Bruce MacVarish Notes

Personal Media Memory Map

Kristina Loring at Frog Design does a nice job summarizing day 1 of PopTech 2011.

What caught my eye was the Personal Media Memory Map developed by the New York Time’s R&D Lab.

The app takes your basic personal info and creates a personalized map of media relevant to your lifetime by aggregating and curating articles, pictures, posts and other content. 

Check out this video of Alexis Lloyd talking about the challenge of creating these personalized media maps.

 

 

 

Google Unlocks Voice Data

Google announced that starting today, you can download a copy of all your Google Voice and other communications data.  

This is a huge move by Google that unlocks new value for end users, for application vendors and advertisers by enabling new ways to benefit from our communications and conversation data.

The value of voice communications is no longer found in the connecting of conversations but rather in the data, analytics and relevance derived from the conversation content.

 

 

 

The Value of Average Influencers

Liz Gannes interviews Duncan Watts about a number of topics included in his new book "Everything is Obvious".

I found his perspective on the challenges, reality and research focused on "Influencers" very interesting (about 3:17).  

He suggests it is very difficult to identify the very few people that have strong influence in the network... and the results are often disappointing.

Instead, Watts sees research on influence moving toward finding the very many people that have "some" level of influence in the network.  

It would seem that Watts sees more value in finding the "average many" influencers instead of the "vital few".

 

 

Human Behavior as the start of Social Design

Jenn Webb interviewed Paul Adams in prep for Web 2.0 Expo scheduled for later this month.  

The interview is well worth a read. You should also keep an eye out for Paul's forth coming book titled "Social Circles" (I've already pre-ordered).   

One of many interesting quotes from Paul's interview includes: 

"Our (mobile) phone, or whatever we carry around with us, will probably be our primary source and producer of social media data, so it's important that when we use it, we're not burdened by its place in the ecosystem — for example, by seeing constant privacy controls or too many invasive alerts."

Paul Adams, Global Brand Experience Manager, Facebook

For me, it is interesting to think about his reference to "whatever we carry around with us will probably be our primary source of social media data".  

What about you?

 

Not all Graphs are the same

Chris Dixon, CEO of Hunch, recently presented at a GoogleTechTalk at the Google New York office.

Chris talked about the value of Graphs ... as in social, communications, intention, taste graphs ... the evolution toward Graph Wars ... and strategic choices important to developing graphs.

 

I was particularly interested in his question:

"How are Communication Graphs related to Social or Taste Graphs?"  

While there may be some overlap in "nodes" that appear across all 3 graphs, there are many "nodes" that are distinct.  As a result, we should expect to see the use of each graph as the source for distinctly different services for users.

Because not all Graphs are the same, the value of network analysis and new graph based services will continue to grow.

True Value to be found in Sensing Relevance

"Context, the weaving together of interrelated conditions that brings meaning to why a person is doing something, is the key to delivering relevance.  

The only thing of true value in a user-controlled medium is relevance." 

@jonathanmendez , Display's Matching Problem

 

I agree with Jonathan and like his vision for integrating the emerging "sensing wave" to deliver on the opportunity of relevance-aware advertising.  

If we distill Jonathan's statement of "weaving together inter-related conditions that brings meaning" down to the key technology or product elements, I think we have something like:

1. Sensors to capture a user's declarative and ambient actions, reactions, environment, intent, attention and sentiment data.
2. A Context Engine to aggregate sensor data
3. An Analytics layer to derive meaning from the Context Engine data stream
4. A Preference & Policy based Filtering Layer to deliver a real-time, relevance-aware stream of content based on a user's rules and context.

So you end up with something like:

 

Sensors + Context + Analytics + Filter => Relevance

 

It seems to me, there's been too much focus on "context" and not enough focus on the source of true value for users to be found in "relevance".

Games @ Work

I wanted to refresh my thinking on the Guiding Principles of Game Design @ Work from my earlier post. 

