March 2008 - Posts
TheNextWeb posted a good review of Toluu. Briefly, Toluu is about feed sharing.
Looks great. And frankly, I'm far more interested in these sorts of things than I am the "centralization of decentralized me" style services (I believe Solis might have said that first).
I haven't received an invite yet, so I don't know this first hand, but according to readwriteweb, "what you and your friends read and tag as favorites will help you discover new feeds that you may enjoy reading."
I can only wait and hope that Toluu recommendations are not based solely upon me and my friends. The reason, of course, is that I already have multiple communications channels engaged between myself and my friends/contacts. The old line “tell me something I don’t already know” applies.
However, if they’re going to find me people with similar interests that I don’t know, and then point me to things in those collections that I don’t already have, that would interest me a great deal.
Friendfeed:
The good part here is that it's clear they understand we'll all be streaming our behaviors via many different online services. Our online persona's will not be limited to one site. Therefore, for me anyway, I can imagine Friendfeed stealing a big chunk of the attention I currently give to Facebook. (To be clear, I'm not your average Facebook user.)
Socialthing:
The good part here is that it's clear they understand we'll all be streaming our behaviors via many different online services. Our online persona's will not be limited to one site. Therefore, for me anyway, I can imagine Socialthing stealing a big chunk of the attention I currently give to Facebook. (To be clear, I'm not your average Facebook user.)
What:
What will these guys do to create sustainable differentiation?
FWIW, I'm experimenting with Friendfeed. You can find me at http://friendfeed.com/bobreb
I've been attracted recently to ideas that bridge the gap between possibility and short-term practicality. The game is managing the evolution of an innovation. It goes like this: first, what is this thing; second, how does it help me do what I already do; and third, what new things might I do with it. You can't jump from one to three. You have to go through the steps sequentially.
My favorite example goes like this: people at one time thought the best thing to do with a video recording device would be to take it to a live performance and situate it in the best seat in the house. The resulting recording would deliver to every viewer the perspective that could be had only by those few attending the live performance and seated in the most advantageous physical location. As a phase two conception, it makes perfect sense. You can almost hear the pundits: "now everyone gets the best seat in the house." We can only understand something using the conceptual tools we already possess. In this example, it wasn't immediately obvious that you could put the camera places where people couldn't sit at all, or that you could have multiple cameras, or film the event out of order, or in multiple locations, or add special effects, or any of the many things we associate with recorded content today. It's a classic phase two conception.
Today, in the online social space, we find the early majority figuring out phase one, and beginning the move to phase two. Consider that the phrase "social network", or maybe "social graph" is popularly understood as a collection of your friends and acquaintances. That's a very narrow perspective, but it is understandable when we consider the 
conceptual space the idea is entering. In time, on the other side of the hype curve, we'll grow out of it.
Anyway, one idea that I think bridges the gap is the social media release. It bridges the phase one to phase two gap for the PR and marketing professions. I've blogged about it before, because I think it's both practical and a great case study in the evolution of an idea. As it goes mainstream, rigor is added, and process evolves around it. The image here was taken from a deck created by Matt Herzberger and made available on Slideshare.
All hail the bridge builders...
I do a lot -- a very lot -- of work with teams whose members are not co-located. That's why I'm aways on the look out for new tools that might improve communications. Because it's usually development projects, the stakes are high -- miscommunication is costly.
Sarah Perez, of ReadWriteWeb, reported on Twiddla.com. It's an online multi-user whiteboarding tool. I gave it a quick spin and liked it a lot. Check it out:
Only weirdness I discovered was that I couldn't seem to change the drawing colors. The real test will come tomorrow when I spring it on a vendor I'm working with during our con call.
As anyone that knows me heard, I've become a believer that a social computing experience resting upon a semantic web style infrastructure (RDF, OWL, SPARQL, etc.) has the potential to deliver an Internet first: a full featured information worker social computing experience -- a "web workers" dream come true.
As I've said before, the best bet to date appears to be Twine. But then Twine is still in closed beta, and I can't get in. Actually, that's the point of this post. You see, Nova Spivack, one of the men (maybe the man, but that's rarely the reality of it) behind Twine has suggested a way to the top of the beta invite list. Blog about Twine and you could move to the top of the list. Well, well. Done that before, and doing it here again. The request seems a bit over the top, but what the hell.
What should a service of this type do? It should provide me with unrestricted intellectual airspace. I, along with other people with related inclinations (I have learned recently to be suspicious of an unrestricted focus on peer relationships or any type) would be able to explore the web of people and ideas with a precision and fidelity hyperlinks and search algorithm's can't touch. Bring on the unknown unknows, and the serendipitous discovery -- I have desires that can only be met by ties of the weak kind.
We do get at a taste of that with services like Del.icio.us. Social bookmarking gets us part of the way there. But the social bookmarking services seem to have stopped innovating. It's almost like they've hit some sort of barrier and they've been either unable or unwilling to pass. Could it be one of conception?
And the big social networking services are heading in another direction altogether. I recently attended the Graphing Social Patterns conference and it's as if the players there believe there's only one social network per person -- the one called friends on Facebook -- and that no other valuable social graph does or can exist. Of course I'm overstating the situation. The smart ones know full well that every person is a part of many quite disparate networks. No doubt it's the potential commercial value associated with your "friends" networks and the mega millions engaged there (oh yeah, and the ability to actually address that market), that has them rapt.
And good for them. I wish them all the best. I have a ton of fun with Facebook. I just see the landscape differently. I believe the Facebook/Myspace/Bebo/etc. style services are among the first settlements to appear in the frontier and will not be the last; to me they are more a general consumer introduction to social computing rather than an end game. By way of contrast let me point out that I know the feeds in my RSS reader represent, and by a very wide margin, my most professionally valuable social network.
I can imagine what should come next, but I can't find much heading in that direction.
And then there's Twine.
I've been quiet lately. Partly it's because I've so much work work to do, that it's impacted my free thinking time. On the other hand, I seem to have the opportunity to build some new and interesting things at work, so what's to really complain about?
I'll try to post some of my team's work regarding recognition/incentive systems in the next week or so. I'm hosting a Seattle Community Roundtable Wednesday night and I'll be presenting it anyway, so clearly it's not a secret. And it does remain highly debatable. I could use the feedback.
Here's something interesting I found:
Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind.
Marshall McLuhan.
I can't tell you how much I buy that quote. I don't think it's fully appreciated. That might be a good thing.
I lifted the above quote from this slideshare presentation. There are a number of things worth reading -- worth seeing -- in it.