danah On Supporting the Mac
danah, who is Mac-happy, points out that social tools vendors are stupidly risking alienating the very innovators that in principle they should be courting:
The problem is that these companies are trying out "post-everything" technologies through old economy models: namely, mass marketing rather than cluster marketing.[from apophenia: supporting the Mac is required for social computing - pointer from Cory at Boing Boing]I keep beta-testing software the crashes this, that or the other on my Mac. [Given, i'm really really really good at crashing everything.] Worse: i'm often asked to beta test things that don't work on the Mac. I want to scream.
You can build enterprise software that doesn't work on a Mac but you CANNOT build social technologies that don't work on the Mac. Who are key driving forces behind sociable technology? Freaks, (independent) geeks, academics and other marginalized populations. What do marginalized groups use when it comes to technology? Surprise - they use subversive tools. Conferences organized by geeks, freaks and academics are like walking into an Apple distribution warehouse. If you only lived in this world, you would think that Apple makes up 70% of the market share.
It doesn't. But it does matter, particularly if you're building sociable technologies and you want the attention of the geeks, freaks and academics. This includes the bloggers, who are often bleeding edge geeky freaky academically-minded folks.
Sociable technologies are not enterprise technologies nor are they low-end consumer technologies. They require connecting clusters of people. And to do that, you start with the "mavens" to get to the hubs. Mavens are not mainstream users; they don't play by mainstream rules. They value their position as outsider, alternative. They love new gadgets that have cultural value. This is the type that Apple has done a fantastic job at attracting and maintaining.
In a sociable technology economy, it is no longer acceptable to treat Mac users as second-class citizens.
This like the chilling analysis of how network theory should change public health efforts to eradicate AIDS, as offered by Albert-László Barabási’s in his amazing Linked. Namely, we should treat the infected who are likely to have the most sexual partners since they are the ones most likely to infect others. Turns out that the math demonstrates that doing so breaks the epidemic's exponential character, while trying to treat everyone on a first-come first-served basis -- which is seemingly fair -- does not.
Obviously, social tools vendors should target their viral technologies at those most connected, and many of those are elegance bigots, using Macs. If you want the meme to spread, and spread like an epidemic that is hard to stop, target the connected, and forget the others.
Social Alibi Network
The Financial Times had an interesting piece this week that talks about new Nokia software that allows you to disguise your location by providing fake background noise, like traffic or a thunderstorm. This is a lot like the SounderCover service I blogged earlier this year. This service, which I don't think was named in the FT piece, works on certain Nokia phones, and works in real time: as a call is coming in, you decide if you want a background alibi. The software also allows you to have a background phone ring in 15 seconds, so you can plead busyness, and end an unwanted call.
But the article also digs into something more interesting: a social alibi network for SMS users, formed as a club within the SMS.ac service:
I am joining, so the next time I have someone call you and say that I am in bed with the flu and can't make our lunch meeting, it might be a fake-out.Rhymer Rigby[from Phoney excuses at the touch of a button]"One man went to a party until four in the morning," continues Mr Wilfahrt. "He couldn't go into work the next day so he solicited responses from the club. Eventually he got a female club member to pose as his wife and say that he was ill." His boss bought the tale - even though the man in question was unmarried.
"Of course, this sort of thing has always happened," says Jakob Nielsen, a consultant on IT usability at the US-based Norman Nielsen Group. "But with alibi clubs you have access to a whole world to back you up."
Moreover, continues Mr Nielsen, not only can users draw from a deeper pool of excuses, but people are also far less likely to have a problem lying to strangers; in fact they may even find it rather fun. "You don't know who you're covering for and the social constraints break down. We've seen a lot of this already with e-mail. People are far more likely to be rude because it's less personal," says Mr Nielsen.
Instant Messaging in the Attention Economy -- 26 Oct 2004
You're invited to this complimentary seminar, covering business topics from leaders in today's leading companies—delivered via web conferencing from Microsoft Office Live Meeting. All you need is a web browser and a phone. We hope you'll join us.
Instant Messaging in the Attention Economy
October 26, 2004
9:00AM - 10:00AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
12:00PM - 1:00PM Eastern Time (US & Canada)
Speaker: Stowe Boyd, President/COO of Corante
Seminar Overview
The discussion around instant messaging generally centers on the first order effects of its deployment: costs, risks, and direct savings. This was true of all preceding communication media as they were being adopted by business, as well: telephone, fax, email, and cell phones. But as we now know, the second order effects – that generally take much longer to become manifest – are significantly more important in the long run.
We now live in the world that email built; but are headed for a world where instant messaging will become the foundation technology of communication. What will that world be like, how will it be different, and why should we work to adopt the new modes of interaction and communication that this medium requires?
We are in a time of unparalleled information access, but this paradoxically limits our ability to absorb information, because we have limited bandwidth: only so much attention to go around. Herbert Simon, the Nobel laureate, once wrote, ‘What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.’
Linda Stone coined the expression “Continuous Partial Attention”, characterizing it as an aberration, a disorder, and an unnecessary disruption in business. But the benefits that arise from reorganizing around real-time coordination, collaboration, and communication pathways – most importantly the acceleration of response and increased parallelism – outweighs the apparent change in social mores needed to accommodate this new form of interaction.
This seminar will cover:
- What are the first order benefits from IM, and why are they less important than generally argued?
- What is “Continuous Partial Attention” and why does its adoption offer advantages, not disruption?
- Why does IM etiquette matter, and what can we learn from the biggest users of IM?
- How can we gain the acceleration latent in massive real-time communication across projects, the enterprise, and the extended enterprise; and what role can instant messaging play?
Click here to register or get more info.
danah On "Why I Love My Sidekick"
Just like the new gizmo from Verizon, the Ogo I blogged last week, new gadgets that treat IM as primary and other communication as secondary are being targetted at kids and hipsters like danah. This is the front of a transformational wave that old fogeys don't even get, and don't see coming.danah boyd[from apophenia: why i love my sidekick]I ran into a skater kid on the BART yesterday who was sporting the newest Sidekick. I peered over with envy. He told me it was fucking rad and that a friend of his worked at T-mobile and snagged him one before it came out.
I keep seeing kids wearing their sidekicks around their neck on chains. At the X-Games this summer, there were tons of sidekicks. The Hiptop is definitely appealing to the hip-hop youth crowd. And for good reason.
First, look at the device. It looks like a gaming device. It says: you will use me for play and textual communication. Forget the phone - who talks on the phone anyhow? Certainly not you... you don't want to shove a piece of toast up against your ear now do you? And besides, if you want to talk, you'll use an earpiece.
Next, look at the interface. There are no horrible menus, no poorly named programs. It's simple: scroll on the right and find everything you need. AIM is obvious. Email is obvious. SMS is obvious. Everything you need with simple scrolls. The feedback mechanism is purrfect - little icons in the upper corner no matter what screen you're on. And if you're away from the device, it'll buzz for certain messages and turn pretty colors for others. Feedback. Constant feedback.
Three things would make it beyond perfect for me: a longer battery, a retractable ear piece (i always forget mine) and the ability to add programs to the ones available. I hear synching is improved with the latest version, but i haven't tried it out. That was previously on my list.
But the fact is that using the Sidekick makes me feel like a subculture kid. And even as the mainstream kids are picking up on them, only a few adults are. Adults don't get the importance of text, particularly AIM text. And the Sidekick understands that American kids are mostly on AIM and it's a central feature, not a pain in the ass add-on. This is what texting looks like in the States. Turning AIM texting into a gameboy and voila!
Like Rock&Roll, online gaming, and blogging, these social tools will shape society at a very basic level.
