broadstuff

I have been catching up on the BBC Electric Dreams series over the holidays, and was taken by the summary of the 80's as "technology with lots of promise that was very hard to actually make work" and the 90's as technology that "did what it said on the tin, but didn't integrate with anything else".

So what about the Noughties? Looking back over 10 years of networking technology evolution is useful to put things into perspective. As it is fashionable to make lists I have done so, but have eschewed the usual 10 Points. I have (unilaterally) decided that lists are only valid if they use a number on the Fibonacci Sequence, so here are the 8 Largest Trends from the Noughties:

1. Bandwidth will carry on expanding

We started in 1999 with 56 kbps modems, a whopping 128 if you bought ISDN (I know I did). In 1999 you get a fairly standard 2-3 Mbps on most UK xDSL nets, about half that on mobile ones. A few people are accessing some contended piece of 50 Mbps. OECD countries with state intervention in the market (eg France and Scandinavia) are further ahead and the mean bandwidth is higher. In Korea (major state intervention) you get 100 Mbps.

(Given we have had a c 30x increase in 10 years, projecting that forward implies a mean of c 60 Mbps by 2019, and that will give a lead in to my Future Projections post tomorrow)


2. Talking to each other remains the Killer App

Despite all the prognostications of great e-commerce in the late 90's on fixed and mobile services, the killer app every time you looked at a new platform was enabling people to talk to each other. Email groupware and SMS were the examples in 1999. In 2009, Twitter (essentially an asynch chat-group platform) showed the same for social networks to the extent that all others had to adapt their models to map to it.


3. Our "Social Networks" evolve onto whatever the best platform of the moment is

An inevitable progression of 2 - talking to each other - the next need is a "market" to find people you want to talk to. Today we call this Social media. In 1999 email groupware and chatrooms were where the action was, today with better bandwidth and Web 2.0 enabled tools we have Social Networks which rely on more bandwidth and newer comms technoilogies (aka Twitter et al)

4. All useful technology and applications commoditise over a 3-5 year cycle.....

In 1999 getting an internet connection and a LAN was non trivial, setting up wifi was for geek hobbyists and Pringles fans only, and although VoIP was technically possible it required you to buy and bodge a whole lot of stuff (yes Paduans, we had VoIP in 1999 but you had to buy $200 of additional gear to to get the Transmission/Reception on your computer). The reason Skype took off in 2004 was because of good cheap bandwidth and laptops having mikes and speakers and the conversion software, not because the guys were tech geniuses per se. There is a time for everything....

5. .....but People are Still People

The technology changes, we talk and interact with each other in new ways, but what we do remains the same. The human condition is to hatch, match and despatch and between this never-ending circle of life we try and scrabble onto higher planes of Maslowian existence, and try and keep ourselves entertained in our downtimes. From 1999 to 2009 there have been continual attempts to improve access to music, movies, material tat and potential mates. What is absolutely predictable is that any service that facilitates these basic needs better will succeed. What is also absolutely predictable is usually the large corporates that have all the assets to win will not take the initiatives (think mobile operators and music for example). What is harder to predict is which new one will succeed in the Darwinian moshpit

6. Hype (and dodgy economic theories) spring eternal in the human breast

In 1999 there were tablets, ever faster PCs, new mobiles, "must have" games, software programs and other consumer geegaws being hyped to the gills by rich Tech Giants. Scroll forward to Techmeme on any day in 2009 and you will see the same, mainly by the same people (with Google being the one new entrant - see point 6). In 1999 the "new economics" of the Internet was all the rage and was busy fuelling the dotcom boom. There were high priests of the New Tech Age then as now. Anyone churlish enough to be a "New Age Economics Denier" was castigated, lambasted and told they "didn't get it". By 2002 the sceptics had been proved largely right as the dotcom bubble deflated to complete limpness. But by 2004 the New "New Economics" of the Internet was on the rise again with Wikinomics (allowing me to calculate that New Economic memes have a c 2 year refraction time) and by 2009 in full swing with "Free" etc etc.

This time the overall economy popped early so we have the fascinating view of the theories being overtaken by the contra-reality even as they come out. The corollary of course is that every time a New Economic Theory contradicts Old Economics, it will eventually be proven wrong, but many peopel wil lose an d make money in the next turn of the screwed.

This is not to say that the basics of networks economics are wrong - they are not - but much of what is sold around them are pure snake oil, and a good test is the oldest "if it sounds too good to be true, its is". Caveat Emptor applies in 2009 as much as it did in 1999.


