Social Media is bound by our human limitations

image taken from: http://ascannerdorky.wordpress.com/2007/07/18/10/

The definition of Social Media according to Wikipedia is:

Social media is content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

It sounds perfectly reasonable. Social Media gives us all the power to become publishers. To distribute our content and interact over them. To a certain extend this is true. But if you think that the world is waiting for you and your content think again. It isn’t that easy. There are certain rules you need to understand and follow.

While distribution scales endlessly, your ability to interact will not

Wikipedia is right about the scalable publishing technologies. Anyone can now create, publish and distribute content across the web. The technologies involved allow you to reach out to audiences far beyond your social network. There is a problem with this scalability. While your content can be distributed endlessly, your ability to interact over that content cannot. In a sense many of the current successful web 2.0 companies try to scale down this endless stream of content and conversations. Our human limitations do not allow us to follow 10.000 people, process millions of pieces of content and interact over all of them.

Technology tries to help us bring order into this chaos by allowing us to broadcast without the need of interaction (Twitter), limit content and discussions to people we trust (Friendfeed), build up a network of friends we want interaction with (Facebook) or attempt to capture the conversation in one place (Disqus). While technology has found us easy to use and scalable distribution, we do not have proper solutions yet for scaling down our interactions. Search for signal to noise and you will find many different startups and services trying to solve our human limitations wrt scale. This is not a new problem. Google has been working on this for years. They build their search engine and PageRank to try and provide a better signal to noise ratio. It is impossible for us to see all content on the web, so we use search engines to find us the right content.

Social Media adds another dimension to this scalability. It gives us not only more content but also more interaction over that content. Needless to say that this leads to an unprecedented nr of startups trying to provide us new methods and technology to deal with this endless stream of content we now call Social Media.

Social Media isn’t always democratic, it is a game that has winners,  losers and cheaters

Anyone can become a celebrity. The past few years of YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, blogging and Idols have proven that anyone can become a hero, right? Hardly. Of course there are excellent examples of people coming from nowhere into stardom, but for every 1 success there are a million failures. When it comes to online distribution and scale, you need to understand that while the technology itself is perfectly scalable, the actual game is a game with winners, losers an cheaters. There are those that have worked extremely hard, for many years, to become a celebrity (In the Tech world people like Robert Scoble and Louis Gray would fit into this category). These people have been providing constant value and interaction to a community and have earned respect and a voice from that.

Then there are those that understand the dynamics behind the game and seek an audience by taking a few shortcuts here and there. Instead of slowly building up an audience by providing constant quality, they actively seek high visibility through different channels and circling around other celebrities. Getting noticed by a person or channel representing a large community will help build your own community of people you can interact with. Needless to say you do need to provide valuable content in order to get noticed. Bottom line is that it takes a lot of work and a thorough understanding of the dynamics of Social Media to become a well known community member. Just because publishing has become easy doesn’t mean that you will be heard.

And there are those that become instant celebrities because they cheat. If you are thinking about becoming a web rock star yourself. Be prepared to either invest all of your time for the next few years in publishing relevant an valuable content and slowly building up a community of followers. Or cheat, buy yourself into high volume traffic without actually having to do anything relevant to earn such a position (I suggest becoming a recommended Twitter user for example).

Don’t get fooled by the ease to publish. Social Media isn’t easy. It takes a lot of hard work to interact

I see the following type of conversation pop up all the time on Friendfeed. A user observes that while he is active on the community, the content he publishes doesn’t draw a lot of attention (=discussion). This is the perfect way to start interaction on Friendfeed btw . It takes only a few seconds before the community starts to give helpful hints. Bottom line in most cases seem to be ‘give and you shall receive’. In other words. If you want people to interact with you, start by interacting with them. In order to become a respectable member of any community, you not only need to produce relevant and valuable content for that community. You also need to add value via interaction. Give, without expecting something in return. While this makes perfect sense, it doesn’t make things easier. Not everyone is as outspoken. There is always a small subset of the community that is responsible for a large part of the interactions. It’s hard to make your voice count. And while the technology does level the playing field (anyone can be or interact with a celebrity), it doesn’t automatically mean that you are heard. It takes time, effort, and a lot of positive energy to build your own voice within a community.

Some random thoughts

Social Media provides us endless possibilities to create, mash up, publish and interact over content. The one thing that holds this endless scalability back is the human factor. We simply can’t deal with a universe where there are no boundaries. As soon as we enter this world we set a playing field by following a specific set of people, signing up for certain services, interact in specific places, search, filter and share specific content. It help us to create order in a chaotic world. The biggest effect Social Media might have is that we will use it to make our world smaller instead of bigger. Quality over quantity. We might see a trend where networks will become smaller instead of bigger. Where content and interactions will become highly focused instead of widespread. Where geoposition and localization will be more important than globalization. Where interaction with people you have actually met will become more important than people you have stumbled across online.

Just like in the physical world

Questions

Networks and destinations

1. If everything becomes open and connected, what will happen to the big destinations?

2. Why is the web rapidly evolving into uncountable databases with connections, instead of one database where everything connects?

3. If all services and destinations become open, then what is the point in being a destination site in the first place?

4. Why are we creating webs within webs, instead of one network that connects it all?

Personality and identity

5. Why am I forced to be fragmented across the web, instead of having one presence that can connect anywhere?

6. Why do I need to get my friends to use the social services I’m on, instead of having my friends with me no matter what service I use?

7. What is or defines my online identity? Am I my profile, my interactions, my data?

8. What defines my presence on the web? Is it the fact that I can be found, or that I can interact anywhere?

Data

9. Why is ‘having data about me’ more important than ‘serving me the right data’?

10. Why is real-time data more important than serving the right data at the right time?

11. Can data lead to demand, or does it only take care of supply?

12. Why does a company have control over all data, instead of letting the user be in control of his own data?

Privacy

13. Why does every service need a TOS and a Privacy Policy, but at the same time the users that are exploited don’t have a TOS or personal Privacy Policy?

14. Why does every service have to implement privacy controls for the user, while we could implement 1 set of privacy controls that the user can control across all services?

Business models

15. Why is the economic model on the web broken for most companies?

16. Why do most companies work with advertisement models while clearly few manage to be  sustainably profitable?

17. When does the network effect diminish in web business models and thinking?

Behavior

18. Why can we now publicly rant about anything or anyone, without really being held accountable for our actions?

19. Why do we expect everything to be free, and then have high demands and complain about service?

20. Why would we want to have thousands of friends and interact everywhere?

21. Will we continue to increase interaction or are we reaching saturation?

22. Why do we spend more and more time online while real life passes by so quickly?

Just a few questions that I have. How about you? Do you have any?

Anyone have some answers?

Status update: the future of the web is here!

We're all idiots

/rant on

I read a number of posts in the last week that seem unrelated but ended up making me think about this social media circus we are in. Unless you are deaf, blind, and have been sitting on a deserted island the past weeks you must have noticed the hype the media are now creating around Twitter. Respectable media like the NY Times are running Twitter stories almost on a daily basis. We now know how it was thought out, that investors think loads of money will be made on search, that they turned down an offer by Facebook, and especially that it is now going mainstream. We’ve had a few terrible accidents and disasters and Twitter users were able to beat “old-media” bringing the news. As a result every respectable reporter now turns to Twitter not only hoping to pick up some early scoops as well, but more importantly look really cool at the same time too. And don’t forget about real-time search on Twitter, the next Google killer (yeah right).

Personally, I think it is a load of crap. Twitter is currently flooded by people and organizations “playing the system”. Twitter has embraced the hailed network effect of web 2.0, and that is also it’s biggest tragedy. Twitter has become an eyeballs game, just like any other service that shows unhealthy growth. Twitter isn’t growing with twitter users, it is flooded with bots and spam playing with the weakness in the system and its management. Sorry , if management wanted, they could get rid of the spam and bot excesses easily. But since they are addicted to web 2.0 growth steroids there is no compelling reason to help users not get harassed by spam and bots. Why? Because removing it would also ensure that Twitter shows less growth than expected. Making the “mainstream” bubble pop. So instead of doing what is right for its users, Twitter not only lets bots and spam free but even plays its own game with handpicked suggested users for you to follow.

Then there was this post by the BBC in which they interview smart people from the industry that claim that social networks are the “new e-mail”.  Yes, they did call it e-mail 2.0, because that makes it sound even cooler. Digging into the article we find little treasures like one from the founder of Yammer:

Mr Sacks said: “What people want to do on social network these days is post status updates. We think it’s all people want to do.”

Paul Buchheit is quoted:

“I think it’s a new form of communication; not quite e-mail, more lightweight and more real time, often with little bit of a publishing flavour to it,” said Paul Buchheit, founder of FriendFeed, and the creator and lead developer of GMail, while at Google.

And there is this engineer from Facebook that takes it one step further:

Ari Steinberg, an engineering manager at the firm, told BBC News: “It’s been interesting to see the way people change the way they communicate. “You used to e-mail content to people and you had to choose who you wanted to e-mail it to and you didn’t know if your friends even wanted to see it. “Now you can passively put something out there and let people engage with it.”

Notice how each of them highlights their own service strength in these pearls of wisdom that provide insight into our future. Our online future seems to be driven by status updates and passively watching others interact with that. The growth of Facebook, is unprecedented, but as Ari tells us, it’s mostly about status updates. Research from the  Facebook data team suggests that we may have loads of friends on Facebook, we interact with only a few of them. The rest are passive relationships.

