Social Networks

ReadWriteWeb makes some good points about why CIO's are a little wary of Social Media - to summarise the article over here:

1. Unpredictable scaling issues. Twitter failure is OK when we are just twittering about our cats, but would be totally unacceptable if this was an enterprise app.

2. Security against IP loss. This is a legitimate concern. The impact can be major. The fact is that it is no longer possible to "bolt the stable door" as the horse has already escaped.

3. Integration. This is the big "well what about...." objection. Just touting open Internet standards is not enough. You need to show how to build adapters to internal legacy systems that don't work to those standards.

4. Loss of productivity. We do this stuff for fun and in our free time. But when that time creeps into the 9-5 workday, it is a legitimate concern for those who pay the salaries.

5. Accidental brand damage. People who grew up with social media know that the brand cannot be be protected other than by great products and services. Anything bad that happens will get out there. However this scares the bejesus out of traditional Enterprise managers. [because they understand the collateral damage - Ed]

These are all second order effects though - the CIO's primary concern is ROI, or Return On Investment, ie what is the business justification for this project, as measured in hard currency. So far, Social Media's proven ROI has been somewhat sketchy in this space, which will relegate them in the main to pilots ad small trials. As it gets easier to predict benefits, where they are found, etc it will be easier for CIO's to justify these projects. And having managed companies using technology, and advised others in the same boat, my challenge back to the aspirant Social Media company complaining that CIO's are ROI - Redundant Old Imbeciles - is to help Reduce Obvious Impediments by helping structure the ROI cases*.

Totally Irresponsible attitude, of course - every startup thinks ROI should stand for Reward Our Investors

*This is not to say that some companies ROI hurdle rates are set too high, and some are very conservative, but that is a different issue.

Ben Walker's Twitter Song - an aural history of social media:



Props to Jem Stone for the link.

This is very good - its Lloyd Davis, founder of London's Tuttle Club, explaining very well fellow Londoner Leisa Reichelt's concept of the "Ambient Intimacy" effect of social media that makes it so.

It's running on another Londoner's new Web Chat site - Kosso's Phreadz. (I think this is by far the best video microblog site I've used so far - like Twitter it is a multi-media unified comms system as well as a chat system)

Speaking of data displays, the Science Museum in London has this very interesting "Social Media Listening Post" - its a whole wall with a grid (a matrix!) of little VDO green screens (the lights you see in the picture) that are displaying the text of posts from a whole lot of internet discussion groups, chat rooms etc as they happen, and it also speaks them out via text to voice in loudspeakers in the ceiling. See pic below:



Its in a darkened room, which makes it a bit eerie as the varied disembodied machine-speaking voices come through - the gaps in the lights you see in the pic (those are the screens) are silhouettes of people, its also weird seeing the people move as the screens refresh. Well worth a visit.

This was post was sort of inspired by 3 things - firstly, a comment by Robert Scoble on a post by Louis Gray where La Scoble noted, re the plethora of SocNets LG is on, that.....

I'm very close to getting off this train. What you are writing here won't be understood by most people for two to five more years. So, adding more things onto the plate won't help unless they add REAL value. So far I'm totally not impressed by many of the things in this genre. Even my wife says she doesn't get FriendFeed (and if she doesn't get THAT she certainly won't get other lifestreamers).

I'm scared that, as a group, these are going after a smaller and smaller audience of weird people (admit it, me and you are weird users and don't represent many real users).

Secondly, an ongoing interest in how filtering would work in a "too much information" world, and also thinking through how you would, in a wisdom of crowds environment, screen out those friends, followers, twerps etc who you do not think have as relevant a voice on problem area X. (For the arcane minded, I was following the arguments last night on relevant performance of the F 22 Raptor vs the Eurofighter Typhoon*. It is actually possible to have a fact based discussion on this subject as most of the data is there - if you know how to interpret it - but if you read the blogosphere on the subject, you will find that fact based discussion is the last thing you will get - and hence god help anyone relying on the quality of socially mediated advice in less data driven areas.).