7. There is a Google or two in every Decade

In every decade a dominant New Media New Entrant emerges. They tend to be West Coast US companies. In the 80's it was Microsoft, in the 90's it was arguably AOL (and maybe Yahoo), in the Noughties it was Google. Ten years later they are still around as large corporate entities but are no longer the Innovators of the emerging "new" New Media. They are always up and running already, the issue is spotting which has legs. Facebook and Twitter are two to watch though I suspect they are early run - ins, others that interest me are Hulu, the Huffington Post and the Non-bank Banks (I will comment on this more tomorrow).


8. Planet Mobile will always overestimate benefits and underestimate time to get them

In 1999 the "You can use your mobile so you can select a great restaurant nearby for you and your friends" business case was in full cry. It was used to sell everything from m-commerce to location based services. Fast forward 10 years and nothing much has changed, except for one thing - the rogue entrant that re-sets the game for the next round has emerged (Apple and the iPhone). The Rogue uses the technology available to build the "obvious gaping hole" system that the incumbents for various commercial reasons refuse to build. Going back in history, Apple always enters a poorly structured game with a well defined complete - and closed - solution, capturing about 15 - 20% of the more profitable market while the rest is then duked over, and the lower economics usually means 1 dominant player emerges (Microsoft).

Does this mean that Planet Mobile is now about to enter its (much heralded) decade of hegemony? Tune in tomorrow, but as a short answer the operating rules of the last 10 years - divide benefits by 2 and multiply time to get them by 2 - still apply.

In summary then - the Noughties were the era that Metcalfe's Law took hold, and the network economics thereof drove a higher level of integration and "plug and play" evolution. But what the technology was used for, and the tracks it evolved along, were big picture largely predictable as the tracks are pre-laid and people's needs stay the same.

So what does that imply for 2010 - 2020? Tune in tomorrow to find out

I loved this line, it came from Redmonk's James Governor who says he heard it from an old Journalist. The context was that we were discussing a post from Hugh McLeod from his "Evil Plans" thoughts, entitled "don’t worry if you don’t know “absolutely everything” before starting out". I had opined to James that the risk with such heady stuff is that it may entice people to leap before they look.

I agree that it is far better to act than to do nothing, as otherwise nothing will happen. But in order to maximise the probability of success, it is a very good idea to prepare yourself and scout the ground. I thus thought that there was an opportunity to add some "Cunning" planning to one's Evil Plan.

To explain, using the main points in Hugh's post

i. Being an Outsi­der with too much Insi­der Know­ledge, makes it even more likely that you’ll make the same mis­ta­kes as every­body else.

When Goo­gle– the most suc­cess­ful adver­ti­sing busi­ness in the his­tory of the world– star­ted their com­pany, the knew prac­ti­cally nothing about Madi­son Ave­nue...... Which helps explain why, when the nor­mal, mains­tream, industry-obsessed kids of around the same age were just lan­ding their first East Coast internships or junior exe­cu­tive posi­tions at adver­ti­sing blue-chips like McCann’s, Lin­tas, DDB or Saatchi’s, Ser­gey and Larry were already well on their way to beco­ming billionaires.

Not So Fast, says I at this point - What Google actually did was to copy (to the point of being taken to court and forced to pay a licence in perpetuity) Overture's technology, Overture being the company that initiated online placement advertising (it was eventually bought by Yahoo).

Lesson (i) of the Cunning Plan Addendum is therefore: Its actually not ok to have no Insider Knowledge, but better instead to stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before - or, in the words of the Great Lobachevsky, "Plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize - only please to call it Research".

ii. It’s pretty much impos­si­ble to know what the big, bad world is going to do next.

If it’s almost impos­si­ble for the smar­test peo­ple in Govern­ment, Wall Street and Sili­con Valley to pre­dict what hap­pens glo­bally, what chance does a guy wan­ting to open a small, highly-specialized, hand-built bicycle ope­ra­tion have, from his small sto­re­front in Brooklyn?

......

To get some very lucid, hard­core pers­pec­tive on this, I recom­mend that you read Nassim’s Taleb’s exce­llent and highly rea­da­ble “Foo­led By Ran­dom­ness” (W. W. Nor­ton & Co., 2001). Nassim’s the­sis is chil­dishly sim­ple: That the big­ger the his­to­ri­cal event, the more ran­dom and unpre­dic­ta­ble the event was to begin with. Nobody saw 9/11, Pearl Har­bor, the assas­si­na­tions of JFK, Lin­coln or Arch­duke Franz Fer­di­nand, the Ato­mic Bombs being drop­ped on Japan, the 1923 collapse of the Ger­man Deutch­mark, the Bar­ba­rians sac­king Rome in 410 A.D., The Bubo­nic Pla­gue of the 1300’s, or Hitler’s 1941 inva­sion of the Soviet Union coming down the pike.

