Clumpy and Tangled Social Graphs Are Social App Sweet Spot

Originally Clumpy and Tangled Social Graphs Are Social App Sweet Spot, Quora, 2012, answering “Instant Messaging (IM): What are the best seed users for a chat app?“

Apart from college students and tech enthusiasts, which type of users are likely to retain and spread a chat app in a viral way? Also, how and where can we get the attention of these users?

Ankush Saxena

You’re really asking about what type of social graph works best to seed your new realtime network.

What social graph attributes are attractive?

1. Already big, lively. Piggyback.
2. Chatty context. Reasons to talk often, to talk again.
3. Group talk. Conversation type that’s better with 3+ people.
4. Switchworthy experiences. Design for delight.
5. Clumpy social graphs. Thousands of small clusters of people.
6. Tangled social graphs. Lots of weak ties.

First off, you want the social graph that already exists. You don’t want to solve the problems of discovery and introductions. You want to leverage existing relationships if at all possible. So that means you want a social graph someone else already cultivated. That could mean something generic like Facebook, something with more cultural context like LinkedIn, or something very tightly focused like the several hundred Foresight Institute Senior Associate members (molecular manufacturing professionals, investors and champions) who talk about nanotechnology and the technological singularity.

Next, find a specific context that gives people a reason to talk frequently. I have thousands of contacts across hundreds of services. Nearly all of them communicate one-to-one with me only once or twice a year, if that. You’ll want interactions that give people reasons to talk together in bursts, and then come back quickly for new bursts. Sports are a great example; you have a season of events that attract attention. Or maybe your trigger is a life event like a pregnancy (on week 17…) or starting dialysis (want to watch a video together?) or joining a clan.

None of these give you virality. For growth you need two other elements: a type of conversation that’s better with more than two people in it and an experience worthy of dragging friends into your service from other networks. In a sports context, this might be seeing overseas futbol matches from home in the middle of the night but with a ‘bleacher’ full of friends to talk about the game, the players, and beer. Online teams for Warcraft and the other Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games need pre-, post-, and in-game voice chat; again, >2 people and worthy of drawing fellow gamers into the service.

Last, seek social graphs that are clumpy and tangled.

Clumpy social networks are full of existing little clusters of people. Meetup is a great example of a social graph organized around clumps that are both topical and local. LinkedIn groups and Facebook pages are attempts to add clumpiness to otherwise flat networks. If you can find social graphs with pre-existing groups of people, where the group formation energy has already been invested for you, you have a much better shot at achieving the interactions that will make your chat product successful.

Tangled social graphs connect people and clumps across a wider range of personal/social attributes. Tangled networks avoid saturating a small, isolated part of a network just to have word of mouth die.

This is a little abstract but I hope you find it useful.

Uber and the Reverse Disneyworld

In economics, we talk of #externalities, especially where you produce benefits that your business can’t capture.

Classic example: Disneyland in California was rapidly surrounded by hotels, restaurants, and competing attractions benefiting from Disney’s visitors. Disney didn’t capture “rents” from all the businesses riding on its mousetails.

Disney responded by buying up tracts of land around Disneyworld; private property the size of San Francisco. Disney controls and profits from nearly everything in Disneyworld’s vicinity.

But you can do the opposite of recovering externalized revenue.

Many powerhouses in the gig economy do. Rent-a-driver services like Uber and Lyft, delivery services like Deliveroo, rent-a-person services like TaskRabbit.

Instead of capturing external benefits they generate for others, they push out their costs.

Mostly, they push those costs onto their workforce.

• They push capital costs onto the workforce. Instead of the company providing cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, housecleaning tools, safety gear, the worker pays.
• Instead of the company paying big operating costs like fuel and insurance, the worker pays.
• Most stores hire enough staff to buffer variation in demand, to keep the store open even when nobody’s shopping. Instead, the gig economy businesses push demand variability risks onto their workers. Why pay wages for quiet times? Workers aren’t guaranteed weekly hours and salaries. So their wages fluctuate shift by shift, week to week.
• Worker income is often tied to piecework bonuses and tips, again shifting demand risk from the company to the worker.

The gig economy operators say they are transparent about costs so workers can make informed choices.

They argue they operate in a free and open labor market.

But there are problems with this.

