Chris Saad - Co-Founder of APML.org, DataPortability.org, Co-Author of Synapticweb.org. Currently VP Strategy @ Echo
// February 15th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Attention, Dataportability, Media, Technology
Over on EdgeTheory Conversations Louis Gray and I discuss Buzz and Google’s missed opportunity to be a pure aggregator.
// February 9th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Analysis, Attention, Dataportability, Media, Technology, synapticweb
FriendFeed was dead, now it is re-born as Google Buzz.
I’ve not been able to try the product yet, but philosophically and architecturally it seems superior to FriendFeed.
Here are my observations so far:
Buzz is better than FriendFeed because Google is treating it as a consumption tool rather than a destination site (by placing it in Gmail rather than hosting it on a public page). FriendFeed should have always been treated this way. Some people got confused and started hosting public discussions on FriendFeed.
That being said, though, I’ve long said that news and sharing is not the same as an email inbox and those sorts of items should not be ‘marked as read’ but rather stream by in an ambient way.
While Buzz is in fact a stream, it is its own tab that you have to focus on rather than a sidebar you can ignore (at least as far as I can tell right now).
The inevitable question of ‘How does this affect Echo‘ has already come up on Twitter. Like FriendFeed before it, Buzz generates siloed conversations that do not get hosted at the source.
So, the publisher spends the time and money to create the content and Buzz/Google get the engagement/monetization inside Gmail.
For some reason, all these aggregators think that they need to create content to be of value. I disagree. I long for a pure aggregator that does not generate any of its own content such as comments, likes, shares etc.
That being said, however, the more places we have to engage with content the more reasons there are for Echo to exist so that publishers can re-assemble all that conversation and engagement back on their sites.
Note that they don’t have a ‘Follow’ button – it’s using synaptic connections to determine who you care about. Very cool! I worry though that there might not be enough controls for the user to override the assumptions.
Already, Marshall is calling it the savior of open standards. I don’t think Open Standards need to be saved – but they certainly have all the buzz words on their site so that’s promising.
That’s it for now, maybe more later when I’ve had a chance to play with it.
Update: After playing with it this morning, and reading a little more, it’s clear that this is actually Jaiku reborn (not FriendFeed), because the Jaiku team were involved in building it. They deserve a lot of credit for inventing much of this stuff in the first place – long before FriendFeed.
Also, having used it only for an hour, the unread count on the Buzz tab is driving me nuts. It shouldn’t be there. It’s a stream not an inbox. Also it makes no sense why I can’t display buzz in a sidebar on the right side of my primary Gmail inbox view. That would be ideal.
It’s also funny to me that some people have tried to give Chris Messina credit for Buzz even though he’s been at Google for no more than a month. They clearly don’t understand how long and hard it is to build product. Messina is good, but he aint that good 
// February 4th, 2010 // 0 Comments // Analysis, Attention, Business, Dataportability, Media, Personal, Technology, synapticweb
Marshall Kirkpatrick has written a thoughtful piece over on Read/Write Web entitled ‘Facebook and the future of Free Thought‘ in which he explains the hard facts about news consumption and the open subscription models that were supposed to create a more open playing field for niche voices.
In it, he states that news consumption has barely changed in the last 10 years. RSS and Feed Readers drive very little traffic and most people still get their news from hand selected mainstream portals and destination sites (like MSN News and Yahoo news etc). In other words, mainstream users do not curate and consume niche subscriptions and are quite content to read what the mainstream sites feed them.
This is troubling news (pun intended) for those of us who believe that the democratization of publishing might open up the world to niche voices and personalized story-telling.
Marshall goes on to argue that Facebook might be our last hope. That since everyone spends all their time in Facebook already, that the service has an opportunity to popularize the notion of subscribing to news sources and thereby bring to life our collective vision of personalized news for the mainstream. Facebook already does a great deal of this with users getting large amounts of news and links from their friends as they share and comment on links.
Through my work with APML I have long dreamed of a world where users are able to view information through a highly personalized lens – a lens that allows them to see personally relevant news instead of just popular news (note that Popularity is a factor of personal relevancy, but it is not the only factor). That doesn’t mean the news would be skewed to one persuasion (liberal or conservative for example) but rather to a specific topic or theme.