I’ve always wondered if my personal experience with Facebook is very different from others. There is the first excitement of joining, getting new (and old) friends. But after a while the excitement wears down and I’m left with a service I can’t get any value from, no matter how hard I try. I can’t explain it any better than this hilarious and ironic article written by Matt Labash in the weekly standard:

One by one, my non-joiner friends have succumbed. As one reluctantly joined the world of “poking” and getting “poked” by people he already talked to, people he had no interest in talking to, or people he didn’t know at all–all conducted under the suspect rubric of “friendship” so that they can look at each other’s photos and write dreary “status updates” on their “walls” (brief squibs about what you are doing at that exact moment, usually with emoticons and inappropriate quotation marks: “Matt Labash is wondering how long to marinate human flesh to get out that ‘gamey taste’ “)–he was almost apologetic about it. Within two days of his birth on Facebook, he said, “I have 198 friends. I have never heard of most of them. This is so dorky, I hate myself for doing it.”

Being a true friend, I didn’t allay his guilt. I told him he was a very sad man, that collecting Facebook friends is the equivalent of being a catlady, collecting numerous Himalayans, which you have neither the time nor the inclination to feed. “You have obviously never been on Facebook,” he said. “It’s so much worse than collecting cats.” By this week, however, he’d lost all ironic distance. When I told him that he now took it all way too seriously, that I liked the old, conflicted him better, and that he should take a hard look at himself, he sloughed me off. He was now just another friend-whore: “I don’t need to look at myself. I have 614 Facebook friends to do the looking for me.”

We're a bunch of Chimpanzees

A new generation is learning that the best the web has brought us is the status update. That friends are measured in terms of quantity, and that interaction can be done passively. We need pokens to connect (my brain just melted by this infantile invention). If that is the future of the web, then you can count me out. I spend the last week without any social media tools and concentrated on real-life relations in both my private and working life. There is no online experience that can remotely match those interactions. We are all sitting behind our screens like a bunch of dressed up monkeys, confusing status updates with real interactions, and failing to see the wonders of life as it passes by. It’s pathetic.

What is the root cause of this idiocy? I firmly believe it has to do with the way business models evolved on the web. When eyeballs, page views, CPM, unique visitors, traffic, and network became more important than individual users we took a wrong turn. We let the web evolve into into a big market place where “Advanced Ads Targeting Features” have become more important than individual value. The web has become a marketing play, instead of a place where we get real value when connecting online.

I’m with 37Signals here who openly wonder why the web lost faith into charging for stuff? Our online future is reduced to a status message and a million marketeers are making plans to exploit that nonsense. I can understand that. Marketeers can’t help it, they are just idiots. But to hear the Web finest entrepreneurs reduce the web’s future to status updates and refer to this as email 2.0 is more than idiocy. It’s mediocre. And it is scary to think that all our creativity, technological progress, and plain smartness has lead to this ultimate achievement of mankind.

It is time to end this madness and start charging people for the value that they get. Sure, you will lose eyeballs, traffic, status and all those other destructive measures the web currently brings us. But you will gain something too. You will get happy customers and you will deliver user value instead of network value. You will have fans instead of statistics. There are plenty of reasons to start today with a user centric, or user-driven business model. The question is, are you brave enough to deal with that possibility?

/rant off

Demystifying Social Media for companies

What does it take to be a great Social Media Expert (GSME)? Let’s look at a few basic characteristics. The GSME is someone that knows his grand mothers pearls of wisdom and re-uses them to his advantage on daily basis. He will swing quotes at you that summarize what social media is about. Brilliant nuggets of wisdom that seem appropriate in this confusing age of  web interaction:

• “Give, and ye shall receive”
• “Failure is the stepping stone for success”
• “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”
• “Give respect, take respect”
• “The best things in life are free”

The GSME will tell you and your company that the key to a Social Media enabled marketing campaign is to leverage all thinkable social media channels. Exposing your brand out there, making sure people take notice. Joining the conversation. Get yourself on Twitter, create a Facebook page. If you are part of a bit of a geeky company then make sure you are on Friendfeed too. Start creating video messages. Post them on YouTube. Viral is the key to growth. Start blogging.

The GSME will have blazing fast, shiny, visual powerpoint slides to back up that story. More than 1 Bn people on the web, 160M potential customers on Facebook, Twitter, the new conversational tool (”Even Stephen Fry is on it! Who?”), Millions of people will watch and share your video on YouTube, half of the web is blogging, the other half reads it. Everyone older than 2.5 yrs old has a mobile phone these days, most even two. Calling is out, SMS and web browsing are in. It’s on big global conversation out there, and your company needs to be part of that.

You might feel overwhelmed, energized, seeing new opportunities to get you brand out there. But as a newbie you don’t know where to start. You may want to ask the GSME to help you out. After all, he is the expert and he can set out the winning strategy for you and your company.

Sound familiar? I’ve seen many of these GSME’s and heard many of their stories. And while the story gets better every day I feel that many of them do not have a clue how to leverage the power of social media. Let’s see a few examples where Social Media gets you nowhere:

1. Brand exposure: In essence Social Media brings us new channels for brand exposure. It sounds great to build up a prescence in each of these channels. It is cheap and convenient. There are no costs involved to start Twittering or building a Facebook fan page. The GSME tends to forget to mention that brand exposure in itself provides community users no value whatsoever (unless you are a pop band and have fans ). Your brand will be out there, but no one will be paying attention to it.
2. Getting your message out there: With all these great social media channels you can now reach out to millions of potential customers. The GSME fails to mention that you can send for free, but there is no guarantee that anyone wil listen.
3. Going viral: We all know the examples of video’s at YouTube going viral. Attracting the attention of millions of users. The GSME knows how to ‘play’ the system. Getting traction and making sure the video gets picked up and launched into the huge community. The GSME fails to mention that the current online generation has seen thousands of these attempts pass by. They may watch but the impact it has on their life is about as big as  a huge advertisement in a newspaper or on TV. It gets ignored. A great side effect is that if your video is isn’t up to the standards, users will thank you for it by creating brilliant parody video’s exposing your brand and message to the fury of the community. Hey, any exposure is good exposure, right?
4. Start blogging. Open a WordPress account and start writing. Before you know it people will subscribe to your feed and you will have yet another way to be in touch with your customers. And since you are a busy person, we might as well get a PR agency to write posts for you. And let corporate communication will be in charge of that. The problem with that is of course that people will immediately sense who is actually writing. And if it isn’t genuine there won’t be anyone reading it.

The point is that getting involve in Social Media isn’t simple at all. It’s easy to get deceived by the low entrance barrier. But setting up free accounts isn’t the hard part of Social Media. If you want to be part of Social Media you first need to acknowledge what it is. It’s all about interaction. Or, as Chris Brogan writes nicely, web 2.0 is a 2-way web. Being there is isn’t good enough. Exposing your brand isn’t either. You are not acknowledging the 2-way channel.

Playing the system, getting people to write for you, these are all tactics that sound great but simply don’t provide you or your potential customers any value. The technology may have changed, human behavior hasn’t. People don’t accept it if you ‘play’ them. If anything the technology has enabled transparency, enabling people to figure out fast enough if you are genuine or not. if you really want to be part of the conversation then there is only one way to do it. Join in and accept the consequences.

It means adding value without expecting direct return. Being there every day. Getting the employees of your company to start interacting too, without a big corporate manual telling them what to do. Getting your management to empower their team to interact. It involves making a big company look and act small again. It means adding value to conversation, to communities and not directly linking that to your product or brand. You need to bring your expertise into the interaction to help people forward.And if you are willing to put the effort in, and willing to do that for a long time, then social media might pay off. Social media is more about giving than receiving. Don’t listen to GSME’s giving you advice. Heck, don’t listen to me neither.  Getting into Social Media is hard work, and you’ll have to be willing to put the effort in.

Turns out my grandmother was right after all!

On Apple, Facebook, Google, Whuffie and why customer lock-in sucks

What is the difference between customer lock-in and customer value It’s huge! Customer lock-in is a marketeers wet dream. It is a bonus received at the end of the year. It is an internally focused measurement. It is EGO. If your CEO, organization, or marketeer is talking about customer lock-in you can be sure of one thing. Making revenues is more important than bringing value to a customer.

Don’t get me wrong, every company has to make revenues. But think about this for a second. Which company would you rather work for, or buy products from? A company that is focused on revenue and sees customers as a byproduct of that revenue? Or a company that is focused on providing user value, and as a result of this earns a good living?

How to you reach a status of customer lock-in? You can’t accomplish that by serving the customer value. Instead you focus on the costs involved to move away from your service. If the cost of leaving the service are high enough, your customer will not attempt to leave. Too much hassle. Examples? We see lots of businesses attempting some form of customer lock-in. Try leaving a mobile operator and taking your mobile phone number with you. Leave an Internet access carrier and then try to keep your data or e-mail address. Try switching banks making sure your monthly payments are still in order. The list is endless.

The online space isn’t any different. Web 1.0 thinking is essentially customer lock-in thinking. Web 1.0 business models force customer lock-in. It is their oxygen. Without customer lock-in, no revenues. It is the reason web 2.0 isn’t really a revolution but simply an evolution. Examples? The most obvious one is Facebook. Once you sign up your soul is sold and leaving again is impossible. Actually, that is not entirely true. If you simply quit, your account will not be deleted. But if you really want to get out, start acting against the terms of service and they will wipe your account faster than the speed of light. Facebook is a black hole that sucks you, your friends, your interactions and data in, but never lets it out again. It is the perfect customer lock-in platform.

