Planet Enterprise 2.0

SocialU is a new lifestreamingish social application, that goes to enormous lengths to create a cheesy social environment centered on fungible social gestures, like giving a contact an electronic package of french fries. To 'buy' the fries, users can apply their initial stake of $500,000 social dollars or earn more cash by doing various social things: adding friends, making comments, etc.

socialu - it's all about you v0.0.3287, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I am all for giving friends gifts, but the ersatz quality of SocialU is depressing. I can't see myself participating in a meta-community -- the system allow you to open tabs on Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Bebo, and just about any other social app out there, in various tabs -- that is principally focused on translating social gestures into virtual currency, and then distributing that cash by buying virtual bling, property or other e-goods, and possibly gifting other contacts.

Forgive me for being subject to social physics, but I would like my socialization to be about something, like tachnology, or saving the world, or collecting toy trains. But this 'hall of mirrors', self-reflecting social hypodermic needle doesn't add anything that we need.

Perhaps the sort of obsessiveness associated with Tamagotchi pets plays here -- another fad I never thought added up to much.

And it is not the materialism per se that irks me. I am all for sites like ThisNext, where people share recommmendations about stuff -- furniture, gizmos, jewelry -- because I buy in on the idea that all e-commerce will be social in the near future. But this is phony, like giving food pellets to pigeons in a Skinner box for going through the motions of social interaction. I am all for social karma (or "swarmth") building up in the innards of social tools, but directly tying actions to specific economic inducements, instead of an algorithmic authority or reputation is a terrible way to go.

[from Seth's Blog: The first law of mass media by Seth Godin]

Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter.

Massification = de-personalization.

[via @davidcushman]

I spoke with Stephanie Booth, yesterday, the organizer of the Going Solo conferences, and she has determined to cancel the upcoming event in Leeds, planned for 12 September 2008:

[from Going Solo » Not Enough Attendees For Going Solo Leeds]

Yesterday mid-afternoon, I had to take the difficult decision to cancel Going Solo Leeds. The reason for this is that a bit over two weeks before the event, there are simply not enough registrations for it to take place under the conditions I envisioned for it.

After discussing the situation with my advisors, I reached the conclusion that the most responsible course of action right now was to cancel as soon as I could.

I’m aware that for some of the people who have arranged to travel to Leeds, it’s already too late to cancel travel plans. If you’re going to be in Leeds anyway, how about doing something together? Let’s gather on the 12th for a free SoloCamp where we will discuss soloist issues amongst ourselves in an informal way.

The Going Solo conference concept and the community around it live on. There will be a third edition of Going Solo — I’ve learnt a tremendous amount of things preparing both the Lausanne and the Leeds editions, and will be taking advantage of those lessons to do things slightly differently. How, when and where are still unknowns, but if you are subscribed to the newsletter you’ll be informed in good time.

I am sure that Stephanie will regroup, and come up with a plan for the next Going Solo that will push the energy we had in Lausanne out to new areas: perhaps the US? I noted in the comments that some people thought that having a different crop of speakers might have led some who had attended the Lausanne event, only a few months ago, to attend again. Others suggested that London might have been a better spot.

I am an advisor and participant, and I think that Going Solo should take on more of a workshop feel (perhaps an extra day of more intense working sessions), as well as a bit more of a mixture of a local, community-oriented unconference with a smaller number of formal sessions. I am sure that Stephanie will continue to tinker, and get the formula right.

Turns out that I will be in the UK for other reasons, as well as the Going Solo event, so I will be supporting the informal 'Solo Camp' event, anyway, if it gets off the ground.