Could Facebook popularize personalized news? Should it? Do we really want a closed platform to dictate how the transports, formats and tools of next generation story-telling get built? If so, would we simply be moving the top-down command and control systems of network television and big media to another closed platform with its own limitations and restrictions?
Personalized news on closed platforms are almost as bad as mainstream news on closed platforms. News organizations and small niche publishers both need a way to reach their audience using open technologies or we are doomed to repeat the homogenized news environment of the last 2 decades. The one that failed to protect us from a war in Iraq, failed to innovate when it came to on-demand, and failed to allow each of us to customize and personalize our own news reading tools.
That’s why technologies like RSS/Atom, PubSubHub and others are so important.
What’s missing now is a presentation tool that makes these technologies sing for the mainstream.
So far, as an industry, we’ve failed to deliver on this promise. I don’t have the answers for how we might succeed. But succeed we must.
Perhaps established tier 1 media sites have a role to play. Perhaps market forces that are driving them to cut costs and innovate will drive these properties to turn from purely creating mainstream news editorially toward a model where they curate and surface contributions from their readership and the wider web.
In other words, Tier 1 publishers are being transformed from content creators to content curators – and this could change the game.
In the race to open up and leverage social and real-time technologies, these media organizations are actually making way for the most effective democratization of niche news yet.
Niche, personalized news distributed by open news hubs born from the ‘ashes’ of old media.
Don’t like the tools one hub gives you? Switch to another. the brands we all know and love have an opportunity to become powerful players in the news aggregation and consumption game. Will they respond in time?
Due to my experience working with Tier 1 publishers for Echo, I have high hopes for many of them to learn and adapt. But much more work still remains.
Learn more about how news organizations are practically turning into personalized news curation hubs over on the Echo Blog.
// December 11th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Analysis, Dataportability, Personal, Technology
Over on the Open Web Foundation mailing list Eran Hammer-Lahav who, despite his gruff and disagreeable personality, I respect greatly for his work in the development of open standards, is effectively calling for a complete shakeup of the foundation and the work being poured into the ‘common ground’ of the standards efforts.
Let me define the ‘Common Ground’ as I see it.
Building strong common ground is like building strong open standards deep into the stack. Just like a software stack, our community needs a stack of organizations that are loosely coupled and open to participation. Groups like the W3C and IETF provide a rock solid core, more agile groups focused on specific standards like OpenID and Oauth are in the middle and a project like the DataPortability project was supposed to be on top – a kind of user interface layer.
You see, good standards efforts are neccessarily projects that work to solve one small problem well. The problems are often deep technical challenges that attract passionate and, let’s face it, geeky people to hack, debate and decide on details that don’t hit the radar for 99.9% of the population.
The problem, of course, is that the rest of the world has to care for a standard to matter.
Leaders and project managers need to be found, real companies need to get involved (not just their staff), collaboration platforms need to facilitate real and open discussion, calls for collaboration need to be heard, specs need to be written (and written well), libraries need to be written, governance needs to be put in place and so on.
Also, once the standard is (half) baked, less involved hackers need to participate to test the theories in the real world. Less savvy developers need to hear about the standard and understand it. Business people need to understand the value of using a standard over a proprietary solution. They also need IP protections in place to ensure that by using the standard they are not putting their company at risk. Marketing people need to know how to sell it to their customer base. Customers need to know how to look for and choose open solutions to create a market place that rewards openness.
All of this is ‘Common Ground’. It is common to any standards effort and there should – no must – be an organization that is just as lean, mean and aggresive as Facebook in place to provide these resources if we are ever going to compete with closed solutions.
At the start of 2008 the DataPortability project became very popular. It’s goal was not to build standards, but rather to promote them. To provide much of the common ground that I described above.
The DP project’s particular mission, in my mind at least, was to focus on the marketing effort. To build a massive spot light and to shine that intense light on the people, organizations and standards that were getting the job done.
Is the OWF providing a generic legal/IPR framework? Fantastic! It was the DPP’s job to let everyone know – developers, business execs, media, potential editors, contributors and more. Our job was not, and should never be to start the framework itself, but rather to advocate for, provide context around and promote the hell out of someone else’s effort to do so.
Is a conference happening next year? Excellent. It was the DPP’s job to get in touch with the conference organizer, organize not just a DP panel, but a DP Track and to create room (and perhaps even a narritive) inside which the people doing the actual work can speak.
