Bruce MacVarish Notes

Solving Social Exhaust

"People seem utterly exhausted by the plethora of networks they manage and the number of people within those networks".

David Armano's post "Less Networks, More Meaning"

I agree with David and believe social / information / conversation overload is taking its toll on the value of social applications to many users.    

While the answer may be the introduction of more advanced "filters" (a la Shirky's suggestion), not everyone will be ready to manage their social streams through finer and finer filters.   The "Geeks" maybe... the "Normals" ... no way.

To help extract and maintain the valuable "meaning" found within our social networks, we need to rethink how we manage and connect with our most important social hubs... not just filter the raging flow of social streams.

Brutally Curating Signal from Noise

From @scepticgeek

 
 
 

XMPP and One Social Web

An earlier post outlined key enablers for a people-centric, real-time web including:

- Portable profiles means that instead of creating an account on each service you join, you can now host your identity in one place and bring your profile and friends with you to other sites as you surf the social web. Webfinger, OpenID, Portable Contacts, and OAuth all make this possible (and for bootstrapping profiles from the legacy document-web, we have Google’s Social Graph API).

- Distributed Push Publishing means there is no longer a need to rely on proprietary platforms. The emerging standards here are PubSubHubbub (PuSH) and rssCloud (see comparisons on TheNextWeb and TechCrunch).

- Synchronized Conversation Threads means that users can participate on the same conversation thread across multiple interfaces and services (we are still waiting for a standard, for which various geeks are actively devising a plan). Check out the Salmon effort as an example. 

So you might say that the people centric, real-time web will be based on a stack of building block technologies including:

- OpenID
- OAuth
- Portable Contacts / Profiles
- PubSubHub / rssCloud
- activitystrea.ms
- Conversation Threading (example Salmon Protocol)

With this as context, it is interesting to see the work of OneSocialWeb that describes the following as their mission:  

"The purpose of onesocialweb is to enable free, open, and decentralized social applications on the web. Its protocol can be used to turn any XMPP server into a full fledged social network, participating in the onesocialweb federation. The suite of extensions covers all the usual social networking use cases such as user profiles, relationships, activity streams and third party applications. In addition, it provides support for fine grained access control, realtime notification and collaboration."

Here's a recent presentation providing additional detail

OneSocialWeb presentation at FOSDEM 2010

View more presentations from Laurent Eschenauer.

Relevance-Aware Flows

Originally posted in May 2008...

Just caught up to this post by Steve Gillmor and his take on the role, scale and reliability of Twitter as a communication/information switching platform.

Two things caught my attention.  First, positioning Twitter as a relevance-aware conversation soft switch... and second, defining a signal-to-noise for relevance of Twitter Flow as a function of who you follow, what topics you track and how you filter.

" At its simplest (its true power) Twitter is a phone switch for routing information flow. Those who control the flow control the price for the information. In a virtualized platform, the hardware is the razor and the software switch is the blades. The software switch is an affinity-based construct that manages the signal-to-noise ratio of the information flow based on the contouring signals (gestures) of the members of the group. In the language of Twitter, it’s who you follow times what you track divided by how you filter.

So, managing the signal-to-noise ratio for (twitter) Flows based on user or group gestures starts to define a relevance-aware flow of conversations or...

Relevance-Aware Flow = f( Following * Topics ) / Filter

One could imagine a number of different user-defined filters (think social, project, functional, process or other variables) used to identify and channel important conversation streams from within the Flow.

While the question of decentralizing Twitter as a method to improve scalability and performance is important, we shouldn't gloss over the need and value of filtering Flow into specific streams of relevant conversations and making them discoverable and social.

Noisy Feeds

I agree with Om ...

  

Social Networks are Communication Businesses

"The key to understanding the business model issues facing social networks, and indeed the source of the confusion for media companies and the venture capital community, is the recognition that social networks are not media businesses at all. They are communication businesses. This is why the venture capital community loves social networks and why media companies have struggled to make economic sense of them."

Bo Peabody, Facebook and Twitter Will Always Be Crappy Businesses

Old World vs. New World

 

Back in 2006, as I started to realize how consumer oriented innovation was leading enterprise innovation and could serve as a proxy for future enterprise applications, I started a habit of replacing the word "computing" with the word "communications" when reading new announcements and visions of the future for computing.

You know... "cloud-computing" became "cloud-communications"..."virtual computing" became "virtual communications"... "social computing" became "social communications"... you get the picture.

Where am I going with this?

I found myself repeating this habit when reading Steve Frank describe an interesting way to think about the difference between "Old World Computing" and "New World Computing" when reacting to the recent Apple iPad launch: 

"The bet is roughly that the future of computing:

1. has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
2. completely hides the filesystem from the user
3. favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
4. favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
5. lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps"

So, take out the word "computing" and replace it with "communications" and we have a rough draft vision statement for the future of communication applications... driven by the emerging computing model.