Hugh makes a good point here, ie there is no sense in trying to worry about far larger problems in a small business. But if I may add to this, there is also a lot of point in worrying about which way the wind is blowing, the current is flowing, the tide is turning etc - swimming against the flow is a lot harder than swimming with it. Also, while I am a fan of Taleb's book, I think that its incorrect to claim that all such big events are unpredictable. Of the above, I would argue that quite a few were being predicted at the time by people who knew the actual situation. This is where James' comment came in:

Paradigm shifts are for people too stupid to spot trends

So Lesson (ii) in the Cunning Plan Addendum is to make sure you understand the direction of the tides that surround the ship your dream is on, and to understand what the really smart people in the space are thinking. Some people are likely to be seeing the trends, its a question of finding them. In fact, I rather thought Hugh's approach was quite good illustrating for this:

So I just put the idea out there on my blog to see if any fish would bite. And they did. A lot of them even liked the idea enough to put up money in advance, before I had spent a sin­gle penny.

That's pretty cunning preparation - see if the kite flies first!

iii. Inte­res­ting des­ti­nies rarely come from just rea­ding the ins­truc­tion manual.

Yes, Louis Pas­teur did say, “For­tune favors the pre­pa­red.” On one level, he was right. That being said, the stuff you learn befo­rehand will never be one-tenth as use­ful as the stuff you learn the hard way, on the job. All the for­mer can do is help train you to deal with the rea­lity of the lat­ter. The real truth is always found in the moment, never in the future. Sadly, not every­body is cut out for thri­ving in the pre­sent tense. Life is unfair.

Which is true, experience is a great teacher - there are quite a few studies that show that a bad action is sometimes better than no action. Sadly, there are also examples that show a rash action is far worse than no action. For example, its a very unwise idea to go sailing around the world without learning how to swim and sail a boat first. You could do it without these skills and stay alive long enough to learn to be an old salt, but the probability of failure is far, far higher. And its probability of failure that the Cunning Planner is aiming to minimise. Let others do the headless chicken routine.

So Cunning Plan Addendum lesson (iii) is to do a bit of core preparation before leaving shore - if you can't swim or sail, get some lessons or hire an experienced crewman. In other words, what core skills do you need, and how can you get them?

iv. “Some­ti­mes Paranoia’s just having all the facts.” –William S. Burroughs.

(snip of businesses Hugh has been involved in)

Take it from me– if I had known ONE HALF about these busi­nes­ses that I know now, I doubt I would’ve bothe­red in the first place. Ins­tead, I would’ve just got­ten an MBA somewhere and lan­ded a mid-level posi­tion in a bank or a cor­po­ra­tion. Maybe joi­ned the local country club while I was at it. Or something. Lucky Me.

Which is true - unless entrepreneurs were extremely optimistic they would never do anything new - but some understanding of the founder's discount and calculation of the risk verses the reward is a very good idea for a Cunning Planner. Venture Capitalists always want to know the size of the market you are looking at, and its not an irrational view. There is also an old saw, that you get richer supplying to rich industries than poor ones.

So Cunning Plan lesson (iv) is to (as with robbing banks) go where the money is.

By the way, I agree totally with the heading of this post - Paradigm shifts are for people too stupid to spot trends - in that in much of the stuff we have looked at over the last 10 years or so since I've been doing projections of future trends, there are always signs that are there early, and it is nearly always possible to imagine the correct (enough) scenario albeit assigning probabilities early is very hard (it typically becomes clearer over time though). The really hard things are:

(i) predicting the when, not the what. There is a useful recent McKinsey paper in using game theory in scenario development that may be useful, I will comment on it in detail in a later post.

(ii) planning for very big, very low probability events (Taleb's "Black Swans"). Many are possible, but very, very improbable so in reality you just have to ignore them for all practical purposes or you'd either do nothing or spend a ludicrous amount mitigating very unlikely events.

