The real life Social Network

Came across this really informative post via Slashdot, on a Google researcher's presentation on Social networks. 216 slides and worth it. Paul Adams, the author of the piece, has a few compelling ideas that he introduces as part of the pitch - focusing on how Social Networks have got social networking wrong.

Paul starts off by showing how, by their very nature, social networks lump different types of acquaintances together under the umbrella of “friends” creating an inherently awkward atmosphere. By referring to everyone as friends, social networks (*wink* facebook *wink*) ignore the reality that people have distinctly different groups of friends.

Secondly, social networks also do a poor job of differentiating between strong and weak ties. Not everyone in a given group of friends is equally close to us. Instead social networks take the Twitter approach of treating everyone the same - giving rise to overload of trivial updates.

Thirdly, users care about privacy. But privacy is not a two-state concept or private or not private. Instead it is a much more nuanced state of private, public and publicized across different groups and strength of ties.

The entire presentation along with the speaker notes after the break.

Review: Enterprise 2.0

A little while ago, I was able to get my hands on a signed copy of Andrew Mcafee's Enterprise 2.0.

The book starts off talking about the key idea behind the 2.0 tag, introducing the power of "emergence" in social networking. It then goes on to introduce 2.0 technologies, illustrating their impact on businesses through four case studies. A couple of quick frameworks to think about social networking technologies are introduced next, along with the key benefits of the Enterprise 2.0 space.

Part two of the book takes a more pragmatic look, cautioning that most of the benefits will be available over a long haul. The book also covers some key failure scenarios, ending with a road map for businesses in the 2.0 world. The last chapter deals with the question of organizational behavior and its relationship to tools and technologies offered by Web 2.0

The book was an illuminating, sometimes thought-provoking and relatively light read, even though it felt like some of the pit falls were pooh poohed quite easily. Also, while the framework of tie-strength bull's eye was a useful way of articulating the need for 2.0 technologies, it didn't feel as involved with the actual plan for taking a business down the path to Enterprise 2.0. A couple things I felt strongly about:

Legal discovery risk - One of the precepts of the book is that moving from a channel of communication (e.g. email) to a platform (e.g. wiki) doesn't necessarily increase discovery risk related to litigation. The support? Andrew did not see any in the large number of businesses that have thus far implemented 2.0 technologies. Put this way, I am sure the argument seems shallow. Emails has been around for the good part of three decades, and only now have they really started to become the target of discovery requests and increasingly part of legal proceedings. Flippant emails form great news headlines, and even if the legal risk was zero, reputation damage would not be inconsequential. There is no reason to think a platform would fare any better.

Uncertainty - 2.0 emergence takes time. Social media presumes a flat user base, that is largely unconcerned with direction, that seemingly generates something awesome from thin air. There is too much uncertainty in that vision, uncertainty businesses do not like. Uncertainty of deliverable, time, order, ownership may work well when the stakes are lower. But when having a job is critical to taking care of the kids at home, it is too much to hope jobs stick around long enough for something awesome that may emerge out of uncoordinated actions. Again, I am sure that sounds extreme, but it does illustrate the oxymoron Enterprise 2.0.

At the end, the approach that the author lays out for a company to implement 2.0 technologies is tellingly similar to that of a pre-2.0 IT implementation. Identify problem and vision > don't expect dramatic wins > communicate > redesign processes > and measure. I believe, 2.0 technologies are answers to specific questions, as opposed to revolutionary tools just waiting to deliver multi-pronged increases in productivity. It seems more to be a case of 2.0 enabled Enterprise, than Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0

Andrew McAfee, author of a new book called Enterprise 2.0, spoke at an internal conference today. Very energetic persona, with an interesting pitch. And on a side note, that allowed some of us to grab a signed copy of the book for further study.

