomenon that arises from use of public chatrooms, where pornbots lurk for the unwary, spim will be a future hazard: when interoperability between the public IM networks lowers the costs and barriers to spimming.
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January 21, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Thomas Claburn writes in InformationWeek about spim, and includes one of my thoughts about the paradoxical benefits of public IM network non-interoperability: "Boyd also doubts that spim will ever wreak the havoc of spam. One reason is the fragmented nature of the IM networks--an AOL IM user can't talk with an MSN Messenger or Yahoo IM user. That's been a criticism of IM, but it's likely to inhibit the growth of spim. "Because the major instant-messaging networks have not worked toward any kind of public interoperability structure," he says, "it's extremely difficult to create a uniform mechanism to spim on all the networks."
But it's not impossible. Those running the IM networks are discussing greater interoperability. That could be just the incentive spimmers need."
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Wired reports on Bell Labs announcement of new approaches to cell phone location privacy: "Bell Labs says it has developed a network software engine that can let cell users be as picky as they choose about disclosing their whereabouts, a step that may help wireless companies introduce location-based services in a way customers will find handy rather than intrusive.
In a presentation this week at an industry conference, researchers for the Bell Labs division of Lucent Technologies plan to describe how their technology copes with the conflicting demands of speed, privacy and personalization on a live telephone network -- enabling users to specify what location information is shared, when, with whom, how and under what circumstances."
"Examples of such services would typically include the ability for restaurants and other businesses to send a solicitation by text message to a cell phone when its owner wanders within range of those merchants. Other applications might include the ability to locate co-workers and customers.
While many cell-phone users might like to be notified of a nearby eatery or find it helpful to let others keep track of their movements, most would rather not expose themselves to round-the-clock, everywhere-they-go surveillance."
[from SmartMobs]
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Tim Oren at Due Diligence presents his first Dubious Distinction Award of 2004 to fax.com: "To get 2004 off to a good start, the first Dubious Distinction of the year, for continuing efforts in operating a business plan which is largely illegal, goes to fax.com. This is occasioned by the FCC levying a $5.4m fine against the company for repeated and flagrant violations of junk fax/do-not-fax regulations. Yes, before there were spammers, there was fax.com, and they are still at it, as I can attest. Pacifica's inbound fax is a known good number, and we get ads for fly-by-night insurance and refis, with the characteristic fax.com footer format. After a few, one of us gets annoyed enough to call the remove number, and they stop for a while - and then start again. This has happened enough times that it has clearly moved from incompetence to 'enemy action'. At $11,000 a pop - the fine levied by the FCC for flagrant violations - each of these could be a significant step toward bankrupting these bozos, so maybe I'll start saving them...
Update: Sounds like the fax.com clowns need a RICO investigation more than fines which they ignore."
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
CNN profiles a Finnish company now shut down by authorities: "A service promising to answer people's prayers with a text message apparently sent by Jesus has been shut down after complaints by Finland's mobile services watchdog.
The heavenly service offered answers from Jesus in response to a text message prayer at the cost of a hefty 1.20 euros ($1.52) per message, but lasted less than a month."
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Jabber Inc. has been selected as a "2004 Company to Watch'' By Network Computing magazine: "Editorial accolades put an exclamation point on the success we have enjoyed over the past year," said Tony Bamonti, acting president of Jabber, Inc. "We are thrilled to be recognized by an organization of Network Computing's caliber as it appropriately reflects the exceptional effort of the entire Jabber, Inc. team."
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Ross turned me onto a David Kirkpatrick piece in Fortune: "We're entering what might be called the Bottom-Up Economy. As the Internet's influence grows, we're seeing its intrinsic egalitarianism and tendency to empower the small start to change many aspects of modern life." He goes on to note that 'bottom-upedness' is breaking out all over -- Dean's emergent swarmocracy, eBay's global yard sale, and the threat posed to traditional software players by the open source movement.
It's a bottom-up world, after all.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
The folks at Cutter have dubbed me Cutter Consortium Consultant of the Month, a bald-faced marketing trick to get people interested in the newly published report "Social Tools: Ready for the Enterprise?" My interview is posted: "Q: Tell us about the importance of swarm intelligence and "swarmth."
Swarm intelligence is simply the observation that a group of people -- each operating without global understanding -- can collectively come up with smart solutions, even when, individually, they couldn't. In this view, the intelligence of the group is an emergent property of the social network that arises through group communication and collaboration. We all know that people's abilities and contributions are uneven: but in self-organizing societies, the members judge each other's contributions, and as a result, those who are judged to be better contributors build a reputation. In many social tools, this reputation is made tangible: in the Slashdot (http://slashdot.org) tech forum, for example it is called "karma." I like to call it "swarmth" -- a measure of social network value based on the collective judgment of your peers."
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
 Sanyo has come up with a new cell phone that uses bone conduction to provide better sound quality in noisy situations:
"The new phone is equipped with a "Sonic Speaker" which transmits sounds through vibrations that move from the skull to the cochlea in the inner ear, instead of relying on the usual method of sound hitting the outer eardrum.
With the new handset, the key to better hearing in a noisy situation is to plug your ears to prevent outside noise from drowning out bone-conducted sounds."
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
MessageVine, a leading provider of messaging and presence solutions and InphoMatch, a leading provider of global inter-carrier wireless data solutions, announced today a strategic partnership to bring a fully interoperable mobile IM solution to market.
Under this agreement, InphoMatch will host and resell MessageVine presence and instant messaging solutions, based on the MessageVine IM Interlink Server. MessageVine's solution provides carriers with a uniquely integrated platform for mobile IM, including full interoperability with established PC instant messaging networks, so the carrier retains total carrier control of billing processes, user experience and quality of service.