• Individuals don’t have the buying power of a corporation.
  • So insurance for driving, liability, health, life, parenting, and disability are much more expensive.
• Individuals don’t have the collective bargaining power of an employed workforce.
  • So while they can beg, they can’t negotiate for better working conditions.
• Individuals don’t have access to relatively cheap capital funds.
  • So workers have to save and borrow at consumer rates for transportation and tools.
• Individuals have limited ability to buffer dramatic schedule shifts and compensation gaps.
  • So when workers absorb the company’s demand variability without pay, workers are hurt short term in their ability to fill those hours with other income and suffer long-term financial damage.
• Individuals don’t have the same accounting and IT infrastructure as the gigcos.
  • So workers don’t have a full picture of their real costs or the ability to identify ways to lower them.

With these costs and risks falling on workers, this makes them vulnerable. Their living and life are precarious.

Which leads us to precarity (for their situation) and the precariat (for their economic and political class).

---

Back to externalities for a moment.

Sometimes pushing costs outside of your firm harms society.

Air pollution in big cities is one example. Households and businesses pollute everyone’s air without specific incentives.

The air is a common resource, important to everyone. So it made sense to use government power to change polluting behavior.

• In cities and states around the world, rules limit and penalize industrial waste.
• Fees and taxes incent better behavior. They make higher-polluting choices in cars, ships, heating, and architecture more expensive than less-polluting ones.
• Egregious pollution is criminal, resulting in businesses closed and executives jailed.
• And scientists measure everyday results so everyone can see our collective progress.

So the Los Angeles basin, home to Disneyland, once a world leader in smog death and injury, is once again safe to breathe and beautiful.

Two other examples of societal harm from pushing costs outside the firm:

• Drug dealers not responsible for the costs of sickness caused by their narcotics.
• Employers paying less than a living wage not responsible for workforces drawing too heavily on poverty safety-nets.

---

Action?

Let’s end our talk of the gig economy and the precariat by looking at next steps. How can society respond to companies shifting unwanted costs to their workforce?

• Labor actions are quick. Strikes and boycotts, informational pamphleteering, organizing trade associations and unions.
• Litigation. Suing gigcos to have gig workers receive the same protections and benefits as employees. Suing governments to change the laws.
• Fees and taxes. Shifting some of those costs and risks back to gigcos.
• Universal income. Taking risk off the shoulders of the very bottom of the workforce.
• Accounting. Insist gigcos measure and report the costs and risks they pass to their workers. Same for risks. And do it accurately, publicly, consistently, frequently. And aggregate teh results so all of society can track progress.

Sadly, we don’t seem to have regional or national government agencies that know, understand, and are committed to fix these problems. Same for most existing organized labor orgs. Or political parties. Or news media. Or good government watchdogs. Which stakeholders will pull the trigger first?

“Have you organized a diverse and distributed group of people and moved them to action?”

Code for America asked me a few questions. I thought I’d blog them.

What’s your experience working in or with government?

• My first public sector job was in my junior high school’s stationery store.
• I had a high school internship with the State of California’s Wilmington oil field engineering team.
• I slung books for the Long Beach public library.
• I directed traffic for the City of Long Beach’s convention center.
• I issued and maintained gear in the physics lab at Cal State Long Beach.
• I managed a team for the Naval Supply System Center in Oakland as a GS-8 civilian operations research analyst, assuring fissile material and toilet paper continued to flow to the fleet through new logistics systems. At 19.
• I was a business development analyst for Bechtel National, successfully finding, researching and drafting responses for billion dollar chemical and civil engineering project requests-for-proposal including the removal of nuclear waste from Soviet-era Siberian missile silos.

Can you communicate?

I’ve been a communicator and storyteller.

• Sang in my high school musical, competed on the school speech team, published poetry.
• First civic op-ed published in a major newspaper as a college freshman.
• Designed the U.S. Navy’s community relations program for a major base closing while still in school.
• Sold computers, managed sales people, developed curriculum for b2b salespeople (in case you are interested in persuasive communication).
• Started blogging in 1998 and was one of the metabloggers who defined social media through the mid-2000s.
• I’ve spoken at academic and tech industry conferences.
• Writer and Managing Editor of a Skype-focused group blog from 2005-2011.
• Slideshare featured several of my presentations on their front page.
• Quora named me a Top Writer for 2013 and 2014 and published my work in Forbes.

Can you organize?

I’ve been an advocate for privacy and personal data rights.

• I was a director of the DataPortability Project where we defined the basic right to take your data with you and persuaded some of the largest Internet firms (Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and others) as a core practice.

• I was a director for the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium where we helped small firms and NGOs build personal control over personal data into their apps and business models through collaboration, publishing, and strategy services.
• I served on Oakland’s Domain Awareness Center citizen committee with colleagues from the ACLU, EFF and Oakland Privacy Working Group, for 18 months, designing a privacy architecture civic technology.

