Mercora announced a swarm approach to getting an artist or group sent to the LA Music Awards. They will aggregate the choice of listeners... (Windows users only at the moment)... using the Mercora IM Radio application.

I now run a bunch of instant messaging clients on my desktop, for a variety of boneheaded reasons:

1. iChat - I am on the Mac, and iChat is really a cool way to interact with other Mac users, so long as they are likewise using iChat, that is. iChat also gateways to AIM and Jabber, so I use iChat as my client to talk to those worlds, but that can be less than optimal, since a number of the AIM and Jabber features don't work in iChat, or the other services don't support iChat style addresses. My handle is stoweboyd@mac.com, which various AIM services don't recognize as an AIM address, for example.
2. I recently downloaded the Yahoo Messenger client, because I wanted some means to IM with Yahoo folks. I discovered that a/ the user interface is ugly, and b/ all the neato-cool features of the new Yahoo beta are not supported on Mac: that same old Windows-first approach of dissing all the Mac minority.
3. I just have given up on Microsoft instant messaging solutions, primarily because of their antipathy for Mac. If they had ported Outlook to Mac, I probably would have stayed with it, since so many applications and services integrate with it (like Plaxo, for example), but I have made the jump over to Mail and iCal.
4. I had tried to run various multiheaded instant messaging clients on the Mac, like Fire and Proteus, but they were maddening, so I have dropped them, at least until the time that someone comes up with a way to support more than just text interoperability. I really need audio and video.
5. And then there is Skype. That has become the number two instant messaging solution for me, and often an IM chat in iChat becomes an audio call in Skype. I am considering swithching to Skype as my primary conduit, and most likely will do so when the video capability is debuted, later this year. There are several third party solutions, like vSkype and dialcom's spontania4IM, that support video, but they do not support Mac (Grrrr).

My pal, Stuary Henshall, who is perhaps the world's leading Skype head, sent me this message:

So I went to look at the Jyve Tools, and, yes, you guessed it, they only run on Windows. So I can't post the neato-cool chiclet on Get Real showing my Skype presence, as shown here.

The Apple folks ought to get with the big switch that is going on here, and make iChat integrate completely with Skype, or pay someone to build all these cool Skype related widgets for Mac. Because I think that Skype is building the kind of momentum and user base that could lead to a wholesale defection from the other services, and I for one am ready to quit.

Since Apple decided not to build a closed network of their own, nor to rely on the federated model of Jabber, they should licence Skype and build it into the next generation of iChat. Skype is already squarely in competition with Yahoo and Microsoft, given the strong push those companies are making toward VoIP in their instant messenging products, but Apple has seemingly let that battle go, choosing to not add VoIP into iChat.

So a tighter link with Apple is likely to be a good move for Skype, based on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Especially when Mac comes out with iPod Phone (including video!) and squares off with Microsoft in the looming monster battle for the living room: the little black box that will control the family's internet-based entertainment. It's going to be Apple, with the killer iPod brand and partnered with Intel, versus Microsoft's Xbox and Windows solutions. Apple lacks various key pieces of the puzzle -- like a viable game platform, instant messaging plus VoIP, and a tivo solution -- but Jobs is likely lining those pieces up.

And, just as a side effect, one outcome of that battle is likely to be consolidation of the fragmented instant messaging world. If and when someone wins that battle I believe it will be like Betamax/VHS, and the standard will become ubiquitous. Its early to call a winner, but Microsoft's flabby innovation these days when contrasted with iPod's market dominance in digital music makes me nod toward Apple. And if Skype wins big as a result, thats cool with me. I just want one buddylist, and if the government isn't going to force interoperability, llike they should, then I am rooting for an instant messaging monopoly. And please, God, don't let it be Microsoft.

I got a Goolge alert about a new social networking solution, called look4mac.com, which seems to be motivated by the premise that people who use macs would like to have a social network excluding non-Mac users. Hmmm. I don't think so.

Using the now conventional (yawn) friend of a friend network model (see above), look4mac seems only suited for people in the Mac business world -- like technicians, mac software developers and support staff, and perhaps graphic artists -- who want to buy and sell goods and services to each other. The site does not use the social media approach (blogs) but relies on the older collaboration model of forums and interest groups (yawn).