Instant Message Barbie
Instant messaging is more that ubiquitous: even dolls are using it!
I couldn't find anything at the Mattel Barbie sites, but did find it at Sears:[from Mobile Technology Weblog]Mattel in India have launched a Barbie doll, impeccably dressed as always, but also with her own must-have accessory - a mobile phone. But this is no toy - the mobile works. Barbie's owners can Instant Message Barbie and friends who have a Barbie too. Plus the look of the phone can be changed to match her clothes. It's priced at R 1199 (USD 26), according to The Statesman.
Whatever next - a phone for dogs? Ahh, we had that last week.
Get hip with technology, and instant message with Barbie and her friends. The included instant messaging "phone" has a real working text messaging feature. Girls can send real messages to Barbie doll and receive a message back. Send messages to friends who have an Instant Message Girl Barbie doll, too. Each doll also comes with an extra face plate, trendy fashions and a cool messenger bag. Measures approximately 12" tall. Requires 3 button cell batteries (not included). Includes 3-"AA" batteries and 3 button cell batteries
Big on Small Talk
David Weinberger makes the case for small talk:
David Weinberger[from JOHO]Small talk lets you and your interlocutor take little steps until you find ground you share.
Over at Headshift, Suw picks up on David's meme, and elaborates on the loss of opportunity in today's workplace to rub antennae together in constructive ways:
Suw Charman[from Headshift]The demise of the communal teabreak in offices has probably done more harm that good. The habit in many offices is that people work through their breaks, including lunch, and the idea of taking a short break mid-morning and mid-afternoon is very much frowned upon. People also have a tendency not to take breaks communally anymore except for the odd lunch or drinks after work. These trends decrease the opportunity for face-to-face small talk in the workplace.
Instead, people use email, instant messaging programme or external blogs or bulletin boards in order to get their fix of chitchat. The social requirement for small talk hasn't gone away, it's just moved online.
At the Social Tools for Enterprise Symposium, Euan Semple talked about his experiences implementing social software internally at the BBC. He found that a significant fraction of posts on the bulletin boards were not overtly to do with work, but either passing on experiences gained outside of work or the sort of small talk that glues communities together. But, as Euan says, "People get to trust each other through small talk, and I actively defend it against those who say it is not work related."
At Headshift we hold the same view. Implementing blogs and other social tools in a work environment allows us to provide individuals with their own voice and the opportunity to connect witwith colleagues and build relationships using, at least in part, constructive small talk. Creating a way for people to comfortably engage in small talk, and removing the stigma attached to it, will help them create and maintain the sorts of social ties that allow them to both feel more comfortable and function more effectively in the workplace.
In fact, social tools are the only hope we have of holding on to the annealing benefits of small talk-ish interactions. There is too much movement, timeshifting, and geographic dislocation to keep up with your office buddy, who was transferred to another building across town, or to another city, and the new folks that have moved into your building are likewise too time pressured for tea or beers after work. We have to wrest tiny snippets out of the flow of everyday work, note that Peter has come on line by sending a brief "wassup?" or pinging Greg with some tidbit of news. If we don't reach out through these social tools we will live increasingly isolated and less fulfilling lives.
And as David points out, finding shared ground, step by step, is why we should all be big on small talk.
How Americans Use Instant Messaging
Pew Charitable Trust report by Eulynn Shiu and Amanda Lenhart on How Americans Use Instant Messaging has been released. Some findings:
Although most internet users favor email over IM as a form of communication, nearly a quarter of IM users say they instant message more than they email [emphasis mine]:I am not surprised to learn that those more likely to use IM are younger and technology savvy:
- 24% of those 54 million IM users report using IM more frequently than email and 6% of IM users say they use IM as much as they use email.
- 70% report using email more than instant messaging.
- 36% of IM users say they use IM every day and 63% say they use IM at least several times a week.
Within the instant messaging Gen Y (18-27 years) age group, 46% report using IM moreIf you want to see the future, look to Gen X and Y. Email is on the way down: it's the future surface mail.
frequently than email. In contrast, only 18% of Gen X-ers (28-39 years) instant message more often than emailing. In older generations the percentage is even smaller.
- 21% of IM-ers in each of the Gen Y and Gen X age groups log onto IM several times a day, followed by 17% of Trailing Boomers (40-49), 15% of Leading Boomers (50-59), 10% of Matures (60-68), and a mere 9% of the After Work (69 and older) age group.
- 35%, or the largest portion of those who IM for about an hour are Gen Y-ers. In contrast, the greatest percentage of instant messengers who IM for less than 15 minutes consist of Trailing Boomers (26%).
I found other demographics interesting, as well: that women IM more than men, and lower income people IM more than those with higher income. Personally, I interpret that with the natural conservativism of older, more well-educated, and more well-off people, who tend to stick with established communication media out of a sense of formality and perceived rightness. IM does tend toward the informal and spontaneous, and has dropped a lot of the ancient letter-writing style that still pervades email, with the antiquated "Dear Mr. Jones" and "Sincerely," and so on.
On the other hand, IM is a conversational medium, and a lot of the old etiquette folderol is just not there at all, and its hard to push it back in. It would be nearly impossible to IM someone saying, "Dear Mrs. McGillicuddy, How are you today?" No, the more typical "hi, what's up" exemplifies the split between IM and email.
I find that the extensive IM that I am doing these days is leading to a more IM-ish style of email, where I am not starting messages with the recipient's name (they know who they are, don't they, and its in the To: field already) and I am likewise dropping the 'best wishes - Stowe' at the end, for similar reasons. I am increasingly using email (when I use it) as very slow IM, rather than thinking of IM as very fast email.
[Pointer from Kevin Philbin]
Dvorak Dismisses Disruptive Technology
Over at IdeaFlow, Leslie Martinich has stumbled over another hunk-of-junk idea promulgated by self-styled social critic and genius, John Dvorak. His newest craziness is to dis Clay Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma) and the idea of disruptive technology in general:
Leslie Martinich[from Disruptive? Radical? Discontinuous?]John Dvorak in "The Myth of Disruptive Technology" calls the "concept of disruptive technology" "the biggest crock of the new millennium."
He claims that "There is no such thing as a disruptive technology."
I grant that much has been made of disruptive technology, but I disagree with Dvorak's claim.
I consider the work done in this field in the last 5 years to be useful in conveying information to folks who might not have spent much time studying history. Innovations (new technologies) change (or disrupt) the way people do things. And they change (or disrupt) the way businesses operate.
And leaders are better off if they understand the dynamics of technology and change.
Other terms used to describe the same phenomena include "discontinuous" or "radical" innovations. And we can find the same sorts of dynamics at work, whether we use one term or another. There is plenty of wonderful research on this topic, starting perhaps with Schumpeter, with the even scarier term, "creative destruction."
The term "disruptive" has some intimidating connotations. Perhaps it serves to catch the eye of the business leader who did not read economic history to notice what happened with moveable type, the telegraph, and 18th century navigation aids.
Leslie is far too nice to state the obvious which is that Dvorak is an idiot. It is pellucidly obvious that technologies -- like the invention of the internal combustion engine or the written word -- are disruptive. They overturn the established order -- political systems, markets, social systems -- in unpredictable ways.
This is the same guy who I had the go around with last year on his dismissal of instant messaging, where he stated
This led to an interesting email exchange, culminating in his relenting, basically recanting his nonsense, but not until he attempted to suggest that since I used the term "value proposition" in our conversation I was a clueless toad:"The always-on notion has led to the creation of numerous IM networks. Some analysts have even predicted the future of business would depend on IM. But why do we need to know when somebody is online? Just to say hi? Direct computer-to-computer links like IM are channels for future problems."