How about Code for America brigade life?

I’ve been a member of the OpenOakland brigade for years. Along the way:

• I’ve coached teams and been a member of several
• I’m a member of the Executive Team, co-leading the Marketing Director role
• I ended a thriving project and partnership when it didn’t meet our values
• I led CityCamp sessions
• I co-wrote the job descriptions for the OpenOakland leadership team
• I instituted many of our core practices including:
  • a rework of our hack night process,
  • a focus on optimizing the volunteer experience,
  • more use of email and social media to engage our publics,
  • project “stand up” status blogging, and
  • proposed product portfolio metrics and annual strategic objectives.

I co-created OpenCalifornia (now the California Civic Laboratory). CCL’s an alliance of local brigades to work on common applications and problems, especially those where we have more impact together. We’re pioneering ways for brigades to collaborate remotely between hack nights and to blend distance and in-person work. Our first product, the multicity Open Disclosure California, goes live this fall.

Have you organized a diverse and/or distributed group of people and moved them to action?

The long story: My East Bay Kerry organizing experience.

What we did:

• 18 months before the 2004 presidential election, ten of us met in a Berkeley café to organize East Bay Kerry. With no money, no official sanction, and a simple organization design and free online tools, we grew (between 30-35% each month) to 5000 full time volunteers from Alameda and Contra Costa counties for the month before election day. That’s more than 3.7 million person hours over the campaign (1 million person-hours in that last month).
• We made one million phone calls to swing states.
• We set up professional service bureaus of lawyers, geeks, media relations pros, technologists, and creatives supporting field offices in swing states.
• We hosted debates and stump speeches. We trained and operated a speakers bureau.
• Despite not being a recognized “political club,” we elected many delegates to the national convention.
• We sent swarms of people to get out the vote in Reno and in other swing territories.
• We registered and turned out more Democratic voters in our two counties than in the history of California and the party.

How? Some of our hacks:

• We pioneered using the then-new Meetup.com to recruit and organize events each week.
• We designed an intake experience (often in cafés) where people told their stories of why they wanted change in America, connecting them to each other and reaffirming their sense of purpose. We:
  • Oriented them to the organization so they had a sense of how they fit in
  • Put everyone to work right away so they’d feel a sense of accomplishment and proof that this was a way to get things done
  • Connected them with a team so they belonged and would have people to connect with as the campaign continued.
• When teams got too big, they split up, keeping each team personal and nimble.
• We adopted medicine’s “watch one / do one / teach one” practice for moving people rapidly from newbies to leadership.
• We used blogs, mailing lists, and drupal sites to communicate.
• We tried to be gracious to volunteers for other candidates, inviting them to meet with us before and after the primary election, successfully bringing other cadres and communities into ours without quashing their spirit and ambition.

We learned:

• The Edge. Decentralized authority can work at scale.
• Faith. Commonality of purpose is a prerequisite. It lets volunteers sacrifice their time and egos to work together.
• Every volunteer matters. The volunteer is “the customer.”  Design everything so it gives the volunteer satisfaction and enjoyment and they’ll come back for more and bring their friends.
• Hide the Administrivia. Some volunteers thrive on admin work; sequester it so everyone else can enjoy their work. This is a special case of…
• Tailor work to the person. Exploit their skills, talents, and enthusiasms. This means intake is often about helping them find where they can be of service.
• Steal from work culture. We helped our volunteers solve our campaign problems using what they brought with them and the ways they already knew to get things done.
• Scale needs a managed social graph. We limited cross-talk so teams could focus. We set up “ambassadors” to manage communication between our organization and the many others.
• Not every volunteer matters. We walked away from people without Internet access and mobile phones: our connective glue. We walked away from people who wanted to backseat debate public policy instead of trying to help our candidate win the election.
• Seek Forgiveness. Bold action affirms every volunteer’s power to initiate. New teams, new projects, new approaches were tried at the edge. Successes were spread within the organization and to others.
• Keep processes and communication channels simple. Every time we tried something complex, it broke down.
• Onboarding. Intake was our strongest tool. It was a rite of passage. It modeled their next steps. It showed how to be a friendly, warm, inclusive leader. It introduced them to new friends and comrades. It turned them from potential volunteers into productive contributors and future evangelists.

I’m ready for something even more challenging.

What is the future of email as far as business communication is concerned?