Lastly, I've been playing with Blip.fm for a week or so, and am of course shocked by the appalling taste in music so many of my friends have . More seriously, I had noted a few weeks ago that I found, in baking off Last.fm vs Pandora over the last year or so, that Last.fm hit a ceiling where eventually it could optimise no further, whereas Pandora - which focusses on the music itself, rather than your friends' music, carries on optimising. A number of others said they had noticed the same - and I wondered if the next stage for Last.fm and other socially mediated filters was to start discarding "weakest link" friends. (For all I know it does this already).

And thus I got to thinking about how one could take a "cross network snapshot" of all my friends, and what I could deduce, and what it may look like. And then I thought about all the things that one could potentially fall out with a friend over, as sources of Friction. Hence the chart above. (Apparently Twitter is now populated by Middle Aged Men, and as you know we are prone to "Grumpy Antisocial Networking - hence the Friction Feeder" chart axes )

Feel free to add "axes of evil" to it....

*Raptor v Typhoon is a cost v quality optimum argument of course!

Gadfly definition from Wikipedia:

"Gadfly" is a term for people who upset the status quo by posing upsetting or novel questions, or attempt to stimulate innovation by proving an irritant.

So it was with some amusement I read this morning, on my email digest of Friendfeed, that the social media set look like they are preparing to flutter off to a New new service - Rejaw. (Does the gadfly lay its young's eggs in the old host like some wasps do, one wonders )

You can hear the buzz from the wings as they start up..... I wonder if any Dig-Anthropologists are studying the Dance of the Gadfly when it discovers a New Shiny Thing ?

No doubt an irritant to the Friendfeed crew, who have been luxuriating in Gadfly pollination the last few months after Twitter was no longer the nectar of choice.

I was reading the various thoughts on how Bookmarking 2.0 would work post Delicious 2.0's announcement (see my original thought here), and I was especially intrigued by something I saw after that - someone said the now used their bookmarks as part of their content feed onto their various aggregation networks. This seemed to me to be a half-way house solution though - why not just post it on your blog?

And I realised that quite often I do already - a lot of the posts on Broadstuff are around an article that looks interesting, we add some thoughts, and link out to some other supporting articles we find interesting. This way I get to search it in the search engine on-blog, and via consumer search engines rather than relying on the Delicious etc search function. One type of Social Media usurping the role of another.

In that spirit, this article links to Sarah Perez's article on her own blog showing the McCann databook on Social Media (I've embedded its Slideshare version below). I also like how Sarah bookmarks stuff she likes on the right hand side of her blog, rather than in the main content. Will have to cop...I mean flatter that one (Done - see RHS of blog "Bookmarks".)



Now the interesting thing about this is when you go over to Slideshare, it links to a whole bunch of interesting presentations there as well - bonus!

Also, in a piquant own goal, Cow PR admonished large FTSE companies who had not claimed their real estate on Twitter, while failing to not claim their own. Wadds has the story....

One tries so hard to not give in to gnawing skepticism and a general feeling that the whole tech scene is just a bit overhyped But I Just had to comment on the reverse logic re the SoCal earthquake and Twitter being the first place it was picked up.

Its extremely hard to believe that:

(i) Twitterers were the only people sending messages out
(ii) Twitterers were the first people sending messages out.

In other words Twitter cannot get data any earlier than all the other destinations.

I recall reading similar such about forest fires awhile ago, I noted I first saw that in an email - because I happened to be on email at the time. Of course no self respecting social mediahead would ever admit to being on email, so they must have seen it on Twitter

I'd suggest a far more likely scenario is that Twitter is the first place that bloggers and other chatterati first saw it, and as they are the ones who tend to talk about it in the blogosphere echo system which consumes nearly all their attention, that's clearly where they perceive it was first reported.....

The poor old mainstream media of course are hobbled by totally unreasonable requirements such as checking and confirming facts before its broadcast, unlike a social network.

It would be interesting, however, to see when they got the first incoming. I'd be willing to bet it was at very similar times to Twitter and everyone else receiving the first texts.

Update - This is too sublime - from Valleywag the story of the lady who just had to Twitter that the earth moved for her even while her gynaecologist was prodding around. We salute her for sheer dedication to the cause, this is the Right Stuff alright!.