Has Facebook just announced a new feature that could have been achieved through a combination of existing open standards? Then it is the DPP’s job to consult with each of those standards groups and create a cohesive response/set of quotes for the media to use.
What is the relationship Facebook Platform, OpenSocial, Open Standards, OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts and Twitter’s ‘Open API’? DataPortability.org should have the answer neatly described on its website.
Unfortunately, though, many in the standards community chose to fight the creation of the project for whatever reasons crossed their mind at the time. They used all sorts of methods to undermine the effort. Some that would put Fox News to shame.
The result, of course, has been a diversion from the important work of providing this common ground to the standards community to a self-protection state of creating governance and creating our own ‘deliverables’ in order to justify and protect our own existence.
I have, as a result of a series of unfortunate events, fallen out of touch with the Steering group at the DPP. Moving to the US, getting disillusioned with the community I admired (not those involved with DPP. My friends at the DPP Steering group have always performed very admirably and worked extremely hard) and ultimately shifting my world view to realize that the best contribution I can make – the best way to really move the needle – is to ship Data Portability compliant software at scale.
At this juncture, however, I think it’s time for us all to refocus on our original mission for the DataPortability Project.
To restate my humble view on the matter:
This necessarily means that the only real deliverable from the project would be a small set of communication tools that build community, context and advocacy around what we believe is the ‘truth’ (or at least things worth paying attention to) in the broader standards community.
Many have scoffed at that these goals in the past claiming that there was no ‘value’. In my book this set of goals is not only a very worthy, it is increasingly critical to the success and health of the web.
// December 4th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Analysis, Attention, Business, Dataportability, synapticweb
As you might know if you follow my work even remotely, my projects almost always come from a place of philosophical supposition. That is, I first create a model that I think matches the current and emerging state of the world, and then I create a product, project, format or other that works inside, encourages or commercializes that model.
Many of my colleagues at JS-Kit do the same thing. Khris Loux and I, for example, spend hours and hours discussing our shared world views and how this translates to features, business direction and general life goals.
This methodology allows us to couch our decisions in well thought out mental models to make them more consistent, predictable and, we hope, more effective.
Over the years, and with my friends, I’ve proposed a number of these philosophical models including APML, DataPortability and most recently (this time working with Khris) SynapticWeb.
One of the hardest aspects of creating a philosophical model, however, is truly letting it guide you. To trust it. To take it’s premise to the logical conclusion. Another challenge is explaining this methodology (and the value of the resulting outcomes) to others who a) don’t think this way and b) have not taken the time to examine and live the model more fully.
Many times, the choices and decisions that I/we make from these models are nuanced, but the sum of their parts, we believe, are significant.
Let me make some concrete examples.
There is this ongoing tension between the value of social/user generated media and the media produced by ‘Journalists’. Sure social media is amazing, some say, but bloggers will never replace the role of Journalists.
The fact of the matter is, if your philosophical world view is that Social Media is important, that it is a return to one-to-one personal story telling and that it allows those in the know – involved in the action – to report their first hand accounts, then you must necessarily expand your imagination and have the conviction to follow that line of logic all the way to the end.
If you do, you must necessarily discover that the distinction between Journalists and ‘Us’ as social media participants (all of us) is authority, perspective, distribution and an attempt at impartiality.
In the end, however, we are each human beings (yes, even the journalists). Journalists are imbued with authority because a trusted news brand vets and pays them, they are given the gift of perspective because they sit above the news and are not part of it, they have distribution because their media outlet prints millions of pieces of paper or reaches into the cable set top boxes of millions of homes and their impartiality is a lie.
Can’t these traits be replicated in social media? Of course they can.
Reputation can be algorithmically determined or revealed through light research/aggregation, perspective can be factored in by intelligent human beings or machines that find both sides of a story, distribution is clearly a solved problem through platforms like Twitter, Digg and others and impartiality is still a lie. At least in social media bias is revealed and transparency is the new impartiality.
I don’t mean to provide an exhaustive reasoning on why Social Media as a philosophical framework holds up as new paradigm for news gathering and reporting here – only to give an example of how we must allow ourselves to imagine outside the box and have the conviction to fully believe in our own assumptions.
The same type of artificial mental barriers have appeared at every step of the way with each of the philosophical frameworks in which I have participated. Streams, is the most recent.