"The bet is roughly that the future of communications:

1. has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
2. completely hides the filesystem from the user
3. favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
4. favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
5. lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps

For me, this New World vision for (consumer + enterprise) communications implies a number of important user experience, user interaction, device and web application design choices for new products that need to be considered and tested with users.

Do you agree with this view for new world communication applications?

Measuring and Managing the Real-Time Web

I recently read two posts --- one by @StoweBoyd (The False Question of Attention Economics) --- and the other by @JohnBorthwick (Charting the Real-time Web) --- that had me thinking (again) about the challenges of information overload and real-time streams in the enterprise.

Here are a couple of quotes from each post that I found interesting.... first from Stowe:

"I suggest we just haven't experimented enough with ways to render information in more usable ways... the only ones that will benefit in the next ten years will be those that expend the time needed to stretch the cognition we have, now, into the configuration needed to extract more from the increasingly real-time web."

Stowe Boyd, The False Question of Attention Economics

and also this one from John:

"As interactions online shift to streams we are going to have to figure out how measurement works. I feel like today we are back to the early days of the web when people talked about “hits” — it’s hard to parse the relevant data from the noise."

John Borthwick, Charting the Real-Time Web

Both posts highlight the need for better tools to measure, manage, filter and render the streams of information being generated as user interactions shift to the Real-time Web or Live Web.   I agree.  

In some ways, we need to apply to the real-time web a management maxim from the industrial economy attributed to a number of people including Deming, Grove, Drucker and Kaplan:

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it"

There are a number of social monitoring and analytics solutions from companies like Crimson Hexagon, Radian6, Chartbeat and others.  For example, Chartbeat is focused on monitoring, measuring and analyzing real-time interactions across the web.  This video provides an interesting demo of real-time activity on Fred Wilson's AVC blog:

Yet, Chartbeat is a solution focused on monitoring, measuring and analyzing streams of attention from other people to my content / website / service.    It helps me understand certain (not all) flows of attention to me... and to my content.  

If we're to improve management of our attention allocated to the flood of information overload,  we need a "personal" chartbeat-like service focused on monitoring, measuring and analyzing streams of attention coming in to ... and going out from ... me 

To try and manage the real-time stream of information... of conversations... of how I allocate my attention, I will need better tools:

- First, to measure my individual incoming and outgoing real-time interactions, and 

- Second, to manage the most important and relevant real-time streams created from my two-way interactions with my most important personal/work/commercial relationships.

/

Top 5 for 2009

I went back to see what topics were the most active on this blog and seemed to resonate with you and other readers during 2009.      

So... here are my "Top 5 Posts for 2009" along with a key theme cloud.

 

#1 - Guiding Principles of Innovation at Apple

If you had to summarize the guiding principles of Apple's Design and Innovation Strategy what would they be and how might you embrace them to drive new product designs and create new revenue streams from new markets?  

With the help of Chris Morrison, Bruce Nussbaum, Owen Linzmayer, Umair Haque and Daniel Turner, I've summarized a draft list of 11 guiding principles that appear to be important to Apple's innovation strategy.  

#2 - User Experience for the Business User in 2009

Four fundamental forces of change are driving the evolution of the user experience for the Business User in 2009:

(a) economic recession and its impact on the enterprise IT budget 

(b) enterprise governance, security and business policy requirements force "hardening" of consumer apps

(c) new sources of value and revenue continue to be found at the Enterprise Edge

(d) consumer innovations influence and shape business user expectations 

#3 - Social Enabling Voice Conversations

The people we call and engage in voice-based conversations, in our personal and work lives, represent our active - and in many cases our most relevant - social graph.

To build a resurgent voice industry, consumers and business users need a new user experience that helps them unlock the value of their active, relevant social graph by social-enabling their voice conversations.

#4 - The Future of Games @ Work

To engage business users in a compelling and continuously productive collaboration experience, enterprise apps need to tap the user's individual motivation, unleash the user's curiosity and align the user's incentives, unique skills and social networks.  

Are there proxies for this type of engagement?  Yes; in multiplayer gaming applications.  

A powerful example of users who are engaged in self-motivated, aligned, collaborative efforts can be found in massive, multi-player on-line games.

#5 - The Live Web of Interaction Signals for Business Users

The enterprise is shifting from a space/file software model to a time/stream based software model where the real-time interactions of business users have a past, a present and a future.   

New value for business users - and revenue for enterprises - will come from aggregating, analyzing and filtering these interaction signals enabled by the Real-time Web.

Collaboration Curves, Network Effects and Games@Work

"The more players participate and interact with WoW's knowledge economy, the more valuable its resources become, and the faster players increase their rate of performance improvement. 

Said more generally, the more participants--and interactions between those participants--you add to a carefully designed and nurtured environment, the more the rate of performance improvement goes up."  --- @jhagel John Hagel, Introducing the Collaboration Curve

(an interesting follow-up to "The Future of Games @ Work" )