Category: Social Networks
Unsocial Networks
The Head Lemur digs into Ning’s terms of service (similar to Flickr’s and YouTube’s, et. al) highlighting the problem: in exchange for free services “members” grant rights to their stuff to promote the “network”.
Sorry boys and girls, No Pony.
It is just another room filled with shit. They place ads around your stuff, and deliver eyeballs to advertisers in the electronic version of valpack coupons and junk mail.” – The Head Lemur
I don’t think it’s a fair trade either – it assumes that my stuff isn’t valuable in it’s own right unless it’s wrapped in AdSense. I wonder what one of these “social networks” would look like that places a higher value on their members’ stuff than on monetization.
Initial thoughts:
- Members pay a non-trivial amount for access
- Members can import, remove, and export all of their stuff easily
- Members can kill their account easily – say, by not paying
- The network considers members’ stuff private and won’t use it for self-promotion
From that list, I’m thinking BaseCamp or Joyent Connector are the closest things we’ve got.
ELSEWHERE:
Mike @ TechDirt says:
Yes, but, AdSense (and advertising in general) is an admission that the value is misunderstood.
Digging Out
There’s value in keeping comments within a small, private, group of people. If only so you don’t look like an idiot to the rest of world.
If Not Traffic and Page Views, What Do We Measure?
Over lunch with a local start up, the conversation moved towards Digg, encouraging ‘Digg’ing, and generally putting more guarantees around getting ‘Dugg’. While it’s great for exposure, it akin to unloading a bus fleet of tourists into your house. Sure, some of them may stick around and have a beer but, is the line to the bathroom worth it?
I’m not confident traffic and page views are actually the metrics worth tracking. Digg or otherwise. MySpace has lots of page views – because it’s such a poorly designed site. Conversely, Digg, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube all have a strong level of engagement.
Engagement. How do we measure engagement?
Number of posts, comments, “friendships”, a given member contributes? Maybe. Feels closer.
Experience has shown me it’s easier to sell to the same customer with each consecutive sale. With that in mind, the idea is to create a structure that supports multiple sales/transactions (subscriptions are the easy answer). If overhead is low enough, it’s conceivable that sustainable success could be attained with a fairly small number of paying customers.
Oh, on a related note – I predict 6 months before Digg is replaced by something else, if only because it will be over run by spammers.
Related Elsewhere:
Deep Jive Interests: Digg’s Failure: When “No Moderation” Doesn’t Work
Deep Jive Interests: Digg’s Editors Show Their Invisible Hand (Again)
Micro Persuasion: Fake News Story Games Thousands of Digg Users
UPDATE 11 Dec 2006
Jason continues:
“But digg users tend to be those that will sign up for almost any beta product or service, then bore of it quickly and abandon it for the next big thing.”
Wanted: More Publishers and Better Filters
David Newberger and I were talking about information filtering models and much of the thinking behind Feedseeder came though as did a couple much larger issues. The conversation was so good, I thought you’d enjoy it as well.
David: I was talking with a few people today and each one mentioned Information Overload in the seperate conversations. I knew that is was gaining more of a following but I didn’t think this many people were getting overwhelmed.
Garrick: I believe it. I think there are two tools that havent caught up w/ the information tidalwave yet; filtering and integration.
David: Yep. Sites like Digg and Memeorandum are not working it tells me also.
Garrick: Nope.
David: There is also the whole age factor in this as well.
Garrick: Seems to me there’s a fairly simple question we’re not getting a good answer to: ‘What should I be paying attention to right now’
David: Yep. I think if someone can effectivly answer that then they are going to be the next Google but the approach is something totally different then Google.
Garrick: It is. I believe it requires intimate knowledge of a persons social groups, and personal/professional goals.
David: I was thinking about a contract I heard about. The DoD is willing fork over $20M to figure out what the media is focused on at home and abroad……this seems like something that would be a jumping off point for the question you posed.
Garrick: Huh. I don’t think there is a focus. At least not in our house. Either TiVo or Netflx playing in the background while Jen and I are on our laptops.
