Studying social networking

The NYT covers a computing symposium, "2016", where social networking (research) is being discussed. I'm not saying this is not relevant, but somehow I prefer Danah Boyd's almost inside-out approach over the way these professors are theorizing about this 'revolution'.

"Social networks, noted Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell, are pre-technological creations that sociologists have been analyzing for decades. A classic example, he noted, was the work of Stanley Milgram of Harvard, who in the 1960’s asked each of several volunteers in the Midwest to get a letter to a stranger in Boston. But the path was not direct: under the rules of the experiment, participants could send a letter only to someone they knew. The median number of intermediaries was six — hence, the term “six degrees of separation."

Web 2.0 lesson

Interesting article on the authority of data sources in which Tim O'Reilly also makes a very recognizable remark on software bugs..;-)

"Aside: That's a classic bug cascade. As my friend Andrew Singer once noted, debugging is discovering what you actually told your computer to do, rather than what you thought you told it. Unfortunately, you sometimes don't understand what you told your computer to do until some particular corner case emerges.)"

And the Web 2.0 lesson:

"But it's a real shame that it's not possible just to remove the bad data. As Lou said in one email, "the whole story seems to be such a strong illustration of the downsides of connected and linked databases (and therefore very much a Web 2.0 lesson)."

It's not about Second Life

With all the hype surrounding Second Life these days it is understandable that some people are wondering if it is all justified. And on the level of Second Life the answer is probably no. There aren't that many concurrent users, there are technical and more fundamental usability issues, and there's a lot of superficial reporting on what's really happening.

But for me Second Life is showing a scenario of how we might use the internet in the future. From that perspective it inspires me. However, I do not believe that it will necessarily be Linden Lab dominating the virtual world space with Second Life. There will be many connected virtual 3D environments, like we have many websites, portals and communities today.

I think the hype is justified, but not because Second Life is or will be so successful. It could be, but it doesn't have to be. It's just an example of a much more fundamental development.

"Despite the problems and excessive hype, Second Life and the other massively multiplayer virtual worlds do represent a strange and wonderful phenomenon worth writing about for journalists: people living in an alternate reality — literally creating their alternate reality — that affects their “First Life” either through virtual relationships or by running real businesses. Hopefully, more journalists will be able to tell the story of these cultural shifts without becoming the pawns (and customers) of the game’s creator."

Google's switchboard vs. repository issue

Tim O'Reilly sees a risk in the way Google is evolving, somewhat related to my own concerns.

"But Larry's on to something. I've been seeing the distinction that he makes coming more and more into focus as a defining issue for Web 2.0. Google has been a key enabler of the decentralized nature of the net -- they make other sites more visible, distributing attention, rather than concentrating it. But some of the newer sites, and the newer applications from Google and the other big guys, are increasingly aimed at centralizing user activity and user data.

This is true of GMail, of Orkut, and of Google Calendar. Google Maps could have been such a centralization play, but because of the brilliant hackers who built the first mashups, it's instead been liberated as a "real sharing" service.

I've been concerned about this switchboard vs. repository issue very specifically with Google Book Search. While I've come to the defense of Google over their library project, and overall, I believe that GBS is a very good thing for the publishing industry, it's essential that Google remember their heritage, as a distributor of attention, rather than trying to make their sites sticky (Web 1.0)."

Contextual shopping in Second Life

I like the comparison Amazon's Jeff Barr makes between the potential of AJAX technologies six years ago and Second Life's scripting language today. From the Reuters interview:

"Reuters: It seems like going to shop on Amazon.com is still easier at this point than shopping in Second Life.

Jeff Barr: Ease of use is only one way you’d look at it, integration is a really important thing. You can imagine a Second Life build where you have a concert or a musician that’s just done a live performance, or maybe an author who has done a book reading. Just as you’d walk out of a venue in real life and buy a book or a T-shirt or a CD, now you have the same ability in the virtual world — it’s contextual commerce.

People love to do things that stay within the metaphor. So if you can say in character and if you’re essentially doing your shopping in avatar scale, that seems to maintain the quality of the experience.

Reuters: Are there still constraints in Second Life you find frustrating?