In my research in the mobile IM sector, I have learned that carriers -- many of whom initially signed up with the vendors of the major IM services -- are moving aggressively to bring control of the IM technology in house. However, they are still eager to provide access to the public IM networks, meaning a fully interoperable solution is most attractive. That switch has fueled the growth of companies like MessageVine, who, in particular, has grown very quickly by meeting that market need.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Entopia announced today that Eric Miles has assumed the role of CEO from Lionel Baraban, co-founder of the company, who has served as CEO for the past 4 years. Mr. Baraban will remain at Entopia as president and board member.
Miles comes to Entopia with 30 years of technology experience: Sybase, Informix, The Ask Group, Ingres, Amdahl, Bank of America and IBM.
 Entopia is a leading knowledge management firm, with a broad range of solutions including enterprise search, content management, expertise location and social networks analysis, collaboration, knowledge visualization, classification and storage resource management.
I am particularly interested in Entopia's social network analysis and visualization technology.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Chris Gaither of the Boston Globe covers the launch of Eurekster, the social networking search technology I covered a few weeks ago. "Eurekster gets results like a normal search engine but ranks them according to the interests you and your friends have shown through past searches. For example, if many people in a social network use Eurekster to seek information about the Boston Red Sox, the websites they visit most will rise to the top in future Red Sox searches. Eurekster also lists queries that members of your social network have made -- although it doesn't say who made them -- and recent websites they have visited.
Eurekster is betting that "your network is interested in this, therefore you should be, too -- so go look at it," said Stowe Boyd [that would be me!], managing director of A Working Model, a technology consulting firm in Virginia.
Eurekster hopes to make money by selling ads related to specific search queries, known as sponsored search results, and by licensing its technology to Internet search providers and social networking websites. Overture Services Inc., a subsidiary of Yahoo Inc., powers Eurekster's sponsored and nonpaid search engines."
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January 20, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Another piece on the evil that Instant Messaging is, from PersonnelToday.com
"A new survey by filtering firm Surf Control showed that almost 40 per cent of employees in UK companies are using instant messaging programs while in the office.
More than half of respondents said instant messaging hurt productivity as people interrupted their work to deal with incoming messages from friends.
A spokesman from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said that employers should be concerned about this misuse of the internet and adapt their security policies to include instant messaging." Shut it down! Right Now! And take the phones off their desks! Every second counts! Work, work, work!
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Proof that virus writers can't spell come from the most recent effort to get us to open a dangerous attachment (as reported in Silicon.com).
"So, you've been tinkering on Kazaa, treated yourself to Christina Aguilera's latest tune and now there's an email from the FBI saying they've got some evidence on you and they'll see you in court. Should you be worried? Yes -- but not for the reasons you might think.
The email is a piece of malware from a virus writer looking to mess with your machine.
The email, which uses the subject line 'Your IP was logged', tells the recipient that the FBI have been tracking them and have found illegal downloads and they can expect to be charged with in the next few days." The good news is that the idiots who wrote the virus can't spell -- they use 'indicated' in place of 'indicted' -- which gives you a clue that you should delete the message before opening the attachment.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
LiveOffice has announced the release of IMConferencing, which the company is positioning as "first fully integrated application to merge the immediacy of instant messaging (IM) with the powerful features of traditional web and telephone conferencing."
I recently took a demo of the product, and it compares favorably with the solutions of market leaders Microsoft and IBM. Even more than those companies offerings, LiveOffice has built the web conferencing experience around the instant messaging paradigm. The solution provides support for web co-browsing, application and file sharing, powerpoint presentation, and integrated teleconferencing capabilities through the company's own conference calling service. IMConferencing supports both scheduled and ad hoc web conferences, and automates invitations, reminders, and RSVPs.
The IM platform is the company's own, and at this time, LiveOffice has not sought to integrate with any public IM networks, although that is under consideration.
All in all, an extremely well-integrated solution, targeting the small and medium business marketplace for web conferencing.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
The Business Development Institute is holding a seminar on Social Networking, Feb 10 2004. Speakers include
- Antony Brydon, Founder and President, Visible Path
- Reid Hoffman, CEO, LinkedIn
- Valerie Symes , Co-Founder and EVP Business Development & Marketing, Tribe Networks
- Andrew Weinreich, Founder and CEO of I Stand For, Co-Founder and Former CEO of Six Degrees
- Adrian Scott, Founder and CEO, Ryze
The seminar will be held in New York, and simultaneously webcast to Palo Alto, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
I have been asked to co-host the San Francisco get-together, so I am weakly linked to the event (forgive the small world pun).
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
[Update: 29 September 2004 -- Do to the overwhelming number of comments added to this story I am adding a few notes:
- GoogleMail is still strictly available by invitation only
- I have no connection with Google, and cannot provide accounts, so don't post a comment asking me do sign you up
- Those interested in more information about Googlemail should look at Google, here.
]
I saw in a CNN.com article that Google is planning to roll out its own email service, to compete with Microsoft, Yahoo, and others.
"Google already knows how to deliver its sponsored link ads -- which are in the form of Web links and appear on the perimeter of Web pages -- to e-mail newsletters and content sites.
Furthermore, Google last year purchased an e-mail management software maker and in 2001 registered the domain name googlemail.com." Apparently, they may differentiate themeselves based on better spam protection.
I bet they will launch their own instant messaging solution, too. Its the second most used Internet app, and in some demographics (teenagers) its number one.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Apparently, its really easy to temporarily stun your SPOT watch, and wipe out the downloaded content: "Take off a sweater. Touch a thermostat. Have a co-worker touch your watch."
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January 18, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
In a recent Red Herring article, a number of statistics about enterprise IM use are collated: "A study by the Radicati Group in Palo Alto, California, says that the number of corporate IM accounts will explode from 60 million in 2003 to 350 million by 2007. Ferris Research, moreover, estimates that IM in the enterprise will mushroom from 10 million users in mid-2002 to 180 million by 2007."
