broadstuff

There is no doubt that social networks have a conundrum with "monetization". On the one hand they have an incredibly rich source of data about their users, but on the other no-one seems to want to give them much money to advertise to those people. Thus various schemes have been tried (such as Facebook Beacon) to extract that data in more useful (aka intrusive) forms for advertisers. That Beacon was roundly condemned seems not to deter others who wish to rush in where those already burned fear to tread.

Latest up is SocialMedia with FriendRanking:

The company scans data about your activities on Facebook and other social networks, infers who your best friends are, and ranks them. Then the company exploits that ranking to serve you relevant ads.

It does so with something it calls “social banners,” which insert references to your best friends within advertisements.

The idea is that showing you ads that reference your friends will attract your attention and thus make the ads perform better.

CNet explains it thus:

[The] social banner would ask which of your close Facebook friends, among a short list, you’d like to invite to see the movie. Or a social banner might inform you that a friend Jim just ranked Iron Man with three stars, and it might ask to “click here to buy tickets at Fandango.

So, given that people didn't love Beacon a lot, why will this work? Frankly, we don't think it will, but that won't stop desperate SocNets buying it - as SocialMedia's CEO notes, the response rate to standard display advertising on social networks is abysmal. People click on ads about 0.02 percent of the time, because people have started ignoring ads. Given that everyone wants billion dollar valuations, it has to get rates better than that.

But it won't - the Behavioural Economics are against it. Social interactions - the things we do with friends - are "social capital" and we separate those things from "Financial Capital" In fact, introducing the market to our social interactions totally changes the game of the interaction. Lewis Hyde, who wrote on Gift Economies (of which social intercourse is a type) noted that when a primarily gift-based economy is turned into a commodity-based economy, the social fabric of the group is invariably destroyed. Quite simply, pimping stuff is not an acceptable social transaction unless the information is directly asked for.

The dream of course is that by mining your social metrics, you will get Ads that are very relevant and you will welcome them - except they are not, cannot be as not only is this the commercial realm invading the social, but we are simply not "in the market" when we are conversing with friends, unless we directly ask. Not only that, but the Beacon evidence is if people do find that their data is being mined overtly, they get extremely upset (or at least a noisy enough cadre do).

For this reason, any advertising in the space has to have a very light touch - 10 years ago Yahoo experimented with email advertising and found that the only thing that was acceptable was an ad at the bottom of the email. The lesson was not lost on Google, hence Adwords - and its not on Gmail or on Google Groups!

Then again there is a new crop of bubble-valued dotcoms desperate to get (or keep) sky-high valuations despite all rational evidence, so there will no doubt be more (VC backed) toiling in the vineyards of social datamining.

So what will happen in this game longer term?

Clearly there will be continual iteration of the social net datamining play, the belief that the next approach will be sufficiently "relevant" to get under the user's trust radar and hit the economic attention El Dorado. But we predict something else will occur too - every crass attempt will build up the resistance and mistrust, people will start to be more wary and subvert these systems, so the value of what is mined will decrease as the ability to mine rises. It will also push th argument fr personal datastores, obfuscators and so on.....

And what does winning actually look like?

Congratulations, you have managed to subvert social into commercial capital - but guess what, we behave differently in that world - and we will - and its not how people like it, so its highly likely people will just move their social capital elsewhere. It is transferable, after all. And there will probably always be another VC or Offset funded SocNet starting out looking for new eyeballs too, that is willing to be more homely as it starts the journey

Afterthought - here's the thing that gets me with these services - there are a bunch of them being built, VC funding is forthcoming, but its all bad-guy stuff - its not something you would do if left to your basic human ethics after all. So imagine if you wanted to build an anti-Friendranking system, an antidote to antisocial object mining? Its not hard to do, it just reverse these technologies. How many VC's would line up to fund that? There's no money in it, after all - its just useful! Thank heavens for Open Source......

Last week there was a panel discussion at Supernova 08 on "Liquid Conversations", to wit:

....about how personal content, text, video and comments can be separated from individual websites and shared across the net and personalized.

In other words trying to justify why comments left on your blog should actually be allowed to flow to somewhere else - i.e. go to someone else's aggregator service to make them rich, not you. This is explained most succinctly by Dave McClure:

i think there's a really interesting conversation (heh) that's becoming more important around the role of what i call the Comment DJ Mashup Artist, or the Share Pimp -- that is, not the person who creates original content, but rather the person who promotes / shares / pimps it out to other audiences, whether that be via Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Mixx, Facebook News Feed, FriendFeed, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, SlideShare, embeds, etc etc.