Saw some big news from Ismael Ghalimi about the upcoming Office 2.0 conference, to be held 3-5 September in San Francisco. First of all, Ismael always challenges gravity by concentrating his execution of the conference into a two month period, which is astonishing, considering the professionalism of the event. But this time, some last minute jitters led to a major sponsor dropping out. But Ismael, undaunted, has regrouped and added a launchpad to the event as a means of countering the loss of revenue:

[from Office 2.0 Conference : Office 2.0 Blog: Community Power]

Losing our Diamond Sponsor 10 days before the conference was definitely a huge blow ($75,000), but it forced us to be creative, and focus our efforts on what makes this conference unique, as Susan and Gadi so eloquently pointed out — its community-driven nature. The Office 2.0 Conference would not exist without the help it receives from its sponsors, but many early-stage startups cannot afford even our entry-level package ($2,500). In fact, they can barely afford the cost of flying to California today. Yet many innovations come from the smallest companies with the tightest budgets, and we've always been looking for ways to engage with them. The Office 2.0 Launchpad might be the answer.

Less than 24 hours after announcing it, we confirmed the participation of 8 companies, and are reviewing another 5. With a little bit more help from the bloggers community, we should easily reach 20 to 30, creating a nice balance with our more established paying sponsors. This is a perfect example of how powerful a community of online contributors can be, and a real-time illustration of how this event is put together, in less than 2 months.

I am a strong supporter of the event, and plan to help Ismael however I can in the next few weeks.

Update: 27 August 2008 - /Message readers can get a $100 discount on attendance at Office 2.0. See here.

[Update: 4:30pm ET 25 Aug 2008: The nice support folks at Disqus have moved the comments so that this post is now moot.]

I apologize to those that posted comments here in the past week or so, since I set up Disqus on /Message. I broke the templates that I worked on for so long (see ), and managed to link /Message comments to the /Mind blog: a cut and paste error.

If you'd like, please redo your comments. I am sending a help message to Disqus to see if I can reassociated the comments with the correct blog.

Mark uses the pre-web language, a la reengineering and knowledge management, to recast Gilmore's aphorism. Gilmore said,

The net regards censorship as a failure, and routes around it.

Mark Pesce tries a new spin, in a very interesting (and too long to provide a precis for here, especially on my vacation) post:

[from Mob Rules (The Law of Fives) | the human network]

The net regards hierarchy as a failure, and routes around it.

My pass:

The web regards centralization as a failure, and routes around it... by moving to the edge.

But I like the gist of his commentary, although I would use the term 'us', 'we', or 'the people' instead of 'mob', which sounds more like something menacing, while taking control of our own communications and identity shouldn't be cast that way, at least by us. The others, the Centroids, will do that on their own.

[pointer Matt Balara]

I've just finished reading *Personality Not Included by social marketing guru Rohit Bhargava. I don't know a lot about marketing, but I know what works and doesn't work when companies try it on me, and I'm increasingly interested in the crossover between social media and marketing.

Bhargava examines the concept of personality as it applies to organizations: why it's important for an organization -- or often a brand produced by that organization -- to have a personality at all, and how to use that personality to strengthen customer relationships. The first two chapters are essential reading for any organization that's still stuck in old-school marketing: first, why being faceless used to work but doesn't any more, and second, how social media is fundamentally changing how organizations communicate. Much of the rest of the book is some solid advice on how to create and foster the necessary brand personality, but so many companies are still stuck back in the "why should we do this?" phase that the first two chapters are going to be a major eye-opener for them. Also brilliant are the short "sellevator pitches" at the end of each chapter, summarizing the main message.

With the first half of the book covering the theory of brand personality, the second half digs into tools and techniques for making it happen. The book lists 10 major personality-focused marketing techniques -- curiosity, karmic, participation, un-whatever, sensory, antimarketer, fallibility, insider, incidental, and useful -- then describes each in terms of what it is, why it works, when you should use it, who's already doing it, and step-by-step instructions. There's also guides for finding the accidental spokespeople inside or outside your organization, empowering your employees, creating a successful company blog, and hiring employees with personality.