I was inspired by Deirdre Molloy's reading list for Social Media to list the books I've read to date that I have found most useful. As is the fashion, one has to have a number - well, I counted the ones that were very useful and that I'd recommend to get up and running fast - and there were 11

Firstly, Background Reading to get the evolution and big picture to where we are today:

1. The Victorian Internet - Tom Standage
A good analysis of the rise and eclipse of the telegraph, and the "online" social communities it formed. Many parallels with the Web, the 'Net and Social Media

2. Non Zero - Robert Wright
Examines how and why human society is learnin g to co-operate in larger and larger numbers, from small related groups of early cavemen to supra-nation emergence today. Its essentially a treatise in the evolution of behavioural psychology of co-operation.

Secondly, the theory of Social Networks:

3. Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means - Albert Barabasi

An early - and still very good - primer for social network analysis - enough theory to get you going so you can tell why and how say Twitter, Facebook and Linked In are differently architected. There are later and more complex books, but this is a good starter.

4. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age- Duncan Watts
The first - and still one of the best - works on how the "Social Media" age will evolve. Its useful today as you can compare what was thought in 2004 to 2009 and see where reality has devolved.

Thirdly, how Social Media works

5. Here Comes Everybody - Clay Shirky
Even Shirky would probably now admit the book is a tad optimistic, or at least does not examine the dark side enough, but it is still an excellent summary of the whole space

6. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom - Yochai Benkler
Hard going and aged in parts , but like Shirky a good coverage of the overall macroeconomic landscape of social networking. Also like Shirky, probably too optimistic (or politically naive, looking at how China censors Social Networks) but a good summary nonetheless

Fourthly, the critics and sceptics - the promoters tend to be on the optimistic side, but to get a balanced (realistic) view its necessary to pick up the views of informed critics:

7. The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It - Jonathan Zittrain
This is more about the struggle for control of the Internet, but the discussion has huge implications for social media services that sit on it, and touches on emerging issues like privacy abuse that tend to be glossed over elsewhere.

8. The Cult of the Amateur - Andrew Keen
The most vehement (and long standing) critic, who took the opposite side to Shirky et al. Lambasted frequently by many for his continual pessimism, he forms the counterweight. By 2009 it was clear that Social Media was in a middle ground between his views and Shirky et al.

Fourthly, the state of the art today. Sadly, (in my opinion) too much of the stuff that has come out in the last 2 years has been rushed out to satisfy a market demand (there are a plethora of new books essentially promising that you can make your fortune in Social Media - avoid!) rather than go into much depth to explain what's actually going on. Ones that I have been most impressed with are:

9. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies - Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
I don't agree with everything they say (We've had more than a few shots at their thinking on Broadstuff) but being "proper" analysts their writing gives you a rational and structured view of their hypothesized ecosystem, so you can see how they come to their conclusions - and they are comprehensive and up to date.

10. The Blogosphere
The latest stuff is not in books yet, I have been watching a number of disciplines as they are being applied to online social networks - emerging topics such as Digital Anthroplogy, Social Graph Theory and Behavioural Economics, and research reports from a range of sources such as McKinsey, the Pew Institute, the EFF, and eMarketing for example. Techmeme is a useful source if you ignore the obvious product pimps from the digital megacorps, and The Economist is often an early-up with a business angle. Its also useful to look at whats being talked about at SXSW last year and next - not so much by the well known names in the main panels, but the emergent topics in the group sessions.

And lastly, the emergent future - there are futurists, there are science fiction writers, and there is Cory Doctorow who is both a commentator on the Social Media scene and a Sci Fi Author, so the primer is:

11. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
An analysis of Social Capital (which he calls Whuffie) which is partly story, partly science fiction prediction, and partly satire. He has a large body (of work ) and its a useful starting point.

Now you will all feel that I have left some books out, and how dare I include say Andrew Keen but - in my view anyway - these are the ones that are original contributions, and still largely on target and allow one to get an overall picture to separate sincerity from snake oil (becasuse there is a lot of that around - in fact familiarity with the Gartner Hype Curve is essential in this space). Anyway, feel free to criticise, commend or create your own list.

We've written before on the daftness of using DRM to protect one's business model, its always merely a matter of time before its hacked. News today comes of the Amazon Kindle being hacked - BBC:

An Israeli hacker claims to have broken the copyright protection on Amazon's Kindle software for PCs, reports say.

The hack will allow the ebooks to be transferred as pdf files to any other device.

The only surprise is thats its taken so long. Now, if the Kindle design is half-way smart it will be able to patch the DRM remotely (they seemed to be able to delete people's books remotely so we suspect it is) but of course it will be hacked again.