...but this can be done without moving the original content! In fact, strictly speaking, these "liquid" conversations are in fact thixotropic - ie they only flow if forced to - left to their own devices they would stay on the blogs, but give em a squeeze and they flow elsewhere, to the Share Pimp....who thus gets the lions share of link love, pageviews, Ad revenues etc. I absolutely get why there is a conversation about this!

And this property will generate more Plasma (hot air) conversations in the future, as TechCrunch notes:

One big issue with all of the different conversation aggregators is around the ownership of comments. When you post a comment to a blog, who owns that comment? Many of these services directly copy the comments off and will place them within their own applications - so the question is how copyright and ownership works in these instances (in the same way that it isn’t kosher to completely copy a complete blog post, it shouldn’t be kosher to copy a complete comment)

Also, call me Nick Carr, but I fail to see what is in this for the Original Content Producer (aka Blogger) - who has thus been relegated here to the role of digital sharecropper. In fact I can imagine a lot more Plasma Conversation (aka superheated air) will be generated by these liquid conversations once bloggers understand who gets the bulk of the value they are creating!

In addition, as a user of these aggregation services I have noticed that "liquid" conversations are generally not as solid as a good blog conversation, ie they do not lead themselves to the more considered arguments one sometimes sees on blogs, but are more a series of one liners + karma points.

Still, they are better than the vaporous conversations one sees on Twitter for example.

No, rather than liquid conversations, what we want to see are Visco-Elastic Conversations, that can flow but return to where they started.

Interesting piece in TechCrunch re valuation of Social Networks, the really interesting bit is this table:



Now we have had a look at these valuations before, (see here and here for example) and our view is that the tiny % investments in Facebook and Linked In don't really show value, whereas outright takeouts like Last.fm and Bebo do. Thus the column from Bebo's valuation are in our view more indicative of the real values - especially given that there is increasingly a view that the early assumption of Ad revenues are overblown

There are clearly conditions to the valuation, and this was a good comment from Rich Swier:

....but from a pure valuation perspective, you are missing some key elements like

1. Dead Profiles - The biggest “dirty little secret” noone talks about is how many of these sites have dead profiles, where people never login again. If you look at Alexa (etc) you can predict how active the site really is. I think most of these sites have a serious retention problem.. especially Facebook (once kids graduate and become adults)

2. User “willingness” to Pay - this to me is the biggest factor you overlook to some degree. Its great to have millions of users, but if they are not willing to pay for premium features, then it will be hard to monetize. Even the biggest networks make very little money on ads… (because users are there to socialize not click on ads (e.g. shop). To me this is the key to a valuation. If you can’t make money? What’s the point?

3. And finally, the other factor to Valuation is “who will buy it?”… I don’t think any of these companies can or want to go public.. so who is the buyer? if there is no buyer, then the valuation is meaningless…. I think sites with critical brand recognition like Linked In in the pro-market, will have a longer list of buyers…

All very true, but given that most of these networks are chasing similar (yoof) demographics we can probably assume 1 and 2 are more similar than different (Linked in being an exception) Point 3 is always key - there is a limited set of buyers for these services.

You can imagine a Richter Scales style skit on this using the Clash's "I'm so bored with the USA".....anyway, this post by Fred Wilson on A VC caught my eye:

I read a comment on my “Looking For Inspiration” post this morning that suggested I was just getting bored with Web 2.0 like many others. It’s something I’ve considered a lot lately....

....I am a bit jealous of friends who are working on finding and funding alternative energy or biomedical technologies that have the potential to address the serious problems facing the world. At times it seems that helping the web become more social, intelligent, mobile, and playful is not as impactful.

....And certainly there is much about “web 2.0” that doesn’t seem to address that need. Throwing food at your friends on Facebook or twittering about the length of the line at the shake shack lands squarely in the “banality” camp that Kirby railed about in his essay on “pseudo modernism” that I blogged about last week.

Fred has been seduced by Umair's thoughts about using the Web to:

Organize the world's hunger.
Organize the world’s energy.
Organize the world’s thirst.
Organize the world's health.
Organize the world's freedom.
Organize the world's finance.
Organize the world's education.