If I can make one complaint about *Personality Not Included, it's the overwhelming number of gratuitous analogies used in the writing, to the point where I started finding it annoying. I'm not talking about relevant examples, I'm talking about analogies, like the one where he spends half a page talking about Disney's movie High School Musical -- which has nothing to do with anything else in the book -- in order to have us understand the concept of being pressured into sticking with the status quo. By the time that I read a number of these, it started to feel like filler. This is purely an issue of style, not content, and you may experience it differently.

Disclosure: this book was provided to me for free by the publisher, McGraw Hill, through a great program called Mini Book Expo for Bloggers, which allows bloggers to claim a book in order to receive a review copy, in exchange for writing a public review of the book. All books can be shipped for free to bloggers within Canada, and some now can be shipped to the US.

Chatting with colleague Dan Thornton I said outloud something that's been festering at the back of my mind. And I want to share it with you.

"I only use search to find people and companies. For everything else I follow what other people point me at."

And to be honest, I follow links for much of the people and company checking out, too.

And it got me wondering. Am I a bit of a social media freak, or actually pretty normal in a world rapidly headed away from discovering people through content (perhaps a match with the Newtonian world of mass media) and toward discovering content through people (a fit with the evolutionary, long-tailed, user-as-destination networked world)?

When I wrote Portability is the new Pointworthy (Why Links Won't Matter), I was thinking a few steps into the future.

But what I know I am doing right now, time and time again, is turning to people to provide the links - not algorithms.

So freak or not? How are you using search now?

I have been using Disqus on a number of the new blogs here at /Edgewards, so I decided that it might be time to step up to the new comment system for /Message.

Knowing that I would have to convert the Typepad templates to 'advanced' -- which means that Typepad's WYSIWYG system for managing the look and feel of blogs would not longer work -- I put off the switch to Disqus until I had other reasons to change the templates in this radical fashion.

The first motivation to change templates arose from the limitation of Typepad's formatting options in the WYSIWYG system. In particular, I have been adding a number of contributors to /Message and other blogs, and I wanted to be able to display the author's name near the top of the blog post, so that readers can see who has written the post easily, without having to scroll to the bottom of the post, which was the only location offered by the preconfigured templates from Typepad.

So, I had made that change, which involved a long tiresome process involving creating several new templates and modifying many of the existing ones, and then replicating that for each of the three blogs involved. I also made a number of other stylistic changes, and tweaked existing styles a bit, like making the technorati tags and other footer information smaller fonts.

Ok, so then I turned to the Disqus comments insertion. There are directions and templates for the 'seamless' integration with Typepad, but they are based on the flawed assumption that the Typepad user has made no other changes to their Typepad templates. Their step-by-step process is based on simply cutting and pasting their slightly modified version of the default Typepad templates.

As a result, I had to laboriously find the various Disqus specific elements of template code (thank goodness they put in comments in the code, so they could be readily found), and insert them at the corresponding locations in my already hacked templates. And, note, that is several locations, I had hacked the same regions of the templates that Disqus had, as well. (For example, I had applied a tweak to the templates -- one detailed in Typepad help pages -- to omit the name of the author at the bottom of each post. Note that there was no note from Typepad describing how to put the author's name at the top, however. And wait until I try to create a hcak to fetch a photo of the author to display at the top of the post, too.) Nevertheless, I was able -- based on a considerable amount of experience with Typepad -- to get the contraption up and running.

I am willing to share the templates, by the way, once I have things tied down and finalized. Maybe I can work with Typepad to figure out how to do that sensibly.

By the way, it would be really helpful if Typepad tweaked things so the templates that are made accessible by 'converting' to 'advanced' actually included comments in them, describing what the hell is going on in the gobblegook there. Not everyone wants to have to search in the Typepad help pages and forums to find out what $MTAuthorNickName is. (Note: the MT stands for Moveable Type, despite the fact that this is Typepad.)

