On Wednesday, Twitter tipped the tuna. By that I mean it started peaking. Adoption amongst the people I know seemed to double immediately, an apparent tipping point. It hasn’t jumped the shark, and probably won’t until Steven Colbert covers this messaging of the mundane. As Twitter turns 1 on March 13th, not only is there a quickening of users, but messages per user.
Twitter, in a nutshell, is mobile social software that lets you broadcast and receive short messages with your social network. You can use it with SMS (sending a message to 40404), on the web or IM. A darn easy API has enabled other clients such as Twitterific for the Mac. Twitter is Continuous Partial Presence, mostly made up of mundane messages in answer to the question, “what are you doing?” A never-ending steam of presence messages prompts you to update your own. Messages are more ephemeral than IM presence — and posting is of a lower threshold, both because of ease and accessibility, and the informality of the medium.
Anil Dash was spot-on to highlight “The sign of success in social software is when your community does something you didn’t expect.” A couple of weeks ago it became a convention to start messages with @username as a way of saying something to someone visible to everyone. Within the limited affordances of the tool, people started to use it not only for presence, but a kind of shouting at the party conversation. Further, when you see an to someone who isn’t in your social network, you find yourself inclined to go see who it is or add them if they are a friend who just joined. This kind of social discovery goes beyond seeing friend lists on profiles, aids network structure and quickens adoption.
While the app is viral (you have to get others to adopt to be able to use it), mobile social software has great word-of-mouth properties. At Wikimania this summer, a buzz went off in my pocket when I was having dinner, which prompted me to get Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer and the brothers Gillmor to adopt. Wednesday was the first day of TED, so a bunch of A-listers spread it. At SXSW it seems to be the smart mob tool of choice, and there is even a group for it with a feature I’ve never seen before, JOIN.
Most recently there has been a rise in fake identities and even celebrities. Partially because people want to form more than one group, sometimes as integration points with other communities. Some of the groups I’ve spotted include AdaptivePath, Barcamp, Technorati (a hack that begs people for blurbs in WTF), Techmeme (a hack that posts new top stories) and Wordpress (release updates). Andy Carvin hypothesizes Twitter could save lives in a catastrophe, but group forming is already ahead of his theory with the USGS Earthquake Center on Twittter.
This week most of my company joined Twitter and I set up http://twitter.com/socialtext for no reason in particular. I posted the login in a private wiki page to let anyone contribute. But when Moconner saw how simple the API was, he wrote a bot to let us post from our IRC channel. Now we have a low threshold way to express group identity that fits with the way we work.
Liz Lawley well addressed the differences of this form of presence and criticisms of mundane content and interruption costs. She highlights “exploring clusters of loosely related people by looking at the updates from their friends. There are stories told in between updates.”
However, I do think the the interruption tax is significant — especially with the quickening of adoption. You use your social network as a filter, which helps both in scoping participation within a pull model of attention management, but also to Liz’s point that my friends are digesting the web for me and perhaps reducing my discovery costs. But the affordance within Twitter of both mobile and web, that not only lets Anil use it (he is Web-only) is what helps me manage attention overload. I can throttle back to web-only and curb interruptions, simply by texting off.
Good thing too, because back when it was called twittr people held back believing what they posted would be interrupting on mostly mobile devices. Lately I think people just go for it, and most consumption is on the web or other clients. I’d love to see some research on posts/user, client use, tracking @username, group identities, geographic dispersion and revealing other undesigned conventions.
SlideShare launches today — the YouTube of Powerpoint. While Powerpoint destroys thought, so does TV. And misgivings aside, slides can be an art form in and of itself. They are objects you spin stories around. Like this:
It is easy to embed a presentation and player within a site, blog or wiki. The above presentation is one I found by danah. I’ve been playing with the Alpha and really have to applaud Rashmi (you may know her from Dcamp), Jonathan and the gang at Uzanto.
You upload your Powerpoint (PPT and PPS formats) or OpenOffice (ODP format) slides into My Slidespace with a familiar title, description and tags. The flash player is fast and intuitive.
What’s also fascinating is their servers are backed by Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). The other week when Socialtext 2.0 launched with a large-file webcast, we got Techcrunched and were worried about the load on our servers. After a little scrambling in IRC, Pete Kaminski leveraged S3, and problem solved. In this case, SlideShare has web serviced their scalability. An interesting model to watch, and good thing if this thing is a sudden hit.
We launched Socialtext 2.0 today. Techcrunch has the story, but I thought M2M readers might be interested in this screencast which talks through the design decisions.