I commented on this last week (see here), and have been mulling a Part II for it - the issue is in how do we organise - ie what structures are used - so here are the thoughts on how this might be done. First, the caveats - technofix is not for everything, nor is the hammer of Big IT - but one of the benefits of the more modern technologies is that they have a lighter touch, ie they avoid these issues better:

People would rather live with a problem they can't solve than a solution they don't understand
One of the professors on my MSc program used to say this about implementing successful change programs - ie an externall imposed solution seldom takes root as well as something developed by people in the situation. Ie its not enough to give people fishing rods etc, they have to be left to define which ones to use, how they will fish etc.

There is a risk of applying the most modern technologies to problems that can be more simply solved....
In the early 70's E F Schumacher wrote "Small is Beautiful", which showed how simple, locally produceable technology trumped large scale technology in developing countries. The lessons were largely ignored by aid organisations then (as most aid programs require recipients to spend money on the donor countries' technology) and by and large still are.

That said, I think there is quite a bit modern technology can do to drive change. A cursory glance at history will tell you that shifts in economics drive huge sociopolitical change. Communication technology has driven huge changes in these economics since the Industrial Revolution, but the benefits, like the future, are unevenly distributed. In my view Web media have especially high impact potential as they:

- Reduce Transaction Costs
- Give people access to correct information
- Allow people to self-organise
- Impact energy and resource usage
- New financial structures

Reduce transaction costs
Reducing transaction costs doesn't just allow people to be banal on Twitter - the uses are far more transforming than that, Ronald Coase showing in the 1930's that reducing transaction costs allow much smaller organisations, with lower capital formation, to be sustainable. In other words people can now create change with small organisations that don't need high capital formation. This is driving the Web 2.0 startup scene, but its also driving for example home-working, micro-credit, global action networks (of which terrorism is the dark side example) and should allow major increases in the ability of small groups of people in developing countries to organise themselves.

In many ways this is the Prime Mover for much of what we see today, but there are some of the specific benefits of reduced transaction costs that have major magnification effects - these are the ones noted below:

Access to Correct Information
One of the downsides of "social media" is that groups can become infected with "groupthink", ie "This is the way we have always done this" - so being able to independently acquire correct information, at low cost, must have a major part in any plans to impact these issues. Not only this, but ease of information transfer allow a greater understanding of global issues so hopefully allows the formation of systems that can re-allocate resources etc to where they are required, allows people to reign in dangerous leaders, etc. Today Wikipedia, what can tomorrow bring?

There is another side to correct information - there is a lot of cr*p information out there, but as more data is digitised and exposed, it can be crunched to hopefully ascertain the real facts rather than opinion broadcast by those who have access to media, which pervades too many areas today.

Allow people to self organise
Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody" is the latest book from a long line of people who have understood that allowing people to self organise to solve their own problems is a powerful tool. Web 2.0 systems based around social networks will be one of these tools as they evolve - in fact in my view the only way we are going to mobilise sufficient resources to solve the issues Umair lists is by using these sorts of tools. (This is also a long wave system - long after Facebook and Twitter have gone the way of telex and faxes, these systems will underpin much of the underlying comms structures we use.)

This is not to say that self organising is a panacea, history shows this is best used for protest/resistance movement structures and not to actually run things, but to run things ongoing probably also requires derivations of these social media tools.


Energy and Resource Usage
One cannot of course have a discussion about "saving humanity" without talking about climate change etc. I'm still sceptical about mankind's alleged influence on all this, but I do buy the argument that continuing consumption of resources at the level of today's Rich West and then expanding it to the rest of humanity is unsustainable. I personally think we'll run out of resources (and water) long before we bake and/or drown ourselves in any new global Jurassic period. The comms technology we are building must have some capability to help here in terms of, for example:

- reduce energy usage by removing the need for so many journeys - online ordering / home deliver in urban areas is more efficient that car journeys, a flight saved by a webcast is always useful

- allow us to redistribute used goods far more effectively - it is always far more resource intensive to make something new than use something already made (take cars for example - ignore the Pious, buy a good second hand sports car and be virtuous ). Today eBay, tomorrow the world

- there must be all sorts of other small efficiencies possible just by accessing correct infomation and being connected to other people

New Financial Structures
You don't have to be a banker or economist to sense that there is something seriously wrong with the world's financial structures (in fact it probably helps not to be) but the combination of reduced transaction costs and being connected may help us to avoid if not replace the worst of the financial system's excesses. By this I don't mean makin' whuffie (too fluffy imho, we evolved out of gift economies for good scalability reasons) but by making it easier for people to find correct information and organise effectively sans middlemen (think of replacing brokers by online trading etc and magnify that) and having more say in distribution of our money. Imagine if you could vote for where your tax money went - how many foreign wars would we see?