So, I will be reporting on the changes that follow a transition to something like Disqus, or specifically the switch to Disqus. I read some posts recently intimating that Disqus will be pulling comments made out in the commentsphere (like Friendfeed, Twitter, Readburner, etc.) back into the blogs where the initial posts were made. I want that, so I decided to make the switch, despite the headaches.

On, and from now on, all posts will have Disqus integrated while older posts will still have Typepad comments.

Despite all the recent discussion about failing blog networks and the resulting handwringing about the presumably negative climate for blogging, I am moving to launch a new project that I have been working on in the background for a few months. /Edgewards is a new media collective that I am heading up, one that will involve a variety of new blogs launching here at www.stoweboyd.com, as well as growing number of affiliated blogs hosted elsewhere.

The premise behind /Edgewards is straightforward: to foster thought, writing, commentary, and conversation about topics that truly matter -- topics that may be underrepresented in the great social media explosion -- and bringing forward deeply committed contributors, leaders in their fields of interest,

In the past few weeks, I have been joined at /Message by some new voices:

• Matt Balara is a designer based in Hamburg, but soon moving to Australia.
  
• David Cushman has spent the last 20 years banging around in media, and speaks with a British accent.
  
• Sandy Kemsley has a deep background in enterprise software, and watching where the web is taking us.
  

A few weeks ago, I launched /Ground, a new blog dedicated to localism in all its possible meanings: local food, transit, politics, governance, production, economics, and distribution. I am lucky to have been joined by some truly cool contributors, all located in San Franscisco:

• Rachel Weidinger is a massive foodie and local communities fanatic.
  
• Hillary Hartley is a leading advocate of Government 2.0.
  

And today I am announcing the launch of /Mind, a blog devoted to cognitive science and the universals of human cognition. I have been joined in my work here by a new friend:

• Brynn Evans is a doctoral candidate in cognititive science at the University of California at San Diego, although she's been spending a lot of time in San Francisco recently.

I will be continuing to write at /Ambivalence, which is basically just a grab bag of web scraps with the byline 'no tech, only flesh.' /Ambivalence also provides me the opportunity to fool with Tumblr, while all the blogs here at stoweboyd.com are hosted by Typepad.

In the upcoming weeks and months, I will be adding new blogs here -- like one devoted to the New Nomad lifestyle -- and also affiliating with some of the great bloggers who have existing blogs. My good friend, Jamais Cascio, who blogs at Open The Future, is the first of this larger federation of blogs under the /Edgewards banner. In the next several weeks, he will be joined by others... and I will provide them an actual badge to put on their sites, as well.

Note in the sidebar of /Message there is a new /Edgewards collection of recent posts and feeds. There is also a consolidated feed for all posts with the /Edgewards federation. On my return from vacation I plan to launch an /Edgewards blog, that will include announcements about the federation, and discussion about the direction we are heading in.

Back in Copenhagen at Reboot, Matt Balara (now a contributor here at /Message) pulled me into his series "What's Design Mean To You?", and he posted the video today at his mattbalara.com blog. I think I do a fairly good job describing the remedial sort of (re)design that I do a lot of the time. People generally get the basic 'clean piece of paper' sort of design that I put into Nerdvana or Workstreamer.

I was fascinated to learn that people don't know what I do:

[from mattbalara.com : “ What’s Design Mean to You? An Interview with Stowe Boyd” Aug. 9, 2008 by Matt Balara]

Funnily enough, a number of people at Reboot asked me, “what exactly does Stowe do?” Admittedly, I didn’t really know exactly either. He explains it quite well in the interview.

And what’s Stowe’s take on design?

It’s the laying out of processes or models that represent some thing that’s going to be built or manufactured.

I came across this tweet in Gerd Leonhard’s Daily Wisdoms

“Bloggers are now like DJs: They pick bands to play and talk about, and become powerful super-nodes (me;) http://tinyurl.com/5zf2td”

Gerd thinks about the future of music a lot (and like many of us who think about the future of anything), discovers convergence at every turn.