I believe the Wired Wiki experiment can be called a success, and yesterday I would have said it was doomed. Just came back from Wiki Wednesday, where Wired reporter Ryan Singel held a conversation about it. How we conducted the experiment, what part of the editorial process it was directed at it and the participation of the community gives us a lot to learn from.
Do recall that the use of wikis in journalism has been significantly tainted by the LA Times Wikitorial debacle. It was a failure in wiki implementation, goal setting, content structure and moderation. While the media has embraced public blogs, they still have a while to go before public wikis are accepted.
Last time someone tried this it was a disaster, but Wired News has boldly put an article about wikis into a Socialtext wiki for anyone to be a Wired editor:
In an experiment in collaborative journalism, Wired News is putting reporter Ryan Singel at your service.
This wiki began as an unedited 1,059-word article on the wiki phenomenon, exactly as Ryan filed it. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to do the job of a Wired News editor and whip it into shape. Don’t change the quotes, but feel free to reorganize it, make cuts, smooth the prose or add links — whatever it takes to make it a lively, engaging news piece.
Ryan will answer questions from the comments page, and, when consensus calls for it, conduct additional reporting. If there’s something he missed, let him know, and he’ll get on the phone and investigate, then submit new text to the wiki for your review.
Readers can also submit headlines for the story, and write and edit the “deck” — a blurb for our front page and RSS feed that promotes the article.
To make any changes, you’ll first need to create a free account at Socialtext.
We’ll release the results under a Creative Commons license, and, if the whole thing doesn’t turn into a disaster, run the final story on Wired News on Sept. 7, 2006.
It is without shame that I can share the release of Socialtext Open, an Open Source distribution of Socialtext. I figure this is in demand by M2M readers, and, well, we are quite proud of it. For your downloading pleasure.
Prepare to be spammed globally. Twttr just launched, a mobile social software app for SMSing your social network developed by Odeo. It’s slightly simpler than Dodgeball, not location centric and a bit more viral. Biz Stone calls it present-tense blogging. Ev notes you might want to upgrade your SMS plan and they are working on compatibility outside the US. To me its reply-to-all baked in your phone.
If they support MMS and let me send a photo to twttr and CC flickr, it will be a killer app. But for now, put my SMS’ in a sidebar widget or give me feeds I can splice.
I’m advising a new startup called Dandelife, which is a Social Biography Network. TechCrunch has the scoop, but let me tell you why I think they will be successful.
Ever get that feeling why you are blogging and flickring your life away that you have lost something? That you are telling your life’s story, but it is lost in the archives and in the minds of people who are really paying attention?
There is a gap in social software for binding stories in a chronology. For building biographies of people, places and things. I think Dandelife serves as different object to tell stories around. Time.
The horizontal and vertical visualizations are what makes this work:
Dandelife is definately beta and Edward and Kelly are working hard on it. But when you can upload your blog and photos to start your story, its pretty powerful. Go play. And let them know how it can get better.
Socialtext released an update to the Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) case study on enterprise wiki and blog use. Based on the usability interviews performed by Suw Charman, the case addresses ease of use and adoption issues that lead to wiki traffic outperforming the intranet within six months. Specific use cases such as managing meetings, brainstorming and publishing and creating presentations collaboratively are explored in depth.
We had to move away from a static, dead intranet,” says Myrto Lazopoulou. “The wiki has allowed us to improve collaboration, communication and publication. We can cross time zones, improve the way teams works, reduce email and increase transparency.”
The case study is also available in PDF format and complements other research done on this leading deployment:
Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
Accepting of many types of data
‘Social’ means that there’s always a person on at least one end of
the wire with Enterprise 2.0 technologies. With wikis, prediction
markets, blogs, del.icio.us, and other Web 2.0 technologies with clear
enterprise applications people are doing all the interacting and
providing some or all of the content; the IT is just doing housekeeping
and/or bookkeeping.
If there is debate, it will be on two fonts: the role of organizational identities (Egalitarian) or an emaphasis on technology over social dynamics. McAfee focuses on the second, that of Enterprise 2.0 vs. SoA:
Last week Liz organized the Microsoft Research Social Computing Symposium. I shared some raw notes here, and here is a good gaming summary, but most of the activity was in a private Socialtext wiki. Among other things, Clay and danah held a session on the lingering questions in our field. This should tease out what work is already done or in progress, but I thought they may be thought provoking at the least:
Social Science Questions
* How can we measure the success of different types of online communities, and their survival and prodictivity and various criteria?
* Coates: which community software is more successful in which environments?
* What are the boundry conditions for mobile and pervasive (social) computing systems?
* To what extend, in what ways, at what rate/time scal will mobile and/or pervasive systems change the way humans interact socially?