""In the last 18 months, there has been well over $100 million in new VC funding for enterprise IM firms, geared heavily toward vendors of IM management and security solutions," says Paul Ritter, program manager for collaboration research at communications and networking research firm the Yankee Group. That is a 400 percent increase over the previous 18 months (January 2001 to June 2002), Mr. Ritter estimates." While the piece covers the enterprise IM territory in broad strokes, and makes a few useful distinctions bewteen the infrastructure players (like IBM, Microsoft, etc.) and sort of separates them from network players (like AOL, Yahoo, MSN), and segregates the IM management companies (like IMlogic, Akonix, and the unmentioned Facetime), all in all this is a very tame article. Not the old Red Herring, at all.
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January 16, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Great piece by Jeff Jarvis (thanks to David Weinberger's pointer) that pokes fun at the amazingly dumb discussion about the role of blogging in so-called "Real-Time Democracy": "Well, this chitchat assumes, wrongly, that (a) the Internet is for fringe opinions and (b) Internet users are Dean supporters. The logical extension of that is that Dean is fringe, but I'll leave that straightline aside. This is still stupidly generalizing.
IT'S JUST A TOOL, BOYS. Tools have no ideology or loyalty. Whether pamphleteering or phone canvassing or direct mail or the Internet or weblogs, they're just tools that are used wisely or not. Dean learned quickly and used them wisely. That says a lot about Dean -- and his people -- and little about the tools, you tools.
: Frustrating just reading that.
I'll tell you what the world needs: Another show: Meet the Blogs." Yes, it's just a tool, Jeff, but "we make our tools, and then they shape us," as Kenneth Bouldin once said.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
 A new entrant to the MSN Direct-based watch market, Suunto, a Finnish company well-known for diving timepieces and high-end sports watches, has released the N3, as reported by AP:
"The service, available in 100 metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada, is free for the first month and $9.95 a month thereafter (or $59 annually).
The plastic timepiece works by picking up a special FM radio signal. Reception was strong where I live in Dallas, but based on Microsoft's coverage map, I'd be out of range if I visited President Bush's ranch in Crawford, about 100 miles to the southwest.
What's missing? Content. There's no real-time sports scores, although ESPN is expected to fill that void soon.
Another drawback is that you can receive instant messages sent with MSN Messenger, but you can't respond." What's the point of having MSN Messenger if you can't respond? They should at least allow you to predefine a list of responses on the website, and then select from a pull-down list. This seems to be a limitation of the MSN Wrist Net service, not the N3, since the offerings from Fossil and Abacus share this limitation.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
It was bound to happen, I guess, but I was hoping against hope that it wouldn't. I recently got my first real comment spam. Some idiot wrote a series of vauguely pornographic comments using spurious names (Julia Roberts, Jack Nicholson, etc.) on an entry I recently wrote about AOL spam activities. Luckily MoveableType has IP blocking.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
In an article by Todd Inoue, I came across some interesting stats on Friendster: "The website counts more than 2 million sign-ups in its easy-to-navigate matrix. According to Internet measuring firm Nielsen/NetRatings, Friendster logged 532,000 visitors in June, 675,000 in July and 961,000 in August. According to the Alexa rating service, it's already one of the Top 100 most visited English language sites on the web. (Match.com is at No. 23.)" Millions of people making friends!
I get a kick from the company hiding its address, laying low from all the people that want to petition for jobs at Friendster: "There's no signage from the street, nor is Friendster listed as a tenant on the building map. Walk up to the assigned door, and it's just that, a big block of wood. The only indication you've arrived is a Friendster sign behind the front desk and a helpful person wearing a fleece jacket (due to a faulty air conditioner that day) who offers a cup of coffee.
The spot is a Segway and Aeron chair-free zone. Scattered around the mostly spartan 1,600-square-foot headquarters are Desk Depot knockoffs positioned against bare beige walls. When Abrams seats down, it's in a chair he got for free.
He asks that I don't reveal the address; they just don't have enough help to sort through the potential employees who could and would stroll through the door. The 10-person staff moved into these quarters in July, and the company is already looking for a larger space."
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January 15, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I have been invited to present at a KM Cluster event in NYC, 26 March 2004. Deloitte is hosting the event at their Manhattan offices. My talk is entitled "Social Tools: Ready for the Enterprise," the same title that I used for a recent Cutter Consortium report I wrote. The event will be a full day, and John Maloney, who heads KM Cluster, will soon be posting more information about it.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Shannon Henry of the Washington Post, in an article today, reviewed the social networking phenomenon in general, and more specifically, the use of LinkedIn by Dc area residents. The girl must have it in for me because she left me out of the list of locals using LinkedIn, even though a/ I know her (slightly), and b/ I am the second most LinkedIn human in the DC area, and c/ I am tracking the social networking space VERY closely.
Washingtonians using the system include a slew of techies, including CEOs MichaelTessler of BroadSoft in Gaithersburg, Donna Hemmert of Dulles-based OptiView and Eric J. Kuhn of Varsity Group in Washington. Also linking in are many local venture capitalists and investors, such as John May of New Vantage Group, Tim Meyers of Updata Capital, John Backus of Draper Atlantic and quite a few people from In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital arm. Many America Online executives are checking it out, too, as are some politicos like former Clinton White House staffers Michael Nelson and Mike McCurry (although McCurry's profile notes he's not receiving requests for contacts).
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
A WSJ piece caught me up on the start of the practice in shipping containers vis-a-vis real-time communication:
"In its simplest form, a smart container would include the means of detecting whether someone has broken into a sealed container and would have the ability to communicate that information to a shipper or receiver, via satellite or radio. Some advocates of the technology also envision equipping cargo boxes with an array of sensors to monitor temperature, air pressure, motion, chemicals, biological agents or radiation."
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
New Scientist reports that the European Commision is investigating the use of text messaging to report crashed automobiles, authomatically.
"Researchers funded by the European Commission are beginning tests in January of a system called E-merge that automatically senses when a car has crashed and sends a text message telling emergency services in the local language that the accident has taken place.