The upshot of the pitch was that the same forces that caused the shift of the web from 1.0 to 2.0 are awaiting a shot at transforming corporate information management culture. Historically, the way to think about information management in a company has been built around the structured, hierarchical approaches. Moving to tools and processes of the 2.0 web, includes a culture shift of leaving the controlled process paradigm and instead accept a more free form style, that almost required faith that it will work. Some companies that have already moved to this culture have started reaping benefits. And companies that adopt these technologies and cultural tenets stand to gain a many-fold increase in productivity.

Reading the book is, therefore, next on the agenda.

Connectivity - Part III

The third milestone in my love for mobile connectivity, happened shortly after I bought my second phone. It was work that demanded I have no personal time and took steps to get me a Blackberry.

The Blackberry turned out to be a very different being, in comparison with my current phones. Everything about it screamed business - no frills; just a steady solid performer. It had everything I wanted to get work done, nothing that would make me buy one for myself. But it was the company that was paying for it, so my decision making process consisted of little more than asking a colleague which handset he recommended.

Thus I came to be in possession of my new Blackberry Bold. The feature list was pretty impressive, not to mention a paid for, always online 3G connectivity. Completing my enterprise activation was a breeze, and within time I had replicated my email and calendar on the perfectly usable mobile device.

The keyboard took a little getting used to. Realizing the power of being fully connected took a bit longer. But somewhere between checking the location of my next meeting without needing my laptop and being able to reply to quick emails at the extremes of each day, I realized something strange - I was no longer fascinated by the new device. In comparison with the time I spent configuring and personalizing my earlier phones - the customizations to my Blackberry were close to nil.

At the beginning I attributed this to my trivial approach to selecting it. But that wasn't it. What had changed was me and my attitude towards connectivity. Full mobile capability had quickly become a means to an end. With abundance came transparency - the Blackberry bold held little fascination beyond the emails it carried and the meetings it reminded me of.

I was no longer a connectivity virgin.

Connectivity - Part II

So, after about 5 years the phone - which was probably pretty advanced at the time of its purchase - was woefully antiquated. Not to mention the rough and tumble of time severely tested the paint, plastic and the buttons on the phone. It was time to get into the market for a new phone - and boy was it a revelation. All the time that I had not really paid attention to phone market, a number of new things happened - including the iPhone. But eventually I settled on my new Nokia 5800.

As I worked through the pros and cons of the phone, what struck me most was the extent to which my wants and needs from a phone had changed in the last five years. WAP an not an acceptable speed to browse. Browsing websites no longer meant struggling through text extracted by a lynx-lookalike; full color depiction of sites was expected. Email on phone completed with regular desktop clients in terms of capabilities and features. And having an always accessible device meant newer and more powerful applications. But instead of being overwhelmed, a missing accelerometer could be the reasons for rejecting a phone.

Beyond the physical capabilities, what struck me most was the ability to stay fully connected all the time. As soon as I acquired my phone, I linked my personal email accounts to the built-in email client, linked it up to my WiFi and was catching up on email with friends. The fact that this phone was able to connect to a wireless network, which about a couple of years ago, I couldn't find enough desktop software to support was mind-blowing. In addition, the phone also came with an in-built Global Positioning chip that spoke directly to satellites tearing across space fourteen thousand kilometers away.

And the thing weighed a tad more than a hundred grams or three and a half ounces.

The first mobile phone weighed in at 28 ounces, not including its antenna and only barely made phone calls.

In my mind this was my second generation of the mobile phone. My first phone showed me how to make phone calls, and use a smattering of other services. This one however was a more mature attempt at connectivity. However, I hadn't signed up for the ultimate of connectivity - an always-on network connection. And that would by the third time charm.

Connectivity - Part I

My first phone was bought back in late 2003. It was a Sony Ericsson T610. I remember this clearly, because I was among the last of my friends to purchase a phone. By the time we joined the productive workforce, mobile phones were no longer a luxury. Handset prices had been relentlessly pushed down by the glut of companies in the market, which was almost matched by the competition among the service providers. Before long, pretty much everyone I knew had a phone. And it became not only a connectivity imperative among friends, but became a requirement to keep in touch with team-mates and other business colleagues.