This is not to say that new ICT alone helps - and just getting networked is an issue still in much of the world, as is affording the gear - but the arrival of the $5 mobile phone and $100 PC can't but help, as is the emerging skein of global wireless networking, brought about by sheer scale economics. initially paid for by richer people. My thought is more that people building a large ecosystem of Web 2.0 services that cut their teeth by throwing sheep etc allows the darwinian evolution of robust, low cost services that become very useful ongoing. Top down services designed to fix big problems always seem to struggle. That said however, I think if Fred and his fellow VC's are prepared to fund "GreenWeb 2.0" businesses that could be very interesting.

On Friday I attended the MediaFutures Conference, put on just before Mashed08 up at Alexandra Palace this weekend. It was interesting on a number of fronts.

Firstly, the layout of the room - to the right and centre looking from the stage were round tables and chairs, on the left a whole load of sofas with extension cords. The new meedja bloggeurs mostly went to couches with their laptops, the old stream media mostly sat at the tables.

Secondly, the wifi worked perfectly. This is most unusual at any form of New Media conference in my experience.

Thirdly, the presenters and topics were (by design I'm sure) quite provocative to all parties there, this was quite refreshing as I find pure "New Media" or pure "Old Media" conferences tend to wax too much on the side of their preferred beliefs.

Anyway - a brief precis of the day (all the speakers bios are on the website linked above, so go there for details - also presentations will be added over time):

First up - Dr Brian Winston, who talked about "Unknown Unknowns", ie trying to put some structure around thinking about those things we cannot predict about how and where the media will evolve. Here are some nuggets that resonated with me:

- Rogers' original technology adoption curve (Moore's Chasm is based on this) was based on a group of Iowa farmers adoption of new seeds in the late 1940's. Extrapolating to modern Geek tech is risky

- "The Law of the Suppression of Radical Potential" - New Technology is introduced into the mass market insofar as it doesn't upset anybody, tends to be clocked for a long time if it does.

- The reason why university education will never go online is students' need for sex. (Except for IT of course)

There was quite a long debate between Peter Day and Brian Winston, and various members of the audience, who, instead of asking questions, rambled on about their own hobby horses. I really reckon we need a sort of 1 minute question rule for the audience. We were getting restive on the couches and the Twitter backstream started up. The observation was made that at one point the people on stage and doing the "questioning" were all more mature people wearing chinos and grumbling about modern technology, and the term Chino Crisis was coined by your correspondent ( who else ;0 ) - and it is spreading .

Anyway, next up were a series of presentations of research of what actual users are doing:

Alex McKie showed us some research that showed the mass of user behaviours and motivations has not changed that much at all, much of the supposed behaviour shift that is blogged about incessantly is really only still done by a tiny proportion of people. Takeaways I noted were:

- when people who have downloaded all heir stuff from iTunes find they can't move the media on to other devices, thats when the kickback really kicks in - she thinks Apple is storing up trouble there.

- most people find it easier to believe in magic that understand how a lot of modern technology works (the A C Clarke law)

- put your money on the technologies that allow people to gossip.

An outfit called Plot then asked us to think about how our usage of media had changed in the last 10 years and played some interviews of people's views. My biggest shift has been the near ubiquity of my laptop...it now allows me to have a "packet" based timestream - I was listening to the speakers and was active online. I do find in conferences the actual speaking is sometimes far slower than my mind works so being able to fill in is useful - and this was one of those times. Maybe its "continual partial attention" but I don't think so - if I know the subject or where is going I can do something else for a few moments.