No new ground is plowed here, and although I am trying hard to suspend my disbelief and imagine that for a very specific constituency this could be useful... but, nah, I really can't buy it. And I don't really understand the social network feature, given that it appears to not be very integrated with other features, like classified and forums. And look4mac offers a photo gallery and sharing capability, but does not include the key social architecture widget of tags, for photos or other artifacts. I pass, and I am a very ardent Mac head, although I don't make my living servicing them, which may be the whole point of the service.

I got a PR email the other day from AIM, asking

EVER WONDER HOW POPULAR YOU REALLY ARE? THE AOL INSTANT MESSENGER (AIM®) SERVICE HAS THE ANSWER

New AIMFIGHT.com Site Lets AOL® Members and AIM® Users
Gauge Their Online Popularity, Compare Buddy List Ranking With Friends, Colleagues and AIM Users Everywhere

Dulles, VA July 18, 2005 Are you the social center of the online universe? Do you covet the pinging sound of popularity and importance? Today, American Online, Inc. and the AOL® Instant Messenger(TM) (AIM®) service unveiled a new Buddy List ranking feature and Web site that let users once and for all answer the burning question: "How Popular Am I?"

Live today, AIMFIGHT.com (www.AIMFIGHT.com) lets AOL® members and AIM® users see how connected they are to the online community at any given moment. By entering their AOL or AIM Screen Name, as well as that of a friend, users can square off against their buddies to see just how popular they really are, and compare Buddy List rank.

We have seen a lot of this sort of gaming in the early days of the social networking explosion, when people would attempt to become the 'most connected' at orkut or LinkedIn.

In an accompanying description of what social networks are, the AIMFIGHT site is pretty good, and pretty funny.

I checked who was more connected, Greg Narain or me, using the 'boydstowe' and 'madmonknyc' handles. I dominated!

Of course, it would be a lot more easy to just put the numbers on the buddy list, like other attributes. In my ongoing Nerdvana rant, I'd like all these sorts of social attributes to be on the buddy list entries, but in a case like this it's even more obvious that it should be displayed there, instead of this silly AIMFIGHT screen.

What I would like to do with this underlying circles of friends and friends of friends information is to be able to make my own attributes public: where I am geographically, recent blog posts, my availability, or whatever. The implicit social network latent in the instant messaging network is just crying out to be tapped, and not for silly games like this: it's the future center of the online universe if someone at AOL, Google, MSN, or Yahoo wises up to it.

I am smack in the middle of an experience I have thought about a lot over the past few years. I am getting the opportunity to work with an impassioned group of entrepreneurs who are trying to design a new social application -- details omitted to protect my liabilities under NDA -- and unlike my usual technology consulting, this is really, really early stage.

We have been talking about various well-known solutions that incorporate social elements -- like friends, groups, collaborative filtering, tagging, and so on -- and stargazing about what the hypothetical users will want and care about (we even flew in a few to get their insights and thoughts). And what I have realized, after the first day, is how hard this is. I mean, I have designed lots of software in the past, and used a lot of different approaches to doing it, but this is somehow more complex: exactly because it is all about the social aspect.

I feel that we don't know enough about social tools to have the necessary design patterns defined to construct the social architecture that will surround all future successful social applications. Based on the events of the past day, I am offering a few -- perhaps obvious and overgeneralized -- observations:

• People Are The Living, Breathing, Beating Heart Of The Universe -- Those folks that I know and form my social reality are the center of my universe. Therefore, activities involving interacting with them, learning about them, and perceiving the world through their eyes should be the centerpoint of social applications. I am strongly biased toward the instant messaging buddy list metaphor as a central motif around which social interaction can swirl, but it's not essential, I guess. The motif of an address book can serve, I suppose, or the network models that underlie social networking apps, but seems to me less helpful than buddy list aggregation into groups. (See Nerdvana posts, for more on this.)
• Artifacts Bind Us Together and Define Us -- People create and leave a trail of their social activities, like creating blog posts, comments, tags, links, ratings, posting pictures, even the path that they have taken through a series of pages on a service. These artifacts are actually a more interesting way to characterize people than simply written stuff in a profile. More importantly, some of these artifacts -- links to people and posts, ratings, testimonials, and so on -- represent the social glue that links us, and is a reflection of emergent value in social networks. When dozens of people link to a book review I post in a hypothetical service, and rate it highly, they are -- in essence -- suggesting that my post matters, that it should be read, that others would find it helpful, and, by extension, that I, as the author, have made a contribution that is valued. This accretion of meaning through the tens of thousands of individual activities within a social application is larger than the 'content' generated: the whole is truly greater than the sum of the parts.
• Social Interaction Is Bottom Up, And So Is Everything Else -- Features like tags, user defined groups, arbitrary user-defined relationships, and user defined categories make sense and work because social context is very personal and local, not universal and general. All fans of what I think of as downtempo music will not use that term, and even if they did, they may still not agree with my characterization of a specific album as downtempo. But when you surrender to the bottom-up nature of social applications, that ceases to matter. Over the long haul, those that care about downtempo-ish music will converge toward a more-or-less consistent use of the term, at least consistent enough for the term to be useful in an approximate sense. Which is really all we can hope for in a subjective universe, anyway.
• Social Stuff Absorbs and Trumps Domain Stuff -- Imagine a social application dedicated to the love of wine (I'd join!). There is a natural information schema in the world of wine, based on things like country of origin, regions, vintners, vintage, kinds of grapes, and so on. That information structures an intuitive schema that we all adopt regarding wine. The same holds in other areas, like music, books, blogs, and nearly anything that people can obsess about. But you shouldn't imagine that this domain schema should the primary axis for people's interaction. That just leads to a giant catalog experience, which basically sucks. The primary axis of user interaction in social applications is human interaction -- people communicating, or individual looking at what others say about their obsessions, or finding new potential friends based on shared obsessions, or finding new wines, books, or music based on the recommendations of friends. The natural schemas of the world should be leveraged in the social sphere, but should be subsumed by it. People will want to live in a coffeeshop, talking to people about books, not in the stacks at the library or the warehouse at Amazon.

Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace Anna Karenina [update and correction thanks to Steve and Alex: see comments], "All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I bet that all successful social applications will be based around the same, shared social architectural patterns, while ten thousand failed solutions will fall by the wayside by adopting some "innovative" take on social architecture that will, in the final analysis, miss the point. Like a social bookstore that forces us to stare, endlessly, at the stacks, and makes it hard to find out what your friends are reading, or to connect with other people that quote Tolstoy in their blogs. Even established realms like Amazon will have to rework their architecture to match the social architecture latent in our wiring, or they will get pushed aside by an upstart that cracks the social code.

Dina Mehta has a great post on Worldchanging Social Tools from a few months ago that I missed. Read!

Dave Sifry responded to my recent post on Remote Tagging, telling me that what I want already is supported:

Stowe, we already do this, and support people who link using rel="tag" without necessarily pointing to technorati.com.

This surprised me, so I went to Technorati and looked up the Tags description and found out that, yes, something nearly exactly like what I want is supported:

[from Technorati: Using Technorati Tags]

You do not have to link to Technorati. You can link to any URL that ends in something conforming to the tag standard. For example, these tag links would also be included on our Tag pages:

• <a href="http://apple.com/ipod" rel="tag">iPod</a>
  
• <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity" rel="tag">Gravity</a>
  
• <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/tags/chihuahua" rel="tag">Chihuahua</a>
  

So, this allows me to create a tag in a blog post that associates a tag with someother post (or URL), basically a remote tag. But it isn't in the more normal conversational form:

"over at <a href="http://marc.blogs.it/archives/2005/06/stowe_floats_a.html" rel="tag:socialarchitecture">Marc's Voice</a>"

This would have to be written differently:

"over at Marc's Voice, he has some comments about <a href="http://marc.blogs.it/archives/2005/06/stowe_floats_a.html" rel="tag:socialarchitecture">social architecture</a> worth reading"

What I don't understand is what Technorati does with all the social information: I have never noticed a Technorati tag that displays the information that a tag like 'social architecture' is associated with a particular post at a blog, such as Marc's Voice, but has been created by a third party, in this case, at Get Real. That the critical social glue, here, not just the abilty to create the remote link.

So, I am going to create one here, as an example, and I will see what the outcome is.

Marc Canter agrees with my call for Death To All Panel Sessions as I wrote the other day.

This should lead to Marc's post being associated with the Death To All Panel Sessions tag at Technorati, as I understand it.

More to follow.

I was involved in a brief email exchange with Eric Marcoullier of Mybloglog.com about his service, which provides a means to track what hyperlinks people are clicking on in your blog or website. I told him that I seldom look at the reports, and the reason is that I am more interested in why people follow links than what links they follow.

