Monday, March 22, 2004danah is right - of course - that without CONTEXT - none of this matters. But I'm commenting on something you haven't read yet (at least not here.) My comments below....
how to solve problems with social networks.
According to David, Eric Schmidt from Google said: "Social networks will get better as we figure out what problem they're intended to solve." In an attempt to learn from last week, i will try really hard to not take that literally and imagine that he meant to say that "social networking TOOLS will get better..."
But even still, there's a bit of backwards logic here. Why are we asking: what can social networking tools solve? Why aren't we asking: what problem do we have that social networks give us insight to? I remember when i first got involved in technology creation, there was always a technology-first, problem-second approach. A technology was created and then everyone was rushing around trying to put it to use. I find it very entertaining that social networks (which weren't invented, but modeled) are being put to the same process.
The thing is that social network representations require nuance. We can either try to solve the nuances universally (not going to happen) or try to figure out what problems we're trying to employ social networks in and figure out how to negotiate them there IN A CONTEXT. The latter is going to be far more successful. Haven't we already learned that each YASNS models a different social network anyhow (and no, FOAF is not the answer here because the different models are often because people are segmenting their networks differently in order to represent different facets).
I don't believe that social network tools will get better as we find our problems. I think that social networks will get embedded into tools simply because they help us solve specific problems. The focus won't be on the network, but on the problem solving.
(::cringe:: I'm almost approaching activity theory here. Must stop.)
Marc's rant......
danah is also right that FOAF does nothing to represent the subtle nuances between each usage of social networking. I think that the rdf folks HOPE that subtle semantic things can be represented, but the key thing danah DOES grok - is the chicken/egg situation.
Why is it that we even have to justify some new technology?
Technology should be thought of as some new 'lick', some new kind of 'black box' or 'widget' or 'whatsa-mah-callit' - that just does magical stuff - that makes THIS particular end-user experience exicting, tingly, connected, relevant, timely, interesting, in context. Focusing on technology and not what's done with it - is the curse of Silicon Valley - the revenge that nornal people get over nerds - who just don't seem to get the fact that they exist for the purposes of making things better, not vice versa.
I've said it once and something tells me I'll be saying it again - social networking is like multimedia or the web. It raises the bar on ALL markets, all solutions, all sectors. It's not a stand alone anything, unelss it's in context to something else (thank you danah.)
Afterall - what software ISN'T about people?
This is the right idea but now it needs to be implemented for mere mortals to use. Only when RSS hits functionality for the masses and not for the digerati will it take off. I'm looking at some stuff that does just that and it will change the way you think of RSS (and more importantly, you won't need to think of RSS) when released.
Andrew Grumet: "RssReader is TiVo-resident software that displays the contents of an RSS feed on your television."
[Scripting News]
I agree with Michael - but hey, at least we're getting there. It's not like TiVO would ever dream this up!
This just in from Andy King.....
marc,
hi, just published this. i predict we'll break 50% by june.
US Broadband Penetration Jumps to 45.2% - US Internet Penetration Nearly 75% - March 2004 Bandwidth Report
US broadband adoption increased to 45.15% in February, up 2.14% from January 2004. Nearly three out of four Americans have access to the Internet.
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0403/- Andrew B. King
Author of "Speed Up Your Site: Web Site Optimization"
Founder http://www.WebSiteOptimization.com
http://www.SpeedUpYourSite.com
Chris Schmidt is the guy at LiveJournal who is responsible for getting FOAF support into Lj. Here's his description of the 'community' and focusing on people is more interestign than focusing on teh words they say.
Don't get me wrong - words are important too - but compared to someone's face? It's not even a contest. Do any of us wonder why Leonie rose so high - so fast? It was a direct testimate to the sexual games going on at Orkut - whether we like it or not.
Anway - here's Chris' rap.....
Source: By crschmidt at 06:14 pm on 15th March, 2004
Neighborhood/Community Aspects of Social Networking/Personal Publishing. In social networks, being able to build a "community" or "neighborhood" is not the simplest thing in the world to do. With people that are seperated by hundreds or thousands of miles, it's difficult to congreagate, and difficult to establish the relationships that people have between each other. I may be friends with foo, bar, and baz, but they may all hate each other, making the relationships mutually exlusive. In my current state, I have no simple way of knowing that - no way of telling who is friends with who, or even who knows who. I may have 10 friends that all live in the same house - but other than descriptions they might make in their own way, either through conversation or articles they publish - I have no way of knowing that.
However, the information in many cases is out there. With LiveJournal's FOAF information, I can build a graph of who my friends are - that's simple enough. I'm in the center, and they're all at points equidistant around me. The next step is to add in the next level of Friendship, or knows data. For example, I know ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
jessical, and she knows pie_is_good, who I also know. In fact, jessical and I share over 50 "friends" - people we both know/read. For those in the non-LiveJournal world, this is like sharing 50 of the same links on a "blogroll". So, obviously she and I are closer than, for example, myself and danbri, who share no links. Drawing the graphs is not the difficult part - TouchGraph already does that with information available via FOAF and other sources.