* Do natives of social media systems have a different notion of themselves as individuals and abour their relation to broader social groups?
* What are the mechanisms that cause people to act, mark up, buy or sell bits they care about online?
* What tips people to try something, what’s enough to bring value?
* Does the “regular public” want to connect with people othey do not know? (outside the context of dating)
* What level of visual representation of the body is necessary to trigger mirror neurons
* Are the online community members of tomorrow going to be more or less participatory than today’s? And why?
* What impact do computer/video games have on the everyday habits and routines of the gamers?
* Is society becoming more or less individualized?
* How can we use the computational ability of our machines to transform communication?
* How can we get access to behavioral (server logs) and attitudinal data (survey data) from large scale worlds?
Design Questions
* What elements of MMOG can be adapted to web applications?
* How can we build virtual worlds/spaces where we can operate parallel servers with slightly variable rulesets?
* … so that we can change one experimental condition and obverve the response by the inhabitants?
* What are the barriers to contributing to social group ointeraction (social bookmarking, wikis)?
* …What are the steps to mitigate the barriers?
* How do we make memories portable?
* How do we use social judgement to surfae what your peers care or are interested in? What the crowd is interested in?
* How can communities support veterans going off topic together an new commers seeking topical information and connections?
What lingering questions do you have for possible research?
I have an article in the spring 2006 issue of Sloan Management Review (SMR) on what I call Enterprise 2.0 — the emerging use of Web 2.0 technologies like blogs and wikis (both perfect examples of network IT) within the Intranet. The article describes why I think this is an important and welcome development, the contents of the Enterprise 2.0 ‘toolkit,’ and the experiences to date of an early adopter. It also offers some guidelines to business leaders interested in building an Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure within their companies.
One question not addressed in the article is: Why is Enterprise 2.0 is an appealing reality now?…
He continues, in his blog:
As described in the SMR article, these tools include powerful search, tags (the basis for the folksonomies at del.icio.us and flickr), and automatic RSS signals whenever new content appears. As I type these words I don’t know the best site to serve as the link behind the abbreviation ‘RSS’ in the previous sentence. To find this site, I’m going to type ‘RSS’ into Google and see what pops up (sure enough, the Wikipedia entry for ‘RSS’ was pretty high in Google’s results). I also don’t know the URL of the page I’m using right now to type this blog entry. I do know that it’s on my del.icio.us page, tagged as ‘APMblog,’ so I can find it whenever I want. And I don’t know what work my three collaborators on a research project are doing right now; I just know that when any of them has some results to share or a new draft of the paper they’ll post it on the project’s wiki (which is powered by Socialtext) and I’ll immediately get an RSS notification about it.
These examples are not meant to show that my professional life is perfectly organized (that assertion would be worse than false; it would be fraudulent) or that we’ve addressed all the challenges associated with the growth of the Web. They’re meant instead to illustrate how technologists have done a brilliant job at three tasks: building platforms to let lots of users express themselves, letting the structure of these platforms emerge over time instead of imposing it up front, and helping users deal with the resulting flood of content.
As the SMR article discusses, the important question for business leaders is how to import these three trends from the Internet to the Intranet — how to harness Web 2.0 to create Enterprise 2.0.
McAfee sounds a note of caution along these lines. He notes the possibility that “busy knowledge workers won’t use the new
technologies, despite training and prodding,” and points to the fact that “most people who use the Internet today aren’t bloggers, wikipedians or taggers. They don’t help produce the platform - they just use it.” There’s the rub. Managers, professionals and other employees don’t have much spare time, and the ones who have the most valuable business knowledge have the least spare time of all. (They’re the ones already inundated with emails, instant messages, phone calls, and meeting requests.) Will they turn into avid bloggers and taggers and wiki-writers? It’s not impossible, but it’s a long way from a sure bet.
This is true, adoption is the rub. But one hedge we have is, to McAfee’s point, how these tools help cope with overload. I’d wager, in fact I have, that email volume will only increase, some devices only exacerbate the problem, and unlike KM — more productive and simpler models have an upper hand.
Dion Hinchcliffe focuses on the technical aspects of this trend: Ajax, SaaS and SoA. But what is really different is the focus on users ahead of buyers and architecture. Remember, it’s made of people.
Jon Turow passed on an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg in the Daily Princetonian. Facebook recently expanded from college to high school, resulting in a clash of uncivilizations:
…If we really wanted to, we could steer clear of the groups by just avoiding the high school profiles. But we can’t ignore it when they post on our walls. And my god, do they post. Unfortunately, they don’t understand that by posting “OMG how are you? I haven’t seen you since our Model UN trip three years ago!” they are undermining the college personas that we have so carefully constructed over the past there years. And when a 16-year-old girl pokes us, we worry that poking back could result in a cyber-statutory rape conviction. Something tells us that when having sex with one of your facebook friends could result in a criminal violation, things have gone too far….