Another example? The Apple iPhone. Apple builds great products but dictates everyone how to use it. I have an iPhone but I couldn’t buy it from the mobile operator I have been happy with for years. Instead of offering me choice, Apple has decided to make it exclusively available via a select set of operators. The reason is simple, it isn’t about customer value, but revenues. While the iPhone itself may be a great and user-friendly product, the Apple strategy is a lock-in strategy. Forcing me to buy the phone and jail breaking it. Sorry Apple, I don’t give a toss about your exclusive strategy, I want choice! Google’s g-phone? Exactly the same issue. Not because of the way they will distribute it. But because it needs a Google account to be useful.

Customer lock-in is a lucrative business. Corporations have tons of marketeers employed to build their customer lock-in strategy. The funny thing about it is that if you would get rid of all that overhead (yes, marketeers are idiots), you would not only save a whole lot of money unwisely spend, but you would also have the chance to work on customer value. It would make your customer, your employees much happier. It would generate profit and build you a strong business with loyal customers. You would not need a “Social Media strategy”  to “engage” with your customers. You would not need “loyalty”  programs. Note that these two “social” strategies become customer lock-in tools if applied within a customer lock-in organization. You would not need Tara Hunt to explain to you what the Whuffie factor is, as it would be in your genes. Having said that, you’d be crazy not to hire ten Tara Hunts and turn your company around form customer lock-in to customer value. A company build on customer value would be doing these things naturally, well before any consultant has thought of a new Powerpoint title called “Social media”. It is funny to realize that great developers tend to understand this much better than any marketeer ever can. It’s because a great developer does not take revenues into account. He looks at customers first.

There are many reasons thinkable why customer lock-in is dominant in company strategy, but that is big enough in itself to write another post about. Sufficient to say that if your company is using social media consultants to enter this exciting new web 2.0 world, you are in deep trouble

It is naive to think our online lives are not connected to real-life

There seems to be a strange disconnect between our online and offline lives. Different rules, norms and values seem to apply. It is as if our online personality is not connected to our real life. We act differently and feel a sense of freedom online that seems to compensate for the restrains we might feel in real life. We are all actors in this massive online play and it allows us to do things we wouldn’t consider doing in real life.

Examples?

We wouldn’t allow anyone, not even the landlord you rent a house from, to put web cams in our houses and record every conversation inside the house “to make our experience better”. Yet we throw our privacy principles over board when we get online and join sites like Facebook or MySpace.

We wouldn’t show a stranger arriving at our doorstep our family photo album. Yet we publish and annotate these same photos online so that the whole world can view them.

We protect our children against danger in the real world. We supervise their first steps into the world.  We don’t let them talk or walk with strangers. We don’t let them bully others. Yet we let them get online unsupervised and unprotected, explore the web and social networking.

We do not divulge private matters concerning illness, lost jobs, winning the lottery, fights, love, etc. to strangers we bump into on the street, yet we disclose all of this online in social networks where half of the time we don’t even know who is listening in.

We wouldn’t tell complete strangers where exactly we live, when we are going on holiday or business trips (what if they rob us), yet you can find all of that information, and more, online.

In real life we have opinions, but we do not disclose these opinions everywhere. We might even be inhibited to do so as it might turn on you at some point in time.  Online we join every conversation and start opinionating immediately. And we forget it gets recorded and will never disappear again.

The people we call friends in the real world is limited. A friend is something different from an aqcuaintance. Online we have thousands of friends. You may argue these are not your real friends, but why then do we disclose so much about ourselves to these ‘friends’? Why do we spend so much time engaging with people we really don’t know?

We do not tell anyone about our bank accounts, our passport numbers, social security numbers or birth dates unless there is a real need to do so. Yet online we sign up for any service that pops up and disclose happily our e-mail addresses, passwords, birth dates etc. In most cases these turn out to be the exact same pieces of information we use for online banking and financial transactions. Every once in a while we get scared of phishing, but soon enough we forget about it again.

We don’t trust new insurance, banking, or telephone companies that tell us we can use a service for free if we allow them access to our private information, and listen in on our conversations.  Yet online we let social networks have access not only to our own profiles, our annotated baby pictures, our families and friends, but also to our interactions with all of them.  We allow all of that private data to be exploited commercially.

We protect our privacy and family in real life, yet we let social networks protect our privacy online? Who protects us then from them?

I could probably extend this list further and think of more disconnects between real life and online behavior. But the real question is, do we care enough about it to actually deal with it? The ability to connect and interact with anyone online has brought us a lot of freedom. It has many positive aspects to it. It has freed us from many real-life constraints. If you can afford to be part of this online experience you will find that it tends to level things. Everyone can be a pop star.

But I would like to urge you to think about this for a minute. As real-life and online behavior become more and more connected, entangled, you will find that it is less easy to separate them. Online and offline become the same life. While we see our online behavior as play now I doubt it will still be play in a few years. And yet we act as if these worlds are not connected. We disclose almost anything about ourselves online and do not think or understand the possible consequences in real-life. With viruses spreading across the world and a network of computers that spans the entire planet harm can be done in a split second. Where wars are still fought on the ground, they will also move into cyberspace. Where commercial exploitation of your private data now leads to display ads you can safely ignore, it might lead to less harmless forms of commercial activity in the future. Where your next job interview might now depend on your previously achieved results. In the near future it will depend on what a Google search result will reveal about you.

Am I being too negative about this? Maybe, considering current behavior in social media my views aren’t exactly popular. But I also firmly believe that we are formed and shaped by our own actions. My advice would be that you start acting online like you would do in real-life. Thinking these worlds are disconnected is naive.

Warning: Life is colored by the information we absorb

A few weeks ago my 6 yr old son was sitting next to me while I was watching the news. I was a bit distracted and didn’t realize he was sitting there, but after a while he said something to me that made me turn off the TV. His words were “Daddy, why are there so many dead people on the news?”. He doesn’t watch the news very often, and we tend to not watch it when he is around. But even so, he noticed there is a lot of bad stuff in the news. Six years old, he should not be asking us this.

I was telling Ian Hayward about this (I’m with Ian in San Francisco). He told me that he had not watched the news in over 2 years. The reason for it is that he feels that we are all too influenced by the things reported to us. I thought about that for a while, and I tend to agree with him. We all know the feeling of going on a 2-week holiday and not following the news. It actually helps us feel great during the vacation. Ian has been on a 2 year vacation already.

Other examples. How about the feeling of panic that is fuled by the news around the financial crisis? Don’t get me wrong, there is a crisis. But the economy is influenced strongly by consumer trust. If we don’t trust. we spend less, and we get into a spiral that takes the economy down further.

I sometimes feel the same way about all these social media conversations. They are a lot of fun, but people sometimes take it a bit too seriously. The professional blogosphere is a game. It is a game where (some) people make money. Big sites aren’t there for your entertainment, they are there to make tons of money. Traffic over relevance. Stories promoted into our rss readers.  And this is fine btw. As long as we don’t take it all too seriously. There is more to life than spending  your time in social media conversations. Its fun, its play, but its imapct isn’t life-changing yet (although it takes away a lot of time ). In the end it is all about what you do in real-life. Don’t let your feelings be manipulated too much by what others think or say out loud. Make up your own mind!

I’ll be turning off the TV a bit more.

Interaction will drive the evolution of the web

I’ve often said it, and I’ll say it again. The real value of social media lies in the ability for anyone to interact over anything. It is the interaction that creates the value. Smart people like Tim O’Reilly will tell you that web 2.0 is about the web becoming a platform. That data is becoming more important than software. And that network effect determine value.

Clay Shirky is interviewed by the Guardian about his view of the next decade. Not a great in depth interview, but an ok read. In it he predicts newspapers will disappear (wow), and  that books will be printed on-demand. I do like his final statement:

What does the next decade hold? Mobile tools will certainly change the landscape, open spectrum will unleash the kind of creativity we’ve seen on the wired internet, and of course there will be many more YouTube/Facebook-class applications. But the underlying change was the basic tools of the internet. The job of the next decade is mostly going to be taking the raw revolutionary capability that’s now apparent and really seeing what we can do with it.

Kevin Kelley talks about the development of a new kind of mind:

It is hard to imagine anything that would “change everything” as much as a cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence—the kind of synthetic mind that learns and improves itself. A very small amount of real intelligence embedded into an existing process would boost its effectiveness to another level. We could apply mindfulness wherever we now apply electricity. The ensuing change would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than even the transforming power of electrification. We’d use artificial intelligence the same way we’ve exploited previous powers—by wasting it on seemingly silly things. Of course we’d plan to apply AI to tough research problems like curing cancer, or solving intractable math problems, but the real disruption will come from inserting wily mindfulness into vending machines, our shoes, books, tax returns, automobiles, email, and pulse meters.

And he agrees with Tim on the importance of network effects:

We see evidence for that already. A farmer in America–the hero of the agricultural economy–rides in a portable office on his tractor. It’s air conditioned, has a phone, a satellite-driven GPS location device, and sophisticated sensors near the ground. At home his computer is connected to the never-ending stream of weather data, the worldwide grain markets, his bank, moisture detectors in the soil, digitized maps, and his own spreadsheets of cash flow. Yes, he gets dirt under his fingernails, but his manual labor takes place in the context of a network economy.

I do not pretend to be as smart or experienced as these people. But I think we can safely say that underlying many of these developments there is one major driver. Many of these technological developments have been driven by the human need for interaction. The success of web 2.0 isn’t data. YouTube didn’t become the largest video portal because it stored video’s. It became the largest one because people could share and interact over these videos.

I see that behavior everywhere. Take Friendfeed for example. The most important aspect of Friendfeed isn’t content aggregation imo (that’s actually not important at all as content aggregation lacks intention). It is the ability to interact over the content. I suspect many users engage in conversations on Friendfeed without actually having seen the original piece of content that sparked the conversation.