I like the image. As a start point.

But we are not DJs who only select finished versions to play. We are DJs who remix what we listen to as we play it back, scratching and creating our own versions, rapping over them, adding a melody… removing a bass line.

And the music never ends. You hear my iteration, play it, remix it, layer more tracks on it and share it. I rediscover it and feed it into the tune I was playing.

And the music never ends.

The music we select, share, shape and import back into our ongoing mix helps shape what we are.

I am a DJ, I am what I play (as David Bowie put it…)

The never-ending remix may (may?) start with bloggers but extends to everyone who participates in the networked world. The DJ is no more important than the listener here.

It applies not only to ideas, but also to messages, services… products.

Everyone is a DJ now. And everyone is making the music. The remixer adds as much value as the orginator and as the player.

In this world, the song, most assuredly, is not going to remain the same.

Gregor has attempted to analyze the success of Twitter using old media imaginings, and largely fails to capture what is happening:

[from Why Twitter Hasn’t Failed: The Power Of Audience]

[...]

The answer lies in understanding Audience.

Twitter has a simple premise: You tweet & the message is pushed to your friends. The actual mechanics are slightly different (messages go to everyone who follows you, whether they’re your “friends” or not, assuming your stream is public) — but from a user’s perspective, the circle of receivers consists only of the people they know. Everyone else is part of a faceless crowd that’s hidden behind the follower count.

This simple premise holds the key to Twitter’s success: messages go to a well-defined audience. In the moment you release a tweet, you know who’s on the line and you have an idea of who can catch a glimpse of your message. @replies are the best illustration for this sense of audience: Even though Twitter is not a point-to-point message delivery system (let alone a reliable one), @replies are sent with the understanding that they will be read by the intended people because they are known to be in the audience. (Imagine a newspaper article that suddenly greeted a specific reader.)

Blogging on the other hand has no such clearly defined audience. An aspiring blogger who hasn’t crossed the chasm speaks into the void. Direct feedback can only come in the form of written comments (a relatively high barrier of effort) and it’s diminished by spam and vocal trolls these days.

I think the metaphor of an Audience -- which implies passive observation by the many of the active participation of the few -- is totally wrong, even though activity in Twitter is distributed unequally. Jay Rosen's coinage -- "the people formerly known as the audience" -- is meant to be emblematic of the tectonic shifts in social media.

Twitter is much more like a cocktail party, where people alternate speaking and listening, in open conversations in which some or many of those listening are not saying anything at the moment. This allows sparkling conversationalists to hold court, for curmudgeons to nit pick and make ironic comments sotto voce, and for arguments to break out, all in different rooms at the party.

And Twitterers who have no followers are in exactly the same situation as bloggers with no readers. However, there may be a real distinction between blogging-with-readers and twittering-with-followers, but that depends on the style of the blogger. My sort of blogging is more like writing essays, while others write shorter, more personal posts. So I think of it as a continuum, with twittering and tumbler-blogging at one end and /Message and The Huffington Post at the other.

But the notion that Twitter somehow provides a canned 'Audience' willing to consume tweets really misses what's going on. If you change the term to 'community' or even 'cocktail party' you'd come much closer.

My pal, Jamais Cascio, asked me to drop in on a series of meetings earlier in the year, something to do with Mozilla and the future of the browser. I was able to work with Jamais again -- we met in some of the earliest work with the Open University's Social:Learn project -- as well as getting the opportunity to work with Jesse James Garrett and Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path for the first time. The workshop also involved a bunch of other brilliant and interesting people (see below):

Jesse recently unveiled the Aurora user interface concept (which I have yet to comment on), which was a direct outgrowth of the project, and has posted Jamais' forecasting scenarios, as well:

[from Aurora: Forecasting the Future.