Answer by Phil Wolff:

Let's start from what computing and communications in general will be like in 20 or 30 years. I assume they'll be:

• more pervasive (seamless connectivity, internet of things, etc.),
• more wearable or built-in (contacts, cochlear implants, dermal displays, etc.),
• and we'll have new services to help us bring that universe from overwhelm to whelm.

One more assumption: Natural Language Processing will completely blur the lines between spoken and written language, and even which language (Hindi,  Pirate, American Sign Language) you use. So you'll be able to choose how you want to communicate.

So, in that hypothetical future, email is part and parcel of the whole mix of conversational media. Conversational media have several basic events:

• discovery,
• conversation initiation,
• consumption (reading, listening, watching, feeling, smelling, haptic senses), and
• expression (speaking, drawing, singing, writing, gesturing, etc.).

Discovery. How do you find who to talk to? In the 2010s, work-persona directories (LinkedIn (website)) and enterprise discovery services help find the person or group of people to contact for a given purpose. Since we'll be awash in personal data long before 2040, we'll have more than "white pages", "yellow pages", or "social networks" to find people. People Match systems, serendipity services, topic networks, reputation networks like Connect.me, tribal event networks like Meetup (company), and location services will help you discover the right person to work with or talk to at the right time.

Initiation. In thirty years your software agent/proxy/broker will field offers of new conversation before they reach you. Think spam filter meets alerting service meets professional assistant. Services will compete on how well they interact with you, how accurately their filters reflect your preferences for interruption and notification, and how well they negotiate a mutually agreeable blend of time and media. These "inboxes" will have a wealth of data to use to calculate whether, when, and how to notify you or to start a conversation: social proximity (you're both friends of your ex-husband), prior interactions with you and others, affiliations (works for x, belong to y) and endorsements (your mentor says you should take this call), verification of identity, commercial offers (will pay 元10 for nine minutes in the next hour or a Starbucks cup of coffee), alternative ways to spend your time (you're in line for a concert), your interest in the subject, whether you're on company/personal/family time, etc. In 2013, Facebook decides which updates of thousands from those you trust fit into the fewer than 100 updates the average person reads in a day; in 2040 you'll have more control of what shows up in your inbox.

[Side bet: Microsoft or Google will be better than you at choosing which 'inbox' items are the most interesting to you by 2020 based on user satisfaction tests.]

Consumption. One of the things people like about Skype is it's easy to throttle up and down a ladder of intimacy. At the low end are slow-changing mood messages and presence indicators. IM lets you throttle up from asynchronous messaging to live back-and-forth chats. When that's not enough you can add voice. And when you need to see faces and body language, you move up to video. In thirty years we'll have more UI presentation methods to choose from like holographic avatars or Rapid serial visual presentation or having your tweets sung to you in the style of Taylor Swift. You'll have new metaphors and design surfaces for consuming asynchronous conversation. And we'll find it smooth to rapidly switch among any media and any visualization paradigm.

Expression. Thirty years' ago in the early 1980s we didn't have Internet, smartphones, electric cars, free video conferencing, private spacecraft or nanotechnology. We're now in the 1980s of 2040, the subject of costume dramas and kids ironically 3D Printing our fashions. By 2040 we should have at least a few more billion people connected to cyberspace, some very intimately. The range of available connectivity, devices, and media will continue to diverge with haves and have-nots.

When talking human-to-human you'll be able to toss original content – data from what you say or perform – into the conversation flow. The channel should take care of converting it from how you choose to express yourself (longhand, typing, talking, foxtrot) into forms preferred or needed by the other other person; consider this automation of the interpreter relay services provided for the visually impaired or the deaf on phones today.

Your channel will let you play "live streaming producer" on your part of the conversation, feeding media objects into the conversation as you like. You'll even be able to merge and fork live threads/streams (think git for live conferences).

You'll also have some control or influence about other attributes of your conversation. Who has the right to share the record of this conversation? How much? With whom? Can records of this conversation be destroyed in real time the way some email services delete email after expiry? Can we have this conversation permanently archived in public? How much anonymity or pseudonymity will you accept?

Toasters and insulin pumps. But email is not solely the province of people. We've been hooking up machines to email for decades. By 2040 we'll have trillions of sensors and devices engaging in conversation with people and each other. Notifications from our bodies (Quantified Self), our things, and our places will be in our Personal Clouds. Our inboxen will test Inquiries from stranger devices just like inquiries from strange people: Is this notification from the bus you're riding worth your attention now? If so, what's the best context and form for engaging with it given you're in a space where it's impolite to talk and you're using your hands to hang on for dear life? Some conversations just don't need words, after all. You may just need to see a chart or hear a message; you may just need to grunt or wave in response. Remember to buy a premium personality for your pacemaker: for an extra two percent, the Bollywood star of your choice will be its living avatar.