It occured to me that I would really like to steer people to links in a traceable way, one richer with semantics. So I have a humble suggestion for the poor folks at Technorati, whose life I have been making a living hell over the past months.

Here's my idea: a means to associate tags with URLs, so that I can assert that the destination location in a URL should be tagged, even if those who are managing the destination site/blog don't use tags. I can do that today with Deli.cio.us, but not within the context of blogging. I am colling this "remote tagging" for want of a better term.

Currently technorati tags are of this form:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tags/whatever" rel="tag">Whatever</a>

When you click on the link takes you to the technorati page associated with that tag. But what I would like is another form of url, where you associate a remote destination with one or more tags, and when you link on it, it takes you there, to some blog or other destination, not to technorati.

An example:

"over at <a href="http://marc.blogs.it/archives/2005/06/stowe_floats_a.html" rel="tag:socialarchitecture">Marc's Voice</a>"

This would have the effect of associating the tag with Marc's post. Technorati could also keep track of the fact that it was Stowe that associated the tag with Marc's post, and in which post I did so. Presently, only the author can create Technorati tags for a blog post, unless you use Deli.cio.us (or Furl) bookmarks.

This would turn Technorati tags into a much richer mechanism. The social element would be heightened, because the tag could be used to connect posts. This brings the social element of Deli.cio.us bookmarks into Technorati, but not based on a bookmarking metaphor: it's threaded into the social medium of blogging.

This would also provide tremendous fodder for analysis of the social networks implicit in links. For example, if I have 10 links to Marc's Voice, and 7 are tagged "socialarchitecture" and 3 are tagged "deathtopanelsessions", the nature of our social involvement can be teased out. And likewise, the multifaceted nature of people's social networks could be directly supported in this way. I could tag all links, including blogroll entries, so that the various overlapping social networks that comprise my world could be evident. This would mean that we could drop efforts like FOAF, and instead simply enrich the blogging activities we already are involved in.

I hope offering this feature to Dave Sifry & Co at Technorati will make up for all the trouble I have been causing, finding various nicks, warts, and bumps in the current Technorati implementation. Of course, free advice has a tendency to be worth what you pay for it.

Using a variant of the trick that teenagers have employed for years -- using their instant messaging away status to represent mood, location, or generally what they are up to -- Hollywood freelancers have started to use their away status to indicate availability for work:

Cyrus Farivar

[from Wired News: Never IM in This Town Again!]

Instead of displaying simple "away from my computer" messages, Hollywood buddy lists now overflow with come-ons, from "need work" to "wrapping up shoot." Producers hiring for a new production can tell at a glance who's available now, who's not and who might be free in the near future.

My on-going Nerdvana spin on this: the buddy list is the center of our online universe. People make the away message do all sorts of things that it wasn't designed for because we would like to hang all sorts of self-identity attributes off it. It becomes a nexus of our meta status. I generally display what I am listening to on iTunes, but I would really like to have a spectrum of information being displayed: what I just read, the newest tag I just created, the last blog entry I wrote, and my Plazes location.

Ed Batista analyzes Audioscrobbler using Seth Goldstein's analytic framework and finds it a future hit in the making.

I stumbled onto a new Mososo app called Meetro, based on the instant messaging paradigm but offering the possibility of interacting with random users who happen to be geographically close to you.

It looks interesting, although much of it is unimplemented, and the cockamamie way I was using it -- via Virtual PC -- meant that the server couldn't even hazard a guess about my location. According to Paul Bragiel, of Meetro, they plan an OS X version later this year, as well as rolling out all sorts of other features.

Meetro interoperates with AIM/ICQ, although I didn't see if that includes iChat addresses.

I'll keep you posted as new features roll out. Looks cool, but has a long way to go to be the Nerdvana client I wrote about not too long ago.

[Update 5/25/2005: Several readers asked the context for this post, which is cross-posted from the CTC2005 conference blog, where I am serving as a member of the advisory board.]

My friend, Doc Searls, one of the visionaries behind the Cluetrain Manifesto, and an all around great mind, is fond of pointing out how important metaphors are. How we frame a discussion, or structure our terminology about something, can have much more profound impacts than we might at first imagine. For example, he recently argued (at the Les Blogs conference in Paris), that the First Amendment guarantees for freedom of the press might not be protected for bloggers, unless the bloggers wisely start to describe what they are up to as "journalism." If we call ourselves something other than "journalists," he points out, the Federal government may try to abridge our freedom of speech, since only the press is protected from government contols.