It isn’t about ‘always on’ either (this used to be the mobile mantra). People do not buy mobile phones with cool technological features so that they can be ‘always on’. The mobile handheld may be a good way to be ‘always on’, but underlying that technical capability I have always felt the underlying need was a fear of not being there when it happens. It allows you to track what is happening and interact any time you feel like it. Interaction is what makes life fun.

I do believe that the nature of the interaction will evolve. Right now it is a very public interaction. Half of the Internet population is on Facebook or MySpace by now. Conversations are taking place everywhere and with anyone. While that will remain, I also think there will be an increased need for more private interactions. Instead of talking with thousands of people all over the world you really do not know, we will see more and more possibilities to allow you to interact with the people you really now and care about.

As a result of this I think we may see a decline in the growth of these huge social networks. If everyone is there, it is simply not as interesting anymore. People will revert to smaller, more private environments in which they can interact whenever they want with their friends, family, colleagues etc.

What do you think?

The incredible power of Social Technology

My good friend Steven Hodson has written an excellent post called The impossible dream – Social Technology. Steven is, rightly, concerned about the fact that many people in society are not part of the freedom and conversation social media technology has brought us. Steven writes:

As enamoured as we are currently with Social Media we have become more entrapped by the services built on what Social Media is all about. Social Media is an idea – a platform of sorts – that because of its philosophy of openness and transparency gave us a new way to communicate. It was a two way communication where those that created the content could interact with those that were consuming that content.

In of itself Social Media has changed the landscape of our online lives by letting us be participants instead of just bystanders. Even though we have gotten caught up in the ways we use the new media it doesn’t change the fact that the Internet has evolved – if only ever so slightly. Even with that evolution though we are still living in a world where access to this new world is a haphazard affair.

Stephen points out that as long as basic access is seen as a revenue generator for companies there will always be people left out of this conversation.  He writes:

In effect when you have Social Technology borders of every kind change, morph or just plain melt away. Your world changes when the barriers that we have perceived to be an integral part of our lives are no longer there or have changed.

The borders around our job truly change like they never have in the past. The borders of the country we live in don’t have the same power they once did because we are no longer held to them in the same way. With Social Technology everything changes – our world changes – we change.

But it is because of those very things – those changes – that I don’t believe we will see real Social Technology within our lifetimes. These types of changes are too radical and endanger too many positions of power. So the dream will probably remain a dream.

I would advice you to read the entire piece, it is excellent en gets you thinking (it did for me). I believe that Steven is right about his assessment that his dream (everyone has access) will not be met in his lifetime. There are too many complex factors that inhibit this to happen. But Steven got me thinking in another direction. It may yet be impossible to drop the transactional costs of getting online to zero (so that everyone can participate), but imagine the power that Social Technology could bring to improve the quality of life for all of us (and yes, that includes the poorest).

If there is one thing history has proven it is that is enough people care for a change to take place, it will eventually happen. We are currently facing some of the most difficult and life threatening challenges with severe climate changes, the absence of clean water and food in large parts of our world, financial issues. These are all very physical problems. You may wonder what Social Technology can do about them. I imagine it could do at least 3 things:

1. It can help us create awareness of the problem
2. It can help us discuss and find solutions that can actually work
3. It can help us create enough momentum to force ourselves and our governments to act

We are already seeing the grass roots of such incredible changes in society. Just look at the discussions that are evolving around our climate issues. A few years this was a problem that no government was willing to face, now it is one of the most important issues at hand. We see movements appear that were not government supported (cradle to cradle) but are now embraced. We see people getting fed up with buying large SUVs and now turning to smaller, less environmental damaging cars. We see a whole new green economy appear and the current financial crisis has proven that people are willing to invest in ‘green’ and sustainable causes. The awareness that we cannot continue to consume the way we do is increasing, and while 2/3rd of the world is demanding to be part of this consumption society, we see awareness appear that we cannot continue like this.

I believe that Social Technology is partially driving this awareness and need for change. I also believe that it will increasingly become more important and help us all to change the world we live in. Not because of the technology itself, but because of the unlimited power it brings us. It allows us to be participants instead of bystanders. It allows us to take responsibility, instead of leaving it with others. And when a large part of society is participating, it doesn’t let us be bystanders anymore. Let’s just hope it is not too late yet.

Facebook Connect a privacy tool? Yeah Right!

A good article by Brad Stone at the NY Times entitled “Facebook aimes to extend its reach across the web”. Brad talks about Facebook Connect:

Facebook Connect, as the company’s new feature is called, allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends’ activities on those sites. Like Beacon, the controversial advertising program that Facebook introduced and then withdrew last year after it raised a hullabaloo over privacy, Connect also gives members the opportunity to broadcast their actions on those sites to their friends on Facebook.

This is beginning to sound like a development I have talked about many times, the user-centric web. In a User Centric Web, the user is in control of his data and interactions. Facebook’s attempt sounds like it, but it fails in one major perspective. And Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operation Officer of Facebook, together with Brad’s analysis indirectly explain where it fails.

Sheryl is quoted in the article:

“Everyone is looking for ways to make their Web sites more social,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “They can build their own social capabilities, but what will be more useful for them is building on top of a social system that people are already wedded to.”

Brad writes about the possible intentions of Facebook Connect:

Facebook has detailed information about its users: their real identities, what they like and dislike and whom they associate with. With a member’s permission, it could use that data to help other Web sites deliver more personalized ads. Similarly, those sites could tell Facebook what its users are doing elsewhere, helping to make its own ads more targeted.

In many ways Facebook Connect, and Google’s OpenSocial, attempt to do what the User Centric Web is about. It allows users to take their data with them on the web. It allows them to be in control of their data and their interactions. The problem I have with Facebook Connect and these other initiatives is that to me it seems the wrong intentions are used to build it. Facebook Connect looks like a scheme that will provide Facebook more value. By letting Facebook users leave the Facebook platform they are actually hooked tighter to the platform. And that is good news for the advertisement revene streams of Facebook. User value seems to be reduced to  welcome side effect. Facebook Connect lets Facebook extend the reach of its social graph beyond the platform, making the network inevitably more valuable than the user.

In my opinion the underlying business model makes it very difficult to provide the user true control over his data. If your business model is free advertisement based services, then you are forced to make network value more important than individual user value. It make privacy control an “issue” to deal with, instead of a value you can provide your user with. Big difference. I am afraid most social network users don’t care or are ignorant, but the issue of privacy will become more and more important as social media takes control of our lives. Openness and interaction that come along with it are great, but there are also dangers to consider with Social Media.

I’m afraid the NY Times calls it right when they say Facebook aims to extend their reach on the web with Facebook Connect. That sums it all up. Facebook pitches Facebook Connect as a privacy tool. I am left with one question. Who is going to protect me, my data and my online interactions from Facebook?

5 dangers of social media

Few people seem to realize or care about the dangers social media brings to our lives. Our online habits are changing rapidly from a closed, private behavior towards an open and sharing culture. While this brings us lots of good, it seems to me we are still very naive about its possible dangers.

Let me provide you five dangers that arise due to our changed online behavior. These dangers should make us realize that when (not if) we move into an era where data becomes currency, we will need to develop better privacy and security measures to go along with that. There are many more dangers that can be thought of, but I’ve just picked 5.

1. Identity theft

Stealing another person’s identity is easier than you think. We are not aware of the information we share on the web. And we often do not realize that Google never forgets. We can find names, birth dates, family members, school and work history, and much more on anyone. We can find e-mail addresses, credit card information, and from there we can get access to bank accounts and identity information. Honestly, it doesn’t take a genius to steal a person’s identity online. Right now this often has financial repercussions (people buy stuff on your credit card), but the consequences may be more severe. When important aspects of our lives are moved online identity theft can do us more harm. Think about someone committing crimes in your name. And it can be done so easily. All you need to do is sign up for a new cool web 2.0 social networking thingy. This is a harmless example, but you can imagine what can be done.

2. Everything known about you can and will be used against you

Remember that college party where you had a great time and posted a few pictures of you and your friends on the web? Remember that post you wrote where you talked about your political views, your religion, sexual preference, or point of view on various issues?  Remember that you friended a person that turns out to be a criminal? Or it happens to be someone that is a bit more explicit, has really different political views than yourself. Often we are not aware what others can find about us. Part of the problem is that we have almost no control over the data that is stored on the web about us. But once it is out there it can and will be used in ways you hadn’t thought about before. How about a status update on Twitter or other social network. “I’m off to the web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco’. Harmless right? Not if you realise how easy it is to figure out the address you live at and then empty your house while you are away in San Francisco.

3. Everything is traced to you as a person

If there is one difference between the online and physical world is that data online can be traced to individuals more easily than in the physical world. We are often not aware how much information we give away that can be directly related to us. Social networks have millions of of profiled users in their database. Google has Google accounts. Every time we log into such profiles the data that is collected is directly related to our identity. It isn’t anonymous, it is traceable to ourselves. And that data is used, often for commercial purposes, but sometimes for evil purposes. It may take new laws, new governments, a change in a management team, or a war that can get the wrong people have access to your profile.

4. You have no control over your user data

Web 2.0 services live and thrive by your user data. Facebook exploits your and your friends data and creates revenues from it. Any web 2.0 company that has advertisement as one of its core business model elements will use your data, your interactions, your friends, to create revenues. You get privacy settings that protect you from other users, but who protects you from Facebook itself?