Jamais called on a whole lot of smart people and led them (and a bunch more from both Adaptive Path and Mozilla) through a two-day workshop to forecast one possible future for browsers and the Web. Through a series of group exercises, we identified three major trends that we thought would have the biggest impact on the web:

• Augmented Reality: The gap is closing between the Web and the world. Services that know where you are and adapt accordingly will become commonplace. The web becomes fully integrated into every physical environment.
• Data Abundance: There’s more data available to us all the time — both the data we produce intentionally and the data we throw off as a by-product of other activities. The web will play a key role in how people access, manage, and make sense of all that data.
• Virtual Identity: People are increasingly expected to have a digital presence as well as a physical one. We inhabit spaces online, but we also create them through our personal expression and participation in the digital realm.

Based on these trends, Jamais wrote three scenarios fleshing out the details of how these trends might come into being, and how they would manifest in people’s everyday lives. We wanted to use these forecasting scenarios to explore several aspects of this possible future world that we knew would never end up in our movie, but would provide us with some context for the design choices we’d be making.

Download:
Forecasting Scenarios

Forecasting Workshop Contributors:
Mike Beltzner
Rebecca Blood
Stowe Boyd
Leah Buley
Dawn Danby
Alex Faaborg
Henning Fischer
Jesse James Garrett
Dan Harrelson
Sebastian Heycke
Julia Houck-Whitaker
Mike Liebhold
Jessica Margolin
Peter Merholz
Lisa Rein

PS I am responsible for the "Terminator Goggles" in Jamais scenarios, and was the most strident advocate of the position that the 'browser' will cease to exist, as we know it, and instead, we will switch to a multiplicity of tools that interact with the Web in very specific and different ways than the all-purpose swiss army knife approach that we take for granted today.

My pal, Ian Forrester invited me to the alpha of a new media sharing app called Boxee. Yikes. I was baffled by the experience at first because the app doesn't support the use of a cursor, you have to use keys to mouse around. I can't remember the last time I fooled with a tool that doesn't allow mousing.

Boxee, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

It would take a handful of friends to determine if sharing my movie, music, and photo preferences with others -- and vice versa -- through Boxee is worth the fiddly interface, which reminds me of the controls on a television menu, or searching through the movie offerings in a hotel.

Apparently, there is a lot to Boxee. It is a surrogate player for media (drives iTunes on the Mac, for example), and presumably does the same for movies in some way (I haven't tried). The alpha crashed once, but aside from that seems pretty workable, once you get used to navigating with arrow keys, enter and escape.

Boxee's lightshow effects were very trippy, however:

BOXEE, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

BOXEE, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

There is a Download page, which I don't understand: where are things downloaded from? My friends? Some online service?

At any rate, if a bunch of friends sign up, I might try it as a place to share movie experiences. More to follow. Let me know your Boxee experiences.

No surprise that Google has assessed it's $1B acquisition of 5% of AOL and decided that it looks like a bad deal, now:

[from Wired News - AP News by Michael Liedtke]

[...]

Google acknowledged for the first time that it might have to recognize a loss on its 5 percent stake in AOL, whose struggles have made it a financial albatross for its owner, Time Warner Inc.

[...]

Google bought its stake in AOL largely to prevent one of its largest advertising partners - AOL - from defecting to Microsoft Corp. The bidding war helped drive up AOL's implied market value to $20 billion, based on Google's investment.

Some analysts have suggested AOL may be worth less than $10 billion now. Google didn't estimate in its SEC filing what it believes its stake to be currently worth.

[...]

As part of its investment, Google has the right to demand that Time Warner spin off AOL in an initial public offering of stock or buy back its stake. But Google so far hasn't indicated any interest in going down that path.

I continue to be astonished that Google -- being directed by relatively smart people -- would invest in AOL, for whatever reason.

[from The myth of the creative class]

When we talk about the Google age, then, we do talk about a new society and the rules I explore in my book are the rules of that society, built on connections, links, transparency, openness, publicness, listening, trust, wisdom, generosity, efficiency, markets, niches, platforms, networks, speed, and abundance.