Clay may end up posting something about pattern languages for moderations systems here, but Nat has great notes from his talk at Etech and I couldn’t help but lift this quote:
This is the direction that the conversation around social software is taking. Hobbes would say that Dave had the right and all was good. Rousseau would reply, “no he didn’t, software systems that don’t allow the users to fight back are immoral.”
Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn’t realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools. We need to have conversations about the explicit goals of what it is that we’re supporting and what we are trying to do, because that conversation matters. Because we have short-term goals and the cliff-face of annoyance comes in quickly when we let users talk to each other. But we also need to get it right in the long term because society needs us to get it right. I think having the language to talk about this is the right place to start.
Then again, Plato argued in the Seventh Letter that only philosophers are fit to rule.
Perhaps the greatest competency Socialtext has gained over the past three years is fostering adoption of social software. Adoption matters most for IT to have value. It should be obvious that if only a third of a company uses a portal, then the value proposition of that portal is two thirds less than it’s potential. But for social software, value is almost wholy generated by the contributions of the group and imposed adoption is marked for failure. Suw Charman has been working with Socialtext on site at Dresdner Klienwort Wasserstein and has spearheaded the creation of the following practice documentation. I believe this will be a critical contribution for enterprise practices, so do read on…
An Adoption Strategy for Social Software in the Enterprise
Experience has shown that simply installing a wiki or blog (referred to collectively as ‘social software’) and making it available to users is not enough to encourage widespread adoption. Instead, active steps need to be taken to both foster use amongst key members of the community and to provide easily accessible support.
There are two ways to go about encouraging adoption of social software: fostering grassroots behaviours which develop organically from the bottom-up; or via top-down instruction. In general, the former is more desirable, as it will become self-sustaining over time - people become convinced of the tools’ usefulness, demonstrate that to colleagues, and help develop usage in an ad hoc, social way in line with their actual needs.
Top-down instruction may seem more appropriate in some environments, but may not be effective in the long-term as if the team leader stops actively making subordinates use the software, they may naturally give up if they have not become convinced of its usefulness. Bottom-up adoption taps into social incentives for contribution and fosters a culture of working openly that has greater strategic benefits. Inevitably in a successful deployment, top-down and bottom-up align themselves in what Ross Mayfield calls ‘middlespace’.
…With the caveats that Alexa’s data is not comprehensive—and even if they had perfect stats, “Alexa Rank” is still just one definition of popularity (a combination of reach and pageviews)—here’s the 10 most popular social media sites (with corresponding Alexa 100 rank):
Chris (and Doc) may be on to something about observing the correlation between F500 blogging and stock performance. But at the least, this can serve as a renewable resource for informing social software adoption.
The way he described it, you could shift the burden by changing the law
so that Internet Service Providers would evaluate the plaintiff’s
evidence, and decide themselves whether revealing the customer’s
identity might be appropriate. If the decision is yes, at that point
the ISP notifies the customer, who is given the opportunity to initiate
legal proceedings to enjoin the ISP from revealing his identity.
Given the consolidation of telecom, this would empower a handful of ISPs, as in 5, to be judge and jury for revealing identity. Anonymity is a critical facet of society, and it’s value is more than whistle-blowing. I wouldn’t call it a right, but would call it a feature of the virtual and real worlds (we don’t walk around with name-tags). Regardless of how you value anonymity, you should agree that this would:
create undue costs for ISPs,
privatize governance and enforcement,
create undue legal costs for consumers, which
could lead to infringements on civil liberties, because
customers would be guilty until proven innocent.
Now, if the ISP or legal action revealed the libelous party it would resolve Seigenthaler’s complaint against Wikipedia.
Beyond this attempt to weaken anonymity on the Net, Wikipedia’s open nature is also under attack. Adam Curry edited podcasting history in his favor. Big deal. It’s a wiki, just edit it if you disagree and let the community’s practice work over time.
Consider regulating against graffiti. You have two options:
Guard every wall in town to prevent the infraction from occurring
Paint over infractions and enforce the law by chasing down perpetrators
The former is not just prohibitively expensive, it kills creativity and culture. The later is the status quo and generally works, especially where communities flourish.
So what would have Wikipedia do? Lock down contributions through a fact checking process with rigid policy? Or let people contribute, leverage revision history and let the group revert infractions.