A similar although not so politically charged battle of words is going on in the world of collaborative and social technologies. And, like Doc's advice regarding freedom of the press, the choice of words involves high stakes, since behind the words there are the various constituencies using them, with potentially divergent agendas.

I hope that the danger inherent in metaphors doesn't blow up in this discipline, like we saw in the ill-fated knowledge management experiment, where the industrial and financial concept of managing and controlling assets led to a wholesale dehumanizing of knowledge and disastrous results in hundreds of knowledge strip-mining projects.

On one hand, it may seem obvious and sensible that we are talking about people collaborating: sharing information, coordinating activities, and posting messages. Working toward shared goals, in project teams, trying to get things done. All very straight forward, and, perhaps not so obviously, very corporate, very industrial.

Superficially, there is nothing wrong with a focus on collaborative technology. But I believe that this perspective, this metaphor, is flawed. It stresses the wrong side of the coin.

The collaborative technology metaphor highlights the machinery, the technology platform that underlies people collaborating, and underemphasizes what people are doing: socializing. And I don't mean socializing, like gossiping, per se. But I do mean the creation, care, and feeding of social ties, the use of trust and reputation, and the application of digital identity.

Technologists -- and I am a recovering technologist, so I know -- focus on the tools, the plumbing, and information flow. Collaborative technologies are viewed as pipes that bits float through; people are sources and sinks for messages, or documents, or other artifacts through these pipes. A collaborative assemply line, where people are like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, struggling to keep up with the information flow.

Continue reading "Metaphors Matter: Collaborative Technology versus Social Tools"

Based on the recent push I've made -- adding like 10 new wifi spots in the past few days, and inviting five or six Get Realiacs who wanted to help -- I have pushed ahead of Joi in the Plazes Top Ten Discoverers list.

But I bet he sneaks up on me during some worldwide trip. The guy's a traveling machine. I must remain vigilent...

[tags: Plazes, Joi Ito, geolocation]

I stumbled across the personal website of Per Persson, a Nokia researcher who is one of the designers behind Nokia Sensor. He's worked on a number of interesting sounding projects involving proximity, mobility, and social interaction.

The original work on Sensor was called Digidress:

DigiDress (2002-2003)

DigiDress was provided to Nokia employees for user trial. The software was made available and users with compatible phones were invited to download and try it out. The DigiDress prototype was equipped with a logging functionality that enabled us to collect very detailed information about what features were used and how much. During the study we collected 46 DigiDresses which were later subjected to analysis. We also interviewed 10 of the most active DigiDress users.

During the trial period (89 days) 618 users installed DigiDress on their phones. The average use span was 25 days. The identity expressions created were both serious and playful, revealing and non-revealing. Factors influencing the identity expression included strategies for personal impression management, privacy concerns, and social feedback. The application was used with both acquainted and unacquainted people, and viewing the identity expression of people nearby was one major motivation for continued use. Direct communication features such as Bluetooth messages were not commonly adopted. In several instances, DigiDress acted as a facilitator for 'real' social interaction between previously unacquainted users. Privacy concerns and their alleviations, as well as use barriers, were identified.

Weird. I would have thought bluetooth features would have been one of the primary factors for adoption, but mostly people seem to use it to get a better insight to others' 'identity'.

There's a long list of other interesting projects there. My favorite: Scent.

Scent (2002-2003)

By comparing the phonebook data stored on users' mobile phones, Scent application enriched face-to-face encounters by discovering common acquaintancies, while still maintaining privacy. It also allowed users to create identity expressions and guestbooks. 539 users installed Scent and used it over period of 8 weeks.

[pointer by Alex Carvalho]

[tags: Nokia Sensor, Per Persson, mososo, geolocation]

Hylton reminded me we have a January 15 2005 Wireless interview online with Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, the founders of Dodgeball, the company acquired by Google yesterday.

[tags: Google, Dodgeball]

In case anyone was wondering whether Dodgeball really is a cool idea, they were acquired by Google, announced today:

Q: Why did dodgeball sell to Google? A: As a two-person team, Alex and I have taken dodgeball about a far as we can alone. Since we finished grad school, we've been trying to figure out how to grow dodgeball and make it a better service along the way. We talked to a lot of different angel investors and venture capitalists, but no one really "got" what we were doing - that is until we met Google.