When we launched Echo we proposed that any conversation anywhere, irrespective of the mode or channel in which it was taking place, had the potential to be a first class part of the canonical and re-assembled lifestream of a piece of content.
Many pushed back. “Oh a Tweet can’t possibly be as valuable as a comment” they lamented. They’re wrong.
A Tweet, an @ Reply, a Digg, a Digg Comment, a Facebook Status Update, a Facebook Comment, an ‘on page’ comment and any other form of reaction each have just as much potential for value as the other.
Some have created artificial distinctions between them. They separate the stream into ‘Comments’ and ‘Social Reactions’. I have news for everyone. A comment is a social reaction. Thinking of it as anything less is a failure of imagination and conviction. The trick is not a brute force separation of the two, but rather a nuanced set of rules that help diminish the noise and highlight the signal – where ever it might be – from any mode or channel. We’ve started that process in Echo with a feature we call ‘Whirlpools’.
Another interesting failure of imagination that I come up against a lot lately is the notion of community building.
With Echo, we have taken the philosophical position that users already have a social network – many have too many of them in fact. There is no reason for them to join yet another network just to comment. Not ours, not our publisher’s.
No, instead they should be able to bring their social network with them, participate with the content on a publisher’s website, share with their existing friends on existing social networks, and leave just as easily.
By using Echo, you are not joining ‘our community’. You already have a community. If anything you are participating in the Publishers community – not ours.
We don’t welcome new customers to ‘Our community’. Instead we help their users bring their community to a piece of content, interact, share and leave.
Publishers invest large quantities of capital in producing high quality content only to have the engagement and monetization opportunities occur on Social Networks. In these tough economic times, publishers can not afford to bleed their audience and SEO to yet another social network just to facilitate commenting. That is the opposite of the effect they are trying to achieve by adding rich commenting in the first place.
If we use our imagination, and have the conviction to see our ideas through, we realize that publishers need tools that encourage on-site engagement and re-assemble offsite reactions as well – not bolster the branded 3rd party communities of the products they use.
In summation – be brave. Observe the world, define a philosophical framework, imagine the possibilities and have the conviction to follow through on your ideas. Stop being lazy. Stop stopping short of taking your impulses to their logical conclusions because I’ve found, when you consistently execute on your vision it might be a little harder to sell your point of differentiation – but your contributions will ultimately be better, more consistent and more long lasting for your company, the web and the rest of the world.
// November 29th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Analysis, Attention, Business, Dataportability, Media, Politics, Work
Steve Gillmor often writes fantastic (and fantastically long) editorials on the landscape of the real-time web, but they are often very dense and sometimes fail to cover some key points. I thought I would take the liberty of translating and correcting his latest post with my own contributions.
Ever since FriendFeed was sold to Facebook, we’ve been told over and over again that the company and its community were toast. And as if to underline the fact, FriendFeed’s access to the Twitter firehose was terminated and vaguely replaced with a slow version that is currently delivering Twitter posts between 20 minutes and two hours after their appearance on Twitter. At the Realtime CrunchUp, Bret Taylor confirmed this was not a technical but rather a legal issue. Put simply, Twitter is choking FriendFeed to death.
Translation: The FriendFeed team were absorbed by way of acquisition. Twitter has terminated their priority access to Twitter data because FriendFeed is now owned by Twitter’s primary competitor.
Correction: Of course Twitter turned them off. Facebook is Twitter’s self-declared number one competitor. When you own the platform and the protocol you have every right to protect your own arse. In fact they have an obligation to their shareholders and investors.
What’s odd about this is that most observers consider FriendFeed a failure, too complicated and user-unfriendly to compete with Twitter or Facebook. If Twitter believed that to be the case, why would they endeavor to kill it? And if it were not a failure? Then Twitter is trying to kill it for a good reason. That reason: FriendFeed exposes the impossible task of owning all access to its user’s data. Does Microsoft or Google or IBM own your email? Does Gmail apply rate limiting to POP3 and IMAP?
Translation: Most commentators think that FriendFeed is dead because the founders have been bought by and buried inside Facebook. If FriendFeed is so dead why is Twitter trying to choke it.
Correction: FriendFeed is clearly dead. If you have ever worked for a startup and tried to ship a running product you know that focus is the only thing that will keep you alive. Facebook is a massive platform serving a scale of social interaction that has only been previously seen by distributed systems like email. The last thing Facebook wants is for its newly aquiried superstar team to waste time working on a platform that no longer matters to their commercial success or the bulk of their users (i.e. Friendfeed).