Personal vs. Work. Do you remember when you had separate email accounts for each job, for your personal life, from your school, and for volunteer gig? Umpteen mailboxes? Whilst it keeps your peas from touching your potatoes and your boss from talking with your mistress, the actual act of juggling mutliple accounts is painful. You'll have one queue, one spew of inbound offers to talk from every part of your life. You may offer different faces/handles/personas for each context the way you hand out personal and business email addresses now, but your single, seemingly self-aware "inbox" will let you wear the appropriate mask and project the appropriate identity for each. New legal constructs, like The Limited Liability Persona, will support this.

Work vs. Talk. You asked specifically about email for business. Email and other electronic media are part of how labor markets work today and how workers get things done together. So let's talk about the Future of Work for a moment. Thirty years from now, on the other side of wars, famines, depressions, disruptions, and alien invasions, many elements of work will be the same: many of us will rent our time to people or organizations that will pay us. But expect much of that work, to be done with, if not through, your communication channels. There will be no need to have separate toolkits for conversation vs. metawork (work about work, like scheduling, to-do lists, project management, budgeting, etc.) vs. collaboration. Context providers will let you "skin" your full-body-browser to add the features that blend work, metawork and conversation together. Think of it as Bring Your Own Inbox/Phone/Reality. So whether you're sortieing with your squad for work, tweaking your bots for fun, or negotiating a contract for your family, you'll use the same conversational media.

Somewhere in 2040, email as we know it in 2012 will continue to flow. But we'll be thinking about "email" then the way we think about teletype consoles and punch cards now: antiques that paved the way.

What is the future of email as far as business communication is concerned?

Ten Ways ‘Customer’ is the wrong frame for #CustomerCommons

Some founders of the Customer Commons have an emotional investment in the use of the word “Customer.” I believe we can do better.

Here’s why we should try.

Customer is the wrong frame, invoking the wrong preconceptions.

‘Customer’ is akin to ‘consumer’: weak, disadvantaged, requiring protection. The person behind the counter has power, the customer lines up with all the other customers waiting their turn. We should invoke strength and power. ‘Warrior Commons’ might be overstepping but that’s the right direction.

A ‘Customer’ is merely a node in a network; the real juice is in the connections among the nodes (relationships) and the topology of the network (clusters, intermediaries, proximity, flexibility). Our true focus has been on how to help people use the network to their advantage. If this were television, ‘customer’ is like a passive ‘viewer’ in the creative YouTube and Ustream era.

‘Customers’ can only buy/not-buy. We’re creating a world where people’s relationships give them more power and more active choices like collective action, bargaining, trading non-cash behavior for non-cash benefits.

 

‘Customer’ limits relationships to the lifespan of commerce. Our relationships are multilayered, longer.

‘Customer’ says commerce, cash, and money is the measure of a relationship. That is only true sometimes. For example…

• ‘Customer’ ignores Person-to-Person relationships. Children aren’t their parent’s customers.
• ‘Customer’ misses government-citizen relationships. Citizens aren’t customers.
• ‘Customer’ leaves out student-teacher-school relationships. Students aren’t customers. Employees aren’t customers.
• I don’t want to use tools built for ‘Customer’ to flirt. I’m a man, not a wallet.
• ‘Customer’ excludes NGOs. I am not my congregation’s customer.

Finally, this is not how I want to identify with our project.

‘Customer’ is the slave name given to people by marketers and the people who pay them.

I reject it.

So what is the path forward?

The relationship.

The vector, not the node. Interpersonal relationships and person-to-institution relationships, perhaps even institution-to-institution relationships (Persona LLC, anyone?).

Relationship Commons.

Connection Commons.

Interaction Commons.

Engagement Commons.

Just focus on the ties connecting people and we should be great.

My two cents.

PresenceNext: Authorization by Negotiation, central to Presence 2.0

Ivar Ekman points out Google‘s Jaiku poses a privacy risk.

Ahem. That’s the point of disclosure.

Presence: Dimensions of Disclosure Influence

1. Recipient
2. Data
3. Social Context
4. Time Value
5. Licensing

And presence.

Presence is the approved radiation of your latest information.

Presence authorization is not a binary disclosure to Everyone or Nobody.