The system was developed by ERTICO, a transport research organisation based in Brussels, Belgium. Cars are fitted with a cellphone-sized device attached to the underside of the dashboard which is activated by the same sensor that triggers the airbag in a crash. The device includes a cellphone circuit, a GPS positioning unit, and a microphone and loudspeaker.
It registers the severity of the crash by reading the deceleration data from the airbag's sensor. Using GPS information, it works out which country the car is in, and from this it determines in which language to compose an alert message detailing the precise location of the accident.
The device then automatically makes a call to the local emergency services operator. If the car's occupants are conscious, they can communicate with the operator via the speaker and microphone."
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Ross offers a modest proposal to deal with comment spammers: those creeps who insert URLs in your blog that lead to porn or Viagra ads.
"So here's a solution for you. First, turn off comments. Second, do what Cory did and move your discussion to a Tribe (http://boingboing.tribe.net) [Cory notes in comments that his readers did this when they shut comments off because of spam]. This creates a social network-based whitelist for conversations. It raises the cost of commenting to registering with the service and agreeing to policies. It shifts the burden of enforcement to a third party. We really need a protocol of being admitted to the implicit community of readers after application to the author. Moving the community to Tribe.net does that, but the comments are then out of context. This is a failing of blogs, based on the lack of explicit social relationships.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
New research by Martin Reuf of the Stanford Business School examines the factors contributing to innovation, and suggest spending less time with those you know well, and more time with those you know less well. The power of weak ties, again!
"Looking at entrepreneurs' social networks and their career histories to see what the connection is to innovation, Ruef concluded that the most creative entrepreneurs spend less time than average networking with business colleagues who are friends and more time networking with a diverse group that includes acquaintances and strangers. "Contrary to common assumptions," says Ruef, "the evidence suggests that in many cases strong social ties do not provide significant new information, so it helps not to be as embedded in them."
Ruef has found that disparate information and its transmission are keys to innovation. "Weak ties" of acquaintanceship, of colleagues who are not friends, provide non-redundant information and contribute to innovation because they tend to serve as bridges between disconnected social groups," he says. "Weak ties allow for more experimentation in combining ideas from disparate sources and impose fewer demands for social conformity than do strong ties."
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January 14, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Emily Nussbaum's recent NY Times magazine piece, My So-Called Blog, explores the ways that kids -- highschoolers -- are using new media, like blogs and instant messaging -- to socialize.
"Peer into an online journal, and you find the operatic texture of teenage life with its fits of romantic misery, quick-change moods and sardonic inside jokes. Gossip spreads like poison. Diary writers compete for attention, then fret when they get it. And everything parents fear is true. (For one thing, their children view them as stupid and insane, with terrible musical taste.) But the linked journals also form a community, an intriguing, unchecked experiment in silent group therapy -- a hive mind in which everyone commiserates about how it feels to be an outsider, in perfect choral unison." I think "hive mind' really captures the emergent quality of blog networks. Despite its treatment of gossip and the potential for flaming in blogland, this piece is a great counter to the wave of stories recently suggesting that IM and blog use are inevitably negative force in children's lives. A must read.
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January 13, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Another announcement that underscores the growing convergence of real-time communications -- instant messaging, and real-time conferencing -- Bantu and Spectel have announced an integration of their respective instant messaging and web conferencing technologies.
With the level of web-conferencing functionality present in today's leading public or enterprise instant messaging technologies, its hard to imagine how web conferencing companies can compete without integration of instant messaging -- or if adding instant messaging will be enough.
The seamless transition from one mode of interaction -- IM, for example -- to another -- VoIP, for example -- has become more of a commonplace. This medium switching will rapidly become the norm. Note that 40% of IM communication leads to a phone call today. This will quickly become VoIP, as players like Vonage and Skype figure out how to leverage presence appropriately.
The presence network that underlies IM will seep into all other forms of communication, and better them. Why call someone if they are not available? And if they are available, let's call that meeting, right now, and get everyone into an ad hoc real time conference to resolve the issues, right now.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
 Steve Wozniak's new company, Wheels of Zeus, announced a broad pact with Motorola to incorporate the company's mobility technology into new home electronics products:
"The company's wOz Platform includes a reference design, wireless network, and online service that enable people to locate and take better care of what's important to them. The unique, local wireless network technology of wOz can provide long-range performance in harsh environments, and long battery life at a low cost." wOz is a GPS-enabled system, with a "wOznet" wireless network, and an online service, which enables users to track status of tagged objects (like your six-year-old, grandfather, or Lexus) from a web browser.
I recently read that IDC estimates spending on RFID in the retail supply chain will grow from $91.5 million last year to nearly $1.3 billion in 2008. With offerings like wOz being built into the next generation of consumer electronics, we could see those figures for consumer electronics spike as well.
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January 12, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Judith Meskill caught a news story that seems like so 2003: "InterMedia Inc. ... announced today that they have listed their
website RateOrDate for sale on eBay. The owner and CEO of
InterMedia Inc., Jay Gould, recently expanded the company by creating a sister
company SocialTree Inc., which will focus their efforts on the recent and
highly financed online social networking industry.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Christopher Allen offers his distilled experience after fiddling around with various social networkings solutions, and then lays out the form of The Perfect Social Networking Service: "My ideal service would have the the multiple professional affiliation features of LinkedIn, but also allow me to show non-professional affilations. It would allow me to form intentional communities like Tribes.Net, but would also let me do a Wiki in addition to a message board. It would have meeting/party invite services like eVite, and blogging features like LiveJournal. It would have an endorsement system like LinkedIn integrated not only with professional endorsements, but personal endorsements as well, and you could even endorse intentional communities. It would let me better map and control my network, giving different friends different privileges. It would handle the release of my personal information like Ryse, but less clunky." I have an upcoming coumn in Darwin (sometime this week, I think) where I opine in a similar fashion about the fusion of blogging's implicit social networking with the explicit relationship management of Ryze, LinkedIn, Spoke, VisiblePath, etc..