Social media is disruptive. The role of regulation significantly impacts how society will manage transition. Today much of media is regulated through complaints (e.g. indecency). It only takes one horror story for us to loose freedom of anonymous speech. The easiest and most dangerous way to curb social media is to have it conform to mainstream models.
UPDATE: Cnet has a pretty good article on the liability reform sought by Seigenthaler, the first argument I made. Mitch Ratcliffe takes issue with my second argument, about how a wiki works and how best to regulate it. Mitch, you keep trying to fit Wikipedia into your model of how an encyclopedia should be instead of recognizing how it is different. A print version of Wikipedia should have an editorial process bolted on to emergent practice, as it is a comparable product, frozen in time. But instead, the evolving nature of Wikipedia needs to be recognized and celebrated for what it is. Help people understand what it is, not what it is not.
If a knowledge worker has the organization’s information in a social context at their finger tips, and the organization is sufficiently connected to tap experts and form groups instantly to resolve exceptions — is there a role for business process as we know it?
“I think, partly because of the personality types who become programmers… I don’t know what it is exactly… a lot of programmers, seem to me to think that the whole point of social software is to replace the social with the software. Which is not really what you want to do, right? Social Software should exist to empower us to be human… to interact… in all the normal ways that humans do.”
A slew of social software startups have arisen as of late, and while we don’t cover the news here, it’s a good time to be a culture critic.
Ning — Social Apps
Ning is the latest entry into the social applications space, aiming to be the mother of all social software. Aiming to be a platform from the get go is a tough haul, the prize is admirable, but most platforms start as apps first. I’ve never heard someone utter the words “killer platform.” As a result, the applications are relatively shallow and they are competing against decentralized open source application publishing.
Since I used them as an example of stealth as an old school model, it turns out they are located a block away from my office and I have met a bunch of great people there. So let me offer this more constructive take away. Today Ning fosters transient micro communities with only pivots to bind them. When the first class node is an app, as opposed to a profile, group or other object that centers on people, you have to construct an overlay of sorts to enable group forming across networks. In other words, object-centered sociality is currently isolated, which limits network effects. On the upside, the information architecture does a decent job handling underlying complexity, their terms of service are well done and they are leveraging standard languages instead of seeking lock-in.
One sentence suggestion: Focus less on the apps and more on the social.
Flock — Social Browser
Flock is aiming to be the browser that we always wanted. Yes, it’s more of an alpha than a beta, and after you start playing with it you want more. For Innovators, we already do all this stuff with well groomed bookmarklets and personal hacks. For Early Adopters, it’s not quite there yet.
Maybe that’s the point. It’s an open source play that is releasing early and often. If the Innovators build upon it (and from what I understand, like Greasemonkey and RonR, it’s like being a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for developers) it may fulfill the needs of a more active mainstream. Today the blogging client and favorites features are too shallow to move me off of Firefox, bookmarklets and Etco/1001. There are two almost hidden features that demonstrates synergy (cough) between modalities:
Search auto-completes with the breadcrumbs you leave behind. It’s not social search, but could be a perfect compliment to Yahoo (which points to both the Biz Dev challenge that will really enhance the product and is their core revenue stream — but also the potential exits as the browser war heats up).
When you add a favorite, if the page has a feed, you can go back to see what’s new from the source.
Aggregation may be the modality (compared to Browse, Search and Author) that could blossom, as it needs better interaction design, there is a lot of demand to bring reading and writing together and the client gives you offline capabilities. I’m starting to speculate here, but that’s the exciting thing about Flock, it makes you speculate to the point you want to engage.
One sentence suggestion: Focus on interaction between modalities and services, manage for quality and get busy with Biz Dev (I can’t believe that’s a job title again).
Wink — Social Search
Wink is a nice Social Search play that incorporates user tagging and ranking to provide recommended results and block spam. My favorite feature, of course, is the ability to create a concept around a query that is an unstructured wiki page. If the concept exists as a pagename within Wikipedia, it populates it with that page and offers related concepts based upon the content. I’m not sure that Wikipedia eats Google, but there is higher quality metadata available and a great way to augment the user experience. Wink is a small startup with lot of promise, but has the inherent challenges of vertical search play (how to attract users, is Google ad revenue enough, and the portals are not acquiring).
One sentence suggestion: Bake into blogspace.
Memeorandum — Social Aggregator
Okay, this one may not be social yet. But Memorandum is starting to solve a problem for me, where to go for a dashboard view of blogs and MSM with the ability to drill down into conversations. I’m not sure that it has the accuracy yet that Google News does for the top two stories, but this is an invaluable dimension to get me out of my subscribed echo chamber.