"to tell you the truth these VC phrases such as "value proposition" -- which is a completely meaningless phrase -- do nothing to help your argument.combining these two words is nothing less than silly
I'm guessing that what you mean to use is "worth" as in I don't understand the worth of IM. This may be true. Or possibly I do understand it and reject it anyway. But instead of saying it simply you use the condescending language of Silicon Valley 20-something bullshitters trying to sound important. So how can I take this seriously?
To which I replied:
""Value proposition" is a well-understood marketing and management term, and my using it does not make me a bullshitter, 20-something or otherwise."Value proposition - 1. The unique added value an organization offers customers through their operations." [Carla O'Dell & C.Jackson Grayson]. "Value proposition: A clear, simple statement — resulting from a set of very disciplined choices — describing what a customer can expect from us in the way of goods and services (including quality, timeliness and innovation) and the price that customer is willing to pay." - Weyerhauser. Although I was applying the concept to a technology, the concept is the same.
I wasn't -- and still am not -- trying to be condescending, although I maintain that you don't agree with the (dare I say it) value proposition for IM."
So this is a guy with a history of trying to make his deadline by asking himself "what obviously important idea or trend can I dis now?" and thereby making his trollish readers happy. But when confronted -- which Renee is too highly-principled to do -- his arguments dissolve into mush: empty semantic arguments about adjectives not agreeing with nouns, or the like. He is the Jerry Springer of technology pundits.
So when he argues that the concept of disruptive technologies is spurious, it's just another case of backward-looking, venal, rabid anti-trendism -- a classic enemy of the future:
John DvorakOne problem in our society is the increasing popularity of false-premise concepts that are blindly used for decision making. The amount of money squandered during the dot-com era because of "paradigm shifts" and "new economies" is staggering. People actually believed that all retailing would be online and that all groceries would be delivered to the home as they were in the 1920s, despite changes that make delivery impractical. Who cares about reality? We have a disruptive technology at work!
The concept of disruptive technology is not the only daft idea floating around to be lapped up obediently by the business community. There are others. But the way these dingbat bromides go unchallenged makes you wonder whether anyone can think independently anymore.
So, based on a logical fallacy -- because someone advanced the idea that a flawed business model was a new paradigm, therefore the idea of "new paradigm" is itself bankrupt -- he is off suggesting (again) that the concept of a "paradigm shift" (as introduced by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) is wrong-headed idiocy... I will leave that battle for another day, though.
Fahrenheit FBI
Really good synopsis of the stupidity surrounding the FBI's recent blundering around in VoIP land:
Declan McCullagh[from Fahrenheit FBI]You've been saying that terrorists may use VoIP services to "evade lawful electronic surveillance." But the only detailed court statistics available show that 77 percent of wiretap applications were for drug crimes, and terrorism-related offenses were so few they didn't even make the chart. Is terrorism the real reason behind your wiretap push?
The Language Moves On
I see that technology terms are edging into the Oxford English Dictionary at a fast clip:
[from Yahoo! News - New dictionary makes room for baffling 'va-va-voom']"Speed dating" ("an organised social activity in which people have a series of short conversations with potential partners in order to determine whether there is mutual interest") also makes the Oxford dictionary pages.
So too does "flash mob" ("a public gathering of complete strangers, organised via the Internet or mobile phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse again)".
[pointer from Cheesebikini]
A Brand is not a Promise, it is an Invitation
Apropos of my recent aphorism-- "a brand is no longer a promise, it is an invitation" -- I stumbled across a wild piece at GapingVoid.com:
[from gapingvoid: "the kinetic quality": the future of advertising]The future of brands is interaction, not commodity. It's not something you buy, but something you paticipate in.
i.e. a brand is not a thing, but a place.
The Standoff Between Blogs and Journalism
The Democratic National Convention is bringing the formerly simmering dichotomy between blogging and journalism to a boil. In my rant yesterday on Strange Attractor, I attacked a vocal critic of Suw Charman's gonzo introduction to the new blog, but granted that he was uncovering something central in the war of words between the two "sides" in this ideological battle: journalism's belief in objectivity and editorial oversight versus blogging's reliance on subjective voice and individual authority.
The flapdoodle that cousin danah has started about bloggers being dissed by the traditional media priesthood is exactly the same issue:
danah boyd[from Demeaning bloggers: the NYTimes is running scared]As i’ve written before, blogging is rhetorically situated between journalism and diarying. Most often, people label blogging as one or the other in order to degrade it. The NYTimes pulled this act today because they have a professional interest in portraying convention bloggers as “low-brow” and unworthy of reading, while the NYTimes will present the real “high-brow” convention story. By framing bloggers as diarists, the NYTimes is demanding that the reader see blogs as petty, childish and self-absorbed. They further perpetuate this view by pasting a picture of a youth on the front of the article to suggest that bloggers are all inexperienced and naive, further implying that their reports will not have the value of the more “adult” perspective of “real” journalists.
The entire spin of the article focuses on how bloggers are like children in a candy store - naive, inexperienced and overwhelmed by what is now available to them.
This latest skirmish was picked up by many, including over at The Industry Standard, where an optimistic, live-together perspective is being presented:
Esme Vos[from Journalists vs. bloggers: is that really so?]With the official recognition of bloggers as members of that sacred tribe, the Press, at the Democratic National Convention, a war of words has broken out between the high priests and the newbies. Danah Boyd feels that the New York Times ran a demeaning article about bloggers. Other bloggers have weighed in saying that the mainstream press is afraid of them.
I have a different opinion. Journalists who have written on muncipal wireless broadband tell me that my blog, Muniwireless.com, has helped them research and finish their stories quickly. Blogs that focus on specific issues are now great sources of information for journalists. By visiting one site (example: Corante) they have access to the experts and accurate information much more quickly than in the past.
Through blogs, newspaper and magazines also find freelance writers who can contribute articles on specific subjects. Granted a lot of blogs are just stream-of-consciousness diary entries, there are enough that can add value to a newspaper's content.
But I think nothing brings this controversy into sharper relief than the exchange earlier this week between David Weinberger and David Mears, a veteran journalist now turned "blogger" for AP, at a Media Circle breakfast.
David Weinberger[from The Media Circle]I asked Mears, "So, who are you supporting for president?" He said that he wouldn't tell us that because "how could you trust what I write?"
"Then how can we trust what you write in your blog?" I asked.
Mears gave an articulate defense of the canon of journalistic professionalism, and of the craft and value of objectivity.
Of course I respect that. How can you not? We need professional journalists. But for most blogs, we want to know what the writer's starting point is. That's not because we're subjective journalists. It's because a blog is a conversation among friends, and when you're arguing politics with your pals, it'd just be weird to refuse to say where you stand.
You're right, blogging's not "subjective journalism," per se. Blogging is gonzo journalism, where who we are, what we are, and what we care about is as much a part of the story as what we are writing about. And, of course, the same is true in so-called objective journalism, except the belief system and perspective that underlies the purported objectivity is implicit, and therefore cannot be addressed directly.
More importantly, the editorial agenda of the traditional media -- what has made modern journalism such a potent force -- is all about deciding what is important and how much of the front page or the news hour to devote to it.
The world of blogging brings these decisions back to the individual, based on the personal balancing of trusted voices. Each of us can decide what issues are most critical, how to apportion our attention to the affairs of the day, and which memes are worthy of follow-up. We are taking the remote control out of the hands of the editors, and they don't like it. It will eat into their advertising, big time. It is no wonder, given what is at stake, that the established priesthood will rail from their pulpits, and make light of what is a truly profound power shift in the making.
