Octavianworld is now a featured blog on MITX Exchange. (Thanks to MITX for the privilege, and especially to Dean Whitney for all his hard work building that site.) I'm honored to be there, in good company, and hope to put back even a little of the lots I've learned through MITX people and events.
This viral messaging campaign by Ten4 for SonyBMG's release of a collection of Bob Dylan's music last fall was enormously successful. I've always loved the original video, and harbored ideas of recording my own version of it at home to kick off various presentations I've given in the past, but hadn't pulled the trigger. Then I saw this (via Scott Kirsner -- thanks Scott!) and was really impressed. The mind races to all the other similar possibilities, though doubtless there are intellectual property issues that weren't a problem here.
Reminds me of another viral favorite, Mr. Picassohead
It seems not a day goes by that I don't get an invitation to connect with someone on one social networking service or another. It's all very flattering, but it's getting really hard to manage, especially as many of these services don't syndicate well, or at all.
In an ideal world, I could connect and interact with people and groups from a single interface. Of course, different providers of these services would feel very differently about this. Smaller ones would love to have this outlet as an alternative to almost-certain obscurity. Bigger ones say, "I already got one, it's my world, and my users are just living in it, thank you very much."
Via Caroline Meeks and TechCrunch, I just finished reading Brad Fitzpatrick's August 17 essay, "Thoughts on the Social Graph". Brad does a very good job of laying out the problem to be solved and how to go about solving it. Better yet, he and friends are actually working on it. With Google behind him, this is pretty serious.
Still, I wonder if it's a bridge too far. Prediction: with agents like Jonathan Miller and Ross Levinsohn at Velocity now out there trying to aggregate interesting web properties into networks with the minimal reach necessary to make them interesting to advertisers (i.e., moving them up from the AdSense basement I live in), we'll soon see "federated" APIs based on these individual properties' collective social graph emerge. Why? Because doing so will make it more interesting for advertisers to build their own versions of "Facebook applications" on top of these social graphs.
Let's take an example. Let's say mythical new age ad network "Travelamigos" goes out there and rolls out a bunch of small travel social networks. People who use these networks are more likely to find and connect with buddies if they are connected across all relevant networks, not just bilaterally, so they'll find such a capability useful and be more likely to join the underlying services. Advertisers will have a larger, better-connected user base not just to sell ads to, but also to develop services for.
For large media firms, who currently control and are expanding their own "social media" properties, aggregating and exposing such a "social graph API" would also seem to be a natural progression.
Many of us have been wondering for a while when LinkedIn would get around to opening up its API so others could take advantage of its networks of registered users to build applications that could be spread virally through those networks. Facebook has stolen a march on LinkedIn, first by allowing anyone to create a group, and most recently by exposing an API to allow others to develop applications that use its registered user base and networks -- or what they call the "social graph".
Facebook applications have taken off like wildfire, and with this initiative Facebook has raised the "platform ante" beyond where Google, Amazon, and Yahoo had it (i.e., rich APIs and data sets to query through them, but limited networks of users) for anyone aspiring to build a large-scale web presence. My favorite Facebook app, which I think best (most simply) demonstrates what Facebook has made possible, is the "Friend Wheel". When I look at mine, I realize how many friends I still have to introduce to each other! (Maybe what I need is a Facebook app that implements "graphic friendship" ideas...)
Now there's speculation about LinkedIn getting with the program. Folks fret about whether the LinkedIn UI could handle the weight of a bunch of apps. That's a red herring, IMHO. Based on the relative rate of connection requests I've been getting in the last few days (4 or 5 to one in FB's favor), it would seem LinkedIn has no choice.
But what's even more compelling about what Facebook's done, and why the imperative for LinkedIn is even more urgent, is the economic opportunity it creates. Everyone in the network can now make informed choices of apps to place on their profile pages, and a smart platform player will ultimately do a three-way rev share -- some for the member, some for the app developer, and some (ok most) for itself. It will be interesting to see how soon Facebook gets around to this.
A while back I wrote down some ideas about viral marketing prompted by a meeting with an entrepreneur who was having some trouble executing a campaign. Today, I came across a really interesting research paper, "Memes and affinities: cultural replication and literacy education", by Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear, presented in November 2005 at the National Reading Conference annual meeting. The paper is here: http://www.geocities.com/c.lankshear/memes2.pdf.
Continue reading "Think Viral, Act Tribal, Part II: What, Why, and How Memes Propagate" »
Things are booming. Nearly US$5M exchanged in January, up from US$235k in October 2005.
With the data provided by Linden Labs linked from here:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/02/09/state-of-the-virtual-world
-%E2%80%93-key-metrics-january-2007/
(The comments on this post are interesting, BTW)
I plotted this:
Short version: Since October 2005, 40x more folks, each spending 1/6 the hours, but exchanging 3x more money per hour.
