Clunky Flow

via Eirepreneur , via loic.tv

A video from an ad hoc gathering of techies made up of those who responded to
Martin Varsavsky’s (FON) open invitation to pop round his farm on Menorca last weekend.
Michael Jackson who runs the day-to-day of Skype talks chats to an ad hoc gathering
of people who responded to Martin’s open invitation.

http://try.vpod.tv/?s=0.0.198200

 

Skype is not about free calling and destroying the incumbents.  This is just a side effect.

Skype is about removing the barriers to communication :

Like Price (Solution: Free Calling)
The absence of body Language (Solution: Video Calling)
The PC ( put skype on you mobile or PDA)

After about 100 years of innovation with the incumbents..what have we got? Call forwarding. That’s about it

Skype, the next generation telco…enabling the world’s conversations.

If you are communicating with people you have other needs. So adding communication onto stores (ebay)
and making it possible to send money to one another within social groups, families, office collections (paypal) etc
makes good business sense.

 

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Just has a look at new social network Moli They distinguish themselves on the users ability to create several profiles to represent different facets of themselves to different consitituencies on the web. This means the user can be a house angel and street devil or vice versa. In effect, I can make it so that only my college buddies can see pics of me drinking beer and my professional contacts only get to see the professional me. Tribe had a similar approach to the problem of faceting. There is a ‘hard problem for social networks’ residing in this issue. All lot of publicity around social networks centers around how teens can avoid predators. But teens are not half as afraid of predators as they are of ‘potential employers’ and ‘parents’ seeing facets of their personality that they were never meant to see. At the moment users get around this problem by creating several profiles to present different facets of themselves. Moli is a new startup and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has a little something more up their sleeve when it comes to solving this particular issue of online social networking.

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Following thru’ on my post here about Twitter and what was learnt while scaling with Ruby On Rails.

Comes this post containing an excellent collection of presentations on web scaling from Simon via Joe Drumgoole’s blog.

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Shelly Farnham is one of the most insightful professionals working with emerging social tools.  Most of her writing to date has been in academic publications, so she may not have the blogospheric profile of danah boyd or Stowe Boyd or Ross Mayfield.  But now, as cofounder of Waggle Labs, she’s blogging, and you will be missing out on one of the best in the field if you don’t stick her in your feed.
Here’s Shelly riffing on some of the possibilites for next generation social tools once we pay a little more attention to the underlying ‘taken for granted’ dynamics of everyday social interactions.

[Applications facilitating] complex social interactions, requiring not only interpersonal trust but also procedural assistance, are having a new hey day.

… these sites provide procedural templates for social transactions, while leveraging the advantages new web 2.0 social technologies afford by embedding these transactions in a rich social context (e.g., social networks, reputation systems, social tagging). Here is the formula: take any common interaction between two people that’s usually mediated by an authoritiative third entity, study its core elements, develop an understanding of the predictors of a positive outcome, create an online template wizard for the experience, slap it over a social network, add some crowdsourcing intelligence, and voila!

…[so] what common activities and transactions are still in the “chokeholdâ€? of authoritative entities such as specialized knowledge holders, bankers, and editors that could be freed by web 2.0 technology? A few come to mind: the real estate market, legal contracts, small claims court, insurance, education, astrology, psychology….the list goes on!

Just imagine it, an online small claims court where participants agree to abide by the rulings of their peers! Finally, taxpayers can stop paying for judges to resolve conflicts where most peers can mediate perfectly well

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Following hot on the heels of reports of a Twitter-like implementation on facebook we get another report direct from Mashable of a similar new development at Bebo.

The name of the feature is “What are You Doing?�, which Twitter users will recognize as the Twitter slogan. Subtle.

Makes you wonder if the current crop of dominant social networks simply own ‘online connectedness’.

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Twitter developer Alex Payne is quite forthright and candid about what they have discovered via the experience of deploying the world’s biggest Ruby on Rails app. here

All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that
makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely
punishing, performance-wise.

All of us working on Twitter are big
Ruby fans, but I think it’s worth being frank that this isn’t one of
those relativistic language issues. Ruby is slow.

Food for thought.

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