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
CNet reports that the FBI and US Justice Departments are continuing their efforts to listen into your VoIP conversations. "This is not the first time the Bush administration has expressed concern about terrorists and other lawbreakers using VoIP to avoid wiretaps. As previously reported by CNET News.com, a proposal presented quietly to the FCC in July sought guaranteed surveillance access to broadband providers. But the latest submission, which follows a recent FCC forum on Internet telephony, is more detailed than before and specifically targets VoIP providers as a regulatory focus."
"When weighing the FBI's request, the FCC will have to decide whether a 1994 law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) applies to VoIP providers. The law is ambiguous. It clearly requires "telecommunications carriers" to provide ready wiretapping access while explicitly exempting "information services." If the FCC decides CALEA does not apply, the debate would shift to Congress, which could decide to amend the law.
When Internet links are used to carry voice calls that begin and end in the traditional, circuit-switched network — a move that Verizon Communications announced Wednesday — that would easily fall within CALEA's existing definitions. But Internet-to-Internet voice links like those offered by VoIP companies Vonage and Skype are closer to information services and fall into a regulatory gray area. The status of voice conversations carried through instant-messaging programs is even more unclear, as is the FCC's ability to compel overseas VoIP providers to comply with U.S. rules." This will turn out to be a huge mess, and in the final analysis, a waste of time. Those who are truly interested in total secrecy will be able to use encrypted channels of communication -- even VoIP -- which will be unbreakable. That's without even considering the personal liberty issues related to expanding the license we have handed to the government to snoop on us, and the possible misuses to which these can be applied.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Recent research on the Internet as political information source, shows what I consider a sad state of affairs: "Even among Internet users, TV reigns supreme. Some 76 percent of all Internet users still say they get most of their news from TV. And the Internet even trails newspapers among Internet users (37 percent to 20 percent). Among Internet users, 20 percent say the Internet is the place they have been getting most of their news and 17 percent say radio is the place they have gotten most of their news.
Internet users rely on big media companies for their news, rather than exclusively Internet-based news operations. Some 41 percent of Internet users get political news regularly or sometimes from portals like AOL; 38 percent get political news sometimes or regularly from the Web sites of major news organizations such as CNN and the New York Times; 10 percent get political news from online news magazine and opinion sites such as Slate.com.
Internet users are more information hungry, as a rule, than non-Internet users. They are more likely to consult all kinds of media for information. Thus, Internet users who get political news are more likely than non-Internet users to get political information from cable news networks, their daily papers, talk radio, political talk shows, National Public Radio, print newsmagazines, C-Span, and comedy shows." I guess the Pew Research groups running this research haven't broken out blogs as a separate source of information distinct from web sites managed by media groups, but I hope they start doing so.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
BusinessWeek Online Technology Editor Alex Salkever interviewed Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom, and I find the discussion about interoperability between new Internet-based telephony services (like Skype, Vonage, and others) and the PSTN (public switched telephone network) central to the adoption of these technologies.
I am also eager to see how and when other services -- like Vonage -- begin to incorporate instant messaging-like presence information. Imagine if users of Vonage could see whether I am "available for calls" prior to calling me?
By the way, I have been happily using Vonage for the past few months, and its great -- with the exception of the flakiness of my Comcast cable connectivity. But Vonage supports the automatic transfer to an alternate number -- in my case, my cell -- if the unit is not reachable. It really has been an effortless transition.
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January 09, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Just a brief note to point you in the direction of the left column over there <-----
where you'll see a field into which you can put your email address. Subscribe and you'll start receive emails from us every day or so that alert you to our latest coverage.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
David Weinberger writes about the increasingly prevalent practice of leaving 'social spam' in blog comments. He notes, unhappily, that the comments are often bland and inexact encouragement to the blog author, suitable for nearly any context: "Frankly, I'd rather be spammed by someone touting penile enhancements than drown in innocuous platitudes.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Chirgwin won't relent, despite the following assessment of Plaxo's lawyer, as related by Scott Epstein of Plaxo: "I spoke with our attorney, who has a good base of knowledge on anti-spam legislation. He reviewed this issue and found nothing in Australian law or the laws of any other jurisdiction that would make use of the Plaxo service a violation of anti-spam, privacy or any other applicable law.
Again, Plaxo is a "carriage service" (in the parlance of the Australian law) that enables individuals to contact all or some of the other individuals in their address book to get updated contact information. Plaxo does not send out unsolicited e-mails on its own accord. It is true that the content of update requests includes a request for the recipient to join Plaxo and other information about Plaxo, but this is similar to the ad for Yahoo! that appears on the bottom of e-mails sent by Yahoo! users (like many other e-mail services)."
Chirgwin can't resist a parting comment or two: "Without being too contentious, there is at least one difference between advertisements in Yahoo's free e-mails and messages sent through Plaxo: I have never had a Yahoo! E-mail in which the advertisement was personalised to the recipient." Huh? Plaxo is not pushing ads, it is attempting to get updating contact information on behalf of one of its users.
"As to readers who have e-mailed me saying that they found Plaxo useful, I guess I would reiterate my original concern: I simply can't devote my time to data entry for other people. The “backchannel” effect on someone like me could quickly become overwhelming; so I choose not to take part." Again, if you would simply register as a user, you wouldn't have to do any data entry.
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January 08, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Interesting thread going on, with Tim Oren riffing on recent remarks by David Weinberger at M2M regarding the limits of social software which are followed up on by Jeff Jarvis. One of Tim's remarks:
"I think Weinberger's argument could be reasonably restated as 'relationships are contextual.' There is value in representing and supporting relationships in their original context. Trying to abstract them from that context, and use them to market / connect for business / whatever, is a fraught proposition. Ordinary folks are now finding out why field sales people keep their best contacts 'on their hip' and lie like thieves to the SFA tools.