5. Who are you talking to?

Everything becomes social. As a result we can friend thousands of people on the web. In most cases we do not know who that ‘friend’ is. We are not aware that social networking services have a business model in which the network (the no of users connected) is way more important than the individual users. So ‘friending’  is dead simple and encouraged. It seems less important to actually know someone than to ‘friend’ anyone that comes along. Quantity over quality. And while this works out fine in many cases this certainly provides dangers for children, relative less experienced web users, etc. Who are you really talking to?

conclusion

I do not think that sharing, social networking or social media are necessarily bad things. I do mind that current practice ad business models make sharing more important than privacy and security. The current financial flow doesn’t allow us to develop better privacy or security measures as there is no one interested in investing in it. Privacy is losing ground to social media while they should be developed hand in hand. I often hear the argument “I have nothing to hide, so what is the fuzz about”. I find that a naive view on this subject. This shift in behavior caused by social media services with data becoming the most important currency is a development  that is unstoppable, and it calls for immediate action.

The idiocy of Social Media conversations

I read a post by Robert Scoble just now that made me laugh out loud. He observes that the discussions over at Friendfeed regarding the financial crisis lack depth and knowledge.

In the past 18 hours I’ve read literally thousands of posts and have done almost nothing but hang out on FriendFeed. I’ve seen a LOT of idiocy. And these are supposedly from the smarter, more educated people around. People who I’ve had a beer or two with and who I count as friends and fellow Americans.

[stuff deleted]

The downside of this new media world is that you’ll hear a lot of opinions. Which one is right? I’m not always right. In fact, I’m often wrong. But I’ve counted on YOU, the audience, to help me correct that when I’m off in the deep end. Now, though, I’ve seen so much idiocy that I’m not even sure of my audience anymore. That’s how deep our loss of confidence in each other has come.

It made me laugh a bit for 2 reasons. First, Robert is a passionate Friendfeed user and goes through major ups and downs regarding the value of the service.

Secondly he complains about the idiocy within the discussions on Friendfeed and the loss of confidence in his audience there. For some reason Robert assumes there are experts hanging out on Friendfeed that are engaging in thorough, deep discussions.

This assumption is wrong of course. Friendfeed is a cool hangout place for smart people that much is true. It is a specific type of person that hangs around on Friendfeed. Mostly early adopters of web technology. Regardless of the ’smartness’ of the people that hang out there Friendfeed lacks any support for in-depth discussions.

At best Friendfeed is a bar where we can hang out and ventilate our opinions. Which is fine of course, but hardly in-depth. Besides that, a discussion that possibly involves hundreds of people rarely leads to insight. There is no time to explore, people have to make bold statements in order to hijack the discussion.

Friendfeed provides us the stage for our one minute of glory. Engaging with other cool friendfeed users. It’s a bit like an idols competition. If you engage everywhere and say bold things you might get noted by the crowd and earn the Friendfeed coolness factor.

Does that make Friendfeed useless? Off course not. It can eb a lot of fun. You can meet great people and hang out. But that is exactly what it is. A hang out place for the tech elite. No more and no less. Steven Hodson calls it a silly little corner of the Internet:

Even the idea that a Nobel Laureate of Economics or a discoverer of the Human Genome are going to be found sitting around there computers chumming it up on FriendFeed ot Twitter is ridiculous. Like really, give your head a shake if you believe that. Supposing though that for some incredible reason you did find someone like Stephen Hawking on your friends list do you even thing you would be able to comprehend what the hell they were talking about. Not likely.

So Robert, here’s a suggestion for you. Forget even thinking that places like FriendFeed or Twitter are anything more than really cool places to get together with friends and chew the fat. You know .. just like the old newsgroups or web forums. You want the experts – you’re going to have to go find them where they live because they’re too damn busy to find any value in our silly little corner of the Internet.

You want to have a fun but overall useless conversation hang out on Friendfeed. Nothing wrong with that btw, I love doing that every once in a while. You want in-depth expertise call Steven Hawkins.

Early adopters fail to answer the First Use question for Social Media

I read a few posts that weren’t related but did talk about a pattern I’ve seen before. First of all there is this excellent post by Zephoria on Facebook. She talks about the way Facebook “expects” people to use their service versus the way people might be using it. A quote from her post, reflecting an e-mail that a Facebook user received when his account was shut down:

Please note that Facebook accounts are meant for authentic usage only. This means that we expect accounts to reflect mainly “real-world” contacts (i.e. your family, schoolmates, co-workers, etc.), rather than mainly “internet-only” contacts. As stated on our home page, Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you, not a “social networking site”. It is meant to help reinforce pre-existing social connections, not build large groups of new ones. If this is in direct contrast to what you expected as legitimate Facebook usage, I apologize for any confusion. This is simply the intention behind the site.

Zephoria continues this example and describes the gap between what a service was meant for and the way it might actually get used:

Nicole is 100% correct that people primarily use Facebook (and MySpace and Friendster) to interact with people they already know. We know this and that’s why we agree that the term “social networking site” is a bit of a red herring. Labeling is simply political and we believed that it’s better to label a genre in a way that best reflects the practices taking place rather than use a term that signals something that is not dominant. (This is particularly important when, as in the case of these sites, the term is used to create cultural misinformation so as to add fire to a moral panic.)

That said, the categorical term that we use to label a particular site or genre of social media does NOT determine practice. The intentions of the designers do NOT determine practice. The demand of the company does NOT determine practice. In science and technology studies (STS), we have a term for this foolish worldview – it’s called “technological determinism” and calling someone a “technological determinist” is an insult. Unfortunately, far too often, companies take on this reductionist role and expect that the technology will determine practice.

Steven Hodson has written a lot of posts in which he discusses the way early adopters tend to view technology and the gap between them and mainstream consumers when it comes down to the usability and usefulness of a new web 2.0 technology service. I think this post says it best, and I’m quoting a small dialogue I feel describes this gap so well. It’s Steven getting a haircut and talking to his hairdresser:

“So what do you do for a living?”

“Uhm .. I am a technology blogger”

Blank stare …….

“I write about technology on the Internet”

“Oh so then you would know all about Facebook then”

“Yup, but I don’t use it”

“You don’t use it? Why? It’s lots of fun”

“Too many security issues for my liking making not worth using.”

“Security issues? what do you mean…..”

Then there is an excellent piece by Mark Rizzn Hopkins at Mashable in which he talks about the latest in Social Media wonderland,  called “Wisdom of the Crowds”. It seems to be the new buzz word in Social Media, even thought the author of the book, James Surowiecki, shows that crowd wisdom does not always work well, as Mark points out when talking about Digg and it’s possible relation to crowd wisdom:

This is one example of the type of situations where Surowiecki says the Wisdom of Crowds will fail. His list of problematic structures include where the crowd is too homogeneous, too centralized, too divided, too imitative, or too emotional.

I Like Mark’s stance on this. It touches what I feel as a sort of universal truth about any new technology or understanding. It can have great effect, but is hardly ever a solution to all of the worlds problems.

A quote:

Crowd wisdom has this sort of philosophical feel that “cloud computing” does. It’s a catch all term that broadly describes the bulk of what’s produced in the Web 2.0/social media world. I think the best thing that can be done to solve the problem is for a more thorough understanding of crowd wisdom to be kept in mind by those who design these systems in the first place (that is, if they are designing these systems to be anything more than white-noise generators).

And that is exactly where early adopters and breaking news blogging sites tend to miss a turn. They seem to work with an unspoken underlying assumption that if they like the new cool startup thingie, everyone will like it.  As a result it’s impossible for them to imagine what the technology would mean to the users it was intended for. I find this behavior difficult to understand. I am a (reasonably) early adopter of technology and I can be passionate about it. But the most important question technology needs to answer for me is “what does it do for me”? I call that the First Use experience. It’s dead simple to understand, but incredibly difficult to get right.

First use is about creating the best possible user experience when you deploy your service for the first time amongst your target users. First use is about answering the question,”Is a user willing to put in the effort to learn about this new technology and incorporate it in his current habits”?  The answer in any case is that willingness is related to either solving a problem or creating another type of value for the user. If this isn’t obvious from the start, then the user is not committed to put in the effort of integrating this technology into his life.

I feel that our current Hallelujah over web 2.0 social media technology fails to address the First Use question. Yes it is cool to be able to participate in discussions with potentially thousands of people on the web. Sure it’s great to track these discussions, to be able to find new stuff via aggregators, to be able to friend tons of interesting people. To be part of an never ending global discussion. But what does it all boil down to in the end? What is the value of that for your daily life, especially when you are not part if the in-crowd of Silicon Valley or the tech industry?

The answer is that we really don’t know. And if we don’t know, how do you think any normal Internet user will possibly understand it? Social media is here to stay, I’m sure. But it’s impact is highly overrated right now. A friend of mine, Neil Vineberg talks about this same topic over here. He questions the value of social media and notes that his passions tend to reside in offline activities. I do that too, it’s the main reason that I tend to see my social media activites as play. It’s fun to do, but there are more important things in life.

Social Media is just a tool, a fun playground, cool technology. But it doesn’t have all that much impact on the lives of ordinary people. It doesn’t bring a clear and tangible value yet to make people want to integrate it into their current habits. That doesn’t mean that Social media will not become more important for us. It just means that the early adopter and tech blogging community needs to calm down a bit and question the value for the user when new services appear. If we all focus on answering that First Use question, startups will be forced to build user-centric services. Services that evolve around the actual needs of a user. Now that would be refreshing, don’t you think?

That is what I tend to do on this blog. I try to remember First Use and question new technology in that perspective. It’s the Zen of my blogging. And I hope you’ll appreciate it

Our Social Media behavior smothers discussion

I was wondering about an amazing (well to me it is) “discussion” I saw on a blog post over at Mashable. Mark Rizzn Hopkins wrote a post about Early adopters and it didn’t take long before many people jumped on that to provide their opinion.

