Bruce MacVarish Notes

Twitter Graph Relevance

John Batelle provides further proof of the value found at the intersection of network graphs and conversation analytics.   

We now have a number of graphs defined by aggregating links and conversations around social objects: web graphs ( e.g. Google), social graphs (e.g. Facebook), interest graphs (e.g. twitter), location graphs (e.g. foursquare).  

"In short, Twitter knows who you are connected to, and what you (and they) are interested in.

Fashion that into a graph - the same kind of graph that powered Google's graph of web links, or Facebook's social graph - and all of a sudden you have a pretty powerful organizing principle for relevance in the Twitterverse."

John Batelle, Twitter's "Public Interest Graph"

We will see more network graphs being formed around a number of new and different social objects.  In addition, new innovative ways to derive relevance from the social conversations across various network graphs will continue to emerge.  

As MG Siegler points out in his recent take on the Facebook vs. Twitter battle...

"Social networks ... lose because they fail to innovate. Because they fail to stay ahead of the curve."

Expect to see continued innovation focused on ways to aggregate and analyze real-time conversations across network graphs... and... a consolidation across the layers of network graphs.

Strong Ties of our Social Core

I've been working through some key elements of an emerging opportunity in what I've been calling our "Social Core".  

What do I mean by our Social Core?

  
 

I define our social core as the vital few, strong social ties we have with family, friends and colleagues in our life.  They are the trusted core of our real-life social network.  

In the rush to enable users to build extended social networks with 1,000's of "friends" and "followers", social app vendors have overshot our need to truly leverage and unleash the power of the conversations, relationships and trust found in the core of our real life social network.    

Think about all the opportunities to optimize our real life connections with the most important people in our lives (our social core) and ways to engage our social core to optimize our real lives.    

I'm not the only one thinking about this...

I like the way Paul Adams ( @padday ) makes the distinction between our strong ties and weak ties in his presentation The Real Life Social Network. 

Make no mistake, I realize there is significant and proven value to be found in our weak ties.    

Yet, I believe a new class of social apps will emerge to help us manage and optimize our conversations, relationships and trust across our social core... and will answer some of these questions: 

• How can we extend our on-line activity streams to our off-line social core?

• How can we make it easy for those in our off-line social core to join our on-line activity streams?

• What information (i.e. context, location, transactions) are we more likely to share with our social core versus our social edge?

• How do we integrate and manage social core networks that blend our personal and work life?

Conversation Analytics : Patterns, Sentiment & Intent

Here is another proof point supporting my vision for the emergence of conversation analytics. 

Autonomy announces Autonomy Explore:

"Autonomy Explore connects to all customer touchpoints including web, contact center, social media and email to deliver a complete understanding of each customer and customer segment, as well as the overall customer-base. Powered by Autonomy's unique meaning-based technology platform, Autonomy Explore enables businesses to automatically understand, act on, and optimize customer patterns, sentiment and intent."

I have spent the last few years defining, designing and prototyping integrated multimedia communication analytics solutions for users, enterprises and contact centers.  The key elements of aggregating conversations across multiple user touchpoints and analyzing conversation patterns, sentiment and intent are all coming together.   

Get Ready.  We are on the cusp of a breakthrough in conversation analytics for enterprises, contact centers and individual users.

Persuasive Games

As a follow-up to Jesse Schell's presentation at DICE 2010 where he outlines the potential of persuasive games to alter our behaviors because we know we're being measured (and want the points to level up),  Mathias Crawford offers a different benefit of persuasive games:

"...reliance on External Rewards obviates the true potential of persuasive games: namely, that they can be used to help people think about themselves, the world, and life in new and empowering ways. Rather than relying on persuasive games to provoke or impede certain behaviors, what if they were used to open up a world of previously inaccessible experiences? What if games were used to get people thinking about why they acted in particular ways? If they helped them identify if these behaviors were in line with who they believe they are and how they ought to be? If they helped people think through the steps they needed to take to improve themselves from within, rather than from without? "

"Ends vs. Means and Persuasion", Mathias Crawford, Institute for the Future

Whether focused on changing our behaviors from within or without, I believe we'll see an increase in game mechanics being embedded in enterprise communication and collaboration solutions. 

Avatars & Game Psychology Reshape Real Life & Behavior

Avatars ( and by extension our virtual identities) and Game mechanics (specifically game psychology) continue to intersect our lives and influence our real-world social, communication and collaboration behaviors at home and at work.   

 

Here are two perspectives that illustrate the point.

 

First, Jesse Fox at Stanford finds that experiences with avatars, including personalized images of ourselves, can change our view of reality and the way we act in the real world.  From PhysOrg.com

"If you saw a digital image of yourself running on a virtual treadmill, would you feel like going to the gym? Probably so, according to a Stanford study showing that personalized avatars can motivate people to exercise and eat right.

Moreover, you are more likely to imitate the behavior of an avatar in real life if it looks like you, said Jesse Fox, a doctoral candidate in the Communication Department and a researcher at the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab. In her study, she used digital photographs of participants to create personalized avatar bodies, a service some game companies offer today.

 

Second, Jesse Schell of Carnegie Mellon and Schell Games, provided an out-of-the-box presentation at DICE on how psychological design and numerous activity and attention sensors will extend the reach of games in our lives and ultimately may improve personal behavior.  

In the video below , he looks at the unexpected success of Farmville, MafiaWars, ClubPenguin, GuitarHero and Wii in the hopes of identifying a set of guiding principles that could be applied to the design of collaboration, communication and attention game mechanics in the future:

 

 

1. Psychological Design drives user behavior

Use of free-to-play, virtual currency, lead generation and "velvet-rope" models shape and channel user behavior to ultimately spend real money in-game to create new revenue streams.

 

2. Break through to Reality

The most successful games break through from a virtual experience to include real-life interaction. 

 

3. Technology Diverges. Gaming will too

As technology advances it wants to diverge not converge. It grows and spreads. You might call this the Law of Technical Divergence.  Mobile devices are an exception.

 

4. Sensors will enable new gaming mechanics in everyday life

As activity, location, biometric and attention sensors emerge and are embedded in everything from our toothbrush, to clothing, to food and of course devices, we will see an explosion of game mechanics used to drive and change our behavior.

 

5. Persistent history of our actions could drive improved behavior

In the near future, when we are all being tracked, watched and measured by all kinds of sensors; and our children's children will know what we read, ate, did and thought, will it inspire us to improve our personal behaviors.

 

Check out his DICE 2010 "Design Outside the Box" presentation here:

The opportunity is to integrate our virtual identities and Avatars along with Game Psychology to shape behaviors that improve our life through stronger social ties, communication and collaboration.

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.

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.

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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.

Sixth Sense - Blending Digital + Real World Interactions

At a Nov 2009 Ted presentation, Pranav Mistry of the MIT Media Lab provided an update on the status of his Sixth Sense Project and his vision for integrating our interactions between the digital and real world.

As you watch this, consider the possibilities of an open platform that changes how we experience and interact with digital information to augment our work and personal transactions, conversations and relationships.

Informed Opinion and Real Expertise

"...publishers have to stop seeking simply the most controversial opinions. They're abundant: every talking head can churn one out, and faux "news" of every kind is already chock full of 'em shrieking at one another. Instead, successful opinion arbitrageurs must seek the most informed opinions, gooey with expertise, thick with real value for readers.

Those opinions are worth the most — and they're what readers will pay for"

Umair Haque, "Why Controversy Won't Power Next-Gen News"