Many people (including my family) are always asking whats the point of Twitter, Friend Feed, BrightKite, social media and all the other cool new stuff out there. As I have said before I have a grasp on these issues, but communicating to nonbelievers sometimes proves difficult. The good news today is that there is serious money behind web 2.0, blogging 2.0, mashups, etc. Some choice quotes via Twitter today:
Social media and web 2.0 is possibly recession proof (article 1)
Furthermore, James Cooper in his Business Week column points that the Services sector continues to add new jobs while the overall employment rate continue to recede.
All of this is a 4.6 billion market. That’s billion with a capital B. (article 2)
A new study by Forrester forecasts that Enterprise 2.0 solutions to capture an astonishing market share of 4.6 billion by 2013 and Social Networks related technologies are expected to take the lion share of these investments, accounting for approximately $2 billion.
In short, it’s a NEW field here. Enterprise 2.0 they are calling it but its really just another cross-discipline segment of the workforce. Looking around at all the big players in the consulting areas I see nobody, not IBM, Accenture, etc. doing anything specifically in this space. I postulate that the reason for this is a lack of talent in this space. It’s like the computer revolution, almost nobody knows how it works and has experience in this. This will eventually change of course, but in the meantime its time for us to make some loot. Your blogging hobby which you are starting to monetize, your deep interest in social media, your experience building and designing messaging tools are all worth a lot of money right now. This value will decrease over time so lets do something cool today!
Great article on what open source actually means to Microsoft (it’s disruptive) and big business in general that doesn’t subscribe to the open model. The open model allows my startup costs to be zero and I will probably try and monetize the business without selling a a product or a software package. Notice the lack of need for anything Microsoft related whatsoever.
In sum, Microsoft still doesn’t understand the Internet, the ultimate child of the open-source movement. It is the Internet that simultaneously makes Google and open source so brilliantly destructive and disruptive to Microsoft’s future.
Lets begin this exercise in hilarity by covering this little gem of a tagline:
Encryption Chip Will End Piracy, Says Atari Founder
The problem here is that another attempt at draconian DRM enforcement (at the hardware level) is totally worthless. While this might stop a casual pirate, the same people who are currently successfully pirating media will continue to do, regardless of security efforts. The time-rich and cash-poor will always find a way to bypass TPM, DRM and whatever is the current fad in copy-protection. I’m sure some Brazillan kids in a favella already have this particular hardware issue figured out. After all, people don’t need to break the encryption (hard), just find a weakness in the system to exploit (easy).
The DRM failure world tour – “uncrackable” systems that have been bypassed:
Most computer software: id Software / Blizzard / Adobe / Autodesk / Microsoft / etc. – 1990’s to today
The thing about TPM chips is that you give up all rights and lose control of the hardware that you purchased. An example to drive this point home is that it’s exactly like buying a new BMW, only if you decide to get service at the local shop instead of the dealership the car will turn around and drive you home. Not only does this mean you don’t really own your technology but someone else is making your choices for you. Cory Doctorow’s fantastic new book Little Brother covers some of these issues (read it, it’s free).
This draconian type of security is really a problem since 95% of the general public does not understand the consequences of losing ownership in their technology. Unfortunely that means that same public will blindly go along with the DRM people and end up shocked when they can no longer use the data they purchased.
Work from 9 to 5 on a typical day
From 5 to 9 is when I start to play
Without hesitation, head to my station
Pull up my homepage, give into temptation
Crap loada invitations
BLAM
There’s a poop loada notifications
I got females across 50 states
Who I monitor frequently by their status updates
I’ve switched back to the default theme and am going to try and debug things. In the meantime please make do with the ghetto-tastic setup.
Also, anyone know why WordPress 2.5.1 non-stop submits ajax rquests to save the current post? As I write this, Firebug is showing maybe 2-3 requests POSTS per second to:
http://www.aphexddb.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php.
as a thank you to our fans for your continued support, we are giving away the new nine inch nails album one hundred percent free, exclusively via nin.com.
the music is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE. your link will include all options – all free. all downloads include a PDF with artwork and credits.
Replace the original tabletop games phrase with the appropriate subject matter for the conversation that is headed unstoppably towards oblivion.
Don’t say another Goddamn word. Up until now, I’ve been polite. If you say anything else – word one – I will kill myself. And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my black throne, I will lash together a machine of bone and blood, and fueled by my hatred for you this fear engine will bore a hole between this world and that one.
When it begins, you will hear the sound of children screaming – as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face, my dark work will begin.
I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the Earth.