Then a debate about what the media is for today. They had Andrew Keen (author and arch sceptic of New Media), Charlie Beckett of Polis (a Think Tank), Andrew Calcutt of UEL, chaired by Claire Fox of the Institute of Ideas. I'd like to say that this session was a sharp exchange and rebuttal of ideas, but it seemed to me that the protagonists were mostly talking past each other and banging their own drums. Even though they were using the same (buzz)words, meaning were often different/vague so it was hard to work out what they meant. Judging by the Twitterstream I wasn't the only one with this impression. The only thought that was new to me was this re Citizen Media

- if there was any real power in it, no one in media would invite the citizens in! Inclusiveness is tool to get exclusives

Andrew Keen does have a way with words to rile up the Geeknoscenti, these were a few goodies:

- he noted that the Social Media bubble is bursting, and his view of "Web 3.0" is that it will be when the professionals seize back the New Media.

- "Web2.0 - the technology is more advanced than Web1.0, but the conversation is more backward"

Lunch, and the session split into 3 breakouts - "Skills in the Innovation Process", "OpenNess and Innovation", and I was giving a talk on the "Myths of FreeConomics" in the "Provocations / Show and Tells" stream. I'm afraid I wasn't really concentrating on the Show and Tells as my laptop had chosen that moment to misbehave so I was busy getting it back up, so my apologies to those people. In my session, other Agents Provocateurs were Milverton Wallace who talked about the "Browserisation" of the TV experience (we will expect the TV to look / work more like an interactive browsable menu) and seasoned observer Martin Huckerby whose main issue was the incredibly poor standard of factual reporting in the Tech Blogosphere / Journosphere, noting that hype springs eternal.

I missed most of the next session as I had a few other things to attend to, but got back in time for the last session, where Rory Cellan Jones chaired, and Norman Lewis, Sean Phelan (who founded Multimap) and Prof Patrick Barwise (LBS) talked about models of Innovation and Development.

Norman has done a lot of work about kids' behaviour in Social Networks, and noted that a lot of the growth is because our society is risk averse so that they go out far less than in previous generations, and so use social nets to talk to each other. (This was echoed in an earlier session with a comment that Bebo is more about anticipation and talking about something that may happen (eg something like a sleepover that older people took for granted in their youth). Norman did not tell us why there is such risk aversion though, which to me surely is the big question? The rest of the session was a panel discussion, here are some notes I took:

- Microfinance in Africa - lenders increasingly only lend to women as men just spend it on themselves, mobile phones and beer

- Patents are becoming an increasingly devalued currency, in R&D, R is dropping and D is rising - short term good, long term bad

- in 25 years time, most 40 yr olds (todays 15 year olds) will have the same long commutes, mortgages, kids, will watch c 25 hrs of TV a week, and it still wont be UGC

- Children are not naturally good with the technology, its just that they have no preconceived structure or fear to impede them

The last session of the day was the bar - my favourite sort of Liquid Conversation (I have remarked before on the roles of Alcohol in Social Networks and this was great fun - lots of fascinating people to talk to, ideas to bat around etc.)

I'd say it was an "interesting" conference, in that it was quite "edgy" as there was a lot more poking of sticks at comfortable sacred cows than conferences which are more themed and tend to preach to the faithful, and Nico MacDonald and the organisers are to be credited for that in my view. I thought the Web 2.0 scene took quite a few well deserved pokes, and my overall view of the "median" MSM folks is that there is probably still far too much of a remembrance of a media past. The risk of such a conference is that believers go away grumpy after a dose of heresy, so reading the other blogs should be interesting (see here for eg).

The thought occurred after reading a microblog by Suw Charman re walking up a mountain top as a way of "turning off" from digital media. The obvious thought was that one need not turn off from blogging while hiking up Kilimanjaro, which naturally led to the thought of starting the sport of Extreme Blogging, based on Extreme Ironing:

Extreme Ironing (or EI) is an extreme sport and a performance art in which people take an ironing board to a remote location and iron a few items of clothing. According to the official website, extreme ironing is:

“ the latest danger sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt. ”

Part of the attraction and interest the media has towards extreme ironing seems to centre on the issue of whether it is really a sport or not. It is widely considered to be tongue-in-cheek.[1]

Some locations where such performances have taken place include a mountainside of a difficult climb; a forest; in a canoe; while skiing or snowboarding; on top of large bronze statues; in the middle of a street; underwater; whilst parachuting;[2] under the ice cover of a lake; and in warzones. The performances have been conducted solo or by groups. The Guardian said of extreme ironing that it carries on a tradition of British eccentricity

Such as this for example:



So - anyone up for Extreme Blogging....and none of those poncy Mac Airs or EeePC's need apply