In context, to me, boils down to "it's a feature." There's value, but it can't be abstracted away into a stand alone business, which is the filter that I run as a VC. Which puts me in agreement with your skepticism re $100m going into this sector." Hmmm...
My feeling is that social software is inherently different from, for example, sales force automation. If a company emerges that has developed a super-powerful social networking engine and/or developed the killer appraoch to managing the context and content aspects of social relationships, that technology will likely be licensed as an integral component of next-generation, social software-enabled applications. Just as SFA companies don't roll their own database technology, or application server technology, or instant messaging technology -- prefering to license it from others -- I imagine the same will happen in this market. Some may decide to roll-up a very SFA-oriented social networking app into their offering, but I anticipate the shakeout of app vs infrastructure players in the space relatively quickly. So there is room in the space for both direct social networking applications -- like dating, job search, deal acceleration, collaboration discovery, etc. -- as well as core infrastructure development -- like social network analysis, digital reputation management, and so on.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Bambi Franscisco reports on Speed Dating being launched by Match.com
"With Online SpeedMatching, InterActiveCorp's Match.com members go to an electronic prescheduled SpeedMatching session on the Internet where they can participate in four to eight dates per session. The participants have a four-minute phone conversation with each date. During each conversation, a profile -- complete with age, location, a brief biography and photo of their date -- is displayed on their computer screen."
Real time matchmaking is here!
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
The inevitable fleas-on-the-dog effect: as social tools come to the fore, and millions are using them, we can anticipate the deluge of Social Spam.
"Waiting for the Other Shoe
Companies that rely on e-mail to keep in touch with customers may be compelled to take a good long look in the mirror, as this major onslaught against spam takes shape.
"Now that the 'CRM revolution' has given us all these new direct-marketing technologies, we have gone to the opposite extreme and think nothing of sending out a couple million e-mails at a time," Aberdeen Group vice president Denis Pombriant told NewsFactor.
It is more important than ever for companies to develop protective e-mail methodologies and policies, Pombriant says -- especially as marketing and contact technologies reach greater levels of sophistication.
"I've often said social networking has potential to be a power tool for spam. If you think spam is bad now, imagine the plight of a person who has a lot of contacts and a big network whose contact information gets in the hands of a spammer."" Obviously, the efforts that the social tools providers are taking with regard to security and privacy need to be maintained, and probably extended. There is some concern about the potential for identity spoofing (see recent post) which is a likely backdoor apporach for such scenarios.
I can almost imagine a Philip K Dick-esque sci fi thriller that hinges on a malefactor's identity theft of some highly connected and influential person, and the possible global disruption that ensue from this uber-networker's persona leaking out a rumor of, for example, impending monetary disaster in some southeast Asian nation.
Social networking terrorism? Once our social networks become encoded and channeled through software communication channels, they can be subverted.
The vendors will have to do more to ensure that the appropriate precautions -- in security, privacy, and ethical controls -- are in place before there is a horror story. And even one penetration -- one network stolen and used for social spim -- would echo in the media for years.
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January 07, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Just when I was sure that one more top ten predictions would drive me nuts, Dave Pollard offers a list that lines up so directly with my own rantings that I almost wish I wrote my own list.
"4. Blog functionality is a critical component of Social Networking, and Social Networking will transform blogging (and also transform the Internet, the media, the way we communicate, and even the evolution of business) - Social Networking Applications (recently voted Technology of the Year by Business 2.0 magazine) will go beyond just allowing you to publish what's on your mind and browse what's on other people's. They will allow you to map and manage your networks, the communities to which you belong, your strong and weak ties. They will evolve blogging from clumsy, mostly one-way communication to a rich, two-way seamless multi-media communications medium that will allow you to identify and connect simply and powerfully with people you want to know better (for personal, practical or business reasons). Build deep relationships. Collaborate on awesome projects. Find the next president." Blog On!
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Kubi Software has announced their $8M series C round, with finds coming from previous investors Lazard Technology Partners and VIMAC Ventures, LLC, and North Bridge Venture Partners, a new investor.
I reviewed the company's Kubi collaboration technology earlier this year, contrasting its approach -- embedding a collaboration client in Outlook or Notes clients -- with the peer-to-peer model offered by Groove. Here's a few comments: "Kubi is not point for point equivalent to Groove -- it provides no real-time communication capability, for example, and its toolset is not as large or as obviously extensible as Groove. However, the capabilities it offers are a great advantage for people trying to collaborate on a peer to peer basis using Outlook.
The technology is based on the creation of specialized Outlook folders which contain more-or-less normal looking Outlook forms, such as tasks, calendar entries, contacts, discussions, and documents. However, these Kubi folders are in fact being shared by members of a project team, in a manner equivalent to Exchange sharing and replication, but without an Exchange server. This is done by sending specialized messages from one Kubi user to another, exploiting the fact that Outlook is an email client. These messages are intercepted by Kubi's client software and translated into updates of the shared content. Note also that Kubi has a Lotus Note client. As a result, I can collaborate with dozens of folks on dozens of shared projects, none of whom have to share Exchange or Notes server technology.
The invitation process is simple and intuitive. I did encounter a few well-known limitations and bugs in the current beta, but I managed to get around them. In one case I had to update from an older version of Windows 2000 and Outlook, and then encountered a very slow initialization of a project that included several hundred emails, but in the end, everything has worked as advertised.
I have created over a dozen Kubi spaces in my Outlook client, and because the interface is Outlook, I have found the interface obvious. Kubi has provided a number of dashboards to make managing shared work easy. When you click the folder icon associated with a Kubi space, you see a collection of the most recently updated information, as well as upcoming tasks and calendar entries associated with the space. When you click the root Kubi icon, called 'Kubi', you are presented with a cross-project dashboard, displaying hot items from all spaces."