Markets Are Conversations, But Sometimes You Don't Want To Listen
George Michael, the erstwhile pop star, has closed the doors on a chat room set up at his website, since this "fans" were saying less than fantastic things about him:
Sounds like Michael has gone corporate, and doesn't want to listen to the market.[from Fans were too chatty for singer]British pop singer George Michael might have expected some praise from adoring fans when he set up a chat room on his Web site. Instead, contributors complained that the 41-year-old looked old and overweight and criticized his recent music, prompting him to announce Thursday that he is shutting down the forum.
In a message posted on his site, Michael said the negativity was bad for him, his fans and his music. "Those of you that want to carry on the media's work will have to do it somewhere else I suppose," he wrote. "Sorry guys, but that's the way it goes . . . . Peace and Love . . . or nothing at all."
Social Information: What Information Is Owned By Who?
A question from Derek Lomas, regarding the impact of a recent court case, where US District Court Judge Steven D. Merryday ruled that aggregation of web content may not be blocked -- in all cases -- by copyright (see Judge on Search: Copyright Doesn't Cover All Web Sites).
The case revolved around aggregation of boat information from a variety of copyrighted sites by Nautical Solutions, Inc., which presented this aggregation of information to prospective buyers of yachts. The judge argued that the presentation of factual information about the boats was lawful, and that the rights to the pictures and other information were really held by the yacht owners, not those hosting the web sites where the information was being presented.
So -- in response to Derek's question -- my sense is that information about individuals that is made accessible in various social networking and /or dating sites may be subject to the same interpretation.
This opens the door to possible spidering of social networking/dating sites for purposes analogous to those of Nautical Solutions in the boating world. What you are entering about your goals, desires, likes, and dislikes in business partners or soulmates may turn out to not be copyrightable -- it may simply be ruled to be "factual information" and not protected, as a result.
What Is Real?
I saw that Julian Dibbell reported that he is making nearly $50K buying and selling imaginary ("virtual") goods related to the Ultima online game. This has been covered in Wired, and Terra Nova.
Why does this seem more far-fetched than the market for ad-words, or people buying subscriptions for a virtual "pay-for-involvement" with edgy, sexily tattooed women at Suicide Girls, or subteens paying to read the bogus blogs of teeny dolls (as reported in today's WSJ)?
For some reason, the ground seems to have shifted under my feet. But then again, a year ago I didn't expect to have sponsors at my blog, either.
I Even Socially Spammed My Own Website
One of the many email addresses that Zero Degrees' Outlook plug-in found yesterday (see earlier piece), was the 'secret' email address that TypePad provides to post entries to Typepad blogs. So I discovered an entry at my www.aworkingmodel.com website (which is a TypePad blog) that is an invitation to Zero Degrees.
Check it out: A Working Model: Connect with me in ZeroDegrees?.
I discovered this because Jason Hardebeck, a friend who had the same circumstances befall him, posted a comment on the entry, and I was notified by email. Sheesh. As he says in the comment, it will take weeks before the impacts of installing this "virus" are all cleaned up.
[Note: Got a warning from Peter Quintas, of Silk Road, that the "click here for more information" link created by Zero Degrees in the email (now disabled) exposed my secret email address, so people could have posted who knows what at my company website.]
New Zero Degrees' Outlook Plug-in: I've Invited Hundreds By Mistake!
[2004-08-23 Update: Jas Dhillon's comments of 22 August, and my clarification are presented in a new entry.]
[2004-08-21 Update: recent flapdoodle over Multiply has led to a lot of new hits on this story -- see Slicing Social Spam Both Ways. I don't believe that email invitations to join social software is "spam", in the sense that it is generally used, a point I did not make clear in this piece, although I did use it in scare quotes.]
Yesterday, I hoped to review the new Outlook plug-in from Zero Degrees. But what happened is a bit more than I expected.
First, the tool supports finding uncaptured email addresses in messages -- which sounds like a helpful feature. I ran that, and discovered a few hundred email addresses that could be helpful to save, although a lot of them were various 'support' and 'info' addresses from emails directed to me from online services and product companies. Wading through them to decide which ones to keep permanently is a chore that I was not ready to face.
But I thought it would be good to upload my contacts to Zero Degrees' server -- as a backup, before proceeding with other contact housekeeping. However, Zero Degrees -- apparently in response to customer requests to simplify the use of the tool -- has made uploading and inviting all contacts as single step process! As a result, my one mouse click led to hundreds (maybe 1000+) people getting invited to join my Zero Degrees network.
If you are one of the many that I have 'socially spammed' -- apologies. Be warned if you are signing up that the Outlook plug-in has potentially unexpected consequences for users.
It is interesting to see how many positive responses this has led to, however. At least 30 people have signed up to Zero Degrees as a result of the invitations, so far. I have received dozens of rejection emails, as well, associated with out of date email addresses -- which Zero Degrees does not manage in any way. I also have several 'please remove me from your mailing list' requests, and several folks have deflected the invite with a counter invitation to LinkedIn or Spoke.
The Zero Degrees service has many attractive features -- which I will review at a later date, once the dust has settled on this little contretemps -- and has attracted a lot of positive comments from those who have signed up. But the company will have to reinstitute the multi-step, checks-and-balance approach for the Outlook plug-in: in the meantime, don't click the button to upload all your contacts!
[Note: I see Ross Mayfield is warning folks over at Many2Many.]
[Note: I see Chris Allen got burned, too.]
POKE: The Value Of Presence Traces
Clay Shirky manages to salvage more than a good laugh from Peter St Andre and Joe Hildebrand's April Fools joke.
Clay Shirky[from Many-to-Many: POKE in the Eye With A Sharp Stick]So I have become bored bored bored with the April Fool’s stuff by and large, but I was struck by how much conceptual similarity the joke Jabber spec, Presence Obtained via Kinesthetic Excitation (POKE), bears to Matt Webb’s Glancing. I’ve been using Apple’s iChat as my IM client for a while now, and am addicted to the gentle ‘whuff’ sound as users enter and leave presence-space, so while POKE is meant to be ridiculous, it’s about 80% of the way to something real, something that both Webb and iChat are getting at — relying on the limbic system for presence awareness.
I go with that. I really like the subtle cues that most IM systems offer to indicate that buddys of various flavors are coming and going. That sense of social co-presence is a great context enrichment device, especially when this operates at a nearly unconscious level, like people moving around in a physically shared loft space.
One of the interesting 'etiquette' issues is how to propose a conversation to someone, and an obvious opening 'stroke' is the virtual analog of the physical observation of someone coming into your shared space: 'good morning, how are you?" This opens the possibility of interaction without the pressure to do so. But the cue of 'entering' social shared space is necessary, otherwise any approach can be perceived as an intrusion, as opposed to a welcome.
The Network is the Game: Social Trends in Mobile Entertainment
The inestimable A J Kim mentioned that she'd done a presentation at the Game Developers Conference. Check it out.
A J collates trends in mobile phone adoption and use, especially by "Mobiles":
A J Kim[from The Network is the Game: Social Trends in Mobile Entertainment]2. Mobiles self-organize into fluid, loose-knit groups
Ethnographic research shows that mobile users (age 15-30) participate in dynamic overlapping social groups (e.g. family, friends, colleagues) that they maintain via cellphone
Contrast this with MMP players (e.g. SWG, Everquest, Lineage) who belong to a single clan and pursue activities within that group
From a business perspective, groups provide an entry point for new players + a retention driver for existing players
Groups tend to move en-mass from game to game (or venue to venue)
Mobiles are the leading edge of the future wave of personal communication. All businesses should be tracking what is going on there, not just the people directly selling them game minutes, dating services, or mobility solutions. This will be the beachhead for many advertsing avenues, which will transition to locational and 'tribal' models. At least the winners will.