I have been smacked in the face with a battery of new flow apps. There are so many popping up I can't even adequately fool with them.

David Chartier turned me on to Mozilla's Snowl, and sets context pretty well:

[from Mozilla's "Snowl" hunts Twitter, RSS, and (soon) e-mail]

The web is an increasingly chatty place. Between following comment threads, checking in with friends on Twitter, reading a few blogs with RSS feeds, and conquering a mountain of e-mail, we have plenty of conversations to keep track of. Mozilla wants to help us on the conversational journey, which is why the company has launched Snowl, a new tool that offers a small glimmer of hope for those seeking communications nirvana.

But Snowl immediately disappoints. The post on the Mozilla Labs blog calls it an experiment, but it is a failed one, in my case, although I agree with the drivers:

[from Introducing Snowl]

Snowl is an experiment to answer that question. It’s a prototype Firefox extension that integrates messaging into the browser based on a few key ideas:

1. It doesn’t matter where messages originate. They’re alike, whether they come from traditional email servers, RSS/Atom feeds, web discussion forums, social networks, or other sources.
2. Some messages are more important than others, and the best interface for actively reading important messages is different from the best one for casually browsing unimportant ones.
3. A search-based interface for message retrieval is more powerful and easier to use than one that makes you organize your messages first to find them later.
4. Browser functionality for navigating web content, like tabs, bookmarks, and history, also works well for navigating messages.

I think that moving towards a messaging basis instead of a publishing basis is dead-on (see Blogging 2.0 Meme Doesn't Go Far Enough), but getting stuck in the email inbox or RSS reader paradigm is not helpful.

If it's all about conversations being supported by messages -- and who cares where the messages are generated, whether Twitter, blogs, email, whatever -- then we need to adopt a conversational paradigm, something more like comment threads, instant messaging, or Twitter.

I had stumbled across Rejaw yesterday, which is a Twitter application. They seem to have twigged on a useful distinction between 'shouting' -- where a user is speaking one:many -- in distinction with 'whispering' -- where two (or more?) people are speaking privately. Here's is a shout that I created, and a series of replies.

Rejaw: Shout from Stowe Boyd, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Rejaw goes farther than Twitter in tracking the context of a Tweet, and trying to manage visibility around the intention of the speaker. But I rapidly got lost in the twisty little tunnels of the user experience. I replied to a comment from someone, then couldn't figure out how to find the message I had created. Maybe a shout v whisper pane approach, like Tweetdeck, is needed?

Communications nerdvana was exactly what Greg Narain and I had proposed to AOL at the beginning of 2007. I was approached by various folks then working there, based on a series of posts I had written in 2006 and 2005. We kicked off a project, and designed a solution that has never been built, but I think some of its features -- although geared in principle to a large instant messaging network like AIM -- could help the conceptual mess we seem to be getting into with these conversational matrix applications. I offer these observations in open discourse, although if anyone would like to get our help, I am sure that Greg is as open to it as I am.

In the Nerdavana project, Greg Narain and I designed the basic backbone for the application around the model of a buddylist (specifically AOL's AIM buddylist). This lines up with my belief that all media is becoming socialized: all media will be perceived and delivered as relationship-based messages, where the source of the message is as important (and generally more important) as what is being said.

Nerdvana Conceptual Design - Buddylist, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

The idea here is simply to aggregate all the myriad streams from all of your buddies, and to be able to respond to them in a simple way, even if the world is fragmented. Note that Nerdvana is status aware: it knows that you are reading something, or commenting, or whatever, and if you want that status is automatically transmitted as status. (I believe the conflation of status and messages is a mistake in the Twitter model, for example.)