A little gem from the IEEE talking about a a study from UCSD's Global Information Industry Center (GIIC) :

"computers have had major effects on some aspects of information consumption. In the past, information consumption was overwhelmingly passive, with telephone being the only interactive medium. Thanks to computers, a full third of words and more than half of bytes are now received interactively. Reading, which was in decline due to the growth of television, tripled from 1980 to 2008, because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet."

Must warm the hearts of the newspaper people everywhere. No, wait..............it says:

Conventional print media has fallen from 26 percent of INFO [they define INFO as reading, listening etc] in 1960 to 9 percent in 2008. However, this has been more than counterbalanced by the rise of the Internet and local computer programs, which now provide 27 percent of INFO. Conventional print provides an additional 9 percent. In other words, reading as a percentage of our information consumption has increased in the last 50 years, if we use words themselves as the unit of measurement.

But if TV is chortling at the Schadenfreude, beware - they back up our findings of last year:

Two nascent developments might also cause significant dislocations: mobile television and video over the Internet. So far, mobile TV has low utilization and is very much a niche product. On the other hand, video by Internet is quite widespread, but as a complement rather than a substitute for conventional TV program delivery mechanisms. YouTube and its cousins have made a huge variety of novel and specialized video material available to anyone with a mediocre broadband connection.

.......

If and when a substantial number of Americans are able to receive streaming video at sustained speeds of roughly 10 megabits per second and low latency, it may dramatically alter the way they receive video. Internet-based television, rather than being reserved for material where low quality is compensated for by a very wide selection (the “long tail effect”) might become common for mainstream programming as well.

So there - and I'll bet when that happens reading will plummet again. But the most fascinating bit I saw - playing back to my posts on Innovation in 1909 being better than today and the limits to digital media vs analog, is this:

if we include “personal conversation” as a source of information, it is possible that we receive fewer bytes of INFO than our ancestors did 100 years ago. The reason is that conversation is very “high bandwidth.” A full fidelity video link between two locations, including stereo vision and sound is not possible with present technology – the observer will realize they are not physically in the location. If we could do it, however, it would require conservatively 100 million bits per second. Three hours of personal conversation a day at this bandwidth would be 135 gigabytes of INFO, about four times the average daily consumption today.

In other words we still do not have the carrying capacity of f2f, even on the best p2p networks, nad aren't likely to for a while. Maybe the best role for Social Media going forward is to allow us to socialise with real people then?

Useful article on TechCrunch about Privacy (or lack of it) in social networks:

At least those Terms of Service (ToS) that force us to copy addresses and phone numbers one-by-one also prevent scoundrels from stealing our identity; reselling our friends to marketers; and linking our life online to the real world. Right?

Wrong. When RockYou can stash 32 million passwords in the clear; when RapLeaf can index 600 million email accounts; and when Intelius can go public by buying 100 million profile pages; then our social networks have traded away our privacy for mere “privacy theater.”

With apologies to Bruce Schneier’s brilliant coinage, “security theater” (e.g. the magical thinking behind forcing passengers to sit down and shut up for the last hour of international flights), social networks have been dogged by one disaster after another in 2009 because they pursue policies that provide the “feeling of improved privacy while doing little or nothing to actually improve privacy.”

As long as the same information that social networks piously prohibit their own customers from using is being bought and sold on the open market by giant marketing companies, social networks are only pretending protect your privacy.

There's not a lot new here (we covered the economics of all this in 2008 with one of the papers on Freeconomics, "Why your data is Free but everywhere in chains", but nice top see it in a big article on TechCrunch. To be honest, I genuinely thought the post Beacon 2009 was the year the Privacy stuff would hit the fan, but it didn't - its only really the real digerati who understand what is being done in and to your name. The rank and file still seem not to know or care.

Maybe 2010 will be different? I hope so.....

Useful article on TechCrunch about Privacy (or lack of it) in social networks:

At least those Terms of Service (ToS) that force us to copy addresses and phone numbers one-by-one also prevent scoundrels from stealing our identity; reselling our friends to marketers; and linking our life online to the real world. Right?

Wrong. When RockYou can stash 32 million passwords in the clear; when RapLeaf can index 600 million email accounts; and when Intelius can go public by buying 100 million profile pages; then our social networks have traded away our privacy for mere “privacy theater.”