 

The Guiding Principles for Games @ Work were focused on making it easy for collaboration leaders and business users to:

1. Define clear boundaries, shared problem(s) and a community of collaborative business users

 

2. Assign satisfying tasks or roles that enable business users to excel and be part of something "Bigger"

 

3. Build nonmonetary incentives into a game economy to strongly motivate individuals to accomplish group aims.

 

4. Deliver hyper- transparency of information about users' skills and teams’ real-time performance 

 

5. Create a virtual economic marketplace for information and collaboration

 

6. Open multiple real-time sources of information and communication upon which to make decisions

 

7. Structure as a project-oriented organization that can easily be disbanded and reformed based on tasks and skills

 

8. Recognize individual, group and company achievements in a clear, specific way

 

9. Open visibility into all skills / project / social networks of communication across an organization

 

10. Adapt multiple, purpose-specific communications mediums to improve speed and efficiency of collaboration. 

 

With a little vision, strategy and design, it is not hard to see how game design principles will be shaping the future of communication and collaboration applications.

 

Trust Deficits in Social Networks

"Social networks have something of a trust deficit, which will either limit or make “more expensive” its ability to offer new services.  The product teams at social networks have proven their ability to offer compelling services in exchange for personal information, but our research shows that people place a relatively low value on their social information. 

For social networks to offer products in exchange for higher value information such as health records, physical location, or email/IM history, they will need to offer even more compelling products, services and outcomes to consumers."

Timothy Morey,

Frog Design,

Who do we trust with our personal data

LoSoPhoMo and Mobile Enterprise Pure-Plays

Steve Rubel believes the next media disruptors are Mobile Pure-Plays.  I agree.  

From Steve's post:

"Now a new era is under way.

The next wave of media disruptors are laser focused on being tailored, rather than retrofitted, for mobile devices. They start out sometimes just as apps, creating a strong beachhead in your pocket. Then they use these platforms to springboard into other ancillary media ventures. This means they're cut from a different cloth than older stalwarts that often need to retrofit themselves for mobile.

With Internet consumption on mobile devices set to surpass the same on PCs next year, according to Morgan Stanley, and US smart phone penetration to hit 50%, Nielsen says, mobile is no longer the tail on the media dog. For the next wave of media upstarts, it's the dog and the rest is the tail.

We're at the very beginning of a new era in media; one where mobile is the primary distribution platform. What's more, we have a perfect storm of technologies coming together that combine local, social, photo and mobile (what we call "LoSoPhoMo") and this is sure to spur even more media companies that are pure-plays at least at the start."

Steve is focused on the next wave of media.  For me, the question is what does a disruptive mobile pure-play strategy look like for the enterprise when it takes advantage of the very same LoSoPhoMo - local, social, photo and mobile technologies Steve identifies as drivers for media disruption.

In many ways, the emergence and evolution of consumer focused Web 2.0 applications and strategy served as a proxy for key elements of Enterprise 2.0.  

So, it is not too far of a stretch that the emergence of Mobile Pure-Plays and their evolution along a new transmedia arc may provide insight into the evolution of the mobile enterprise.

For example, one strategy could be starting as a Mobile Enterprise Pure-Play and evolving to a --->

    - Mobile Enterprise Web App ---> 

    - Mobile Enterprise Cloud --->

    - Mobile Enterprise Device --->

    - Mobile Enterprise ?

Professor Dunbar talks about the Social Brain

 

As part of the University of Oxford lecture series, Professor Robin Dunbar discusses the social brain, Dunbar's Number of ~150 and research on social interactions.  

Some interesting points:

- brain size related to complexity of social system

- Rings of Relationships grow by 3x the previous ring

- We have 5 true friends - as predicted by Aristotle

- Face-to-face critical to maintaining relationship...otherwise see decay

- Facebook social graph of 44M users have average of 120-130 friends

‘For the first time, it has been possible to provide a genuine evolutionary time depth to the study of brain evolution. It is interesting to see that even animals that have contact with humans, like cats, have much smaller brains than dogs and horses because of their lack of sociality.’ - Professor Dunbar

Rob Paterson, who provided the link to the Dunbar video above and always has an interesting post on his blog, has posted on the topic of what our social "sweet spot" of friends might be and references some valuable research (... I think it is well worth reading).