One sentence suggestion: Let me filter using my social network, even if it’s uploading my subscriptions.
Sphere — Blog Search
I’d agree with John Battelle that Sphere offers a good incremental improvement over existing blog search engines, but others have already extended to advanced tagging and feed features that make it more useful for bloggers. It is relatively spam free and speedy, but we will have to see how it scales.
One sentence suggestion: Differentiate beyond core search for blog reader utility.
Social verbs in online gaming are gestures that do not change the meaning of a object. When someone’s WoW Mage waves to your Paladin, you choose how object’s meaning will change because of the gesture. Language is power, just as an emoticon can get your out of trouble for telling a borderline joke.
I’m paying particular attention to verbs these days as they seem to have greater meaning than nouns, especially places (which are non-persistent; persistence is vested in objects that take actions). The reason I keep coming back to my WoW research (cough) isn’t because of the virtual world, but what I do with a group.
Beyond this gesture, the extended entry riffs on attention management, pull vs. push, marketing strategy and ownership of identity.
I’ve been meaning to blog about a simply great article in the NY Times, Meet the Life Hackers, as I am a fan of the interruption tax, but I keep getting interrupted.
When [Gloria] Mark [from UCI] crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, “far worse than I could ever have imagined.” Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.
Yet while interruptions are annoying, Mark’s study also revealed their flip side: they are often crucial to office work…
Focusing on the cost of interruption is one of the better design principles, not just for productivity applications, but all those social software apps clamoring for attention. The answer is not automation, but using the social network as a filter and pushing things down to asynchronous modalities.
My 11 minutes are almost up. Really, it’s a great read, and for now I’ll point you towards Jon Udell…
Cast aside the anti-hype rhetoric, and keep in mind it is an argument not of fact or policy, but value, and you will find Nicolas Carr’s post on the amorality of Web 2.0 has a salient point — that social software is on an inevitable march of disruption. Commoditization wrought by commons based peer production does enable the triumph of the amateur over the professional. But this does not portend the destruction of mainstream media, only it’s reformation.
Yes, the economics favor the bottom-up. This allows the creation of an alternative we have never had before. A choice. But media selection theory holds that old media simply doesn’t die. Carr’s very desire to retain professional media as his selection is one consumer’s proof point.
The underlying economics of MSM must change, and it will, through creative destruction and unfortunately the loss of many jobs in the transitionary period. Think of social media as a fork in social software, or a third party movement in politics. Unfulfilled demand is self-fullfilled by a new grassroots consituency. New and previously unrepresented constituencies are forming fast as the cost of personal publishing and group forming trend towards zero. But the mainstream gradually co-opts these experiments and movements as their own to stay in power. Today MSM is experimenting with social media in areas where the cost structure previously prevented them to access the market, such as hyperlocal media. To say that mainstream media will not leverage the tools and co-opt the culture of the amateur smacks of technological determinism.
But this is an argument about values, so it’s important to highlight what values needs to diffuse from professional to amateur. Dan Gillmor’s mission to pass on ethical standards from journalists to citizen media is case in point. The former audience is about to go through media training on a massive scale, all in all a good thing, but there is much we can do to pass on practices.
Carr provides a healthy contrarian perspective for the blogosphere. Perhaps by claiming amorality he makes us think, and is advancing our values.
Now, there’s a way around this “collective mediocrity” trap. You can abandon democracy and impose centralized control over the output. That’s one of the things that separates open-source software projects from wikis; they incorporate a rigorous quality-control filter to weed out the crap before it pollutes the product. If Wikipedia wants to achieve it’s goal of being “authoritative,” I think it will have to abandon its current structure, admit that “collective intelligence” makes a pretty buzzphrase but a poor organizational model, and define and impose some kind of hierarchical power structure. But that, of course, would raise a whole other dilemma: Is a wiki still a wiki if it isn’t a pure democracy? Can some wikipedians be more equal than others?
Open source software and Wikipedia are both driven by commons-based peer production. How they differ, and the reason software development requires rigorous quality-control, is that code has dependencies. Writing code is vertical information assembly, while contributions to a wiki is horizontal information assembly. Wikipedia does have quality control and an organiztional model, but it isn’t a feature embodied in code, it is embodied in the group. I know of no goal of being authoritative, but the group voice that emerges on a page with enough edits (not time) represents a social authority that provides choice for the media literate. Carr could create a Wikipedia page to help define what “pure democracy” is to help him answer his rhetorical question — but a wiki is just a tool, and Wikipedia is an exceptional community using it.
Keep in mind that most wiki use is behind the firewall where there is an organizational hierarchy and norms in place. There it taps into similar economics, without the great debates on social truth, and for the competitive advantage of firms.