So, what to do with this data? We now have a representation of the "community" around me - drawn out to 2, 3, 4 levels, or deeper, depending on how far out you want to go. Now, depending on that community, I may want to read different things. For example, I may be interested in technology today - so, I'll stroll over to the danbri side of the fence, or over to the group surrounding jito. Tomorrow, I may be interested in reading more personal things - so I'll look at jessical's entries, and from there wander out to pie_is_good.
Right now, everything in my aggreagator comes linearly, chronologically. However, this isn't always the way that I want the information. I want groupings, communities and neighborhoods. Geocities had it right - group people by interest, and let them stroll through them. The community and neighborhood aspects of the site back in the mid 90's might have been ahead of their time then, but now, with the massive amount of information, it's perfect.
Generate my friends mappings graphically. A 3d map, that I can stroll through, click on, and have it show me content. A grouping of people discussing, with the ability to listen to them individually. Something that allows me to view the content I want in the order I want it. Rather than linear, I want groupings, I want selections. I want the ability to seperate the content by relationships between people, not just between people and me. The data is out there, and it can be used in this way. Bring in more content - let me find something new through my trusted friends, rather than through some random google link. Use RSS + FOAF as transmittal scheme, use graphing techniques like touchgraph to create the information set. Then let me move through the information in a way that is non conventional. Let me browse through people, read what they have to say - and read more from people like them.
The idea of walking up to a group of people that I know appeals to me much more than reading a list of entries written by people I'm not entirely interested in. Show me a community based network model of aggregation, and I have a feeling you'll be showing me a killer app for the semantic web and how it works. By crschmidt@livejournal.com. [Christopher Schmidt]
My my my - listen to the industry leaders rant on about my favorite subject "Social Networking is not an ends to itself".
Right on dudes!
Now let's see you put your words into action!
And oh yah, support FOAF while you're at it!
Dan R, Jonathan Miller at PC Forum.
Dan R, Jonathan Miller at PC Forum
Dan Rosensweig (COO Yahoo, at far left) and Jonathan Miller (head of AOL, near left) have joined Eric onstage. A pretty lengthy discussion of the role of social networking in their businesses, including Orkut. Eric acknowledge that Orkut was strategic to Google's ability to know more about its users so as to provide better service to them, and when it comes out of beta, it'll be integrated in some way into Google. Miller says he sees social networking as not having its own business model, but rather as BASF - making other businesses better. Dan (and later Eric agreed) said that social networking is a way to make sense of a world that has 10-20 billion pages that are all indexed and available - providing a context for better and more intelligently filtered information. The entire conversation is pitched in the context - provided by Esther, who is very engaged this year so far - that these companies are playing in a market that is several orders of magnitude larger than the IT business - what Eric called the information/media business. Architecting the information space is their main product, they agreed, and that is a huge business which is in the early innings. [John Battelle's Searchblog]
Lots of fun things going on at Orkut:
a) Horror! A 'faux' persona (namely Leonie Obermeyer) has been exposed to be a fraud. Imagine that! But people, I am here to tell you that indeed I AM MarcCanter - I am NOT a fraud - I do INDEED exist.
b) The Stats feature - our favorite way of judguing each otehr - has been removed from Orkut. I know this will make danah happy. I wonder if they did it for PC Forum, to celebrate the recent SixApart announcements or something having to do with the Google IPO.
:-)
Idly.Org defends Six Apart from yours truly. Anyway, if TypeKey is anything new it's a breakthrough. I've been puzzling about this stuff for years. Some people say there's something brilliant here. If so, that's great, but until I understand how it works, I'm from Missouri. [Scripting News]
I just left this comment at this excellent post/analysis about TypeKey......
Just one word: FOAF.
It will solve all the complaints, be the right thing to do technically - and help an overall movement which - oh yah - the Trotts and Typepad are already participating in.
:-)
BBC launches interactive quiz. An interactive quiz show that enables viewers to compete with studio contestants is to launch on BBC One. [BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]
Hah!
This is exactly one of the Interactive TV shows I speced out in the late 90's, early 21st century and was part of the package being shopped around under the label "Ealing Digital Studios".
Don't get me started!
Anyway it's great to see this idea finally find the light of day. I doubt stupid Americans would ever go for it - but it fits right into the EU (especially British) model of "hanging at Pubs, with friends" mode of life.
It's where meatspace meets cyberspace.