Twitter is choking FriendFeed for another reason – because it’s systems are now essentially just a proxy to Facebook. As stated above, Twitter can not give it’s number one competitor priority access to one of its major assets (i.e. timley access to the data).
The data that Microsoft and Google does not exercise hoarding tactics over (the examples Steve gave were IMAP and POP3) are open standards using open protocols.
I am never sure about Steve’s position on open standards, he often vacillates from championing the open cause through projects like the Attention Trust only then to claim things like APML and DataPortability are bullshit – maybe he just doesn’t like me (That can’t be right can it Steve?).
The fact is, however, that open standards and protocols are the basis for open systems which is why companies like Microsoft and Google do not control your email. Twitter and Facebook are not open systems.
So the reason Twitter is killing FriendFeed is because they think they can get away with it. And they will, as far as it goes, as long as the third party vendors orbiting Twitter validate the idea that Twitter owns the data. That, of course, means Facebook has to go along with it. Playing ball with Twitter command and control doesn’t make sense unless Facebook likes the idea of doing the same thing with “their” own stream. Well, maybe so. That leaves two obvious alternatives.
The first is Google Wave, which offers much of the realtime conversational technology FriendFeed rebooted around, minus a way of deploying this stream publicly. The Wave team seems to be somewhat adrift in the conversion of private Waves to public streams, running into scaling issues with Wave bots that don’t seem to effectively handle a publishing process (if I understood the recent briefing correctly.) But if Waves can gain traction around events and become integrated with Gmail as Paul Buchheit recently predicted, then an enterprising Wave developer might write a bot that captures Tweets as they are entered or received by Twitter and siphons them into the Wave repository in near realtime.
Translation: Twitter is killing FriendFeed because they think no one will notice or care enough to stop them – Twitter has more than enough momentum and support to continue along it’s current path. Facebook wont cry foul because they are doing the same hoarding technique with their own data.
Maybe Google Wave might save the day, but they seem to have lost their way.
Correction: Actually the only people who can call bullshit on Twitter and Facebook is us, the media. We are all media after all. Steve Gillmor in fact is one of the loudest voices – he should call bullshit on closed systems in general. Instead we all seem to be betting on one closed system to do better than another closed system.
We are like abused wives going back for more, each time pretending that our husbands love us. Guess what, they don’t love us. They love their IPO.
I was the first to support Google Wave very loudly and proudly. I met with the team and was among the first to get in and play with the preview. It is a revolution in collaboration and how to launch a new open system. It is not, however, a Twitter or Facebook competitor. Especially not in its current state. It is not even a replacement to email. It is simply the best damned wiki product ever created.
Waves are the 180′ opposite of FriendFeed and Facebook or even Twitter. They are open, flexible and lacking any structure whatsoever. Their current container, the Google Wave client, however, is totally sub-optimal for a messaging metaphor much less a many-to-many passive social platform. It is a document development platform. Nothing more.
The same could be true of Microsoft’s deal for the firehose, but here, as with Google, Twitter may not want to risk flaunting ownership of a stream that can so easily be cloned for its enterprise value. And as easily as you can say RSS is dead, Salesforce Chatter enters the picture. Here’s one player Twitter can’t just laugh off. First of all, it’s not Twitter but Facebook Benioff is cloning, and a future Facebook at that, one where the Everyone status will be built out as a (pardon the expression) public option. This free cross-Web Chatter stream will challenge Facebook’s transitional issues from private to public, given that Salesforce’s cloud can immediately scale up to the allegedly onerous task of providing personalized Track on demand.
Translation: Maybe the enterprise players – specifically Salesforces’ Chatter – will save the day.
Correction: Doubtful. This is just another closed system for a specific vertical. It’s long overdue. It is awesome. But it is not a Facebook or Twitter competitor much less an open alternative to the proprietary messaging systems we keep flocking to. It is simply a long overdue expansion of the simple changelog tracking feature on ERP assets. It’s a simple feature that was sponsored by a simple question. “Why doesn’t the asset changelog include more data – including social data?”. Duh. I was doing this in my own web based CRM at the start of the decade.