Charter just offered a new package and I upgraded high speed internet to 16Mb down / 2Mb up. It’s also now $44.95, cheaper than the old 10/1. I think this should barely hold me over until FIOS is available in St. Louis.
However Charter is still resetting about 15-25% of P2P traffic according to the Network Status Monitor plugin for Azureus.
The future of social media is a subscription to humanity.
Not a radical proposition- social media offers a way for people to connect along varied information channels that have never existed before. How do you explain the purpose of data-mining to someone who punches a time clock? Or location-based contextual data to someone who has never used GPS? There is simply no frame of reference for this emerging sector other than the ever-perversive shine that “cool factor” casts on such things. I consider myself hip in this area but in truth I don’t have a clear enough picture of the long term benefits. I am knowledgeable enough to guess at those benefits and understand the need for a solid, flexible and open foundation for what will be the most highly connected time in human history.
As I twittered yesterday in excitement, we as a community are finally equipped with the technology to create this system. Some of the current paradigms such as polling are old and busted. We know how to serve web content, do cloud computing and make pretty designs. We can now move forward and kick some ass.
The title I wear in my day job is “architect”, so in the interests of meaningful post content lets take a quick look at the needs for Connected Humanity 1.0:
Must be locationally and contextually aware, humans tend to move around.
Location without relevant contextual information is GPS. If I am in the office, what floor? On a college campus what building? Campus buildings tend to not have street addresses. Even better, am I at my favorite cafe where (more importantly) I have been 10 times this week?
Most phones being sold from the latest generation have GPS or cell tower triangulation, manual updates are also easily accomplished ala brightkite: “@work”
Must put people in touch, possibly make assumptions.
If my close friends, acquaintances or neighbors are nearby (and are advertising their presence) I want to know. In fact, I want to know if they are busy, free, or are meeting clients and should not be disturbed. If someone visits the same cafe in the previous example and we have friends and interests in common, should we know about it?
Micro-blogging works.
Conceptually a new way of expressing and broadcasting content with the addition of conciseness. If you can’t express a feeling, location or idea in 140 characters, get with the program.
Must be scalable and reliable.
Cloud based services = reliable, cheap, and scalable computing resources. Most people have a website/blog, some of us are bigger geeks and run an OpenID server. Language holy wars aside, there isn’t much you can’t do with literate programming and Google App Engine / Amazon S3 these days. Get over it
Must be distributed.
Authentication mechanisms such as OpenID and messenging protocols such as XMPP (Jabber) can assist with this. Twitter is great, but I need to be able to run my own Connected Humanity 1.0 system the same way I run an OpenID server. The Twitter’s of the world provide value from their unique features and services.
Must support privacy / trust model. Facebook has a decent model in the context of configuring the Twitter application to only show updates to certain groups, with exceptions for people. This is important.
Distributed trust frameworks are a different discussion but might play a role. Haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about this aspect as it relates to social media.
Standards must be open, cross platform, and community accepted.
Standards folks, they are important. “Java” will never be the right answer to this item. However things like JSON, XML, and OpenID will all be parts of the answer.
There is more to this than technology.
The technically inclined can really grok this, but it will be the end-users who shape the future here. There are soccer moms out there today who don’t know this yet, but one day will pick up a 3rd gen iPhone and create new world of interaction. The IT crowd will never think comprehensively enough.
There is a business case for social media.
Not talking about Minority Report eyeball scanning advertisements (although suits would argue for this one). Productivity has been creeping upward by leaps and bounds since the industrial revolution. In the information age relationships and context are the currency of connectivity. This kind of connectivity will enable the post-iPod generations to kick some serious ass.
Cases in point:
Last month there was a last minute “Twitter flash mob” in STL. About 10 people some friends, some strangers starting pinging back and forth on Twitter and we ended up at happy hour at The Dubliner and discussed Twitter and social media. I met a few new friends and just got a Bright Kite beta invite from one of them (Thanks CosmosGirl!).
At the Gateway to Innovation conference I heard a great little talk on infusing entrepreneurial ideas into your organization from boblozano. He mentioned Twitter and I posted a tweet (referencing a previous session on EHR) on my Blackberry 8800 via the Google Talk application. The Twitter application on Facebook posted this to my Facebook news feed. A girl I went school with saw my status update on Facebook and emailed me a question about EHR. This loop is incredible:
Human -> Mobile device -> Google Talk Servers -> XMPP -> Twitter -> HTTP -> Facebook App -> Status Feed -> Email -> Human
The free exchange of ideas and conversation between similarly minded people would never have happened without social media! Much to come in the next few years. I welcome all feedback, please hammer away
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