Linda Stone: Update
Amy Jo Kim (who is much more in touch with movers and shakers than I seem to be, and who is guest blogging at Many2Many) let me know that Linda Stone (quoted yesterday in Continuous Partial Attention) is no longer at Microsoft. The article I quoted was a year or so old, but the meme of CPA seems to be hot again, perhaps ignited by Joi Ito's rapping about it.
Looks like she is doing other great things:
[from Wired (November 2003)]Linda Stone: Former Microsoft ambassador; currently advises the power elite and consults for Segway's Dean Kamen.
Node Cred: Old-school network. Stone, 48, directed strategic initiatives at Apple and Microsoft through the late '80s and '90s; her reputation for having the ear of people like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and ex-Apple CEO John Sculley prompted Steve Ballmer to enlist her to soften Redmond's image.
Know your enemy: Stone brought the barbarians through the gate and straight to the podium, starting a Microsoft speaker series that featured open source maven Eric Raymond and copyleft theorist (and Wired columnist) Lawrence Lessig.
Secret Weapon: The dinner party. "I've developed a seating algorithm. I don't think of who will sit next to whom, but who sits diagonally. I make sure people with high energy are thoughtfully distributed. I scatter them, so one corner of the table is always lighting up."
Speed Dial: General Wesley Clark and Danny Hillis.
Node wisdom: Stone coined the phrase "continuous partial attention," popularized several years later at the 2001 World Economic Forum. CPA describes a key characteristic of the node life. "With CPA, we focus on the topic at hand but are constantly scanning the periphery for new input and adjusting our attention accordingly. It's different than multitasking. It's knowing when to hit call-waiting and when to ignore it.
If anyone out there is in touch with Linda, could you point her to me or vice versa. I would like to see where she stands on CPA these days. Could be a fun interview.
Continuous Partial Attention
Caught a thread from Joi Ito (with elaboration at Smartmobs) regarding Linda Stone's (see photo) distinction between multitasking and her new term: continuous partial attention.
[from Inc.]Despite her bureaucratic title [Microsoft vice-president of corporate and industry initiatives], Stone is a creative thinker who has coined the term continuous partial attention to describe the way we cope with the barrage of communication coming at us. It's not the same as multitasking, Stone says; that's about trying to accomplish several things at once. With continuous partial attention, we're scanning incoming alerts for the one best thing to seize upon: "How can I tune in in a way that helps me sync up with the most interesting, or important, opportunity?" She says: "It's crucial for CEOs to be intentional about breaking free from continuous partial attention in order to get their bearings. Some of today's business books suggest that speed is the answer to today's business challenges. Pausing to reflect, focus, think a problem through; and then taking steady steps forward in an intentional direction is really the key.
CPA is a different kind of load-balancing algorithm. Some people think that the only practical way to work is to take a single task and grind away until it is done, and then (and only then) look around to determine what is the right next piece of work to do. The reality is that we need to be constantly scanning the horizon for events that are worthy of our attention. We can't a afford to stay heads down for hours or days at a stretch when critically important events may be occuring that could require us to immediately respond to them.
So, while first-in-first-out is a workable discipline for some situations (like super market check out lines), it fails drastically in some circumstances (like hospital emergency rooms).
Our work lives are increasingly like the ER and not the supermarket. So we will have to revert to a mindset that our earliest forebears must have applied while fashioning hunting gear, and with one eye scanning the savannah for predators and prey.
Alternatively, if you had responded to the event ASAP, and convened a strategy session with your partners, you could have avoided the cost and time involved in the two day detour. And of course, the impact of this propagates through the networks of those five project members, outward through the company and other partners. And if other network members likewise respond in real-time, similar productivity savings can be accomplished. This is the idea of synchronization amplification: paradoxically, increasing synchronous communication early in event response leads to an overall increase in asynchronous performance as the communication streams through the greater network. And continuous partial attention is a necessary precondition: without moving to that mode of time and communication management we will never get that ability to steal a march on events.
The trick may be to filter events so that only those that are material intrude on our reflections and heads-down work. We shouldn't jump up and run in circles every time the wind shakes the leaves, but we cannot afford to become so engrossed in what we are doing that we miss the leopard about to pounce.
There is no absolute here. Those that simply refuse to carry cell phones, or never log in to IM are dangerous to their organizations. If you are a solitary journalist, or a very senior executive, such behavior may be workable: in the former case, no one is harmed by your opting out, and in the latter case you are likely to have staffers who filter the outside world for you. But for the average person, linked in a dense, cascading social network of collaborators who depend on your timely response to critical events, it will prove increasingly difficult -- if not impossible -- to veer away from continuous partial attention. We will have to learn a new balancing act, and it will be strongly canted toward spending more cycles scanning the horizon and fewer looking down at the piecework in our laps.
Blog Survey: Summary of Findings - Fernanda Viegas
I saw that a recent survey about blogging had been developed and analyzed by Viegas, who is a PhD candidate working in the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab.
The bottom-line:
"Formerly viewed as a marginal activity restricted to the technically savvy, blogging is slowly becoming more of a mainstream phenomenon on the Internet. Thanks to much media hype and some high profile blog sites, these online journals have captured the public's imagination. As novice authors plunge into the thrilling world of blog publishing, they soon realize that publicly writing about one's life and interests is not as simple as it might seem at first. As they become prolific writers, more bloggers find themselves having to deal with issues of privacy and liability. [emphasis mine] Accounts of bloggers either hurting friends' feelings or losing jobs because of materials published on their sites are becoming more frequent."
Another indicator of the changes that social tools have -- new ways to hurt people, get sued, or lose your job.
Social Networking And Communities To Get Top Level Domain
A new top level domain -- ".pw" -- is being launched for social networking and community use:
The PW Registry Corporation announced today plans for the activation of the PW top-level domain (TLD), the Internet's first and only domain extension devoted to "Communities of Shared Interests." Unlike other domain extensions, such as .com, .biz, and .info, PW is aimed at providing individuals and consumer/affinity organizations a highly-personalized, permanent and portable e-mail address and a managed platform for community and social networking.
Instantly Fired
In a strange prelude to the upcoming IM Planet conference panel session that I am chairing Wednesday on the topic "HR meets IM", I read in Yahoo! News about a South Korean credit card company that fired 1/3 of its work force by sending SMS text messages to their mobile phones last Friday:
"South Korea's third-largest credit card issuer [KEB Credit Service Co] fired a quarter of its workforce via mobile phone text messages on Friday, after negotiations with striking unionized workers broke down."According to the company, there was no other way to notify the striking workers. Turns out that roughly 70% of South Koreans own a mobile phone.
More is Different: Social Search
Bambi Francisco writes about Spoke Software's newly announced social search technology, and what she saw kind of freaked her out.
"Spoke, one of the rising social-networking upstarts which has raised more than $20 million in venture financing, is attempting to make the search process, or at least the searching-for-people process, more personalized and relevant.Spoke is harnessing public data about people, just like I might if I was considering hiring Bambi for a job. But the ease with which it can be done is unsetlling, just like the experience of seeing a Google map showing your home by simply providing your phone number.By organizing information based on social networks drawn from members' address books and the people they communicate with through e-mails (and instant messaging in the future, I'm told), Spoke improves upon the average search engine's results. That's the cool part.
On the other hand, the data it pulls together includes information about millions of people who are not members and suggests a dark underside to search precision.
For instance, I haven't joined the Spoke service, yet I became one of the 13 million searchable people in Spoke's public network.
My profile on Spoke included a resume, notes about me, and a list of people who may know how to contact me. "
This is a mild form of future shock.