The people at Google think like us. They looked at us in a "You're two guys doing some pretty cool stuff, why not let us help you out and let's see what you can do with it" type of way. We liked that. Plus, Alex and I are both Google superfans and the people we've met so far are smart, cool and excited about what they're working on.

I will try to track down Dennis Crowley, who I met last year at Supernova, and see what this means for the next stage of Dodgeball. Or maybe Clay Shirky, who I think is one of their advisors.

[Update: 6:53pm ET - Clay has a post at M2M about the acquisition that includes one hundred "w00ts" as well as some insight into what's going on.]

[pointer from Ted Rheingold]

[tags: Google, Dodgeball]

I fiddled around with the Yahoo MyWeb Beta, primarily because I wanted to see how they might have integrated with Yahoo 360 -- the social networking solution in desperate need of a reason to live -- but I have already uninstalled the toolbar from Firefox. I had hoped the Yahoo 360 integration would lead to a social search/bookmarking solution that actually built on a buddy list and/or social network, but the integration is not available yet. The MyWeb solution without that looks like just another search and bookmarks system, and there's not enough there to justify changing my little ways.

I also took a look at the MyYahoo, with RSS aggregation built-in. Again, since I already have a gazillion RSS feeds in Bloglines, there is no reason to move to a portal-style solution -- but that's old news, since RSS feeds have been supported there since last fall.

All the buzz about the mad innovation going on at Yahoo doesn't seem justified, with the obvious exception of their acquisition of Flickr. Maybe Stewart and company can reorganize the mindset at Yahoo away from portals and into the paths of socialness.

[tags: MyYahoo Beta, Flickr, Yahoo]

The Mad Linker pointed out that Metaatem is up and running, and allows you to create graphics of words based on Flickr photos of letters. Looks like those Noir ransom notes with the letters cut from magazines.

David is in rare form in Web as world:

[...] some things become clearer if you do not start with the premise that people are fundamentally isolated and battle against noise in order to connect with others. Instead, we find ourselves in a world shared by others. Connection comes first. Isolation and alienation are withdrawals from the pre-existence of what is shared. I think that helps explain why some sites "work" and others don't. Many of the sites that work for me are ones in which I see that my participation helps create and enrich this shared world; I have that sense at del.icio.us and Flickr, at every place I leave a review or join in a discussion, and every time I blog. I can't explain that by thinking of the Web only as a medium, but I can explain it if it's a shared world that we are building together.

I believe that this is the defining figure/ground issue of our time. Those, on one hand, who see the Internet as plumbing and the junk pouring through the pipes as the real important stuff; the publishers' viewpoint, where information is pushed to a passive audience. And us, on the other, who see the Internet as a shared space, where new forms of social interaction structure shared experience; a communitarian viewpoint, where dialog and conversation within groups can reform the world.

Its all in how you look at it, or what you want to get out of it.

Tom Sander on Meetup, based on a research study undertaken this summer in a bunch of US cities: casual dating form of associationism - it's not a lifelong decision.

Study overturns stereotypes - not a young person phenomenon, was attracting well-educated, not newcomers, was not always strangers meeting strangers.

Do people stick? No, found low stickiness. Even when people were positive, half or two thirds might not come back. There is a lot of turnover, even with well established meetups. But there is social capital success: on average, 30% of the people do something outside the meetup with people they met there. 30% found new friends, 23% found 2 or more.

Strongly left-leaning: 10-15 times more opposed to Bush than in favor of him.

Turns out that leader-run meetups develop less social capital than the looser, ad hoc model: when the meetups focus more diligently on the business at hand, people develop fewer friendships, do less collectively outside th emeetings, and are less likely to come back.

Reprises the observation of Lee Bryant that when you move to bottom-up, everything needs to be bottom-up or things don't hold together.