Authorization can be, must be, tailored to the recipient.

Four dimensions of influence:

1. You might base disclosure on attributes of the recipient.

• Groups they belong to (family, co-workers, people I hate),
• age (adults-only data),
• location,
• citizenship,
• security clearance,
• social proximity,
• relationship history (people you’ve talked/chatted/met with in the last year).

Jaiku and facebook share presence based on group affiliation and social connection.

2. Perhaps authorization is more closely tied to which data you share. Some people share their calendar. Do you share just your availability? Your location at a given time? What you’ll be doing? With whom?

3. Social context frames the authorizing decision. Perhaps you don’t share your political life at work. Or your fantasy blog with your family.

4. Time and your Sense of Now change the value of information. Do seconds matter? Minutes? Hours? Some information is better shared late. Perhaps you enjoy sharing the restaurants you visit, but not while you are there. Other information loses value quickly: minute-to-minute election day results, for example.

5. Licensing sets terms of use. Perhaps you agree not to share this data. Or to only share it under certain conditions.

The blend informs disclosure. Of what you share with whom, in each context and precisely when must inform disclosure. You should be able to share your latest blonde jokes only with your blonde friends (data and hair color of the recipient).

Presence is subscribed to, actively requested, not only available for public scraping.

Presence subscription calls for subscribers to disclose too.

So Authorization looks like Negotiation…

“I want to subscribe to information about you.”

“Are you representing a human?”

“Yes, here are my credentials.”

“Ah, looks like you are on my client’s friend list. Here’s a list of feeds you’re eligible for.”

“Jokes! Cool. Yes, I would like to see your joke stream.”

“I need more information. Have you ever tripped over a wireless phone?”

“Yes, I am a blonde.”

“Great. You agree to only share these with other blondes?

“On my blonde honor.”

“You should be able to see the blonde jokes stream now.”

Since Dave Winer and Netscape first promoted RSS in 1997, syndication meant being public, sharing your content with Google.

Skype, Jaiku, and all presence providers must rethink their

tags: <!– –>skype skypejournal presencenext presence context socialcontext disclosure rich presence

notes – etel08 proposal

Voice, Presence and the Social Software Stack – Interop for the Facebook age (for architects and geeks)

 

Managing Editor, Skype Journal

Reef9 Media Corporation

A childhood geek, Phil used Rand computers in 1968, spent a summer coding a Univac in 1972, graduated from high school in 1976, wrote microcode in 1977, etched circuit boards in 1977,

 

Phil Wolff is a technology futurist and product strategist, covering Skype and live collaboration since 2003 for Skype Journal. Phil is an alumnus of Gateway, Compaq, Bechtel National, LSI Logic and was VP for strategy and technology for Adecco SA, a global 500 firm. Phil enjoys cinema and curling.

Voice, Presence and the Social Software Stack

architects and geeks, and business strategists

Let’s talk about “Interop for the Facebook age.” The Social Software Stack brings structure to thinking about how social networks, live communication, and messaging interoperate. (insert overview of the stack here) One layer in the stack is Presence, our subject for today.

Presence is only starting to change now after being frozen for 40 years. Before we get into presence architecture, let’s explore metaphors for presence, what presence means, and what presence does. (insert exploration here)

CIA.vc: presence triggering conversation

CIA.vc blends automated updates from software development workflow with live human status updates. The system messages come from “checking out” and “checking in” your work from an online code repository. The live talk is on IRC – internet relay chat. The bot posts trigger human observations, feedback, interaction.

     <CIA-5>  jupiter * r9203 xchat-gnome/buildsystem.diff:
              update for new plugins
     <staz_>  what are the new plugins?
<purple_cow>  nothing functional yet
<purple_cow>  working on 308765 and 320477
     <staz_>  ok
     <staz_>  thanks

Archived to web, the live stream becomes history: an organized, searchable narrative of a project’s story.

While designed for the open source coding community, this model fits many workplaces. There’s an art to picking which system messages are most meaningful, create the best conversational triggers, and occur infrequently so they don’t turn into spam.

Transformers on Immigration Reform [spoilers]

Transformers is a great summer action flick. I saw it Monday night at a sold out 11pm showing. Its US immigration policy subtext is not so subtle. [spoilers]

— Part 1 – The Evil Alien Invasion —

Aliens show up.

No passport. No visa. No border patrol. Just falling from the sky. 

Bad aliens that kill people, attacking American soldiers, breaching security. They are here to destroy our lives.