New communication media are always disruptive, and are no respecters of the established order. The diffusion of email across the corporation spelled the end of middle management, and led to wholesale "rightsizing" of the enterprise. The emergence of the Internet led to the death of previous models of computing and communications. Social networking-based collaboration and communication technologies will upset other applecarts, and inevitably rewire etiquette and ethics as well.
Social networks exist in the world, and people's relatedness can be inferred from public information. I know that you sit on the board of company X, and therefore infer that you know Mike who is the CEO there. Spoke's is simply applying this logic to rank order search data.
The fact that computing power can be harnessed to accomplish this sort of inferencing in the large is what raises the hair on Bambi's neck. Yes, there is nothing stopping the uncrupulous from trying to use the power of this social inferencing to spam someone. (I am getting social spam daily, anyway, with or without social networking solutions to help, but at least with the social networking tools I can anonymously reject requests.)
But my stance is that the tools are not the issue: prosecute the spammers, create mechanisms to preclude email without proven identities, etc.
Meanwhile, I look forward to a better mechanism to sift through the 16,877 hits I can get associated with "Bambi" so I can actually get the information I need. And I promise not to spam you, Bambi.
iWork@Sun
I had the opportunity today (while attending a small workshop on Working Communities in the SF area) to get an introduction and tour of Sun's program for flexible and mobile workers, called iWork@Sun.
It's no surprise that during the dark days of the last few years, employees like Sun found themselves saddled with far more office space than needed, and increasingly managing a global, mobile, and commute-averse workforce. The result? The iWork@Sun initiative, which has moved nearly holf of Sun's 35,000 staff into a flexible worksplace program, that relies on a "hoteling" style reservations of availble flex space in various Sun facilities.
I gleaned some of the facts that motivated iWork@Sun:
- 30-35% of staff were not "badging" into assigned locations
- Analysis of office-use data showed that providing far less seats would meet actual demand. Seat supply of 1 seat:1.2 staff (in engineering) - 2.5 staff (in field sales) people would meet actual demand for workspace (typically would be 0.85:1 ratio)
- 75% of staff desired to work from home, at least some of the time
- Sun's drop-in centers had already reached higher demand than supply
Since implementation, Sun has acheived $71M annual cost savings, which they estimate will grow to $150M as they ocntinue to roll out the program and as the company grows. This is based on 35K employees overall, with 17K in the iWork@Sun program.
Staff are willing participants, with those involved surveyed at 77% satisfaction levels, and average 3.1 commute hours saved per week. Employees estimate a 54% productivity gain, which Sun representatives agree is a highly subjective figure but again indiciative of satisfaction levels. Note that employees give back 60% of saved time -- reduced commutes, etc. -- to Sun.
Note: only a tiny 1% have opted to work completely at home. This apparently requires a very unusual personality to make it work. 59% remain in traditional dediicated office settings, but 49% of the population now flex their situation.
The technology that underlies the program is what Sun refers to as "Wired Mobility" -- thin client, diskless Java 'terminals' called SunRays, as well as a variety of sophisticated infrastructure to support flex working, such as Java cards that support login on any SunRay.
iWork@Sun has necessitated a shift in organizational theory and an emphasis on remote management skills, including self-management, that Sun has worked hard to inculcate throughout the company. Basics include moving to paperless information management, and a strong reliance on online collaboration.
We had a demo of the Sun Meeting Central tool [presented by Patricia Roberts, Product Manager iWork, and Nicole Yankelovich, principal investigator Sun Labs], which in some ways is quite conventional (i.e., presentation sharing), but which also supports some sophisticated moderation through the Facilitator tool. In particular, the integration of voice conferencing features is very rich -- automatically denoting which participant is speaking with a 'presence'-like icon in the Facilitator window.
In the small, I don't see the Meeting Central tool as really competitive with other web conferencing solutions -- at least not in the current incarnation. For example, the tool lacks integration with instant messaging, and no support for video conferencing.
However, I left extremely impressed with the iWork@Sun initiative as a whole -- the management approach and execution, the serious savings, the acceptance of the new model of organization by the staff, and the ability of Sun to develop a strong hardware and software infrastructure to support the new way of doing business. Definitely an indicator of things to come. Sun is planning to make iWork@Sun a product in the not-to-distant future. For more information, contact Glenn Dirks (glenn.dirks@sun.com) at Sun.
Dvorak Relents
John Dvorak had one last comment as the outcome of our interchange yesterday arising originally as a result of some observations about the inutility of instant messaging:
"I didn't know that these notes constituted "learned discourse." That said I relent. You win."Once again, truth triumphs over ignorance! (wink)
An Exchange With Dvorak
Email exchange with John Dvorak, columnist for PC Magazine, arising from my comments on his recent column, in which he presents his case for the uselessness of IM.
John Dvorak:
"I've heard this before...but you lost me with the dismissive summary: /In the final analysis, Dvorak just doesn't get it. IM adoption is a generational phenomenon, and his statements show that he is strictly '80s in his thinking: stuck in the inbox. Probably thinks blogging is a joke, too./read this to understand why"
The article referenced suggests that many innovative trends behind technology trends are fueled by drugs and wild-eyed psuedo-religious cults, like EST:
"The world of mumbo-jumbo self-actualization hokum is important to the dot-com litany. Much of the computer revolution is tied up with such thinking systems. Their influence is here to stay, just as the influence of drugs—marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines—fuels many high-tech companies at one level or another. Just look at some of the boom-time business plans, in retrospect. The people who drew them up were snorting something. Welcome to California."
Stowe Boyd:
"John -I thought my tone matched yours fairly well. You don't get the value proposition for IM, and think that it doesn't have a serious role in the enterprise, if anywhere. Your paragraph on IM was dismissive.
Re: your piece on "not getting it" and the rise of various faddish and bubblicious software crazes -- all innovations rise through the agency of "innovators" and "early adopters", both the successful and unsuccessful ones. In the piece, you mention a long series of innovations that didn't catch on, but I could have just as easily reeled off examples like PDAs (the Newton was a true failure, but the innovation has been proven), email, portable computers, cell phones, web conferencing, and, yes, instant messaging.
The gibes about drugs and EST aside, some people just don't "get" certain innovations, and this is often generational. While I agree that "paradigm shift" is overused, Thomas Kuhn's observations about scientific revolutions is completely apt relative to the generational shift to instant messaging:
"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." (http://www.corante.com/getreal/archives/001682.html)
Kids, teenagers, and hipsters simply use IM and appreciate its esthetic, while others are less likely to. There are many precedents that are a counterpoint to your examples of pen computing, and Pets.com. Ken Olsen stated flatly that "there is no need for a computer in the home," and as a result Digital completely missed the PC revolution. I was consulting for Novell when senior management collectively convinced themselves that the Internet was not a real threat to their networking business, and as a result the Groupwise product missed the boat for getting with the web, and Frankenburg lost his job. The 'get a horse' examples are endless.
The financial services industry is the leading sector where real-time messaging and collaboration technology has become a baseline requirement for everyday operations. In the trading community, hundreds of thousands of users are involved in IM-based interactions every day. The same will come to be the case in nearly all information intensive work in the future --- partly as a result of the hard benefits of real-time communications (such as presence and availability information, and increase productivity through time savings) but also as a result of the adoption of the style and form of real-time communication.
- Stowe"
John Dvorak:
"to tell you the truth these VC phrases such as "value proposition" -- which is a completely meaningless phrase -- do nothing to help your argument.let's examine this idiotic term...