Back to values, when you tap into the renewable resource of people in mass collaboration, allocated against the scarcity of time, driven by social signals — is this not of greater benefit for social and economic welfare than the disruption that created mainstream media in the first place? I’m glad we agree with Carr on the facts of the disruption. If we can get past the misunderstanding that there is a value difference, we could maybe focus on the right policies that will help us in years to come.
I don’t need to explain wiki to this audience. It;’s so tiny it doesn’t need explanation, but you don’t understand it until you have been there and done that. It’s you and the community that participates that makes it real, gives me perhaps too much credit. My hope is that wiki becomes a totem for a way of interacting with people. Tradition in the work world has been more top down, while wiki, standing for the Internet, is becoming a model for a new way of work. Largely driven by reduced communication costs, it changes what needs to be done and how it’s going to get done. I hope that the wiki nature, if not the wiki code, makes some contribution.
A wiki is a work sustained by a community. Often asked about difference between wiki and blog. Something tangible is ve The blogosphere is the magic that happens above blogs — the blogosphere is a community that might produce a work. Whereas a wikis a work that might produce a community. It’s all just people communicating.
One’s words are a gift to the community. For the wiki nature to take whole, you have to let go of your words. You have to be okay with that. This goes into the name, called refactoring. To collaborate on a work, one must trust. The reason the cooperation happens is we are people and it is deep in our nature to do things together. Important to make a distinction. Cooperation has a transactional nature, we agree it is a mutual good. Collaboration is deeper, we don’t know what the transaction is, or if there is one, but if I give of myself to thsi collablration, some good will come out of it. You have to trust somebody to collaborate. With wiki, you have to trust people more than you have any reason to trust them. In 1995, it was a safer environment, don’t know if I could have launched wiki today.
Refactoring makes the work supple. Word borrowed from mathematics, not going to change the meaning of the work, but change it so I can understand it better. Continuous refactoring. Putting a new feature into a program is important, but refactoring so new features can be added in the future is equally important. The ability to do things in the future is something that I consider suppleness, like clay your hands that accepts your expression. Programs and documents get brittle very quickly. Wiki imagines a more dynamic environment where we accept change, with the aid of a computer not make that dramatic, embraces hypertext which lets a document start small and grow while always being the right size. When there are two ideas in the page, split them into different pages with new names, so a third page can reference both. This is built into the web in some sense, it’s just exploited in a wiki. Phenomenal that so much as been done in a tiny text interface, writing an encyclopedia. I have to apologize as a computer scientist that we have to go through that, but also says how strong the desire is for people to work together, but I look forward to the day where we don’t have to do it just this way.
I was in favor of anonymity when I started this. Anonymity relieves refactoring friction. Have learned that people want to sign things. But try to write in a way where you don’t have to know who said it. But when someone who is not in a giving mood uses anonymity (spammers), that abuse can drive us away from anonymity. But I hope we can drive the ill-intended out without having to give up the openness. Can one trust the anonymous? If you think of trust as believing people will behave in the way they did before, it seems dependent upon identity, but it may not be imporant to know if online behavior is consistent with offline behavior. But knowing what is going to happen when you give something away is significant.
The web has been an experiment in anonymity. Conscious design of low level protocols. Lots of identity infrastructure has been created to make it an online shopping mall, which makes it unpleasant for all of us because the machinery isn’t that great.
Result: people can and do trust works produced by people they don’t know. The real world is still trying to figure out how Wikipedia works. A fantastic resource. Open source is produced by people that you can’t track down, but you can trust it in very deep ways. People can trust works by people they don’t know in this low communication cost environment.
Result: the clubby days of friendly internet are over. Lots of technical questions about to sustain something we have experienced in a more complicated environment.
Opportunity: reputation systems for the creative (non-transactional). Reputation systems are an umbrella term for where the computer keeps more track over who you are and trys to make that visible in controlled ways to other people. eBay as an outstanding example, creating a space that didn’t exist before. Again, going back to collaboration vs. cooperation. Doing this well depends upon excellent collaboraiton between the scientific community and the practitioners. Hopes this symposium becomes the center of this exchange.
Opportunity: organizational forms supporting creative work. The form we have today is a legacy from GM. Corporations aggregate and deploy capital to make things happen. Necessary back when communication was more expensive in this country. Top down hierarchies make communication work when it is expensive, I hope that wiki can be a flagship in this move in the industry to produce computer support for this kind of work and evolve organizational forms.