In the post, entitled “4 questions for every early adopter” Mark tries to describe a stereotype of an early adopter. I kinda liked his stance, I have written about this exact topic before. If you look at it from a wider perspective I feel that the whole Silicon Valley circus with blogs, pr machines, and early adopters running around jumping every cool service they get their hands on is quickly losing it’s sparkle. I wrote a post on that over at Steven Hodson’s blog, if you are interested. But that isn’t what I was looking at.

What I found amazing was the comments that were left behind on Mashable after Mark had published his post. I went through them, one by one, and found that the tone of voice was pretty aggressive in many of the comments. Mark was able to quickly get a pro and a con crowd together in one place. It’s seems that talking about early adopters isn’t without danger.

I found several food fights going on in public where people weren’t really discussing or debating anything. Instead people were passionately writing what they felt was the truth. And that got me to think a little. This social media thing and the value of it. The real power of social media lies in the ability to interact. But to be honest, I wonder if people are really interacting sometimes.

I believe that the weakness in this assumption is very subtle. Social media allows interaction but at the same time, this interaction is bound by a very different set of rules than real-life interactions.

In real-life we have gesture, senses, feelings, etiquette, social control and pressure, and they surround us all. It makes us act in a certain way. It ensures that, in general, we try to be civilised when together. Of course people fight, scream and call names, but it comes at a cost. If you get yourself into such a situation your blood pressure rises, you get agitated, frustrated, feel bad or whatever.

And that is where Social Media interaction becomes different. I feel that once we are on-line, our behavior changes considerably. While we may be shy in real life, it is a lot easier to become outspoken on-line. That isn’t just because you might have a different identity on-line, maybe even one that doesn’t trace back to you in real life. The same thing holds for people, including myself, that simply extend their real life identity on to the web.

It’s the way we get together on-line. Using a keyboard and a computer screen somehow doesn’t make the experience “real” and personal. You may have a public online profile, but it is detached from real life.  Social media can let us interact anywhere we want, but on-line interaction very different from real-life interactions.

It is for that reason people that may be shy in real-life can become outspoken on the web. It also makes us all experts on any matter, even if we don’t know a thing about it. That is why a “discussion” over at that Mashable article isn’t really a “discussion”. People find it easy to be an expert, be offensive or rude. It’s this attitude that makes it hard to have a great discussion, or to explore something with a crowd. Instead of asking questions, we are all eager to provide answers.

I realized (again) that this happens all the time. You can read blogs, comments, discussions on Friendfeed, or any other platform only to find that in many cases the opinions ventilated make the air so thick that it is impossible to learn anything from it. We claim the truth, act like subject experts on any matter, and sometimes even call each other names. Once we get online we feel less vulnerable and start acting like fools.

The one case where this doesn’t happen very often? It’s when you are online getting together with real friends. Then similar stimuli take control of the situation and you start acting like your usual self again. It’s a trap we all fall into one time or another.

All of this above applies to me too of course. I write about Social media technology and their effect on human behavior. I do this because I’m passionate about it. Can I really consider myself an expert on these matters? I don’t know really. So it is best to take everything you read here with a grain of salt.

Remember, just because it is written down doesn’t make it true!

The unlimited power of social media is bound by my human limitations

Social media allow us to interact over content, anywhere, anytime. And we love it. Interaction is what makes web 2.0 valuable. While mainstream users are discovering and engaging in this interaction on services like Facebook and MySpace, the early adopter is way ahead using services like Twitter, Pownce, Friendfeed, Dopplr, Seesmic, Yelp, del.icio.us, Digg, Google Reader, StumbleUpon, Disqus etc. (I could go on for a while). A typical early adapter hero is using at least 5-25 of those services and actively shares his own content, events and stuff found on the web with his friends. Content gets aggregated,  shared, re-aggregated and re-shared.

While I do consider myself part of the early adapter scene I have always been reluctant to spent too much time on so many different services. I read about them, I try out a few, but I never spent hours a day on any of these services. For example, I love Twitter, but unlike most Twitterazi I probably average no more than 4-5 tweets a day.I don’t follow thousands of people, but balance the number of followers and follows.

I have several reasons for this. first of all,  I’m not really fascinated by technology itself. I use it, I work with it, I try it, but the final verdict for any service is never based upon the technology. I always look at it from a user (in this case mine) perspective. Does it help me/solve a problem/or provide me value in any way. For precisely that reason I (unlike most) do not like the iPhone I have all that much. If you get past the cool demo effect, an start using it in daily life you’ll find limitations that no mobile handset manufacturer has solved yet, not even Saint Jobs.

The same thing goes for Friendeed. While many of the tech elite’s find Friendfeed the one aggregation service that will replace them all I find it just another tool. Friendfeed lets you share content via RSS feeds with people that subscribe to you. I don’t care all that much about content aggregation (will get to that). But the real power of Friendfeed is that it lets users comment on the content that is being shared. It makes it really easy to start and participate in conversations with other users. By following people you find interesting Friendfeed highlights the content the person you follow for you. Friendfeed attempts to (re-)organize content using the idea that if you follow interesting people, you will see the content that they are interested in.

The users of Friendfeed are wildly enthusiastic about it. There is more engagement, more content, much better discussions. All of this is true. But I also find that there are many people participating in a discussion, surrounding a blog post for example, without having read the post itself. As a result discussions tend to get long lists of everyone ventilating his opinion. Personally I am more fond of interaction that leads to exploration of the subject at hand.

There are services where you share locations, traveling plans, shopping behavior, blog posts, music, video’s. There are so many fascinating ways to meet new people, interact, share content, thoughts, emotions. It’s very addictive once you get into it. But I have found that social media are quickly bound by my human limitations. There is only so much attention I am willing to spend on such services. And I’m not alone in this. If you search for “noise” or “echo” on Friendfeed you’ll find many discussions and strategies to deal with the immense flow of content you are confronted with. Most problems are related to following too many people and getting too much content aggregated. How can you find the interesting people or content if you are flooded with it? The most obvious solutions are to either follow less people, use less services, or spend less time on them. Some are even building their own experiments and take radical different approaches to their social media consumption (see here and here for example).

As a sidestep, this overwhelming content flow makes it really hard for content to stand out. In the blogosphere this leads to sensational blog titles with often virtually no (or copied) content inside. There isn’t any time for lengthy posts anymore (such as this one). The major blogs write short, snappy posts in the hope people are willing to take a few secs and pay attention to it.

This is where Social Media is quickly hitting our human limitations. There is only so much content we can swallow, so much interaction we can handle. We can’t all be Louis Gray or Robert Scoble. A tech guy talks about the signal to noise ratio, in normal language there is just too much to see and participate in. One of the main weaknesses of most aggregators in my opinion is that there is too much unintentional sharing. We don’t just share things we find really important, we share anything. And worse, we don’t share by sending each other something specific (intentionally), but we share RSS feeds making the act of sharing unintentional (or maybe unconscious). As a result the stuff I might be really interested in gets buried under a whole lot of unintentional, unfocused and mostly uninteresting content.

We have been here before.You can see the exact same pattern developing as it did with e-mail. When starting, you get a few intentional mails directed right at you. Later on you get copied in almost every e-mail conversations, both futile things and in cc:, making e-mail much less efficient and forcing us to deploy inbox rules. And on top of that you get a whole lot of messages that aren’t directed specifically at you, but they are in your mailbox and stand in the way of the content that is important to you. You know what that is? SPAM. Social Media aggregation is quickly becoming the next source of gigantic numbers of unintersting pieces of content (AKA SPAM).

And we are so predictable in the way we want to handle this. We need trust filters, noise detectors, blockers, friend feeds and rankings, all kinds of technical solutions to stop all that useless content obscuring the good stuff from us. But we are ignoring the fact that the underlying principle of sharing is the cause of all this. By using RSS which as a technology is truly great as a sharing mechanism, we also accept that we get endless streams of unintentionally shared content. Most of which is useless to the receiver.

There are limits to what I can and am willing to process on a day. I have found that a few choices help me deal with this:

1. I see everything as a river of content. It passes by all day long, and whenever i feel like it I dive in. I’m not concerned what I miss when I get out again. the river doesn’t dry up, there is always something else to be found
2. Despite of what you might think I prefer to follow as many as possible. I’m not hunting for follows, but if someone follows me I usually follow back. I’m more concerned to be trapped in a small community with lots of similar people than with possible noise. As long as I accept choice 1. this is fine.
3. I actually read long blog posts and try to provide my thoughts if I feel I can contribute. I haven’t visited sites like TechCrunch in ages. I’m not interested in any post that has a title of “breaking news”. It’s not the launch of something new I’m interested in, but the impact it has on me and others. So not the breaking news, but the analysis is what I find interesting. That’s why I follow people like Rolf Skyberg, Steven Hodson, Chris Anderson, Kevin Kelley, Chris Messina, Zephoria, Jonathan Harris and many more like those (sorry guys, can’t fit you all in here).
4. I don’t comment or like endless streams of content (sorry guys). It’s not that I don’t like many things, but I do feel that I need to be reluctant to join in every discussion. I have an opinion about many things, but I’m by no means an expert on them. Instead of adding more noise to the river, I try to interact in those places where I feel I can contribute.
5. I write long blog posts myself. Maybe it ads noise too, but my intention is to contribute where I feel I can. I read great stuff from others, so I feel I need to pay back by presenting my thoughts.
6. I try not to share too much, only the things I myself really find valuable (this is always hard to do)
7. I spent limited time in this social media river. I have a life with a family, friends. I have an incredibly  exciting job (will get to that later) preparing a commercial launch of a service that will conquer the world starting in September  (don’t they all ). I read books, newspapers, and most of all, I interact with real people. There is a life outside social media you know

This is how I deal with my human limitations in social media. How do you deal with it?