....But my darling, its when when I think of thee (Trad Irish folksong)

So, another highly public walkaway from Twitter:

Just Wednesday, Twitter, while not on purpose, removed mine, and others’ followers in some sort of mistake that took a day to fix (I’m guessing someone erased too much data in the database via a bad query on live data, and they had to restore from Tape backup to get it all back). This hit the breaking point for me - they violated the most important thing to me about Twitter, my followers (which are also those I follow and have a deep interest in), and I just can’t trust that things like this won’t keep happening in the future. They crossed the line, whether on purpose or not, and it’s time for me to take action.

(If I recall, they had devised an algorithm to delete spam followers). Anyway, unfortunately.....

after only one day I realized I could not do it cold-Turkey. I have a good number of followers on Twitter that have some interest in me (and I thank you so much for that support - it really means a lot to me), and regardless of whether I want to leave or not, abandoning Twitter would mean abandoning those followers, and I just can’t do that to all of you

Ah, the tyranny of the social network - you may be able to port yourself, but that doesn't mean you can port your followers.

I recall Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid announce he was leaving Twitter too, and he was back within a fortnight. As Terry Pratchett noted in his book Small Gods, one is defined by one's followers, and one has to be in places where they can follow you.....

An afterthought - the issue is that it's not in any of the walled garden players' interest to solve this, as the current situation increases stickiness for them - the solution must be an open standard social net, cf the GGG that Tim Berners-Lee proposed.

This year's Reboot theme was Free, a subject I have some views about. I couldn't make it, but have followed with some interest. Here are a few of the blogs covering the things I found interesting, plus some of my comments. I find many commentators critiquing these new ideas don't go far enough - this post, on the other hand, probably goes too far

New Thoughts in Social Media:

1. Jyri Engestrom on Nodal Points (blogged by David Weinberger). Jyri is imho one of the structured thinkers in the Social Media space (which is sadly far too full of neo-hippies, snake oil salesmen and general fluffbrains) and talks about how this all ACTUALLY WORKS. He has pushed his concept of social objects - ie reasons for connecting but expressed in codifiable form - forward to nodal points, which are connection nodes in the social matrix where information is stored and which can give peripheral context

“Imagine a physical world where we have as much peripheral information at our disposal as in WoW.”

Like Jyri, I've been fascinated for awhile about how we can leave context data at key point in data matrices and have it pop up where / when needed - so more thinking on this is welcome!

2. Don Stowe Boyd follows the whuffie factor to its endgame and argues that the cosy nostrums of warm fluffiness will be more like the cosa nostra of the Mafia. Its not all sunshine and flowers..... (more of this below)


FreeConomics

3. Jerry Michalski on Free (as found reported by Dieter Rappold in one of the few good overviews of the sessions I found)

On the second day Jerry Michalski also talked about different free business models based on the Article of Chris Anderson in the Wired Magazine:

1. Freemium (Flickr)
2. Advertising (Google)
3. Cross Subsidies (donate CDs, have packed concerts)
4. Zero Marginal Costs (digital goods)
5. Labor Exchange (digg, Amazon Reviews)
6. Voluntary Donations (A throusand friends)
7. Pay what you want (TerraBite)

- He showed us also that so much can be done for so little - Craig Newmark shook up 3 industries of billions and billions with craigslist: Yellow Pages, Classifieds, Directory Services! No wonder given the fact that 60% of the internal cost at Telecoms are histrocial costs for legacy systems and billing processes. If one could get rid of that! We got told in business schools that Scarcity = Value. But we increasingly see a growing abundancy mentality.

As Dieter notes, the risk is that:

Todays abundance of Music/Content/Software imposes an important question: Why pay before I know that it’s good? That means we have to be famous first - then get rich!

Which is a Zipfian economy model - ie a very small number of people get very rich (and the advantage goes to those already famous on Record Company money), but most get very little, even with tiny talent differentials.