With apologies to Bruce Schneier’s brilliant coinage, “security theater” (e.g. the magical thinking behind forcing passengers to sit down and shut up for the last hour of international flights), social networks have been dogged by one disaster after another in 2009 because they pursue policies that provide the “feeling of improved privacy while doing little or nothing to actually improve privacy.”

As long as the same information that social networks piously prohibit their own customers from using is being bought and sold on the open market by giant marketing companies, social networks are only pretending protect your privacy.

There's not a lot new here (we covered the economics of all this in 2008 with one of the papers on Freeconomics, "Why your data is Free but everywhere in chains", but nice top see it in a big article on TechCrunch. To be honest, I genuinely thought the post Beacon 2009 was the year the Privacy stuff would hit the fan, but it didn't - its only really the real digerati who understand what is being done in and to your name. The rank and file still seem not to know or care.

Maybe 2010 will be different? I hope so.....

SAI notes that more Kindle e-Books were sold on Amazon on Xmas day than real books:

On Christmas, the company sold more Kindle books than physical books.

Yes, this is obviously the result of everyone who got a Kindle for Christmas (lots of folks) firing it up and ordering a bunch of eBooks on a day in which most physical-book readers weren't shopping. But it's still important and impressive.

The Kindle's economics are still lousy for Amazon: The company loses money on new releases and makes only a modest amount on older titles, thus losing an estimated $1 per Kindle book.

Actually, whats more amazing is that punters will pay those prices for them, but, to paraphrase PT Barnum, there's an early adopter born every minute.... The bit I find amusing though is that the economics of an e-Book are lousy for Amazon - following the above link leads to this analysis:

Amazon accounts for about half of US e-reader sales currently and is losing money selling e-books. Here is how:

- Book publishers are standing their ground on wholesales prices – selling books at about $12 to distributors regardless of if it is a print copy or digital copy.
- Amazon sells them for $9.99, losing about $2 per sale.

Clearly companies like Amazon have to start selling e-books at print retail prices or book publishers will have to lower their wholesale prices. We think it will be the latter.

Given that, like CD's and Newsprint, a large % of the cost of a paper book is physical production and distribution, its amazing that publishers have managed to keep those prices up.

Like CD's and Newsprint, this is not sustainable longer term however, there is a limit to the suck...er, I mean early adopters. Not only that, but publishers already de-risk book sales by the remaindering system (unsold books are not charged for and are sent back at publishers' expense) and Amazon de-risks physical delivery by making the user pay extra.

I suspect in a year or so we will hear the loud wails of book publishers joining the music and news choir's refrain that the Internet is ruining their livelihood, when its clear that a lot of the reasons are self-inflicted. But its not as if they haven't had ample warning, after all music publishing hit this issuel in about 2005.

A fascinating study by B L Ochman shows that:

In May 09 when we first used Tweepsearch to count of the Twitter bios of self-proclaimed social media gurus, experts, superstars and ninjas there were 4,487. A mere seven months later, we were shocked to see that there are now nearly 16.000. They are multiplying like rabbits.

She goes on to break out the 15,740 they found in the chart above.

This represents a 3.5x increase every 6 months. Projecting this growth forward means that there will be nearly 30m Social Media Experts etc on Twitter by this time in 2012, to add to the other disasters in that year (and 100m by mid 2013).

Assuming that Twitter's current growth rate of c 0% on 60m users stays the same in the next 3 years, and that current users churn (ie drop out or become inactive) at a modest 25% per annum, that allows us to calculate that by Xmas 2012 about 50% of all Twitter users will be Social media Experts and by mid 2013 about 80% of them will be. By end 2013 there will be 375m Twitter users, of which 360m will be Social Media Experts of one stripe or another.

Of course, this is assuming current growth rates and these may change over time

Speaking personally, I think anyone who was not on Twitter by end of 2007 has no place in calling themselves a Social Media Guru/Expert/Whatever......

Update - Poor Adam Tinworth retweeted this post and got lambasted for it on Twitter - anyway, he has written the more serious analysis of the issue B L Ochman and I were satirising over here, ie the profusion of charlatans in the field.

Thoughtful post from Philosecurity:

....according to Google, United States state governments have literally handed over our public data to be held and managed by a private company which has well-publicized partnerships with other governments such as China. The data is physically stored in Google’s buildings, on Google’s servers, managed by Google’s employees. This means Google now controls our government’s access to it’s own data.

Google declined to make their list of state government customers public, so instead I checked to see which states had active Google Apps login pages for their domains. There are 19 states that have active Google Apps login pages (plus Washington D.C.)

This can't be a good thing.............