Don Norman: Emotional Design [ETCON2004]. [Full title: Emotional Design: The Principles] Don Norman used to be known as a critic of unusable things but now, he says, he has changed. He has transformed himself into an advocate for pleasurable, enjoyable products. Beauty is good, says Norman. Successful products should a pleasure to use, and convey a positive sense of self, of accomplishment, and pride of ownership. In this keynote address, Norman shares work from his latest book, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Do you believe it? Is there really more to life than whether something works well? Does you car really drive better after you have washed and polished it? Listen in. This was a keynote presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference held in San Diego, California, February 12, 2004. Recording courtesy of O'Reilly & Associates and IT Conversations. A complete transcript of this and other keynote sessions is available on the IT Conversations web site. [Internet Archive]
Don Norman is one of the few people I really look up to today.
His visions picks up right where mine leaves off. We're a perfect complement to each other.
Here we are debating at PopTech 2002 together.
I love it when EVERYBODY blogs the same dam thing. Talk about Echo chamber!
Congrats to Dave, Kevin and the rest at Technorati!
I'm proud to announce the new Technorati redesign has launched, available at www.technorati.com. Some highlights of the new design:
- Three free email or RSS watchlists for individuals - all you have to do is sign up as a member. Of course, people who have paid for watchlists are grandfathered in as well.
- Lots of UI fixes and tweaks. We listened hard to all of you who told us that our UI needed a lot of work. I hope that this is a step in the right direction. We tried to do what we could to humanize the language as well - using words like "conversations" and "references" and "sources" to help better describe what Technorati does, for example. I'm sure there's a long way to go, and lots more improvements we can make. Help us.
- Keyword Search beyond just RSS. We improved our post detection capabilities, going beyond what pure RSS gives you - so that you can search the entire post, not just the summaries often found in RSS feeds.
- Better explanations and interfaces for Current Events and NewsTalk (formerly called Breaking News). Click on the arrows to expand or compress blogger commentary, to allow a "quick view" or a more context-rich, deeper view into the data.
- Improved features for weblog authors: First, a more robust, reliable "Claim Your Blog" codebase. Once you, as an author, have claimed your weblog, you get a bunch of new features, including the blog rank for your blog. (Find out how far off of the top 100 you are...) We're also working on a number of other "Author Dashboard" type features coming soon.
- Caching, speedups, and bug fixes. Almost too many to mention.
A few points to note:
- Response time of the searches is still not reliably fast enough. Some searches are fast, some take a long time. We know this is unacceptable, and we are working on this. Site reliability and faster response time are our top priorities. We are working hard to improve the user experience.
- We're working on providing RSS and email watchlists for keyword searches as well, but it wasn't ready for the cut, so it'll go out as soon as it is ready, which should be quite soon. In the meantime, you can do keyword searches on the site, but can't get RSS or email subscriptions yet.
Send us feedback! Use feedback@technorati.com to send feedback to the Technorati team, or send comments directly to me at david-blog@sifry.com. Your thoughts and comments are extremely important to us.
Thanks again for all your support.
The latest version of Technorati, a blog search engine, has launched. You can read details on what's new from Dave Sifry.
I love it. Technorati is updating it's page design and I am watching it as it happens at 2AM.
A note to Dave Sifry: I like the alternate background coloring, Dave. I also like the conversation thingy except I don't want to click on all the conversations. Reflect the LOUDNESS of the conversation behind each entry with some visual hint (i.e. icon count, color, size) so I can zero in on the center of the noise.
New Technorati beta launches. New looks, new features. Go to www.technorati.com to give it a whirl. [Joi Ito's Web]
Very cool.
[Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
New Technorati Beta. Blog search update. Not sure what's new, aside from an improved UI. Technorati PS. Sifry lists the new stuff.... [Raw]
Technorati has gone live with a raft of improvements that David Sifry explains here. I'm on the company's advisory board, and it's nice to see so many good ideas and suggestions by so many people show up in the (continuously un)finished product.
New Technorati beta. Technorati has launched a new public beta with a bunch of really exciting features, including:
# Lots of UI fixes and tweaks. We listened hard to all of you who told us that our UI needed a lot of work. I hope that this is a step in the right direction. We tried to do what we could to humanize the language as well - using words like "conversations" and "references" and "sources" to help better describe what Technorati does, for example. I'm sure there's a long way to go, and lots more improvements we can make. Help us.# Keyword Search beyond just RSS. We improved our post detection capabilities, going beyond what pure RSS gives you - so that you can search the entire post, not just the summaries often found in RSS feeds.
AND FINALLY FROM THE BRAND NEW VP of INternational Sales at Technorati - the GODHEAD himself.....
New Technorati beta launches. New looks, new features. Go to www.technorati.com to give it a whirl.
Andreesssen: Why Open Source Will Boom - in 103 Words [Slashdot]
- "The Internet is powered by open source."
- "The Internet is the carrier for open source."
- "The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed."
- "It's simply going to be more secure than proprietary software."
- "Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments."
- "Incentives around open source include the respect of one's peers."
- "Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants."
- "Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel."
- "Embedded devices are making greater use of open source."
- "There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren't software companies."
- "Companies are increasingly supporting Linux."
- "It's free."
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