Everybody seemed to be doing it - so I held off - for seemed like eternity at the time, but was only about 9 months. Eventually I caved in. And when I went for a phone, I wanted to take one that had as many features as possible.

The T610 was pretty good for the time - It came with a tiny browser that you could use with WAP to trudge along the information superhighways. It ran JAVA applets - which was absolutely mind-blowing for me (and eventually led to the simple understanding that the phone was nothing more than a different avatar of the computer). And it came with a tiny camera that took 320 by 240 grainy excuses for pictures.

But I was ecstatic. I used every excuse to go online and check movie timings, even if no one else seemed remotely interested in going to a movie. I photographed and cataloged various events of my daily life now that I had a camera always at hand. I used an open source program to connect the phone to my laptop and use it as a mobile router (on WAP). I bought a terminator dongle online to flash the phone to the latest firmware (something that was pretty difficult at the time, requiring special hardware - the aforementioned termninator dongle). I backed up the files, restored them, backed them up again. I built by own ringtone (from the soundtrack of the game Blood)

Looking back, the phone did not do much, but it seemed at the time there was no limits to its capabilities. As it trudged along on WAP, I never stopped being amazed that the phone talked the same networking language as the old world mainframe behemoths - TCP/IP. When it took those tiny, barely recognizable pictures using the built-in camera, it always surprised me that they managed to squeeze a camera in there. I never saw it as the little engine that could, but I was pleasantly surprised that there was an engine in there to begin with.

I ended up using the phone for about 5 years. In the time I traveled across the globe; changed phone numbers at least 5 times; switched SIM cards every few months and generally pushed it beyond its limits. Eventually it's joystick started to give way, a few buttons began developing tantrums and no amount of dis-assembly to clean it helped. It was time for a change.

Metacomm Pollution

I was sitting having a sandwich and cold coffee, reading BBCi over my T610, when this idea struck me. It started with someone making some sort of wearable computer which is intended for a human, but a robot can also use it. Somehow building a robot that used stuff made for humans seemed very funny to me. I thought about it. The reason I thought it was funny was that it seemed to be very dumb to make bots use interfaces developed for us.

Think about it, the reason we have these vague interfaces for humans is because we as a species are "interface constrained". All our interfaces for communicating with the outside world are low on bandwidth and are inefficient to go. Why would you want to build a bot that uses a mouse - you would rather connect the mouse port and allow the bot the directly talk to the mouse port. Rather, you would rather that there was no port at all, which would take care of the low bandwidth and restricted data that can is transferred through a mouse interface.

Now think about it. We as humans are restricted by the rate at which we communicate. Remember the peripherals of the computer which was the reason why the processor was never loaded? Are we not a similar analogy? It is our rate of data interaction with our surroundings that prevents full fledged thinking. Take a look at what I am doing - I got this idea in under 10 seconds, and for the last 5 minutes, I have not even come close to explaining the core concept.

Humans are like computers with extremely slow data exchange interfaces and without multitasking.

Life in the modern world is driven by nothing other than this aspect of the human. Humans had basic wants like food, clothing, shelter etc. These were met. He then had some higher needs, which were also met. However as his needs were met, he started facing the effects of his twin drawbacks.

He started finding difficult to concentrate, to be productive. He found it difficult to think and talk at the same time. He found it difficult to communicate with others, put ideas across, get ideas understood and accepted. This has meant that man now stopped communicating ideas and started communicating about the need to communicate better. Sort of like meta-communicating.

Meta communication is slowly but surely clogging up the modern world. The effects of meta communication pollution is visible all over the place. Management is now the most meta communication polluted of all human practices. All the buzz words, all the terminology, all the talk is little substance and all hot air. However it is understood. And reused. Thus meta communication takes precedence over communication when it comes to management. The how's, the font sizes, the styles, the dress of the presentor. All these take precedence over the content, which is delegated to the backstage. Typical of the meta communication polluted day in the life of a manager.