I recommend that anyone interested in team collaboration solutions, and who has already made an investment in Exchange or Domino mail servers, take a look at Kubi.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Sonia Arrison writes in a piece called Is Friendster the New TIA? an interesting take on social networking: are we voluntarily offering up information on our interests, activities, and predilections that could allow the unscrupulous and/or security agencies to discern our every move?
"The idea of centralizing data to find patterns and links among people is no longer limited to governments or corporations. Individuals are now getting into the game with "social networking" web sites, the hottest thing in Silicon Valley.
Friendster, Ryze, Linked-in, Tribe.Net, Yafro, Plaxo, and Spoke are a networker's dream but a privacy-hawk's nightmare. These sites are aggregating information, provided by people themselves, that could prove almost as useful as a Total Information Awareness (TIA) program to government snoops."
She poses some interesting scenarios: FBI agents create false identities on Friendster ("Fraudsters") who gather data on the unsuspecting, either manually or through the use of Carnivore-like software programs.
I think it is just as likely -- along the same line of argument -- that the networks will become the scene where viral marketing groups of the big ad agencies try to push new trends and memes to the hip, connected, early adopters that are flocking there. Just as insidious, in a way.
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January 06, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
Todd Tweedy, president of the Tweedy Group sent me an interesting email. Todd is a well-known figure in the instant messaging marketplace (co-chaired the recent Instant Messaging Planet Conference), and serves as president of the DC New Media Society.
 Todd recently moved from DC to the farm country of Virginia, which serves as the comic plotline of an upcoming Discovery Channel biopic, entitled City Slickers.
"City Slickers
Gabriella and her high tech husband Todd have decided to say goodbye to city life. They want to bring up new baby Sebastian in a little slice of country heaven, but they have to move out of their city digs in just sixty days!" This I have to watch.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
An interesting follow-up to the recent flap caused by Richard Chirgwin's article that suggested Plaxo would run afoul of Australian anti-spam laws. Scott Epstein, Plaxo's new head of marketing, commented on Chirgwin's piece: "Your article implies that Plaxo is spam. Plaxo is a software program that users consciously and actively download. They use it to automate a process that people do manually everyday: exchange contact information. Like to Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or Outlook, Plaxo is a software application and service that people use to send emails. While Plaxo computers handle the mechanism of sending the emails on their behalf, Plaxo, the company, does not send emails to anyone.
Unlike spammers, Plaxo offers clearly identifiable sender information; has a opt-out policy that is prominently displayed and works; is registered with both TRUSTe and VeriSign; and strives to live up to painstakingly detailed privacy policies. Plaxo has also partnered with Cloudmark, a leading anti-spam software company to provide Plaxo users with additional options to fight spam.
Opting-out
Plaxo launched an opt-out policy earlier this year, which provides users multiple ways to opt-out of receiving Plaxo update requests. If you do not wish to receive Plaxo update requests from our users, you can go to the following URL and block all future emails: http://www.plaxo.com/opt-out.
In less than seven months, Plaxo has registered more than one million users and more than 15 million people have responded to their requests for updated ccontact information. It is a simple and secure way to make sure that all your information is correct and complete." I had an email interchange with Chirgwin, in which he maintains that he is merely looking at Plaxo in the light of the Australian anti-spam law, but I believe there is no grounds for such an attitude, except Luddite anti-technology bias.
Chirgwin counters Epstein's comments by closing: "The question which provoked the article - what's the standing of Plaxo messages under Australia's anti-spam legislation? - is, I think, still valid, so I look forward to continuing my dialogue with Mr Epstein." I guess this furor will not quietly die, and Plaxo will need to continue to take the high ground in the discussion.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
I signed up for the beta of Eurekster, which uses a collaborative filtering approach to web searching, based on the searches of your 'friends' in the Eurekster network.
"What's Hot in Your Network
eurekster uses the six-degrees of separation concept to learn from your extended network of contacts and deliver you prioritised results based on the success and proximity of the searches they have done."
I can imagine that it is helpful to know "what's hot" in your network (a la Blogdex), and if your network is homogeneous (and hard-working in training the system) you will get better search results than keyword- or editorial-based solutions.
My problem is that my network is heterogeneous: really a collection of independent networks. As more and more of my networks are brought into Eurekster, the group will more and more approximate a random sample of people, and this will cancel out the social network effect. The answer is that I really need to be able to partition the network into discrete subnetworks: what are my social software buddies looking at today? What about my personal friends? What about people in the 20194 area? Until social networks attack this angle, we will be dealing with a very coarse-grained approximation for what is actually going on in social interactions.
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January 05, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
I discovered (courtesy of Many-2-Many) a list of interesting social software ideas, including geographical reputation ("what do the people around here think of this restaurant") along the lines of the "Tag and Scan" piece I wrote not too long ago.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
In a recent Herald article, the Scottish newspaper reports on the emergence of radio text messaging as an ad medium:
"One Californian company which provides RDS content to more than a dozen stations has started selling "radio text" advertisements to music and film companies, as well as several mortgage lenders.
North Carolina-based First Charter bank is to experiment this month with scrolling text to coincide with the airing of its adverts on commercial radio channels. Messages will include the text "Free gift" and "Call now", followed by a hotline number. Meanwhile, other companies are likely to see the attraction in advertising a movie as its theme song plays on the radio or promoting the concerts and albums of playlisted artists.
Concern has been expressed in the US about the safety risks of encouraging motorists to read sponsors' messages while driving. Former Green presidential candidate and consumer advocate Ralph Nader said: "All these kinds of distraction add up to the following: the driver is paying more attention to the inside of the vehicle than the dynamics outside."" And it has been shown to be dangerous to look at the speedometer, too.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
In a piece in TelevisionWeek, Time Warner is reported to have "lost about 600,000 subscribers between September 2002 and September 2003."
Analysts believe that AOL is possibly for sale, no matter what Time Warner execs are saying: "The real question becomes whether or not AOL is for sale. For the record, the company denies AOL is on the block. However, many analysts remain skeptical. "Sure, they would sell at the right price. But I don't believe the cash flow at the online unit is headed downward," commented Jordan Rohan, an influential analyst at Soundview Technologies. "2004 could be a good year for them."