They look strange. They hide among us, online and off, often in plain site. Walking down the road, is that a car or a killer? A Nokia N93 or a fire spitting monster?

Easy movie making: a few minutes of slithering, exploding violence set up the first wave of aliens as bad guys. Prime the xenophobic pump.

— Part 2 – The Nice Aliens —

Good aliens show up. Only a handful.

You get to know them as people, as individuals. They wear bright colors, apologize for stepping on the grass, exercise restraint, crack jokes. Some have trouble speaking English but connect through pop culture. They wear all-American GM trademarks.

They help our hero get the girl.

And these good aliens serve with the U.S. Army, earning the right to stay when the war is over.

Harder movie making: at least half the film spent defining characters, relationships, showing the humanity behind alien masks.

— Part 3 – Humans Respond —

At first all aliens look alike, are treated as bad guys. We see good guys captured, threatened, held without warrant, and tortured.

Only when humans personally intervene, risking their freedom for alien friends, are the good aliens freed to fight the bad aliens.

Even then, the good aliens are forced to hide their true natures, to stay in American costume, to assimilate.

— Part 4 – Themes —

Explicit Good fighting Explicit Evil. (The movie’s marketing emphasis.)

Appearances can be deceiving.

Xenophobia is easy. Compassion is difficult.

Resolving the tension between who we really are and how we portray ourselves is worthwhile.

You need a car to win a girl’s heart.  

— This Transformer Blog Post Sponsored By —

Good guy product placement: eBay, GM cars (Chevy, Camaro, Pontiac Solstice, Shelby GT), Motorola, The Strokes, My Little Pony, Lockheed (F-22, F-117 stealth fighter, C-130 gunship), Xbox-360, Sirius radio, Pepsi, Apple computers and cinema displays, Burger King, Panasonic, Furby, Hostess Ding Dongs. 

Bad guy product placement: eBay, Nokia, F-22, Mountain Dew soda, Saleen cop car (“To punish and enslave”).

skype politics immigration xenophobia cars movies transformers eBay GM Chevy Camaro Pontiac Solstice Shelby GT Motorola The Strokes My Little Pony Lockheed F-22 F-117 stealth fighter C-130 gunship xbox xbox360 sirius Sirius radio Pepsi Apple cinema display Burger King Panasonic Furby Hostess Ding Dongs Autobots Optimus Prime Bumblebee Jazz Ratchet Ironhide Decepticons Megatron Starscream Brawl Bonecrusher Barricade Scorponok Frenzy Blackout Nokia N90 Mountain Dew Saleen

Fed’s want presence systems

I found a link to this article in Network World on Slashdot today. It is interesting reading because if the feds want something they will soft regulate it into existance. What does soft regulation mean? Well for IPv6 they are mandating that devices being bought by the Defense Department all be IPv6 forcing the major vendors to put it into their stacks.

The interest in presence technologies seems to be new, given that few federal agencies have deployed the technology. Less than half of survey respondents – 44% – said they use these systems, but another 28% said they plan to roll it out over the next 18 to 24 months. The remaining 28% of respondents have no plans to use the technology….

The interest in presence technologies seems to fit with other survey findings that point to increased use of mobile phones, BlackBerries and other PDAs. The survey found that 83% of respondents use PDAs and 73% use wireless laptops.

A smaller share of federal network managers use instant messaging – only 46% – and soft phones only 21%. Both of these technologies often come bundled with presence features.

“A lot of the mobile devices used by first responders and warfighters support presence,” Burns says. “This finding is a recognition that you can offer new capabilities that will directly address the mission of the agency.”

Toward a River of TwitterGrams: my buddy list’s radio station

TwitterGrams distribute short and small audio clips via twitter. 30 seconds to a minute with a few characters of text.

As twitter
is to
blogging,

TwitterGrams
are to
podcasting.

This is another stupid idea by Dave Winer. Dave’s other stupid ideas included podcasting, RSS syndication and aggregation, hosted content management, WYSIWYG blogging authoring, river style news readers, and other stuff that’s changed my life and how the world communicates. I don’t know if I can handle another revolution this month.

Maybe I could learn to love a River of TwitterGrams. A stream of aggregated short audio and video clips. Updated throughout the day. Embrace Continuous Partial Attention and ignore the Interruption 2.0 Manifesto.

I don’t understand a few things about Dave’s implementation of this.