Lets get a word in. Metacomm is short for meta communication, or communication about communication. It refers to all communication that is not directly related to the communication that has to be done. Metacomm also refers to all activities that are an overhead to the action being performed.

The next most metacomm polluted environment is the new fangled "process oriented" software development companies. Software development is an art and a science. When it is treated like manufacturing, a number of steps need to ensure that this metaphor works - metacomm. The CMM levels, the ISO certification - all refer to process orientation and more importantly spew out metacomm.

I could go on, but I will not. Metacomm is the next big evil that humans have to face. In fact it is the biggest evil in the recorded history of mankind. Information overload with metacomm pollution. Degrading lifestyles, deteriorating minds, stressful environments.

Metacomm pollution is the mother of all future shocks that toffler could ever imagine. And believe it or not, it is here.

And I have a feeling mother nature knows about it too!

More on mother nature, up next.

- ravi

The weakening of the written word

With the explosion of the Information Age, there has been a great hoopla built about the easy accessibility of information. The great Information Divide it seems has been conquered. And Information is available to everyone and at everyplace. But what has probably been lost is the fact that this easy access to information has actually lessened the impact of information.

No, I am not talking about the Information overload that is causing people to spend lots of time just trying to find the information that is relevant to them. I am also not talking about the increase of information availability leading to people broadening themselves, speaking with reference to knowledge, and not gaining a sufficiently deep understanding at the same time.

What I am talking about is the relative weakening of the written word vis-a-vis the spoken word. Seems as though we have come a full circle, from the days before writing ever existed. When the only word was the spoken word. Now the Information age is restacking the odds for the spoken word - the word of the expert.

The reason is this. The explosion of the new era has driven down the costs of information disbursal - and the costs of information generation. Anyone can sit in front of a computer and can generate information - something like what I am doing now. This has meant that there is no automatic disincentive to generate information, which once allowed only those who actually had knowledge to embark upon disbursal. When a book was released, there was a certain certainty of quality associated with it. Though this has been coming down with the decrease in cost of publishing in the recent times, the information explosion has been among the last of nails onto its coffin so to speak.

The typical manifestation of it is seen in all sorts of situations. One is the proliferation of impersonation sites. These include sources of information that are not bonafide either by design or by accident. Those by design include the hoax sites, hoax email chains and so on. Those by accident include all the personal information sites which include and are not restricted to blog sites, information discussion fora, fun focus sites, ask a question sites etc. And the information is anything from health, to technology, to personal blacklisted email domains. These information sources have such a low signal to noise ration that it is increasingly becoming difficult to figure out signal from noise.

This has led to a rapid disillusioning of the information seeker. "I know this is true, I read it on the Internet" does not hold must water anymore. Once bitten twice shy, users are rapidly switching to not trusting the Internet for their informatino needs. Some who can actually separate the signal from noise are profiting, while there are a lot others for whom it is either mistrust or increasing exposure to quoting the wrong information.

Typically technology has responded too. A number of methods have come out which try to understand and review information. The volume of the Internet is so huge that it was deemed impossible to manually classify information. Hence there were a number of automatic, technical methods of information classification which came up. Some it seems succeeded, like the omnipresent google. However as with technology, somewhere the users got whiff of technology and go into the act of meta information manipulations. These moves is slowly rendering difficult data quality prediction using technology. The circle now is complete - it is back to man and manual methods to classify information. Back to the expert. May be technically it is the published word, but it is a good as the spoked word - the word of the expert.

A number of models which do this are currently in vogue. The about.com's initiative is one such effort. It aims to manually give the best sites of information for all the information needs of the Internet users. The other model is that of peer and continuous evaluation. Sites like experts-exchange and slashdot are typical of this method, where experts are the users and where these experts cull out the best of the information available. Hence is the relative weakening of the written word vis-a-vis the spoken word.

haffun

~!nrk