Postscript: of course averages lie. There are sure to be massive concentrations in spending, both in terms of who is buying (big businesses experimenting) and what is being bought (land, skins). And these concentrations could be hints of a speculative bubble that will pop at some point, just like they do in the real world. After all, what if big businesses buy islands and no one visits them? They're unlikely to invest further, at least in the short term. And what if users buy cool outfits, and still can't make friends? Maybe they cash in those Linden dollars, buy some Ben & Jerry's, and crawl back to real world Saturday nights watching Love Boat reruns. At least, until a Dale Carnegie for the 21st century emerges to help us with our virtual world social skills.
Perhaps in upcoming releases of such data, LL could include some of these "who's buying what" stats? Won't be long I'm sure until we see firms cropping up that do all sorts of analysis on the SL economy. (Related issue: if economics is "the dismal science" in the real world, is it any cooler in virtual worlds?)
Gustaf Neumann, who teaches computer science at Vienna University, has been a very important contributor and innovator in the OpenACS/ .LRN community in the past several years. Recently he has authored a very powerful wiki module, built with the OpenACS toolkit. More recently he's integrated some other tools to deploy a "Collaboration Graph" page he's published on the xoWiki instance running at openacs.org. The tool graphs co-authoring relationships for wiki pages among OpenACS community members. Here is an example that plots co-authoring relationships for my friend Caroline Meeks, and here is Gustaf's introduction on the OpenACS forums.
Continue reading "Graphic Friendships, Part III: The OpenACS "Collaboration Graph"" »
With encouragement from my friend Perry Hewitt, I've been fooling around with Twitter to get a better sense for what all the fuss is about. Conclusion: it's a service that provides an asynchronous chat room for group interaction via SMS, and this has its place and time.
A lot of marketers these days are asking themselves how they can take advantage of "consumer-generated media" ("CGM"). The knee-jerk association for the term is with bboards, and more recently blogs and wikis. I've suggested in the past that providing such "unstructured" publishing vehicles as a starting point for productive interactions online is often not very helpful. A more sophisticated approach offers means of contribution where what they're for and how to use them (both to contribute and consume information) are more self-evident.
Continue reading "Bazaarvoice Reviews: Another Good "Structured Collaboration" Example" »
After a year of dormancy during which "Tom" has been my only friend on my MySpace page (set up to check out the service), I added a link to Octavianworld. Stunned by its genius, three of the 163 million reported MySpace members sent me friend requests in the last two days.
"Yahoo! Answers Adds Social Networking", writes Loren Baker at Search Engine Journal (nice demo video from the Yahoo! Answers team included). With everyone trying to build an online community to grow these days, what to make of Yahoo's latest gambit?
My new colleague Steven Forth, who is CTO of eMonitor (the content technology arm of Monitor Group) referred me last night to Many Eyes (http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/home), which is a social data visualization and interpretation service developed by the Collaborative User Experience (CUE) Research Group at IBM's Watson Research Center. As the intersection of social software and content analysis is currently a high-priority professional interest, I decided to try it out.
Among other visualization approaches to structured data sets, Many Eyes generates tag clouds from free text files. Steven noted that in particular, the two-word view seems like a very powerful 80-20 cut at inferring predominant meaning in a body of text.
I experimented by exporting the contents of this blog as a text file, progressively scrubbing useless Typepad artifact words and html tags that appear frequently (like "title", "breaks", "comments", and my name) out of the source file -- to do this I simply ran "edit/replace/'word', '[]'" in Windows Notepad -- and then publishing the file on Many Eyes. Here's the result (click on the image to manipulate the cloud on Many Eyes):
The two-word view does a pretty decent job of communicating the themes I write about, I think. Unintended side benefit: highlights recurring cliches and verbal tics I need to purge from my writing, like "drive higher" (argh).
This whole effort took about 30 minutes, from registration to pasting the syndication html into this post. Two-thirds of that time was spent scrubbing the data iteratively. This could have gone faster in one of two ways. First, Many Eyes could provide a custom scrubbing interface where I could register multiple words to be eliminated or replaced from a text file. Second, and better, they could allow users to share not only comments, but scrubbing filters that would be applicable to data sets coming from common sources with common problems, such as Typepad exports, or government information.
Beyond this, I can imagine a thematic matching capability -- "based on two-word 'keyphrase' frequencies, this data set seems to have lots in common with these other ones..." Such a capability could be further enhanced by ex-post user rating, so people could confirm whether, for any given algorithmically-suggested match, the result was actually good, a la "was this useful to you?" This, like the "Graphic Friendships" idea I wrote about a while back, could help to make the web browsing experience more productive.
(Note: This post was originally published here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cesarbrea/stories/storyReader$8 on November 26, 2003)
I left Bain in the summer of 1999 to join ArsDigita, a small firm of ultra-talented software engineers led by Philip Greenspun, and famous for its open-source application framework, the ArsDigita Community System. Philip's ideas for online communities as the best use of the Web, and of open-source software as a more effective means of realizing such constructs appealed to me on many levels, and I felt I could make a real contribution to the firm. So I signed on as the second "business guy".
The rest of The ArsDigita Story has already been told from many different perspectives. This little fragment has stuck with me (to the groans of friends who have heard me tell it one time too many). It's said that "within every insanity lies a grain of genius," and for me this proves the point.
Continue reading "Past As Prologue: The Tale of The Binge-o-Matic" »