• Why do I need to push the post through an intermediate service?
• Why not just post to twitter directly and ping a server with metadata? The publish-and-ping architecture works now for blogs, podcasts, and vlogs.
• Why limit update intervals? Wouldn’t this inhibit those who create front ends for your service? I could see wordpress.com offering authors the chance to cross post to twitter and TwitterGram. So one “publisher” may distribute hundreds of TGs per minute.
• Why force mp3 as the only medium and format? Why not allow any kind of small payload? Video, playable games, playlists.
• Since you’re building a service that pushes TGs out to one microblogging service, why not let the API include a list of destinations? So one post/ping to you lets my TG go to jaiku, facebook and other selected services?

Just for fun I recorded The Jabberwocky (slightly over Dave’s 200k limit) and a short explanation of the Internet Radio Day Of Silence.

tagged: presence presencenext davewiner twittergram twitter twits architecture

Invitation to Supernova Open Space activity: Presence Theater Presents Role Plays: Acting Out the Past and Future of Presence

For the Supernova 2007 Open Space Day.

Casting call: Actors, Directors, Gatekeepers, Context Brokers, Agents, Calendar Keepers, Sensor Nets, Operators.

My notion: what might we learn about “presence” if we role play four scenarios?

Scene 1. The DND Button

Scene 2. Calling Oprah Winfrey

Scene 3. The Job Offer

Scene 4. Walking Down The Street

I’m hoping the roles and interactions, and some of the metaphors might be clearer afterward. Or at least the questions might be more focused.

So far I see five roles emerging (this is wrong but it’s easier to revise than start from scratch).

1. Presence generators and publishers.

2. Aggregators

3. Instigator agent

4. Gatekeeper

5. Context provider

There may also be a defined role for raw data provider or sensor network.

 

tags: presence presencenext supernova supernova2007 roles roleplaying improv play

Deconstructing Presence – February slides

tags: aggregation digital digitalid fame identity im opencallerid openid presence reef9 skype syndication

Meeting notes 17 June 2007

Phil Wolff, Kaliya Hamlin – Barnes and Noble, Jack London Square – Raw notes

 

Put together a list of potential orgs/people to invite

• Categories – not inclusive

• Academe

• danah boyd

Metaverse

Telecom

Cisco

• Lee Dryburgh

Portal Providers

• Microsoft

• Dare Obasanjo

Other

• Aaron from mindgarden

Users / use case presenters

non-profit, public sectors

 

Preparation package / prework

• Questionnaire – your views
• brief bios
• “accelerated butt sniffing”

 

Synching with other presence events

• Possible, but deferred

 

Sponsorship

• tied to tangibles, like the report, the meals, venue 

 

Designing the conversation

• questions that move conversations forward, appreciative inquiry (AI)
• can we use next generation presence in planning and conducting this conference

 

Venue Hunting

• Sensibility of a retreat
• Tech facilities

 

Timeline

1. Now
2. Pre-invite – 10 people
   • Anchor tenants, people that draw other people
3. Invite – 30 people
• Fill out form – ask good questions
• If I could present, what would i present on?
• Have you presented on this?
• Link to slides or video or pdf
4. Rite of Passage for non-invitees: Essay, why you should come, what you’ll contribute.
5. Confirmation
6. Before You Come
• Things we need. e.g. projectors, video cameras
• decks for ppt karaoke
7. Welcome
8. The Event

 

Miscellaneous to do

• Phil – get on Gordon Cook’s list
• Phil – see “Anthropology of IM” article in The Economist
• Site – before
  • write an About This Event page
  • write Event Deliverables
• Site – for the event
  • PresenceNext community – continuing the conversations
    • bio/personal pages
    • company/org pages
    • listservs
    • refer a friend
    • wiki
    • blog aggregator
    • event registration
    • sponsors
    • membership

tags: presencenext events planning

PresenceNext logo

Orange, like RSS.

A person’s head radiates out.

Typeface: Calibri.

Hugely derivative.

Makes a point, though.

tags: logo brand presencenext marketing

The Marx Brothers on Authentication

From Animal Crackers (1930), where Captain Spaulding is introduced to a musician at a party.

Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding: Say, I used to know a fellow looked exactly like you, by the name of Emmanuel Raveli: Are you his brother?
Signor Emanuel Ravelli: I am Emmanuel Raveli.
Spaulding: You are Emmanuel Raveli?
Ravelli: I am Emmanuel Raveli.
Spaulding: Well, no wonder you look like him. But I still insist, there is a resemblance.
Ravelli: Ha, ha, ha. He thinks I look alike.
Spaulding: Well if you do, it’s a tough break for both of you.