What seems obvious is that the AOL service and many of its divisional components fit perfectly into the category of "nonstrategic assets," which Time Warner says it wants to unload. But the complications may outweigh the benefits, and at least for the moment, the AOL unit is still throwing off significant cash flow.
There are persistent reports that interested parties have been circling AOL, especially Barry Diller and his InterActiveCorp. and Microsoft and its MSN Internet service provider. Mr. Diller's IAC is said to be interested in the e-commerce applications, and MSN is eyeing AOL's 25 million U.S. online subscribers." MSN buying AOL is on way to get interoperability between AIM and MSN, at least.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Interesting piece at P2PNet.net by Annalee Newitz that points out that social networking sites are fairly lax in their security provisions, which makes it possible for your identity to be compromised. An interesting argument is made, suggesting that the reason behind identity spoofing is perhaps the value of a digital reputation, rather than something directly fungible, like your credit card number.
"What makes these attacks novel in the context of a social discovery site isn't how they are deployed, but why. What does an attacker have to gain by spoofing the identity of a member of Tribe or LinkedIn? What kinds of damage can be done by hacking into a LiveJournal account? The answer has to do with the public's growing dependence on social reputation systems.
As we come closer to quantifying reputation, the identities we use in online communities begin to have real-world value. A top-ranked member of a network like eBay might be able to sell more items than her peers. A high-karma user on a site devoted to legal issues could have a tremendous influence over public policy. According to social networks analyst Clay Shirky, identity spoofing is possibly the greatest threat to social discovery networks. "When your reputation is valuable, it becomes worth exploiting. It makes a stolen identity a more valuable commodity.""
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Read a piece about the Jitux.A MSN Messenger Worm: turns out new viruses are being devised to attack on multiple communication paths at once. The article also includes the term "malware" to describe worms, viruses, and other malevolent forms of software, which I haven't seen before.
"A new worm that quickly infects its victims via MSN Messenger is not terribly rampant and was mitigated by poor timing on the part of its author, but the Jitux.A worm does illustrate how use of new avenues of attack is likely to grow in the coming year.
It used to be that viruses and worms almost always traveled and spread through e-mail attachments and required a host file, but because of advances in the automation and complexity of malware, more and more malicious programs have begun using new methods to spread, such as instant messaging , peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and malicious Web sites."
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
A recent New York Times piece covers a lot of ground re: instant messaging use within families, and cites a study from New York University that suggests instant messaging may make it easier for teenagers to discuss difficult topics:
"Teenagers already use online communications to take on difficult topics with one another, said Katelyn McKenna, a research assistant professor in psychology at New York University. Preliminary results from a study she conducted last year, she said, suggest that "they are able to talk with one another about issues that bother them more readily online than when they are talking face to face."
Lissa Parsonnet said that her daughter, Dorrie, is sometimes more open to talking with her and her husband online about difficult subjects, like conflicts with friends, than in person.
"She talks to us as if we're people, not parents," she said."
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
AOL Releases Top Spam List, which include (what a surprise) "Viagra," "Lowest mortgage rates," "Hot XXX action," "As seen on Oprah," "online pharmacy," "get bigger," "online degree," "lowest insurance rates," "work from home" and "get out of debt."
The numbers for blocked spam are truly horrific: "During calendar 2003, AOL blocked nearly 500 billion spam messages from reaching user inboxes, an average of 40 fewer such messages per day per subscriber account. The company said it regularly blocks 75 percent to 80 percent of incoming mail as spam." Email is on the verge of completely breaking down. Rather than propping up the system, we will wind up moving into communication approaches that keep us safe from virulent marketing, like instant messaging.
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
Steve Gillmor's Best and Worst of Messaging & Collaboration in '03 includes a shot at AOL re: lack of interoperability in "public" instant messaging networks:
"Lack of IM interoperability -- AOL and Time Warner get an Oscar for agreeing to stay out of IM video in return for keeping their buddy lists locked up. Post-bubble, Time Warner drops the AOL name, gets $780 million from Microsoft, can do video-conferencing anyway, and still no interoperability. And the winner is: not us."
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
In a piece that spoofs the endless predictions for 2004 that have Manjoo and Mieszkowski predict that Google will move past their search engine start and simply take over the world
"Remember, Google is watching you."
Also, they report that Osama bin Laden will be captured through his use of Friendster.
"FBI investigators, who now routinely use Friendster in their searches for terrorists, piece together these connections and hit the jackpot -- Osama bin Laden's profile complete with an e-mail address, OBLbKickin@aol.com. Investigators initiate a virtual romance with the terrorist leader, and he invites what he believes to be his virtual paramour up to the cave for drinks. Sadly, none of OBL's 49 Friendster friends -- although many give him glowing testimonials on the Internet -- spring to his defense in the real world."
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January 02, 2004
Posted by Stowe Boyd
A new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that Internet adoption has leveled off to about 63% of the American population for the past two years. They predict that it will rise to the 94% level that telephones have, but that it may take 10 years or more.
A real generational divide appears when looking at what people are going online and what they are doing there: "About a quarter of Americans have never been online.
More than 75 percent of Americans between the ages of 12 and 17 use the Internet.
Young Internet users like instant messaging and downloading music. Older Americans more often seek health information and material at government websites.
The most popular online activity is sending e-mail.
In August 2003, 66 million Americans were online on a typical day."
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Posted by Stowe Boyd
ZDNet UK reports that Internet users are increasing bypassing the browser as they use apps to access the Internet.
"The most popular application in December was Windows Media Player, reaching 34 percent of Internet users; AOL Instant Messenger, reaching 20.27 percent; RealNetworks' players, reaching 19.76 percent; MSN Messenger, reaching 19.31 percent; and Yahoo Messenger, reaching 12.26 percent."
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