Eugene Kim asks about the conflict between anonymity and reputation. He calls it an opportunity because it isn’t reconciled. The first thing we think of with reputation will be wrong and has adverse impacts. Do it by watching the impact it has on people in the area of creativity. Doesn’t have to be complicated, but careful with what it reveals. If you walk in
Richard Gabriel: reputation can be attached to an individual or to something, such as words. The reputation can be attached to the words can enable anonymity. Ward says great, idea — take notes.
On moderating change in the original wiki over the past year, and the tools he created for it (the following is probably only of interest to wiki moderators)…
Wrestling with the same issue, I’ve found it’s difficult to decide what to contribute here, because topics are being commercially exhausted. We went through a period where new companies and products were passed on as news, in between well thought-out posts. The job of covering social software news started being done by others elsewhere. As we enaged deeper in out own kind of ventures, this effort was well appreciated. We also found less that was really new to report. The bar was set pretty high for the well thought-out pieces, almost introducing a formality for contribution, that in busy times couldn’t be met.
But with the whole Web 2.0 thing, it may be more important than ever.
What was unique about social software and it’s design principles was how it didn’t emphasize tools, but practice and an understanding of social context. Too much of Web 2.0 is not just made of white people, but an alphabet soup of supporting technologies that mean nothing without communities, networks and even real business models. As the market we helped found continues to froth, commentary on new business models based on power laws matters even more.
But the real reason I haven’t been contributing as much as I used to is because we forbade MMOGs in the topic, and I’ve been playing too much World of Warcraft.
When a bank replaces their Intranet with a wiki, something wonderful is bound to happen. We’ve been working with Suw Charman to document it and the first version of the case study is in. It’s a great account of the adoption pattern, user experience and mass collaboration.
Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein has adopted Socialtext at a depth and scope well beyond what most businesses have attempted. The following case study points to the near-future of simple collaboration in the enterprise.
One thing that didn’t make it into the case study in time is a practice I’m considering myself. The manager of an equity trading group has created an email filter that auto-replys to any team member with instructions to put their message on the wiki. I’ve had managers tell their team they will only read what is in the wiki before, but this truly grabbing the bull by the horns.
About all I can offer is that Web 2.0 is made of people, while keeping this blog clean of commercialization.
But let me share two neat wiki communities with you. Om Malik just put up the Broadband Wiki: We are building a “broadband profile” of the planet. What I would like to do is find contributors who are kind enough to write 250 words about the broadband situation in their country. In the spirit of Loic’s European Blogosphere, the data is coming in fast and furious.
Also check out the Startup Exchange, a renewable resource for those working with fewer resources. It’s chock-full of links to resources and includes a Startup Kit of wiki templates and best practices. Given the number of Web 2.0 products out there without businesses, it might be a good place to start — over.
This is a first for me, but I expect it will eventually become common. I received an email with the following addition to the signature block:
this email is: [ ] bloggable [x] ask first [ ] private
Now that’s a social hack that could one day be replaced by a technical hack. Email messages could have “bloggable” as a mime-type for example, and forwarding to a blog client would set up an entry. Lacking that mime-type, you’d have to resort to cut and paste, as now…
I post this here not for sake of memetic vanity, but to make a point. The reason we are building Web 2.0 is because we were not able to build Email 2.0. The first web didn’t support our social needs, so we used email for everything. But we couldn’t really hack it. Most social software has by now adapted to email, but email could never have adapted to it.
I'm at Our Social World in Cambridge, UK today and taking notes here. But wanted to point out a really interesting Enterprise Social Software project that Headshift launched today:
Patient Opinion is all about enabling patients to share their experiences of health care, and by doing so help other patients — and perhaps even change the NHS. As well as allowing everyone to see what patients are saying about their services, it also offers a way to feed the experience of patients back to the NHS so that their insights and ideas can be put to good use.
They leverage structured calls on a new NHS web service for data about health service providers, then let people tag and blog about their experience with them. What a wonderful feedback loop.
I'm completely stoked to share the news that longtime M2M contributor Seb Paquet has joined Socialtext. I've wanted to bring him on board since we started the company and was pleasantly suprised to find us at the top of the list he put out when he announced on his blog that he was looking for something new.
Let me use this as an excuse to reintroduce you to Seb. Prior to coming on board, Seb was an Associate Research Officer at the National Research Council of Canada, where he worked on innovative uses of social software, in particular in collaborative learning and knowledge management. Over the past several years, Seb has been contributing insightful articles and talks about those topics in English and French and has been running blogs in bothlanguages. He will help us reach out to new customers and pitch into enhancing the experience and value of our software.
Yet another great person hired by blog. Welcome aboard, and see you at Wiki Wednesday, Seb!
