aphexddb.com

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:

1. 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”
2. 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?
3. 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.
4. 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
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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

This is the most accurate flowcart ever created. It speaks truly to the process of geek evolution and how D&D is at the root of all that is awesome. Thanks Gary Gygax, rest in peace.

via nytimes.com

This is just really, really cool. Neat to see the effect they have on everyone!

Frozen Grand Central at Improv Everywhere

A friend recently hit me with some good advice via IM: “Hang in there Manfred.” (Thats a reference to Accelerando for those not in the know)

The way William Gibson describes the future seems to fit better every year. “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.” Most of the technologies that appeared in 07 were measurably cool: the iPhone, the end of analog TV, GPS in cars & phone / blue tooth proliferation, Moore’s law and multi-core CPU’s, etc., etc. These are things that a number of years ago I looked forward to the way I now look forward to neural nanonics, private space flight, bioengineering, and other amazing stuff. Now they appear rather blah, about as exiting as a car or television set. The future is already here alright. I guess I just need to be more patient.

However it was a good year in the reading department. Accelerando by Charles Stross, Spook Country by William Gibson, The Night’s Dawn Trilogy (paperbacks 1 2 3 4 5 6) by Peter F. Hamilton to name some of most interesting ones. Of course Cory Doctorow and the usual crowd had some excellent blog posts. Penny Arcade had some truly great comics reminding yet again that “my people” are out there and going strong. 2007 certainly had an abundance of daily slack to consume.

I’m still holding out hope for my tribe. I expect we will continue to kick some ass and make sure things end up OK, preferably with lots of super bad ass scientific stuff.

Here’s to 2008 and the pursuit of slack and knowledge!

In a rare bout of rationality, I finally bought into my own downtown St. Louis yuppie urban hype. I started taking the train to work in Clayton instead of driving like I’m a suburbanite from O’Fallon burning 10 gallons of dinosaur oil a day in beige mid-size family sedan. My old commute was anywhere from 12 minutes (best case) to 45 minutes (worst case). Now my commute is 35 minutes every single day. Here are five reasons that it’s such a hit:

1. You get some decent exercise. Seriously, walking ~20 minutes to and from each Metro station does wonders for my energy levels. Normally in slug-like office worker mode I went from heated garage to company parking walking maybe 2 minutes total, spread across the entire day. It’s a real noticeable difference and my heart rate is up after breakfast and before dinner. I feel great.
2. It’s relaxing. You can stare out the window and listen to your iPod / read a book / people watch instead of thinking about how the guy in front of you can’t stop riding the brakes. If you are tired you can nod off a little bit, try that while driving in bumper to bumper.
3. It’s cheaper than buying gas, period. If your employer has a mass transit pre-paid spending account it’s even better. If my company had the foresight to offer PERC, commuting to work would literally be free. Some quick math: If the Metro costs $720 a year to ride ($60 monthly pass) the tax deferred amount is a savings is around $252 per year. Even though my car commute wasn’t that long its still marginally cheaper without the tax break. (Plus all the wear and tear on the car should drop well over 60% if you have a typical commute).
4. It lets you listen to more music. In the car you have to pay attention to the road no matter how tired you are, so you can’t really focus in on that news story or the song thats playing. With my new constant 35 minute commute time I can enjoy most of an album or a solid playlist. This is a big one for me.
5. The MetroLink is on-time and clean. A foregone conclusion you may think. Let me ask you this: when was the last time you took a ride on BART (San Francisco), the Chicago train, the T (Boston), or a urine soaked NYC subway and didn’t feel a pressing need to rinse your hands in disinfectant after leaving.

Unfortunately this doesn’t apply to our soon-to-be-screwed friends who live west of highway 170. You have no access to public transportation and come January 2nd, 2007 the main commuting route (highway 40) in St. Louis will be shutdown. To be honest I don’t really have any sympathy. If you choose to live 2 hours from your job and have no problem buying that much gas from our Iranian and Saudi friends more power to you. I’ll be casually strolling down to the station at 5pm with a little kick in my step and a smile on my relaxed face. Enjoy those red-taillights!

Burnout means you’ve pushed your creative energy beyond the point of recovery. Like a well of water, creative energy replenishes itself slowly over time. A person who has pushed their creative well too hard for too long will, like its watery counterpart, one day find it empty. They’ve pushed too far. Usually by the time you notice something is seriously wrong, there’s very little left to work with. Burnout then is something, once experienced, a wise person learns how to avoid and manage (which we’ll talk about later). But right now, lets cover some of the common signs that you’ve become toasty:

• You dread getting up in the morning (unless this is not unusual for you)
• You don’t care anymore about something you were passionate about
• You saw the title of this essay and felt a ray of hope
• Inspired motivated creative people annoy you
• Everything seems gray and pointless
• You’re drinking more or eating more, or showing whatever your signs of depression are
• You find it hard to relax
• It seems impossible to do basic work you know you’re capable of

via scottberkun.com

Looks like we understand a little better how to optimize our biology, check out this article on mice that are basically Lance Armstrong on crack:

The mice over-express a gene responsible for the enzyme phosphoenolypyruvate carboxykinases (PEPCK-C). Normal expression is in the liver, in the production of glucose.

The scientists found their new mice would eat twice as much as normal mice – but weigh half as much. They could also give birth at three years old – which in human terms is akin to an 80-year-old woman giving birth.

via BBC NEWS

Perfect for today.

via Gabriel

Rawr…. brains… Watchout for these brain munching amoeba:

An Arizona teenager has died after contracting a deadly infection that attacks the brain. Aaron Evans, 14, got the disease after swimming in Lake Havasu earlier this month.

A 6-year-old Buckeye boy died from the same infection after swimming in Lake Pleasant last year.

link

Cory Doctrow, I much admire your ability to verbally express so many things that fly around my gray matter. Stealing a number of lines, some modified from a 2002 article:

I consume, digest, and excrete information for a living. Whether I’m writing code, architecting information systems, business plans, or interacting with early 20th century technology via hand tools, whether I’m speaking at table to hungry minds or yammering down the phone at some poor techno-wannabe, my success depends on my ability to cite and connect disparate factoids at just the right moment.

Thus I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web, RSS feeds, email, chance, and serendipity. I used to bookmark this stuff, but I just ended up with a million bookmarks that I never revisited and could never find anything in.
Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don’t know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this — it’s one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

Until I started blogging. And using Twitter. Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mental registers.

Without my electronic blog, tweet trail, gmail search, etc. I would be utterly useless. A portion of my intelligence has been externalized and can never be put back in. Bring on Intelligence Amplification!