Jeff Barr: If you think back to the Web browsers of five or six years ago, we had all the capabilities to do AJAX and it was just a matter of time before people got clever enough and had enough experience. It just took developers a long time, and being absolute masters of the existing technology before they pushed it to the next level.

If you look at Second Life and the scripting language, you realise we’re just at the very very beginning of how people can use this."

Let's be (a) bright

I was doubting whether I should blog about this subject, but I guess Wired has this article for a reason. It's readers are more receptive to the message(s) brights like Richard Dawkins (author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion), Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and others have for us. I indeed hope that one day we will all be (a) bright.

"Look at slavery," he says. We are at a beautiful restaurant in Santa Monica, near the public lots from which Americans -- nearly 80 percent of whom believe the Bible is the true word of God, if polls are correct -- walk happily down to the beach in various states of undress. "People used to think," Harris says, "that slavery was morally acceptable. The most intelligent, sophisticated people used to accept that you could kidnap whole families, force them to work for you, and sell their children. That looks ridiculous to us today. We're going to look back and be amazed that we approached this asymptote of destructive capacity while allowing ourselves to be balkanized by fantasy. What seems quixotic is quixotic -- on this side of a radical change. From the other side, you can't believe it didn't happen earlier. At some point, there is going to be enough pressure that it is just going to be too embarrassing to believe in God."

Or in (his) other words: "There is, he writes, "nothing more natural than rape. But no one would argue that rape is good, or compatible with a civil society, because it may have had evolutionary advantages for our ancestors." Like rape, Harris says, religion may be a vestige of our primitive nature that we must simply overcome."

There's a long way to go: "Still, Adams admits some marketing concerns. Atheists are predominant among the "upper 5 percent," he says. "Where we're lagging is among the lower 95 percent."

But then again "the New Atheism does not aim at success by conventional political means. It does not balance interests, it does not make compromises, it does not seek common ground. The New Atheism, outwardly at least, is a straightforward appeal to our intellect. Atheists make their stand upon the truth."

Embracing Big Brother

There's no escaping Big Brother, so let's make sure we can live with him. This scenario is one of the reasons I'm taking a lot of pictures, plot them on a map and localize myself almost 24/7.

"Whether or not Elahi's story is overstated (as Ethan says some people claim), his approach is still thought-provoking. We're all focused on the idea of hiding from surveillance. Hasan has instead embraced it, saying that documenting everything about his life is the best way of saying he has nothing to hide. Conceptual art indeed."

Cross-generational gaming

Liz Lawley writes about cross-generational play over at Terra Nova. This is very fascinating if you have kids of your own and you're not sure 'what to think of all this gaming and computer stuff' your kids seem to like so much. It's a topic I'm often discussing with those parents...

"What happened as a result was that a number of the guild officers took the responsibility of looking out for the younger players--sending /tells to new players complaining about behavior reminding them that 13yo behavior wasn't inappropriate for a 13yo, and providing a little more guidance and support to the younger players than they might have offered to an adult. ("Sure, I'll run you through Deadmines. Again.") That, to me, represents the very best of what virtual worlds have to offer to our kids. The guild had become an online village, a place where I knew that even if I wasn't there to play with my kids, adults I knew and trusted were there. A virtual "neighborhood watch." This provided not just security for my kids, but also an opportunity for them to learn. They had role models, people who exhibited the kind of behavior online that I wanted them to emulate."

It just takes time

Sometimes I just don't understand why some politicians and law makers are wasting their time on plans that will never work out they way they hope. But then I read Martin's thoughts on those events and they make me think it's all for the better;-)

"Between the bans on online gambling in the USA, and AllOfMP3.com under attack, I can safely predict one thing: alternative forms of value storage and transmission are about to get a big boost. And the American government is going to get a nasty shock, in that there are other sovereign countries who will be the beneficiaries. A whole bunch of tech and business models from the bust need a dust-off. As for telcos, this is unwelcome news. The prepay industry has been expanding into payments for all sorts of digital and physical services, and this in the long run means there’s now competition on the horizon. They’ll do OK, and each will find its own distribution niche. The Internet is going to have a much deeper impact on society and institutions than we think. It just takes time."

