Clunky Flow

via Ina.

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If you’ve been talking to me at all you probably heard me say stuff like this.

Connecting ‘people 2 info’ is trumped by connecting ‘people 2 people’.
Google is great at connecting people to information. But a better way to create new knowledge is to connect people to people. When you connect to people they discover and create new knowledge. And people find this activity deeply rewarding and highly addictive. As the guys discoverio say ‘..discovery is the new cocaine’.

The company that manages this will be bigger than Google
To give people what they want. To really connect people online. We have to create the same sense of privacy, reputation, identity and trust online that we take for granted in the real world.

I came across this today. An article riffing on a comment made by a leading VC…

Search is dead…[In the near future, people will] find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm. After all, the people in your online social network should know you better than a mathematical equation, right?

Social discovery pivots on identity

…this focus on online identity is what could turn search upside down… it’s conceivable that the information could attempt to find us—the old concept of push media, but in a far more refined way. As new content enters the Web, it could tumble through the various filters that you set up around your identity…

The unholy mess of privacy and security issues show us where the pivotal opportunity lies

…[currently] nobody owns this space the way Google “owns” search. And as it evolves, there will be an unholy mess of privacy and security issues to work out.

This kind of talk was the ever-constant ever-recurring theme at the Web2.0 expo this last week in San Francisco. And this has made me even more excited about RelevantM than ever. If that were even possible.

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O’REILLY CAPTURES IT IN A NUTSHELL

Conference blurbs usually drop me into a coma with their schmarketing speek. But not from O’Reilly Media for the Web2.0 conference.

Web 2.0 technologies are empowering us in ways we could only have imagined even just a few years ago.
We’re able to… connect more, have more fun,…and do it all faster.
But as the pace…accelerates, separating signal from noise, useful from annoying…becomes increasingly challenging.

How can we provide a more meaningful experience … have a positive impact on the world we live in?…deliver relevant information…increase conversation and collaboration?

Right on the money. And a word perfect context for explaining…

What MAKES RELEVANT MEDIA UNIQUE in the Web2.0 ecosystem.
In a nutshell:
Relevant Media works ‘with reality’.
Rather than working with ‘models of reality’.

All existing social tools begin by capturing something of real life into a model of some sort. Social networks, for example, try to create an online model of your real world social network. Recommendations engines create a model of what to recommend based on the expression of your tastes by you and your friends.

The problem with models:
The problems with models is that by definition they only capture aspects of the real thing

And this in turn leads to instances where the model and the reality clash. For an example you can take any problem peculiar to online social networks. And I include all those problems related to breakdowns of privacy, reputation, identity and trust. All result from incidents where there have been unanticipated breakdowns or clashes between the model and the reality.

Reality bites:
What is needed are tools and platforms that support, merge and coevolve with the dynamics of social reality

Relevant Media’s tools and platforms couple and coevolve with the emergent and dynamic characteristics of real life social interaction as opposed to trying to capture reality and shoehorn it into a model of the real thing.

This is what gives us a unique ability to better answer all those questions raised by O’Reilly for the upcoming Web2.0 expo.

If you are there, make sure to look me up here on Crowdvine and come over for a chat.

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From today’s New York Times

Kids played Dungeons and Dragons in basements instead of socializing. Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self.

For us, the character sheet and the rules for adventuring in an imaginary world became a manual for how people are put together. Life could be lived as a kind of vast, always-on role-playing campaign.

We geeks might not be able to intuit the subtext of a facial expression or a casual phrase, but give us a behavioral algorithm and human interactions become a data stream. We can process what’s going on in the heads of the people around us. Through careful observation of body language and awkward silences, we can even learn to detect when we are bringing the party down with our analysis of how loop quantum gravity helps explain the time travel in that new “Terminator” TV show. I mean, so I hear.

Facebook and other social networks ask people to create a character — one based on the user, sure, but still a distinct entity. Your character then builds relationships by connecting to other characters. Like Dungeons & Dragons, this is not a competitive game. There’s no way to win. You just play.

This diverse evolution from [Dungeons and Dragons] goes much further. Every Gmail login, every instant-messaging screen name, every public photo collection on Flickr, every blog-commenting alias is a newly manifested identity, a character playing the real world.

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via Valleywag:

After he left Facebook, Nipon Das wanted the social network to erase his personal information from its servers. Eventually that happened. But only after two months, a lengthy email exchange and — ultimately — threats from a lawyer. “It’s like the Hotel California,” Das told the New York Times. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” Facebook PR flack Amy Sezak claims the company is doing users a favor by making it easy to come back to the site after they quit. 6,000 members of the Facebook group “How to permanently delete your facebook account” don’t seem grateful.

Jean Burgess is deleting her account partly because of all these facets of her identity are collided together in an unnatural and unmanageable way on facebook. Which illustrates the point that faceted identity does not scale well and on facebook many people have discovered that it has been stretched uncomfortably out of shape.