If MadMonkNYC has made a comment on some third party's post then if I want to respond I am confronted with the option of a/ going back to the post, b/ sending a message -- email, Tweet, instant message, whatever -- to MadMonkNYC, or c/ creating a linked comment within a conversational matrix tool like Nerdvana (or Friendfeed, Rejaw, or Socialmedian). (One irreducible problem is that these world are not interoperational, and they involved divided communities, but that is a different issue, one that I started to address in yesterday's Blogging 2.0 Meme Doesn't Go Far Enough post, and one that I will return to in another post.)

Greg and I also devised ways to look at the 'pile-ups' in Nerdvana -- when various individuals begin to talk about the same 'topic' -- which could be an event, or a web post, or a direct interchange like an person-to-person message (like an a tweet directed to @gregarious in Twitter). We called this the 'Stories' view, which is similar to the Techmeme memetracking motif:

Nerdvana Conceptual Design - Stories View, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Here you see a group of Nerdvana users have commented on the same post, and rated it. We had also devised a model where users could dial up the degree of how wide the sources for their stories might be: 100% from my closest friends, 100% from the most popular in the entire user community of Nerdvana, or some degree in between.

The RSS reader model might seem to be almost the same, but it treats people as sources of RSS, which is the wrong layer of abstraction. People are conversational engines, and can opt to converse through any number of media, and these should be blended into a person's conversational flow. RSS readers generally do not support conversation, and may not even support finding them when they are happening, which is why reading Techmeme is often more illuminating that Google Reader.

In the final analysis, we have a number of contending models smooshing into each other, but some are inherently more rich and will therefore rise to become the defining warp and weft of the conversational matrix that will replace the publishing model of RSS. There are a large number of challenges, however, and a great deal of retrofitting will have to be contrived to keep the Web a contiguous, even if a fragmented, experience. Tools like Nerdavana don't solve the fragmentation problem, but they do elevate the experience of web involvement from reading to conversing, which is a millennial step forward.

The folks at The We Campaign have already demonstrated that they aren't wise to the web (see Getting Sociality Wrong: We), so it comes as no great surprise that I got an email 'from' Cathy Zoi at The We Campaign suggesting that I write a letter to the editor of my local newspaper about Congress and the stupidity surrounding the nation's elected officials' response to the energy crisis:

No time for vacation, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Oh yes, write a letter to the editor, at a time when newspaper reading is plummeting and newsrooms across the country are laying off, trimming the news hole, and closing down.

But nothing about blogging about it, or chatting to your friends in Facebook. These people need to get some advice about the social revolution. Call me up folks. I'd like to help.

PS I continue to believe it's wrong to send emails that people can't respond to meaningfully.

PPS The production and delivery of newspapers is the sort of contribution to global warming that The We Campaign should be rallying against, right?

I stumbled across Cesar Serna's Tweet Pro, thanks to Rhea Drysdale, and even before I read her insightful review I clicked over to the website and saw this:

Tweet Pro for Twitter - Find Follow and Add Friends on Twitter, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Hmmm. Cash up front, $9.95 for one day access? Multiple Twitter accounts? Obviously for spammers.

I saw that it is Windows only so, I passed on fooling with it.

Rhea twigged to the spamology latent in the product:

I love that I can spam the crap out of Twitter with an unlimited amount of accounts. The average user only needs one account, maybe two, one for their personal account and one for their crochet club. Conversely, an “advanced user” needs thousands to stay in touch with their BFF’s! This is perfect for snake oil salesmen… or hardworking white hats that like to maintain a dozen or so accounts for their honest products.

Bizarrely, Rhea goes on to recommend the tool for SEO weenies, PR professionals, industry experts, or lonely folks: she might have been kidding on the last, but she seems serious about the others.

I grant that a company might want to track mentions of its products, or to find influencers, but this combination of features is suspicious.

Personally, I think Twitter should lock their API to tools like this. It's like an automatic weapon: it has only one use and it isn't home protection. And Rhea, I don't care how much the UI glistens (strangely a gun metal gray), this junk won't fly.