Also, as you can also see, few of the above models are actually Free, they are Offset models, wherein someone else pays for the free lunch - and herein lies the mental sleight of mind in the FreeConomy. This sleight of mind leads to risky errors, such as:

4. Working for Free - An argument about the freedom of free work (Last seen in large numbers c 1970's), fine thesis except for the small flaw that unless you have a trust fund you either (i) moonlight from your daytime job, (ii) have to trust others to feed you or (iii) you go for the "starve in a garret" mode.


Impact of Low Transaction Costs on Organisation / Social Structure

5. J P Ragaswami (Confused of Calcutta) made the basic point about ease of arbitrage in a low transaction cost world - “for every artificial scarcity there will be piracy. It will be destroyed.”

6. Traci Fenton on Democratic Organisations - 10 democratic Design principles (again thanks to Dieter for the list):

1. Purpose + Vision
2. Transparency (open book management)
3. Dialogue + Listening
4. Fairness + Dignity
5. Accountability
6. Individual + Collective
7. Choice
8. Integrity
9. Decentralization
10. Reflection + Evaluation

7. Lee Bryant (Headshift) on freeing the Battery Human. Dieter's report:

And asked how we can codify freedoms and values to provide longevity to them. Ironically we are stuck in the concepts of Max Weber and Frederick W. Taylor. But the consumerisation of Enterprise IT is a big chance to change that. Given the fact that Taylorism is simply too costly in complex, global ever changing market. Social Networks combined with weak ties are a efficient corporate immune system - whistleblowing when things go wrong.

I must admit to being hopeful, but also fairly sceptical about this sort of thing in any large scale organisation, firstly for the reasons of organisational complexity explained well over here by Dare Obasanjo:

There is less politics at a startup. In any activity where humans have to come together collaboratively to achieve a goal, there will always be people with different agendas. The more people you add to the mix, the more agendas you have to contend with. Doing things by consensus is OK when you have to get consensus from two or three people who sit in the same hallway as you. It’s a totally different ball game when you need to gain it from lots of people from across a diverse company working on different projects in different regions of the world who have different perspectives on how to solve your problems.

.....if you do the maths, you find that the number of transactions you need to get anything done in a peer only, dis-organised structure is huge and grows geometrically as you add people - and thus soon becomes unsustainable (the downside of Metcalfe's Law). This is the reason hierarchies come into being, Taylorist get on the job etc - to reduce the messaging and complexity. National "democracies" are in fact very hierarchical by definition, and if you go through Traci's 10 points you'll find that most of them are precisely what we criticize those in power for not doing!

Secondly, the thing less talked about in Social Media is that it operates under power law maths - the Zipfian economy I refer to above - ie, without checks and balances a few rich get richer faster, and the rest are worker drones. This is just another way of saying "Feudal". There is a long tail, but it doesn't necessarily wag the Big Dogs. Thus, seductive though this all sounds in the "sunshine and flowers" way its usually painted, it just does not actually work this way without very careful design. (Don't get me wrong, its possible - see Ricardo Semler's work here for example - but its non trivial to do and its not a "Social Media" thing per se - so caveat emptor!)

Exacerbating that, the laws under which public companies operate force a level of Corporate Evil (yes, even Google) that probably needs to be tackled before peace, love, brotherhood etc breaks out - if not, its more likely just a California Cult scam to make you feel good while being reduced to digital sharecropping.


Other Stuff

Nicole Simon has a whole lot of video interviews over here. There is also Twittering ad nauseam on reboot10 etc etc. It is interesting that as these tools increase in use, the content creators are doing far less long style blogging (at least it was far harder to find it about Reboot10 ).

Now my problem with this is that I just don't have time to listen to N linear video interviews and try to make sense of a plethora of loosely connected twts (Stowe Boyd usefully edits those of his talk on his blog page) - I think the issue with these tools is that they shift the attention time from the creator to the reader, and that is hugely inefficient. Not only that, but I can't do that copy/paste thing to create my own content as easily - so its far less user-friendly for me as a potential amplifier / echo chamber.

Hopefully more people will blog this week so more of the sessions can be linked in here (add any you know of in the comments too!).

All that being said, its great that things like Reboot happen, and I hope to be able to add my (irreverent) contributions next year