So it was a sort odd, synchronicity feeling: I decided to turn on my laptop ridiculously early this AM to jot down some thoughts about the possibilities arising from a better fusion of proximity and place oriented social sofware (specifically manifested in the Plazes beta, about which I have written this and that already) with industrial strength instant messaging (specifically the 2Entwine Gush product, about which I have scribbled mightily). Then I noticed guest blogger Marc Eisenstadt's first post, where he wrote:

[from Greetings + Synchronous Social Software 1]

One of the many reasons I'm delighted to be here is that Stowe has long been the Daddy of what I like to think of as Synchronous Social Software... a category still so new that if you run a Google search for the quoted string "synchronous social software" you find, well... that this is, until now, really a very rarely-used piece of jargon. But unpack the jargon and you find that Stowe has been writing about precisely this niche for many moons now (in addition to having coined the more generic phrase "Social Tools" some 5 years ago!)

And that's exactly what had me tossing and turning, so I had to get out of bed to write the ideas down.

All I Want: Plazes + Gush

Plazes is among the first social software technology that I believe that I will actually use, and it is exactly because of the blending of its proximity and place based capabilities with with synchronous communication opportunities. But of course, I want more.

Plazes brings together some critical elements that match my wish list for social software:

• I want to keep tabs on "the known": basically, those on my buddy list.
  
• I want to know if those folks are online, and where they are.
  
• I am interested in meeting other folks, wherever they may be on Earth, who share my particular interests and obsessions.
  
• I travel a lot, and have difficulty letting people know where I am, but, in general, I want my friends to know, without bombarding people with a stream of spammish emails or IM alerts. So basically, actual location should become an aspect of my presence: this is what Plazes offers, at least in part.
  
• I am interested in knowing more about my immediate surroundings; for example, who are the other people typing away at my local the Starbucks? Or, at a slightly larger scale, what do my friends and others think of the restaurants, stores, hotels, and in my immediate surroundings? What interesting things have happened in Cafe Montmartre (a local bistro I tagged yesterday in Plazes) recently?
  

But I want it all smooshed together, not apart.

Plazes supports RSS feeds from defined Plazes, so you can subscribe to the feeds and be alerted when others tag your haunts. This could also be a means of alerting interested parties to events. Ann, the owner of Cafe Montmartre, could alert me and the other habitues of that bistro about an upcoming wine tasting or musician's gig.

That part of it is already 'integrated' since I have my existing RSS reader. But what is left dangling is the integration of presence.

What I want is to have a client on my desktop pull the piece together. Note that Plazes relies on a desktop client to login to the Plazes network, but it doesn't do much besides login and send location information it lifts from the router.

Instead, Plazes should offer an integration hook for IM clients like Gush, so that I could have a much richer integration of presence indication:

• Every buddy that participates in the Plazes solution would be tagged with geolocation as well as on/off/away presence and availability.
  
• Plazes of interest to me would also exist on my buddy list, so I could keep tabs on them: how many folks are there, how many new tags, network status, how many subscribers to the RSS feed.
  

Note that I already had a discussion with the guys at 2Entwine this week about a new wishlist item: allowing me to put RSS feeds and buddies on the same display, not in two separate worlds. I want to see Marc Eisenstadt's presence right next to My Dog stats. And now, I want to see his geolocation and be able to access the RSS feed from the Plaze he is working (or playing) in.

Dudley and Wes of 2Entwine said relaxing the false dichotomy between RSS feeds and buddylists in Gush should be relatively easy; what I am wishing for here, is however, a major undertaking, and would require all sorts of efforts on the part of 2Entwine and Stefan Kellner and Felix Petersen, the masterminds behind Plazes.

These two groups don't even know each other. But they soon will be introduced, trust me.

Greg Narain has been laboring with a group of collaborators at Pokkari for the past months on a new project, and yesterday unveiled at least part of what has been brewing:

[from SocialTwister.com: Announcing Relevanta: Reputation for the Blogosphere

Pokkari, Inc. announces the release of its next-generation blog aggregator, Relevanta. Unlike other aggregation and search services that strive to index the Internet at large, Relevanta focuses on specific conversations. Relevanta collects and correlates these conversations in a clear, concise fashion which promotes better evaluation and collaboration among users.

Blogs and other forms of emergent media are quickly rising in popularity and influence. As more and more individuals elect to create and participate in this new, exciting form of journalism, issues arise when attempting to evaluate new sources of information. Lacking a context to gauge the material and perspective on of the author, interested parties are forced to either accept material as presented or perform exhaustive research to validate the facts.

Relevanta introduces a democratic, community model into the news consumption and distribution process. All members of the Relevanta community have the ability to contribute information, commentary, and valuations of both the authors and their written works. In addition, Relevanta’s underlying database provides automatic linking of keywords and provides members with extended data and background information.