Just saw this re the ex Yahoos on the Grauniad - this is the ideal way for them to pass that time - finding yourself while losing your dongle on a mountaintop rather than angst ridden posts on Techmeme

We hypothesised last year that the iPhone's early day functionality, like all new media, will be heavily driven by porn. Here is confirmation from Time:

The technological feats of the 3G iPhone are key to the coming pornucopia. To date, mobile porn has consisted largely of still images, racy text chat services and so-called "moan-tones," which are sultry-sounding ringtones. In Europe there is an active market for video chatting; customers pay $50 a month on average to exchange dirty messages with actresses. But now, thanks in large part to the iPhone's video dexterity, short clips are becoming a staple for the mobile porn business. The speed promised by iPhone 2.0 is much anticipated. Google Trends, which measures Web buzz, shows a sharp increase over the past year in the popularity of the term "iPhone porn."

We look forward to Apple reforming the online porn industry with an iTunes like service. YouPorn, you have been warned. But there are issues:

Opposition to iPhone porn, however, may grow as well. The genre's availability could spark new demand for mobile phone porn-blockers, as parents realize that children could access adult content on Apple's device.

Blimey - who buys iPhones for their kids?

Comes as no surprise that the number of VC firms in the Valley are shrinking, and will continue to do so:

There were 844 venture firms investing in U.S. companies last year, 40 fewer than in 2006, according to the latest data from VentureSource, a research unit of VentureWire publisher Dow Jones. That is down 30% from the bubble year of 2000, when there were nearly 1,200 active investors....

In fact, The National Venture Capital Association President Mark Heesen:

....foresees a 15% decline in the next two years in the total number of venture firms investing in the U.S., many of them too small to meet the NVCA’s membership threshold of $5 million under management. The NVCA has about 470 member firms representing 90% of the venture capital under management in the U.S.

Partly its the shakeout from the bubble, but partly its due to good old Messrs Moore and Mercalfe - it costs an order or two of magnitude less to build a startup and get to a decent point of traction, and if it is successful it can usually get mmoney on decent terms from a number of sources. The industry needs to restructure to a more "mass production" model for funding, via incubation (Y Combinator) or a more simple deal, portfolio approach (eg Charles River)

Boomtown (and manyothers) having been gorging on the Yahoo sinking ship exodus, including the alleged exit of the Peanut Butter gallery:

Sources say Garlinghouse and the other execs are deeply unhappy about the new reorganization being architected largely by President Sue Decker.

Structured now to over a lot more power to Yahoo EVP Hilary Schneider, who runs the Global Partner Solutions division, the changes are being made without a lot of input from execs like Garlinghouse.

Instead, Decker–with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang–is working with a small group of top managers, especially Chief Human Resources Officer David Windley, so a lot of other top managers are largely in the dark about the changes.

And this differs from any other large and serious corporate restructuring how exactly? Company hits a rock, axes are swung, heads roll, new people come in. Its the Circle of Corporate Life, and this one is far from a corpse yet.

It differs because les geeks can now write les blogs, so instead of a few measured lines in the WSJ and FT is is all over Techmeme like a rash. Its interesting how the human interest angle has totally overshadowed the business aspects - one of the things about social media is it is more inclined to report on social aspects.

Nick Carr having a go at Twitter et al:

Twitter is often referred to as a "micro-blogging platform," but twittering seems more like antiblogging, or at least an escape - retreat? - from blogging. Blogging is the soapbox in the park, the shout in the street; Twitter is the whispering of a clique. You can easily see why it's compelling, but you can just as easily see its essential creepiness. (At least it's up-front about its creepiness, using the term "follower" in place of the popular euphemism "friend.")

He then comes over a Bit Philosophical:

Yet if Nietzsche's typewriter pushed him further into the aphoristic mode and set the stage for some of his greatest works, might not Twitter be an empty cage awaiting its resident genius? It's worth remembering, in any case, one of Nietzsche's aphorisms: "Talking about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself." That's a tweet worth twittering.

It must be said that the term "microblog" somewhat overeggs the pudding here - "chatgroup with pictures" is more like it. One of these days it'll have threading, sorting and persistence and then it'll be email with pictures. One thing is different on Twitter though - talking about yourself will in no way obscure you, that digital footprint is with us forever and easily scrape-able, mine-able and collate-able.

Not so much ambient intimacy but prurient interest then. But then again, where is the (dis)ambiguity?