David: Not in ours either but when aggregated over the global scope of media I think that there are some stories will have more attention then others. They would like to know the direction of the stories and such.
Garrick: Ah.
David: It seems to be an attempt at the wiretapping execpt this time they are looking at the public information and not the private information. Back to the question of “What should I be paying attention to right now?”. It seems to me that this is a deeply personal questions. It is a question that would require a lot of knowladge in anthropology, sociology, and tech field.
Garrick: Yes. for sure. and marketing needs to be left out of it.
David: Yep. I wonder if it is even possiable to write an algorithm that takes into account things like the social questions.
Garrick: Maybe not to answer the best thing, but it would be helpful to cut out 80% of the noise.
David: True. But the static that is out there is so large that you would have to figure out some of the values you can qunatify for some social issues.
Garrick: Oh sure.
David: I would even argue that cutting out 90-95% of the static would be needed for it to prove useful.
Garrick: Hmmm. Maybe I need to think about this differently. As J Wynia has said – we all know what spam looks like.
David: Think about it, there are what, 40-60 million blogs in the US or is it around the world. And at least 10-20 thousand newspapers in the US.
Garrick: Yes. 90-95% of them don’t talk about things relevant to me at any given time.
David: Plus, you have to take into account the podcasts and vlogs now.
Garrick: Same there.
David: The one that are relevant to me change as the issues change this is something that needs a lot of consideration.
Garrick: Exactly. The publication as a whole is far less important than any individual article.
David: Exactly.
Garrick: Google is our best tool for finding relevant articles. but, it searches the entire world.
David: And there is the splog problem with Google.
Garrick: Mostly likely, I don’t care what the entire world thinks.
David: But I think that narrowing it to the point of keeping it US Centric means it is not doing its job.
Garrick: Oh.
David: in the case of say a war my viewpoint might be one way because of how my government is spinning it and then you have the rest of the world.
Garrick: I didn’t me to restrict it to geographic boundaries. but rather communities-of-influence boundaries.
David: Oh, got it
Garrick: For example, I don’t care what gem transportation companies say about ‘ruby on rails’. I do care about what you say about it.
David: Good point. so now we need a reputation system that is based on a persons status in the subject matter.
Garrick: Oh. I dunno.
David: But we also must allow for bleed from the edges as well.
Garrick: I think we need a filtering system that can pick up patterns from people we declared we care about.
David: Could that skew the persons view to one direction and filter out opposing views? and would that be a good thing if that happened?
Garrick: Only if you’ve declared you don’t care about what the opposing view’s think. And your ‘friends’ have as well. And their ‘friends’ have as well.
David: now that seems like it would be fun to see, it allows for the bleed, reputation, and to a degree subject matter now to filter out the static that is left.
Garrick: So, in the most extreme cases, that’s how blogs work today.
David: I can agree with that.
Garrick: My ‘friends’ write about stuff that’s important/interesting to them. if I find it important/interesting, I write a post on it and link to them. You read it and continue.
David: But with only 40-60 million people blogging right now we have a problem of scale. There are 3.3 or so billion people and we are only getting the view of 40-60 million.
Garrick: Yep. Sounds like we’re doing a good job of cutting out the noise already.
David: True but what is causing it and how do we start to engage some of that untapped well.
Garrick: Find an angle that makes sense for an individual, and make it easy.
David: One could argue that we are only using something like 1% of the collective brain.
Garrick: Exactly. Once the other 99% gets online, we’ll have the same problem we have now….but 99x worse.
David: So, we need to put the dam and locks in place now. Can you imagine 100 or 150 million people blogging on a consistant basis? Think of the mental power that would be. Think of the different ways people think and see things.
Garrick: Exactly.
David: So, my goal would be get 100-200 million people blogging on a constant basis on there passions of interest sure some might like to talk about dogs, fish, girlfriends, and such but other will talk about philosophy, RoR, Computer Science and other areas.
Garrick: They’re all the same. that’s why we need to talk about all of them. Here’s an example – the Google results for garrickvanburen.com include: “keith ellison”, “ical wordpress”, “linksys router setup mac”, “punch pizza in mn”, “house season premier fox”. I see that as a good thing.