Too many worlds colliding, too many invites to vampire garden pirate fishtank zombie kissing applications, and yes, I ended up with kind of too many friends from too many different spheres of my existence (not that I don’t love them all, really) for it to be non-complicated and fun.

And check out what your facing if you want to really remove yourself from Facebook…

Oh, and by the way, in order to delete your Facebook account, apparently, you have to not only deactivate it, but also delete every single item you have contributed to the site (messages, wall posts, posts other people have written on your wall, photos, links to contacts, profile information) and then email customer service and request they delete your account completely. Oh, and also, in order to delete absolutely everything, I’d also have to re-add every single one of the applications I’ve ever had installed, and then go through and remove the content, and then delete the applications again. Because when you delete an application, guess what? Your data is still stored there somewhere.

That’s not just meanness, but I’m pretty sure it’s also not just to be helpful in case you’re quitting in a fit of pique like this one and might decide later that you want to come back. It’s also because of the way the business model works: Facebook and all the marketeers who sail in her pretty much just want you to visit as many ad-bearing pages per visit as possible (that’s what all those applications and invites are for), and having lost your eyeballs, they’d quite like to keep the data that can be mined from those activities. So they’re going to make it as difficult as possible to scrub that data out of the system. Can you guess how much that softens my heart toward the company?

Mark Evan’s compares his relationship with facebook as a kind of ‘amour fou’ that has run its course.

At first, the romance was hot and heavy…It was a lusty, unhealthy affair that made me crazy but you know how lust consumes you…You know that awkward feeling when you’re dating someone, and the romance starts to fade? …I feel that way about Facebook these days…Truth be told, I’ve found someone else - younger, sexier, more streamlined: Twitter. Yet, I’m not as enraptured with Twitter as I once was with Facebook, which is a good sign.

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J.P. Rangaswami explores the notion of applying ideas from the banking system to the problems of identity and trust in the information economy over at his confusedofcalcutta blog.
Using those thoughts as a starting point, the following is a riff that just got way too long for the comments section:

If the question was: “How do we most efficiently handle the information economy?” The answer may well be found by looking at the banking institutions that evolved to serve the cash economy. And its an excellent idea to look for efficient services for the information economy by taking inspiration from those services that increase liquidity and reduce friction in the cash economy.

This search begins with the fundamental question: So how do banks work? Well, you don’t have to have had an account in Northern Rock or in a US subprime lender to know that banks are all/nothing depending on the presence/absence of trust.

But its also worth stepping outside the normal stomping grounds visited when discussing trust and noting that trust emerges naturally in two distinct ways in human society. 1) Through contract ritual 2) Through friendship/gifting rituals. Every tribe and culture that ever existed engages in both. And both are necessary to satisfy our economic needs. Its worth repeating that and empasising the keywords. Both are needed to satisfy our economic needs. The role of frienship/gifting rituals in meeting our economic needs is often overlooked not because of its lack of importance but because we are hard-wired to have a blind eye to its importance.

Bear with me while I explain what I mean by this point. We don’t intuitively understand the mechanics of friendship/gifting rituals because evolution/Mother Nature/God has hard-wired us to have a blind eye to the mechanics of these rituals. Because Mother Nature doesn’t want us to be too calculating in all our actions. Because she knows that a lot of the beneficial things we could do, we wouldn’t do, if we were to stand back an analyse them coldly. Having kids, for example. Or risking ourselves in even a small way to rescue someone else in trouble. Both these examples parallel friendship/gifting rituals…ie where you are giving of yourself with no explicit contractual expectation of getting a return.

Think of finding yourself in a position of being able to rescue another person. Now, move on and think of yourself in the position of being able to rescue a bank on the verge of collapse.

The banking system is a great example of the contractual ritual formalised and scaled-up so that it operates with great efficiency for the benefit of the market and all its participants. As solid as a banking system might look as a central part of society it is of course highly vulnerable and it could collapse overnight. But the threat of collapse is mitigated by a form of the friendship/gifting ritual rather than the contractual ritual that kicks into the action when the system come under threat. For example, when a major bank collapses it causes a scare and a run on other banks. The governments intervenes on behalf of its citizens and will sink all the financial and political power it can muster to rescue the banking system for wholesale implosion.

As such the entire banking system is underwritten in trust not by a contractual guarantees but confident expectation that a rescue is likely to be there when it is needed, whether or not the banking system is truly deserving or not. Which is just another way of describing a friendship contract.

Thus, although we are generally blind to it, the fact remains that friendship/gifting contract is the foundation for the contractual contracts upon which the banking business is operated. Banking systems could not exist without it. Banking systems would repeatedly collapse without it.

If you wish to explore the hidden mechanics and processes of gifting/frienship economies that underlie our contract-based economies and how they are used to create bonds of trust it is worth taking a look at these analyses in wikipedia as a starting point.

Koha

Moka

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