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!
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
 Thank goodness I found this post! Using a Firefox plug in you can block the Facebook beacon URL and this insulate yourself from the EVIL probing fingers of the Facebook people, who obviously have no interest in their user base. Textbook corporate sellout move.
After spending some time in Japan you have an idea of how much of a joke our options are, well done Wired. I don’t think anyone would have made this list any differently if they had the chance.
They stifle progress
They’re a cartel
They’re going to make you pay for Tetris
They just can’t behave themselves
They illegally spy on you
They have annoying commercials
They hate you
Their contracts are nonsense
They charge crazy fees (for services you didn’t ask for)
Now that the NY Times has discontinued their Times Select subscription program and made much more of their 150+ years of content available for anyone to read and link to, let’s take a look at some of the more notable items that the non-subscriber has been missing.
I read about some neat software awhile ago. In order to bring better signal-to-noise meaning to email, the software gives email users a fixed number of points each day. Then people assign point values to emails they send, effectively weighting them. This way you can assume that when someone spends 20 of their daily 30 points on an email for you, its super important. And you can see based on trends that you may need to spend 5 points to have someone even notice your email. It’s definitely available as an outlook plug-in/addon as well.
Problem is I never bookmarked it and I can’t freaking find this product on Google! Ahh! 1 hour of searching and the signal to noise ratio is off the charts when searching for email, collaboration, etc.
Twitter is a way of life. It’s living with a publicity policy. It’s friends, Romans and country people the world over engaged in timely snippet conversations that fit into 140 character chunks.
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