David: Yeah it is diverse.
Garrick: Any 1 topic to me is flat. like a bad stereotype.
David: True.
Garrick: It’s combinations of topics and perspectives that make people and their views interesting. I read Doc Searls for everything he writes – though, I’m not into his photography. I read Mark Cuban for everything he writes, though, I’m not into basketball. Those topics round them out in my head – and make them real.
David: That is a good example.
Garrick: Arguably – I’m exposing myself to opposing ideas and concepts by letting Doc’s photography and Mark’s basketball through my filters.
EdgeIO – Listing First Impressions
I received the preview password to EdgeIO.com today, Mike Arrington‘s new project to aggregate all blog posts using the tag 'listing' at a single site, all organized and such as you’d expect from a classifieds site.
Since I’m trying to sell a house and blogging about it, seemed like a perfect opportunity to test it out.
It’s a slick system. I added ‘listing’ to my WordPress categories, flagged the post with it and a handful of other categories, hit Publish in WordPress, and EdgeIO sucked them right in.
After that, I claimed the post and added a handful more tags and the price. I had more luck with the hidden span claim method than the xml-rpc method.
The most interesting bit – despite having the ZIP Code and address throughout the post, EdgeIO didn’t know the location, until I set my location in my profile. Then like magic it was updated. Good thing my current location and the location of the house is the same.
If you have a preview password, you can check out the EdgeIO listing for the house.
The idea that work I’m doing already (writing to my blogs) can be leveraged in a useful way is very powerful. I can see the same type of aggregating-the-edges system for reviews (music, movie, product).
There’s an undercurrent of concern EdgeIO highlights – multiple silos of tag clouds. The same word in Flickr, Technorati, Del.icio.us, Upcoming.org, 43Things, et. al, bring up very different types of information.
EdgeIO has essentially declared ‘listing’ to have a specific, universal meaning (“something for sale”). If another, existing tag cloud agreed – hell – if all of them agreed on the same meaning, EdgeIO turns invisible. Either becoming the enabling technology behind all the other sites (as NavTech is to mapping) or disappearing altogether.
The Attention Pyramid
How Social Networks Can Actually Help
Sometime in the past couple days, something really bad happened and I lost all but 2 entries in my Powerbook’s Address Book. Just me and Apple Computer. Thankfully, I could pull them off my Treo.
As I corrected a number of importing errors and generally cleaned up the address book, I thought about how many old addresses, bouncing emails, and disconnected phone number might be in contained. It’d be nice if the person owning that information could edit it as it changed and my address book would update accordingly.
Over at Linkedin I could download a vCard for all my contacts – with the self-entered information. That’s helpful once, not ongoing. And it only handles about 10% of my current contacts.
That being said, helping friends maintain current contact info is how social networks can actually be useful and not just “look how many friends I’ve collected” novelties.
We Edit Each Others Media in a Post-Filter World
Previously, I’ve talked about the a Business Model for Abundance and what price means in an age of abundance.
Seems like a meme going around.
Yes, I see Attention.xml playing a big role in this. And I’ve got the napkin sketches to prove it.
Collaborative Technologies at Work – Bottom Up Productivity
Corporate IT departments consider new collaborative technologies (Wikis, Weblogs, Instant Messaging) as rogue elements to be eliminated. When in fact, they are increase productivity.
Ross Mayfield points to this eWeek article describing one organization’s battle with its own people.
The most recent problems came to light when a network failure cut off e-mail and Web access throughout the company’s far-flung operations.
Instead of simply calling it a day, creative employees quickly implemented workarounds. One group installed a quick and dirty Wiki to enable team communications.
Another took advantage of America Online Inc.’s Instant Messenger application to route files and messages between geographically remote employees. Others used Web e-mail and wireless networking to keep the company’s business flowing.
The CIO’s response was predictable: He moved quickly to lock down corporate desktops and laptops to prohibit users from installing unapproved software or accessing unsupported Web services.
New technologies are not without risk, but by eliminating homegrown productivity innovations Corporate IT departments themselves risk being considering irrelevant – thereby increasing constituents finding their own unsupported solutions.