Do we really need privacy controls in Social Media?

A small discussion yesterday on Friendfeed after I posted a video that puts up a big warning about the way Facebook deals with your privacy. I do not know if any of the claims in that video are correct. Jason Kaneshiro pointed me to an article posted earlier that mentions some of the same assumptions here.

Privacy and Social media. An interesting contradiction. Social Media allows us to interact over any content on the web. It’s pubic by nature, people are stimulated to join an open conversation, become public figures. Social media does sometimes provide us “private” back channels (the direct message in Twitter). It is an unstoppable process. Any website, channel or technology is making the move towards the usage of social media. We love to be part of any conversation and by doing that we increase the value of any service for the service provider and ourselves.

And it feels good too. I don’t care a bit about the aggregation capabilities of Friendfeed for example. But I like the ability to join in a conversation about that content that gets aggregated. Same thing goes for Twitter. Tweets essentially broadcast something to anyone that wants to listen, and every once in a while, it leads to responses that make you smile, laugh out loud, sad, surprised. All emotions are addressed in a way.

I think it is a great that social media allow all of these interactions to take place. It makes the online world a more fun and interesting place to hang out. But it gets messy when the objective of the one providing the social media capabilities isn’t to let us interact. It gets messy when the objective is to store and analyze our interactions and relations on the web in order to make money. It gets messy when a privacy policy of the service provider is 10 pages lawyer talk that no one bothers to read. It gets messy when users are naive enough to think that this isn’t happening at the service they use. That is the point where privacy all of a sudden becomes important in social media.

The sad thing about this is that Social Media and privacy are holding each other in a death grip. But privacy is slowly choking and turning blue. Social Media can’t really exist unless it facilitates public interaction. But underneath lies the trouble. I can’t think of a single web company that isn’t using the free ad based business model to exploit social media. And it is this business model that really fights the battle with privacy. And unfortunately it is winning, big time.

The generation that grew up without social media still has a grasp of what privacy means on the web. The generation that lives with social media now is already losing sight on the concept. And that i a real threat in my opinion. Privacy control is as important as controlling your own finances. It is not something to think lightly about. That doesn’t mean that there should not be any public interaction through social media! But it’s crucial that the participants can decide for themselves which aspects of their online lives an interactions are accessible and reusable by others, and which aren’t.

The only way Social Media and privacy could co-exist, because that’s what is needed, is to make the user himself responsible for his privacy control. These controls can’t be implemented within the social media. They need to be implemented within the on-line presence of the user!

To explain this consider the following (its’s from that Friendfeed discussion I mentioned earlier). Facebook allows you to set all kinds of privacy controls. Within Facebook you can decide what your friends can and can;t see, and up to a certain level you get to control 3rd party access to your profile. But there is one control missing. It is the ” Facebook, stay away from my profile”  control. Facebook helps you to protect yoursef from anyone except Facebook.

Privacy is something the user needs to be in charge of. Who are you to think that you can do this for me? To implement this one could think of a highly localized version. Every user has his own privacy controls on his computer. But a much better solution would be to use the banking model. Create large privacy faults on the web where users can store their interactions and controls. Interacting using social media then simply passes by the controls we have within those vaults. Some will provide full access, some will put constraints on them. And the banker that provides this privacy service only has one business model, that is to protect the user’s privacy. And just like with banking, we want to have choice, privacy banks that compete to provide us the best, simple, easy to use, cheap, customer-centric service possible. A service that can connect with all social media and allows instant, fin-grain controls accessible to the user.

A simple idea, but almost impossible to implement due to the mainstream free ad based business model. Do we really need privacy controls in Social Media? You bet. We haven’t seen the last of this. As more Beacon-like services appear, feeding upon our personal data I think that privacy will wrestle back. Privacy will become a powerful counter force to the public addiction of this free ad based business model and get balance back into this death grip.

The phenomenal power of social media

I was going to write about an interesting topic today (will save that for another day) until I was reading through some blog posts and read a couple by Fred Wilson this morning. According to Steven Hodson Fred seems to be in a web 2.0 midlife crisis. Fred talked openly about not being to write a blog post every day anymore (although he still seems at it) because of a lack of things to say. BTW, my mom always told me that if I didn’t have anything useful to say I might as well be quiet and listen for a while

He notes that the major web 2.0 news sources such as TechCrunch, TechMeme, etc. do not provide him much inspiration.

As technology blogging has become defined by blogs like Techcrunch, Gigaom, VentureBeat, Valleywag, PaidContent, AlleyInsider, and many others that are quickly becoming news organizations optimizing around scoops and driving readership, I am feeling that we’ve lost something, or at least we need to look elsewhere for that magic that was existent back in the first half of this decade.

And continues with:

Who knows if what I want exists or can exist. But I want techmeme for inspiration. I want a place I can go every day and get inspired by real people. It hasn’t happened for me in many years in traditional media and honestly it’s happening for me less and less these day in online/social media.

It is interesting to see the direction Fred is taking this. He is now turning his attention to fields outside of web 2.0. He isn’t bored with web 2.0 but wonders how its massive globalization power can help solve real-world problems, inspired by an article written by Umair Haque:

So I am not bored by the web. I do want to figure out how to use the web to answer some of Umair’s questions, how do we:

Organize the world’s hunger.
Organize the world’s energy.
Organize the world’s thirst.
Organize the world’s health.
Organize the world’s freedom.
Organize the world’s finance.
Organize the world’s education.

I really like this train of thoughts Fred is going through right now. We could question the ability of web technology to aid in resolving some of the worlds toughest problems. Web technology might not directly solve hunger or thirst problems. But web technology does bring us the ability to organise the potential to tackle these issues. Social media allow us to interact anywhere. Given the right content and the right distribution could we not organise a mob of creative, intelligent group of people across the world that would be willing to think of solutions? Not problems, but solutions. it might not be possible to resolve just anything. But there are area’s in which technology could definitely help to bring the necessary potential together.

It would need people that have a deep understanding of the essence of these world problems to ignite such efforts. It seems to me that there are often scarcity, suppression, market, logistics, supply chain, technological and human problems underneath. There is food and water, but it isn’t available in the places that need it mostly. There is technology that can help farmers harvest, but there isn’t money to deploy it. There are medicine that can increase basic health but the industry blocks distribution because it doesn’t make them a buck.

There are some successes to be told. For example, in the 70s manipulation of rice crops (not sure if that is the right terminology here) helped create a much stronger plant, leading to higher rice production. If you now Google “improve rice” you will find many projects working on further improvements. If rice production can be increased it will immediately benefit the poor.

There is Muhammed Yunus, who came with the idea of Microcredits, small loans than helped poor people become self employed again. A project that started in Bangladesh and has found its way to many other countries.

There is also the Cradle to Cradle project, founded by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. They have written a framework of production techniques that are not just efficient, they are essentially waste free. It is an amazing idea, producing waste free. The problem I see with this concept right now is that it takes people of the caliber and expertise of William McDonough and Michael Braungart to accomplish such projects. It is really complex to produce waste free and it needs incredible expertise in fields such as chemistry and technology. But here social media technology can really help. Finding the right expertise. Sharing results and good practices.

I think Fred is right about diving into the capabilities web technology to see if this can help to resolve the real issues in this world. Web technology and social media have brought us unique technological capabilities. It is truly worldwide as Fred points out. It helps us share and improve on current knowledge and expertise. And perhaps most important of all, it can help to find and bring the most creative, smart, enthusiastic people together. And these people are needed to come up with life saving ideas. Ideas that don’t just sound right, but can actually be implemented too.

If Fred or anyone else can help this process going, to let people get together and make the technology work for this world, it would be great. The phenomenal power of Social Media might just be what we need to start organizing such a venture. You can count me in!

Can we have more comment fragmentation please!

Comment fragmentation is a hot topic in the blogosphere right now. There are tons of discussions on it. If you search on the topic you can see that every blogger has an opinion on it. There are tons of blog posts written on it. Today even Seesmic is being accused of hijacking threads of comments. I myself have commented a bit fragmented, here and there ,  so I thought it would be a good time now to provide you with my 2cts on the topic.

Many people seem to have a problem with comment fragmentation. I am going to try and avoid SEO debates on this. Not my thing really although I can understand and appreciate that being important to some bloggers. If we forget any SEO implications most bloggers seem to want to be able to track an entire conversation, preferably in one place. Most would like it on their blog, but if that doesn’t work then there are all kinds of tools around that will help you (or the toolmaker) to centralise it at another place. Friendfeed, Disqus, IntenseDebate, they are all at it.

While the idea of being able to track and follow a conversation that you might have started sounds good, I personally believe that centralising discussion is not a good thing. Conversations are by definition not bounded by time or space. They happen here and there, now and then. It is an illusion to think we can centralize discussions. One of my Friendfeed comments in one of such discussions was:

I just left a comment somewhere, can’t remember. And I saw a guy in an elevator and talked to him about it, my wife is in, and I think I might have dropped the subject somewhere at this party I was at last night, although I can’t remember if I was actually there or not. O yeah, and I just placed this comment here too. What is this fracturing all about, not a big deal obviously

While I ended it with a I did mean everything I said. At the very same time I’m writing this blog post I know there are people out there thinking the same or opposing thing. Writing it down or keeping it to themselves. Talking about it with others or installing software in order to try and get a grip on it.

You may provide an argument following this line “I wrote a post on a subject and I’m interested to follow and interact in the discussion that it started”. I get the part of wanting to be able to know and participate. It is fun, provides insight and helps our self esteem move up a notch or two.