It’s likely this pressure can be turned to good use by Facebook, unencumbered as they are by any licensing deal with Twitter. Instead, a Chatter alliance with the Facebook Everyone cloud puts Salesforce in the interesting position of managing a public stream with Google Apps support, which eventually could mean Wave integration. Where this might break first is in media publishing, as Benioff noted at the CrunchUp. Twitter’s leverage over its third party developers could be diluted significantly once Salesforce offers monetization paths for its Force.com developers. So much so that this may call Twitter’s bluff with FriendFeed.
Translation: No idea
But FriendFeed has always been more of a tactical takedown of Twitter than an actual competitor, a stalking horse for just the kind of attack Twitter seems most afraid of. No wonder the speed with which Twitter is introducing metadata traps to lock down the IP before a significant cloud emerges to challenge its inevitability. Lists, retweets, location — they’re all based on raising the rate limiting hammer to discourage heading for the exits. It’s not that retweets reduce the functionality of the trail of overlapping social circles, it’s that they lock them behind the Wall.
Translation: Twitter is introducing more metadata into tweets to maintain its lock in through API limits etc.
Correction: On this point Steve is partially correct. This isn’t about rate limiting though – it’s about turning Twitter’s proprietary protocol into a real-time transport for all the data the web has to offer. It is not about API limits but rather cramming so much value into the pipe that the pipe becomes like water – you gotta drink from it or you’re going to die.
I don’t expect anyone from Twitter to answer the simple question of when will Twitter give FriendFeed the same access they provide other third party client vendors. For now, it’s frustrating to not see the flow of Twitter messages in realtime, but over time we’ll build tools on top of FriendFeed to take such embargoed messages private. Once inside FriendFeed, the realtime conversations that result are just the kind of high value threads Chatter will support, Wave will accelerate, and Silverlight will transport. Keep up the good work, Twitter.
Translation: I doubt Twitter will play nice with FriendFeed and give them equal access again because once items are inside FriendFeed they turn into rich conversations. Conversations that Chatter will support, Wave will accelerate and silverlight will transport.
Correction: Actually Twitter does not and has never given fair and equal access to its data. FriendFeed had a moment in the sun with first class access the likes of which almost no one else has seen before or since.
I have no idea how Chatter fits into the B2C picture – it is clearly an Enterprise play for Salesforce. Wave indeed will act as a great interface through which to participate in real-time threads. The threads themselves, however, will need to be generated or framed by much more rigid systems designed for public discussion.
Silverlight is great for rich web apps. It is Microsoft’s way of bringing the richness of the client into the browser. Just like .NET is to Java, Silverlight is to Flash. A way for Microsoft to leverage a key technology component without handing the crown to someone/something it doesn’t control. But I’m not sure if fits into this discussion.
In the end, the only real solution for all of this, of course, is a return to the way the web has always worked (well). Open systems. The transport should not be Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Wave or any other nonsense. It should be RSS and Atom (ActivityStrea.ms specifically) transported over PubSubHubBub and read by open standards aggregators. The namespaces should be OpenID based and adoptable by all.
The sooner the early adopter community realizes this, the commentators push for this and the developers code for this, the better off we will all be.
Disclosure: I work for JS-Kit, creators of Echo – one of the largest providers of Real-time streams. I also Tweet – trying to find an alternative though!
// October 30th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Analysis, Dataportability, Technology
A very important fact that seems to be getting little to no coverage at the moment about Twitter Lists is the issue of namespaces.
Twitter’s number one asset is its control and allocation of namespaces. Those little things we call ‘Usernames’. @chrissaad is not just my Twitter Name, it is a short form addressable identity that concretely links to my Twitter inbox any time someone uses it in a Tweet.
Addressable, convenient namespaces that can be used in a sentence like this are so interesting and important that facebook went to great lengths to copy them. Nothing on the open web has yet come close to this simplicity and effectiveness. Which is not to say there won’t be an alternative soon.
The important fact with Twitter usernames, though, is that they are unique. There is a finite and shared ’space’ in which ‘names’ can be allocated.
The result is that early adopters end up with all the best names and squatters rush to lock up all the best phrases. Late comers to the system end up with names like chris2423.
Twitter Lists, however, are different. They include the list creator’s username. For example my JS-Kit list is “@ChrisSaad/jskit“.
As you can see, the list ‘JSKIT’ is attached to my username. This means means that each user has their own namespace.