With this new set of data, no longer are articles and other forms of content isolated entities Building and mapping relationships between news sources and the articles themselves are natural features afforded even the casual visitor. "Since the Internet first appeared on the mainstream's radar consumers have been plagued by one burning question: 'Is what I'm reading good and accurate?'. Relevanta helps answer this question using community intelligence." notes Jared Klett, CEO and Co-Founder of Pokkari, Inc.

Greg and the guys at Pokkari have built what I was thinking about when I wrote about Kinja(which turned out to be very disappointing), and even earlier when I was conceiving of a Relevanta-esque solution called "Blogisphere":

[from Rumors of Kinja]

The premise behind Blogisphere is that the missing insight for creating a working business model around blogs is to focus on what the readers need, and build a system to support readers: to make reading blogs easier and more rewarding.

This model would be based on the now well-established principles of collaborative filtering and slashdot style reader-based evaluation of content quality. And like Slashdot, the goal is to foster communities of readers, united through shared technology. Today, we find that this is emerging in an unconsolidated and haphazard way. Providing a better reader experience – one that will integrate with existing authoring systems, but provide a uniform and consistent reader participation model – will provide a strong incentive for readers to use the system. And later on, the authors will follow.

I think these guys are on to something here. I am glad to say that we are planning to create a Relevanta-ized Get Real sometime next month. I can't wait.

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.

I am really excited about a new event that I am honored to be involved in: Corante's Real Time Collaboration Experience held in collaboration with Inbox East.

The Inbox conference runs 17-19 November 2004, and will be held in Atlanta's Cobb Galleria Centre.

The Experience involves a workshop and trade show pavilion, and will be held on the morning of 19 November. Be sure to register with this code -- CRTE04 -- to get a $100 discount!

I have asked my old pal, David Coleman of Collaborative Strategies to play the role of co-host, so we should be having an illegal amount of fun there. Here's the current prospectus, such as it is:

THE WORKSHOP

Your Host: Stowe Boyd, Corante
Co-Host: David Coleman, Collaboratives Strategies

Setting Context: The Wheel of Real-Time Collaboration

Stowe will be leading the workshop using his 'late show' format, involving short and focused presentations, strong reliance on interview and dialog, and demos of breakthrough technologies. In this first session, he lays out a conceptual framework for real-time technology and its impact on today's world.

Market Trends in Real-Time Collaboration

David Coleman will present various trends in the real-time marketplace and their relevance to the enterprise and individual.

The World That Instant Messaging Is Making: New Directions in IM

Stowe and David will discuss and demonstrate a number of innovative instant messaging technologies.

Convergence and Collision: From Apps to Stacks

This session is devoted to the convergence of technologies like IM, web conferencing, voice, video, content, and other real-time collaboration apps into complex enterprise architecture stacks. It will include 'policy/vision' statements from major industry representatives.

Real-Time Social Tools

This session is devoted to the convergence of real-time collaboration into social media and social tools. It will demonstrate a wide variety of real-time social software.

Summary: A Roadmap for Real-Time

This wrap-up session by David Coleman is devoted to detailing a roadmap for the enterprise adoption of real-time collaboration technologies, and then a final wrap-up by the host, Stowe Boyd.

Note: attendees will receive an executive report of the same name, co-authored by the Host and Co-host.

This is in a sense the first real official announcement about Corante Events, about which we will have a lot more to say in the upcoming weeks. We intend to launch a wide variety of real and virtual events over the next few months, and we invite our contributors and readers to help us to make them innovative, timely, and rewarding.

And remember, if you're signing up for Inbox be sure to include the registration code - CRTE04 - to get a $100 discount!

Socialtext raises a series A round as Ross explains, with existing investors (Joi Ito, Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus and Freedom Technology Ventures) -- and new investors (Jun Makihara and Omidyar Network):

This is a major milestone for Socialtext, positioning us to build upon our market leadership and fulfill a mission we began in 2002. When Pete, Adina, Ed and I founded Socialtext we saw an opportunity to build a great company that did great things for its customers as well as society. The epiphany was that this could be done with simple easy to use tools and we could foster a way of working openly that builds trust between users.

It's particularly interesting that Ross says he met Pierre Omidyar through blogging, rather than the traditional VC meet-and-greet route.