“Did I just start that amazing conversation? Oh wait, is Robert Scoble paying attention to it, wow.  )”

Be honest, we all love that.

It’s even better if all of this conversation would take place on the original site, the place where the author published his blog post.

But social media technology and services have ensured that the conversation can take place anywhere. That’s the power of social media. It isn’t about media, content or distribution. It is about being able to interact anywhere we want. Web 1.0 and even 2.0 are about building destination sites. Concentrating traffic and users in one place, preferably with walled gardens. Social media is our great escape. It helps us to move away from destinations. It helps the user and the conversation to be set free. It enables what I call the user centric web. The web where the user, and not the destination is important.

Would I love to be able to track conversations I might have started? Sure. Would I love it when people would comment more on my blog than at other places. You bet. But some things should not be forced into central destinations. And conversation or comments are on that list. They need to be set free. They need to scatter around this wonderful universe. One giant conversation. Who cares if we can’t follow it from beginning to end. The great thing about it is, we can always start a new one!

Can we please have more fragmentation!

Why the old-fashioned TV is the best social media channel known to mankind

Yesterday I spent the evening watching the Dutch soccer team play against Italy in the European Cup 2008 tournament. It was a great game for us. Holland beat Italy with 3-0 and that is a great score against the current world champion. I thought about it this morning and I realized that a sport event of this magnitude can have such impact on social behavior. I haven’t seen the official figures yet but I’m betting that more than 75% of the entire population in Holland watched that game (including baby’s and very old people). In Italy the same thing most likely. They watched it at home, with friends, at work with colleagues or at a local pub on a big screen. You don’t want to watch a soccer match on your own, there is no fun in it. You need to watch it with as many as possible.

What is even more interesting is that the clear winner of this media battle is a very old-fashioned, traditional channel. It’s TV of course. TV is by far the most social media channel known to man. Some of you social media junkies reading this might think “Is this guy an idiot?”. Well, maybe, but just think about it for a second. TV is an incredibly powerful social media channel. Not because it is interactive (it isn’t). Not because you can discuss the thing you are watching with a gazillion others in real-time (you can’t). Not because every user has a unique profile you can look up and engage with (not possible). Not because it is a 2-way medium (no way). TV is old-fashioned broadcasting. You don’t get to choose, it just serves you the images some TV director decides to show. But you can’t say it isn’t a social medium. Not after millions of people watched that game. It’s just that the social behavior isn’t taking place on the media channel, it takes place because of the media channel. The soccer match brought us all a reason to get together. It isn’t the match or the outcome, it’s that the match gave us a reason to get together and socialize.

I can’t think of a more powerful social media channel than the TV broadcasting a major event. TSure, there are millions of people on MySpace, Facebook. Even more that watch video’s on YouTube or comment on weblogs. But a major TV event can bring hundreds of millions of people to a screen the size of some 30 inches or so. In most cases it’s the major sports events, the Olympic games, some major athletic event, soccer, American football, whatever. And these people engage with the screen. They scream, cheer, curse, cry, hug, and probably show every emotion possible during a match.

It is something the web just isn’t capable of capturing. No matter what social network or service is launched. You just can’t get hundred of millions of people showing that much interaction or emotions together. You just can’t socialise like that in virtual space. Why? I don’t think it is the content or the services on the web.

I think that the real reason for it is that the technology we use to access the web, our social networks, our interaction services are A-social. That is, they do not allow us to use it in a social way. It is impossible to surf the web with two people at the same time sitting behind a computer. You can’t interact on a mobile with more than one person holding it. You can’t socialise on a social network while five of your friends are trying to join in while in the same room. The technology is aimed at a single person using it. That same technology doesn’t allow us to user more than 1 or two senses at the same time. It sucks you in, and shuts off your ability to interact with the environment you are in. Just try it out. Get a room full of people, sit behind you laptop, try to engage in some interaction on the web, and at the same time have a meaningful conversation with your friends. It just doesn’t work. Web technology may have brought us the ability to interact using any social media. But it also makes us all lone rangers, sitting behind our computer screens, desperately trying to interact digitally while the rest of the world has meaningful interactions in the physical world. The keyboard or mobile phone as input device. It just doens’t make us social. It makes us very isolated.

Social interaction on the web is a very poor surrogate for the real thing. That isn’t a bad thing necessarily. Social Interaction on the web brings us fun and pleasure too. But engaging in social interaction in the physical world, enjoying the conversations, being surrounded by real people, being able to feel and display the emotions sort of makes the a bit stale doesn’t it?

That is what social media should be about. It isn’t about the technical capabilities, about the 20 ways we can interact digitally with content or people. It is about stimulating social interaction in the both the digital AND physical world. Get your users to interact with their physical world through the content or service you provide digitally. Forget the traffic, the page views, the downloads. Get people to interact with each other over the stuff you provide them. That is what gets people excited. That is what makes hundred of millions of users sit in front of a screen and share their emotions. Maybe the good old TV isn’t that bad after all.

Why noise will be tackled by scaling down the social media conversation

If anything web 2.0 technology has provided us the capabilities to have a continuous 24×7 public conversation on the web. There are blogs, communication services like Twitter, content services like YouTube, search services to help us find the things we need, profile services like Facebook or any other social network, and now aggregation and “noise” filtering services like Friendfeed and The Filter. Social media, or the ability to interact over any kind of media, provides the participants a never ending conversation space. It’s addictive, there is so much being produced, being shared, being launched, talked about that it forces our Internet backbone down on it’s knees and slowly into cardiac arrest. And we haven’t seen the end of it yet. There is an incredible sized population in Africa and Asia that isn’t on the web yet, but they will at some point.

I was thinking about this last night after I had written a post in which I argued that social media is timely. There isn’t a need to be participating 24×7 because there will always be something that’s important when you join in. I see this enormous conversation as a river of information passing by and me taking a plunge whenever I feel like it.

But the early adopters feel there is a real problem with this non-stop social media conversation . It’s the noise problem (Try a search on “noise” here for example). How can we find the things that are really important from that huge pile of information floating around. That is partially why we have aggregation and filtering services. Each of them, using one algorithm or another, tries to compile a tiny subset of the universe and present that to its users. The question that remains is whether or not the right tiny space is presented.

What all these technologies essentially do for us is remove all kinds of physical boundaries like time, distance and space. These constraints prevented us in the physical world to meet 1 Mln people at a time, getting to know people from any place in the world, have anyone that wants to, no matter where or when they are, listen to the things we say. Web technology removed those boundaries, essentially turning this digital world into a giant market square where we can meet.

While I’m writing this, Scott O’Raw just published a post which ties in really good with this one. In his post Scott talks about this very same conversation and worries about people like Robert Scoble trying to become a talkshow host. Robert is very often at the center of conversations (well in the tech world anyway), and that helps him deal with the massive amounts of information. It also makes the brand Scobleizer more sticky. Scott agitates against these shock and awl tactics just for the sake of getting attention. The article is well worth a read, so go over there and give it a shot.

And while all of these conversations seem rather attractive right now I wonder what will happen when not 10 Mln or a100 mln users but 1 Bln users are participating. Or 3 Bln. The entire population in this planet. Everything connected into one uber-social graph. Everyone talking to everyone on the largest virtual market square know to man. The entire digital universe becoming a social media heaven.

I believe we might just get lost in this universe. The conversation simply becomes too large for anyone to even remotely grasp its complexity. Right now we are all creating our own public appearance, getting enough Google or any other kind of juice so that we can actually be found and listened to. Just take a look at a relative small conversation Robert Scoble started just now over on Friendfeed. Imagine not 100-200 people talking and not really listening, but instead 1Mln or 5 Mln doing that. The conversation would lose it’s importance immediately. If the entire planet is out there, connected, wouldn’t that make us all anonymous again? I think so. I believe that once people have had a few experiences with the excitement of being part of this public conversation, they will settle down again. Humans aren’t capable of dealing with such complexity, and computer algorithms, filtering tactics, friend referrals, don’t really reduce the complexity, it just flattens out the conversation until we all hear the same things.

There are two reasons why I suspect that this global social media conversation will be less important in a next evolution of the web. The first reason is that in order to reduce complexity people will eventually fall back on smaller, more personal, more localized communities. The conversations taking place in such communities will be more immersed within the actual physical world the users live in. That doesn’t imply there won’t be a public conversation. I’m suggesting the smaller communities will prove to be much more valuable than large scale ones.

The second reason is that the most important access device that will be used for the web in the coming years is by its nature a very personal device. It’s your mobile phone, quickly turning into a hand held web browser with communication features. One of the characteristics of this device is that it tends to suck you in, leaving you unaware of your surroundings (probably why so many car accidents happen while people are using a mobile phone while driving). It effectively shuts down a few of our senses such as hearing and seeing (except for a tunnel vision). While the monitors on our computers will become larger, TV screen like, the mobile device will remain small and will draw all attention to it’s screen. As a result of this sucking in and the device’s graphical capabilities it is my believe that we simply can’t deal with the complexity of a conversation on a scale of millions. Instead, we will be using that device more effectively with those that we know, friends that we care about and trust. In other words, in much smaller communities. And with that descaling the noise problem will be reduced to a much smaller proportion.

We don’t really need noise filters, the sheer complexity of the social media conversation will resolve itself because we won’t find enough value to continue to participate in such immense structures. We will end up scaling down in smaller but more valuable communities. You can try it out today already. Just stop following people for the sake of it or the numbers. Try to select carefully and notice how the noise level drops to a point where quality and personal interactions take over the enormously crowded marketplace we are all visiting today