This result: There can’t be a landrush for List names because the list naming convention sits on top of the username. It also means that no one can own a definitive list on a subject because each list is subjective.
This is an important design decision for Twitter. One that has both pros and cons for the community. Overall, however, I think the decision was a correct one. Lists can rise and fall organically (or at least based on the influence and popularity of their creators) without the pain and pressure (for Twitter) of maintaining yet another shared namespace.
Twitter’s username namespace, however, is just rife with and waiting for all sorts of headaches. I don’t envy their position and I can’t wait for an open alternative.
// October 27th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Analysis, Dataportability, Technology
Today a company I am advising has launched in the press and will soon be available in the Apple App Store.
They are called Stalqer and, as Techcrunch writes, they are basically Foursquare on steroids.
I think that’s a pretty good description. The fact is, however, the most impressive thing about Stalqer is not what it does but how it does it. Rather than approaching acquisition and retention of users like any typical app , it uses data portability, viral loops and network effects to on-board and engage users on an ongoing basis.
Not enough app developers consider this when engineering their user experiences and the result is usually a big ‘Techcrunch’ launch and a big flame out as users flock for a 5 minute road test and never return.
Mick (CEO of Stalqer) and his team, however, have almost turned virality and network effects it into a science.
Here are some of the highlights of their product decisions.
The list of innovations goes on and on.
The Stalqer team have done an amazing job of baking in the right workflows to ensure maximum adoption and engagement based on their primary use case (discovering people around you) without resorting to raw gaming tricks like points and badges.
I can’t wait to see how the app performs and what they do next!
As a side note, I too have been experimenting with non-obvious network effects in my day-job. More on that later…
// August 22nd, 2009 // 0 Comments // Blog, Dataportability, Me, Media, Technology
The blog revolution that I spoke of in my previous post ‘Blogs are Back” feels to me, right now, like the Iranian revolution that almost happened a couple of months back. It is in danger of fading away as we get wrapped up in ‘what will Facebook do next’ mania.
You see, a couple of months ago there seemed to be an awakening that blogs are the first, best social networking platforms. This realization seemed to be driven by many converging factors including…
Instead though, it now seems that many bloggers are holding on desperately to the notion that FriendFeed may survive or that Facebook may get better. They continue to pour their content, conversation and influence into a platform that does not hold their brand, their ads or their control. We all seem desperate to see what next move these closed platforms make.
I have news for you – FriendFeed is dead. The team has moved on to work with the core Facebook team.
At best, FriendFeed will go the way of Del.icio.us and Flickr – stable but not innovating. At worst, it will go the way of Jaiku or even Dodgeball.
It’s time we start re-investing in our own, open social platforms. Blogs. Blogs are our profile pages – social nodes – on the open, distributed social web.
Blogs missing a feature you like from FriendFeed? Build a plugin. There’s nothing Facebook or FriendFeed does that a blog can’t do with enough imagination.
Our job now, as early adopters and social media addicts, should be to build the tools and technologies to educate the mainstream that blogs and blogging can be just as easy, lightweight, social and exciting as Facebook. Even more so.
All that’s need is a change in perspective and slight tweaks around the edges.
Blogs are back.
Who’s with me?
// July 18th, 2009 // 0 Comments // Analysis, Blog, Business, Dataportability, Media
When Khris and I showed Robert Scoble Echo prior to the Launch at the Real-Time Crunchup he said “Wow, Blogs are Back!”.
I couldn’t agree more. It looks like his sentiment is starting to propagate.
When I say Blogs are Back I mean that the balance between other forms of social media (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed etc) are now finding their rightful balance with the first and foremost social platform, Blogging.
This is not to suggest that other forms of interaction are going away, only that there is a natural equilibrium to be struck.
There are a number of factors that are helping this trend along.
They include:
I also discussed this with Dave Winer, Doc Searls and Marshall Kirkpatrick the other day on the BadHairDay podcast.
You can also see previous references to this in my ‘What is Echo‘ post. I’ve also posted a more detailed account of how Echo fits into this notion on the JS-Kit blog.
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel have also posted on this. I also registered ‘BlogsAreBack.com’ (what should I do with it?).
I look forward to see what this new trend brings!
Copyright © 2010 Chris Saad – Paying Attention. All rights reserved.