The PS3 PC

If Sony is capable of again selling tens of millions of (expensive) game consoles there will be an interesting new dimension to the 'war for the living room' and the OS battle between Windows and Linux. Terra Soft Solutions just announced there will be Linux on the PS3. Essentially turning the PS3 into a complete PC. And I just ordered a Wii because it has a browser that supports Flash...;-)

"The distribution will also have full package support, allowing for expansion of the installed software. It will also come with OpenOffice and Firefox preinstalled, among others. This is Sony’s killer app essentially if it’s done right. A full fledged operating system on the PS3 allows near limitless expansion. This changes everything, what do you think?"

No TV on the web for now

I often find myself in a discussion about how we are all going to watch TV 'on the web' in the near future. Look at YouTube people say. And altough that model might sound really promising and obvious, they don't realize the effort required to make it all happen. Robert Arn tries to explain it over at VentureBeat. And no, P2P is not the answer...

"Let’s look at the real data volumes and associated costs behind the belief network. Some 111 million U.S. households have their TV sets on an average of 8.5 hours a day, according to the Television Bureau of Advertising and Nielsen Media Research. This represents a data volume of about 318,000 TeraBytes per day, or 1590 times the data volume of YouTube. Who is going to deliver it? Akamai? No, and here’s why: Akamai has roughly 300 Gb/s bandwidth in its network today. Building that network cost about $329 Million in raw asset and facility purchases, let’s say about $1Million per Gb/s of bandwidth. To deliver the volume of data just described would take about 83,000 Gb/s bandwidth. That’s $83 billion of capital cost in the Akamai model."

CNET on Eccky

Great article over at CNET on Eccky!

"It's a very natural evolution," said Amy Jo Kim, creative director of ShuffleBrain, a design studio for games and network services. But she offered a word of caution: "Virtual pet games are very addictive--they tap into guilt and a core part of being human."

Two corrections however: (1) we did not launch in April 2005. In November 2005 we had a beta launch and in March 2006 (7 months ago!) we had a commercial launch. And (2): we have 360.000 registered (Dutch) users at the moment, not 310.000. Still growing with about 60.000 a month...

I don't get Google

Why is Google becoming more then a matching engine (of information, advertisements, etc)? Why are they starting to compete with some of their (potentially) most profitable partners? It's a vertical and horizontal integration I don't get. I understand their mission, organizing the world's information, as long as they are indexing things and make it easy for me to find what I'm looking for. Whether that is an ad or a website, on a map, through Froogle or Base, or in a partner's domain. But more and more they are becoming a content platform themselves. Why do they have to buy YouTube to organize the world's information? They need to index YouTube's videos, not buy their platform. I didn't understand it with Blogger, Orkut, GVideo, GTalk, Gmail and Picasa either. I do understand the business opportunity of those services, certainly when they are well integrated. Hey, I'm using almost all of them;-) But why is that Google's business? They have a great platform to enable, facilitate and profit from such businesses when started and run by others, but why does it have to be their business completely?

The only reason I can think of why they are doing this is because they see a future where a small number of companies (Yahoo, Micrsoft, Google) will dominate the communications, sharing, collaboration and publishing business with very tightly integrated offerings for both individuals and businesses. And that each of these businesses will have their own matching engine as a monetizing driver since all services will be offered for free. Google already had the latter, so they are now building and acquiring the first to make sure they won't be out of business if this future unfolds. But will that happen? I don't think so. Tight vertical and horizontal integration organized in one company is not a natural model for doing business online.

Petascale computer in your ear

Wired looks into the future by investigating the huge efforts of Google, Microsoft et al to create huge datacenters.

"The next wave of innovation will compress today's parallel solutions in an evolutionary convergence of electronics and optics: 3-D and even holographic memory cells; lasers inscribed on the tops of chips, replacing copper pins with streams of photons; and all-optical networks in which thousands of colors of light travel along a single fiber. As these advances find their way into an increasing variety of devices, the petascale computer will shrink from a dinosaur to a teleputer – the successor to today's handhelds – in your ear or in your signal path. It will access a variety of searchers and servers, enabling participation in metaverses beyond the ken of even Ray Kurzweil's prophetic imagination. Moreover, it will link to trillions of sensors around the globe, giving it a constant knowledge of the physical state of the world, from traffic conditions to the workings of your own biomachine."