Value 1. a fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged 2. the monetary worth of something *:* marketable price 3. relative worth, utility, or importance [a good /value/ at the price] [the /value/ of base stealing in baseball] [had nothing of /value/ to say]Proposition
1. a (1) something offered for consideration or acceptance *: PROPOSAL (2) a. request for sexual intercourse b. the point to be discussed or maintained in argument usually stated in sentence form near the outset c. a theorem or problem to be demonstrated or performed 2 a. an expression in language or signs of something that can be believed, doubted, or denied or is either true or false b. the objective meaning of a proposition
combining these two words is nothing less than sillyI'm guessing that what you mean to use is "worth" as in I don't understand the worth of IM. This may be true. Or possibly I do understand it and reject it anyway. But instead of saying it simply you use the condescending language of Silicon Valley 20-something bullshitters trying to sound important. So how can I take this seriously?
Stowe Boyd [Who is not used to not being taken seriously]:
""Value proposition" is a well-understood marketing and management term, and my using it does not make me a bullshitter, 20-something or otherwise.I wonder what he is going to say next? Is it possible that this passes for learned discourse, today?"Value proposition - 1. The unique added value an organization offers customers through their operations." [Carla O'Dell & C.Jackson Grayson]. "Value proposition: A clear, simple statement — resulting from a set of very disciplined choices — describing what a customer can expect from us in the way of goods and services (including quality, timeliness and innovation) and the price that customer is willing to pay." - Weyerhauser. Although I was applying the concept to a technology, the concept is the same.
I wasn't -- and still am not -- trying to be condescending, although I maintain that you don't agree with the (dare I say it) value proposition for IM."
Goodbye Email, Hello IM
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."Email is dying, and the teenagers won't mourn it.
...
"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."
The Death Of The Weekend
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?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.Maybe it's just sour grapes: I still haven't been invited to join."
Keichu: Cellphone Addiction
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.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]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."
Email Is Where Knowledge Goes To Die
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.
Social Networking Backlash
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.
Love.com Survey: Everyone's Doing It
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%)."
The Naked Crowd - Jeffrey Rosen
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.
Bottom-Up Economy
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.
Ross Mayfield on Comment Spammers: Turn Off Comments
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.
My So-Called Blog
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.
Online Speed Dating at Match.com
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!
Dave Pollard's List of 10
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!
Social Networking = Volunteer "Total Information Awareness"
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.
Online Communication Makes Difficult Topics Easier
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."
AOL SPAM Police
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.
Internet Adoption Leveling Off
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."
SPIM is on Everyone's Lips
I spoke with Jennifer Saranow of the Wall Street Journal a few days ago, about SPIM -- instant messaging spam. Her piece -- "Angry Over Spam? Get Set for Spim" -- was in the WSJ this morning:
"Ferris Research estimates about 500 million instant-messenger spams were sent in 2003, double the number sent in 2002. That is a blip compared with the estimated two billion e-mail spams sent each day, but instant-messenger spam's fast growth has some spam watchers concerned. And messaging companies are ramping up to fight the new annoyance."
I also got an email newsletter from CBS Marketwatch this morning, Frank Barnako's Internet Daily, that uses the term as well.
I thought it would be fun to dig up what I think is the earliest use of the term. Here's something from July 1 2002 from Instant Messaging Planet:
" Don't SPIM -- don't use IM as spam. Setting up a 'bot-based or alert-based service that pushes information is fine. But it is evil to pounce on the unsuspecting and put the hard sell on them. (Stowe Boyd)"Definitely something we will be seeing more of.
Cell Phone Use leads to Divorce, Italian Style
A new survey published by Italy's largest private investigation company says that in nearly 90% of cases, it is the mobile phone which reveals or betrays extra marital activities, reports the BBC. Italians are known to have two or even three cell phones, to conduct discreet illicit relationships.
"My husband cheated on me with my best friend. I didn't know for two years," says Francesca, who is now divorced."She would come round to our house, we would watch TV or all go out together for dinner. Everything seemed normal... I eventually found out because I read text messages from her on my husbands phone," she says.
Miriam Tomponzi, one of Italy's most glamourous and famous detectives, offers these tips for those who want their affairs to remain clandestine:
"You must cancel immediately any message from your lover which could give the game away," Ms Tomponzi says.
"This is obviously difficult as it is hard to cancel a beautiful message, so you could have another mobile phone in a secret place and send your messages to that.
"You must practice and prepare yourself for when you receive a phone call from your lover in front of your husband or wife.
"Practice in front of a mirror if you have to. You must pretend that a sister, mother or brother has called you and act normally.
"And of course you should never say 'It was just a wrong number' or 'You're breaking up I can't hear you.'"
Dean is Rallying a "Stupid Network"
Good piece at Wired by Gary Wolf making the parallel between the Dean emergent democracy network and Isenberg's "Stupid Networks" concept.
Make the network stupid.[pointer from David Weinberger.]The Dean campaign is a network rather than an army, and that is one of its strengths. But it's a stupid network, and that's also a strength. Stupid is meant in the technical sense, defined by David Isenberg in his classic telephony paper, "The Rise of the Stupid Network." Isenberg advanced the principle that under conditions of uncertainty, a network should not be optimized for any set of uses presumed to be definitive. Instead, the network should be as simple as possible, with advanced functionality and intelligence moved out to its edges. For the Dean campaign, this means that hundreds of independent groups are organizing with very little direction from headquarters.
Dean's network may not be globally optimized toward getting him into office: there are likely to be hundreds or thousands of locally optimized purposes that partitions of the network dream up.
More from the Tech Skeptic
Fortune's Tech Skeptic also lambasts "contact unmanagement" services in his "Fearless Predictions":
"Contact-freshening services Plaxo and GoodContacts experience explosive growth as folks realize that signing up is the only way to stop those annoying e-mails from people they cannot remember who are asking them to update their contact info. Once other tech companies see their success, this particular brand of "annoyance abeyance marketing" sweeps the Internet and soon Amazon and Google and all the rest are devising ways for us to pay them to stop bothering us."My model is to ping folks for update immediately after they initiate an email exchange with me for the first time, or following an email exchange when we haven't exchanged emails for some time. I think that etiquette moderates the intrusiveness of blasting out 475 contact update requests, and moves it from any proximity with spam. Still, my fearless prediction is that this will prove to be a generational issue, with younger, social software oriented users (the "gullible hipster wannabes" of his other prediction) gracefully accepting the social capital exchange implicit in contact updates, while older, less e-engaged folks will never buy into this new social ethos.
Virtual Intimacy
Good piece at misbehaving.net on Virtual Intimacy.
"Are we all practicing a new way to be intimate? Is falling in love online not real? Is it not love? Are friendships on IRC not legitimate, but an aberration supported by technology? Is it time to stop judging one way as less real and one as more real? Perhaps it's a pointless distinction."(Thanks to David.)
When You Put Things Together, They Are Changed
I saw an entry at Techdirt that reminded me of an email exchange I recently had with John Maloney about Google's linking up telephone number reverse searching with map locations.
"At what point will people realize that technology is just a tool, and it can be used for both good purposes and bad purposes? Every time people realize that a tool might be used for bad purposes they seem to freak out. The latest is that people are worried that online mapping services might be used by stalkers to find out where you live. Of course, there are plenty of other ways to find out where someone lives, but because mapping tools and phone books are available online for free, people are freaked out. While the vast majority of users use these tools for perfectly legitimate reasons, there are always going to be some people who use them for nefarious purposes. That doesn't mean that we should ban the technology, but teach people about it so they understand what can be done."But on the other hand, when you put this freely available information together in an easy to use package, it changes the whole equation. Yes, there are many good reasons to type in a phone number, and get a map to that location -- like finding a restaurant, or even the house of a friend. But it creeps people out that its so easy. Another good reason to go purely wireless, or stay unlisted.