The valuation of social networks

There's an intense debate going on about the valuation of social networks like MySpace and Facebook as a result of RBC Capital's analyst Jordan Rohan statement that MySpace is worth $15 billion. This article tries to answer the question of why it is so difficult to put a value on these companies. And this quote below is interesting because it is in line with how I see social networking evolving:

"Metrick believes social networking sites will not be a passing fad. But there's no guarantee that MySpace, Facebook or any of the other current players will be the big winners in the end. Fader, too, believes social networking is here to stay, but he thinks it may work best not as a freestanding function but as an additional feature on sites that draw users for other reasons. Hence, the winners may turn out to be other sites that adopt social networking features. Or they may be new players, or current networking sites that broaden their offerings."

People will increasingly be part of multiple online networks that will be attached to other things. Sports, school, work, hobby, etc. To put it differently, there won't be just one network doing everything for everybody. Of course you can start a new network on Facebook for your basketball team, school, work and hobby. But it is more likely that these different networks will be connected behind the scenes so that it will be easier to become a member of one without having to create yet antother username, password, profile and friends list. So it's not one-size-fits-all, but it's a vision that's more in line with what Marc Canter is trying to achieve with his PeopleAggregator. Large social networks like MySpace and Bebo won't disappear (something Metrick is afraid of), but they will be facilitating this future because these were the first online networks people joined. And if they don't do this they will end up like AOL when they were trying to hang on to their walled-garden approach in a different era. Facebook made a serious first step in the right direction, Yahoo! too, and also some of the work around OpenID is interesting in that context. However, this all means that a lot of the advertising value will shift towards more niche oriented social networks. And therefore a $15 billion valuation for MySpace is nonsense. There won't be a winner-takes-all situation and that's a exactly what this valuation is based on.

Factual redesign

Interesting story in BusinessWeek on Yahoo!'s redesign. All design decisions are based on data and facts. I guess everybody knows the temptations of doing things based on your 'gut feeling'. And we should not disregard that feeling, but finding (and actively searching for) the right balance is important (and difficult)...

"What Yahoo learned often belied initial impressions. Throughout the redesign, the company used a blend of focus groups, one-on-one interviews, test pages, and data mining. "What people say they want isn't always what they actually click on," Bhat says. In focus groups, users consistently said they wanted serious world news. "I don't want Britney Spears anywhere on my page," Bhat recalls one user saying. "What if my boss came by and saw?" But when Bhat's team studied users' clicks, world news got little attention, while Britney Spears stories ranked among the most heavily trafficked."

Second Lifers griefed and addicted

A Dutch research (in Dutch) into the second live's of 250 hard core Second Life users shows that 40% of them feel sometimes griefed by other residents of the virtual world. EPN's research is apparently a first of it's kind and it's main focus was on the heavy users to get a better understanding of the impact these kinds of virtual worlds (and interreality as they call it) might have on society once they become more populated by 'the masses'.

Some of the results:

16% of the interviewed ‘residents’ is entrepreneur. 50% of all interviewed said that they make money in SL incidentally. 60% of those are highly educated and of those 60% are female. 50% of the research population is between 25 and 40 years old.

30%+ spends more then 40 hours in SL every week! And further research showed this was a conservative estimate by these users and 40% of the interviewed would consider themselves addicted. But no (typical) negative consequences (related to addicition) were discovered.

There will be a follow-up to this research and Linden Lab's Philip Rosedale has indicated they are interested in participating. When the results of this research were presented he was speaking in Amsterdam at PICNIC '06 in the same session I was speaking (showing a demo of a talking Eccky chatbot in my SL living room...).

Science finally innovates

I've had numerous discussions with scientists on the way scientific research results are being valued and published. Initiatives to change centuries old traditions have been around for a while, and things now appear to be moving slowly. Strange however that it is taking so long, especially given the fact that the internet originated in the scientific community...

"Democratizing the peer-review process raises sticky questions. Not all studies are useful and flooding the web with essentially unfiltered research could create a deluge of junk science. There's also the potential for online abuse as rogue researchers could unfairly ridicule a rival's work. Supporters point out that rushing research to the public could accelerate scientific discovery, while online critiques may help detect mistakes or fraud more quickly."