Somebody's Watching You
Recent NY Times piece about the use of cell phones and other wireless devices to track people movements and whereabouts:
""We are moving into a world where your location is going to be known at all times by some electronic device," said Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. "It's inevitable. So we should be talking about its consequences before it's too late."
Some of those consequences have not been spelled out. Will federal investigators be allowed to retrieve information on your recent whereabouts from a private service like uLocate, or your cellular carrier? Can the local Starbucks store send advertisements to your phone when it knows you are nearby, without your explicit permission?"
Buzz Meter
Waypath's analysis of recent buzz around Instant Messaging, Social Networking, and Collaboration Technology show all three are fairly hot memes.
Mobi-tickets
A mention in SmartMobs led me to a piece about mobi-tickets: barcodes emailed to mobile phones used as tickets. The barcodes are scanned at the event to gain entry. The story covers the world's first mobi-ticket-only concert, held in Edingurgh.
Love.com Preview
AOL has announced a preview of its upcoming Love.com Web personals service, leveraging the company's success with instant-messaging software into the lucrative Internet dating sector.
I can't seem to register for the service as a non-AOL user.
Compressed Time
Seb Pacquet discusses the impact on our sense of perceptions of time dilation: compression of time through time lapse photography for example:
"Funny how looking at familiar things in a different way helps you rediscover the beauty in them.Boingboing: This is a breathtaking 24h time-lapse film of the Toronto skyline. The sunrise, in particular, is spectacular.I seem to remember that the movie Baraka (which I coincidentally just found mentioned alongside other movies in comments to this) starts out with a few great, reflection-triggering time-lapse sequences. Here's a relevant bit of Roger Ebert's review of that movie:
Time-lapse photography can be dismissed as a gimmick, but for me it's something more than that. It's a visual demonstration of how fleeting life is. Of how the decisions that seem momentous on our time scale are flickering instants in the life of the planet, too small to be observed except on the minute scale of human life. Somehow the technique makes the earth and its inhabitants seem touchingly fragile."
I agree. The opening scene of Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass features time compressed footage of clouds streaming over mountains, sped up to where the clouds look like water in a brook.
We are increasingly time compressed, in our lives and work, and the metaphor of time compression makes us reflect on our place in the world, seemingly like flotsam on the ocean, and at the same time this highlights our connectedness and relationship to the world and society.
Digital Immediate Gratification: The DIG Generation
Ross Mayfield is madly real-time blogging the Red Herring conference (hey, I thought they were bankrupt), and he pulls a great term from the rambling intro of CEO Alex Serge Vieux: Digital Immediate Gratification (DIG).
"In the move to all things digital, consumer electronics are changing the way we live -- and think."I DIG it!
localfeeds Visualization: Another Locale-based Messaging Mocdel
Seb Pacquet turned me on to a visualization service for localfeeds data. Localfeeds is a way to tag syndication information with geographical tags, along the lines that mobile phones can produce. Check out your own zip code or look at the map of San Francisco with localfeeds superimposed.
Tag: Immune System for Messaging
I somehow stumbled across Tag, which is a software agent by Keith Frank, Alex Galloway, and Jon Ippolito of three.org (an outgrowth of the Distributed Creativity project, like Wikipedia, Blogdex, and a bunch of others).
"When readers view messages on the Distributed Creativity home page, they see a header like this attached to every e-mail in the forum; each index is accompanied by a descriptive word or bar chart to indicate the relative "strength" of that assessment. These strengths are based on statistical analyses of the e-mail message itself:I want everything Tagged from now on, like ingredient labels on food: IM content, email, blog contents, everything..
- The JARGON index measures the frequency of academic jargon such as "conflation" or "corporeality" or by the use of Latinate endings such as "ization" or "ism."
- The HIPNESS index measures the frequency of buzzwords suggesting fashionable artistic or technological trends, such as "blogging" or "open source."
- The NAMEDROPPING index measures the frequency of Important Theorists and other household names in art and technology cited in the message.
- The HEAT index measures the frequency of inflammatory, sexual, or curse words, or exclamations and words in ALL CAPS.
- The CONNECTIVITY index measures the frequency of urls cited in a message.
- The LIFESPAN REDUCED BY index measures how many seconds it will take to read the message.
- The PONDEROUSNESS index measures the average number of words per sentence."
New MEETUP for Social Software
In the interest of getting a local group formed to swap ideas, thoughts, wishes, and dreams about social software, I formed an international group at MEETUP around the topic.
Please join, and if there are any MEETUP+ members out there, I would like to chat about venues for Northern Virginia.
New Fad: Instant Messaging!
File this one under "You've Got To Be Kidding."
Headline in The Herald News Online reads "The latest fad -- Instant Messaging." The article starts:
" Forget e-mail. The latest trend for teen talk is Instant Messaging, also called IMing.Thanks for the primer.It is like a quick form of e-mail where the sender clicks on the person's name, types in the message and hits send.
The message instantly pops up in a box on the receiver's screen."
Task Switching = Plague of Inattention
I read in the Wall Street Journal that a new "plague of inattention" is taking over. I was shocked, shocked to learn that people are actually doing more than one thing at once, like talking on the phone and scanning email, or watching TV while IMing.
I am amazed by articles like this one, that report on what I know is a well-established shift in everyday business reality. The ax grinding that goes on is annoying since I don't believe that adopting modern communication media and accepting their impacts on the conduct of business should trigger anxiety and concern. But apparently that is exactly what is happening, at least among those suffering from "infostress."
What's your Google number?
An interesting piece by Valdis Krebs on the use of Google as an indicator of how widely known someone is. The Google number is the number of hits that a person's name yeilds on Google.
Being somewhat vain on this topic, I discover that i have a Google number of 5910, which -- according to Krebs -- makes me a thought leader in my field. Geez... I hope so.
Friction in the Value Chain: Information as Lubricant
I chatted this morning with an old contact, Erik Huddleston, the founder and CTO at BetweenMarkets, an Austin-based software company. Their focus is on improving business partner trading relationships, through what they call Trading Partner Business Intelligence. The skinny is that they have developed a way to describe the meaning of all the information flowing from partner to partner as part of the value chain. These can be related to the specific parts of business processes, or business goals. As a result, the appearance (or absence) of specific information can be interpreted relative to its true business impacts. Pretty heady stuff.
Erik says they now do alerting through .NET alerts and email, and haven't yet integrated IM into the picture, although he has designed the hooks to be able to do it, and all the necessary information is present in the data model -- user identities, roles, etc.
The principal marketing technique is viral: as one partner adopts the technology, they bring partners in, who do the same, and so on. What is also interesting is that those suppliers who have adopted the technology are moving to differentiate themselves because of the technology and the resulting efficiencies related to its use. A winning model.
Bill Seitz is Timeless
Perusing a transcript of a session at the ClickZ conference, I saw this quote of Bill Seitz's:
"What is perceived as a crisis is often the end of an illusion. Weblogs can accelerate that process."
Intuit Tech Support Horror
I have been through a hellish few weeks, updating a lot of software on my PC, as well as working like a maniac, so I have been really bad at blogging. But I must get the following off my chest.
Today, I had a chat session with an Intuit tech support guy where he suggests that printing was a feature that had been disabled for the release of Quicken Premier I have. Come on. That's the weakest bull I have ever heard.
The support area offers a search capability against the "knowledge base" and I got 757 hits for "Adobe Acrobat 6.0 printing problem with Quicken 2003 Premier" -- none of which had anything to do with my keywords.
Time to sell Intuit short.
But even more amazing was a pop-up survey trying to determine the level of satisfaction I had for the support experience.
Yikes.