www.josschuurmans.com

The Live Web Will Be Federated

Under the headline 'Blogging 2.0: Moving Toward Conversational "Flows"', Bill French wrote a piece on MyST Blogsite, in which he observes that conversations on the Internet are increasingly moving away from being contained within blogs, towards being distributed among lifestreaming or micro-blogging services (Bill calls them "flow applications") such as Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter.

He quotes me by saying:

"(...) Ironically, in this comment, Jos Schuurmans equate sthe emergence of social networks with the end of “channels”. (...)"

I subscribe to the view that online conversations will be less and less contained within channels, while more and more federated among and across different platforms and services. To the extent that channels can be seen as walled gardens, the emergence of the blogosphere itself was the disruption that started taking down those walls.

The point I was trying to make earlier, under 'The End of Channels?' and ''Channels' does not sufficiently describe the dynamics of distributed online conversations', is that conversations take place across and between channels, not just within, and that it is therefore less useful to think of the Web in terms of channels. As David Weinberger and Doc Searls have pointed out: the Internet is a place, not a medium.

Indeed, enablers like Jaiku, Twitter, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, Ping.fm, and Facebook are speeding up the trend of conversations being more distributed. But what these services represent most of all is the shift from a more static Web to the "live Web".

Another application worth mentioning in this context is Disqus, an enabler of blog comments federation. If Dave Winer will have his way, something similar is going to happen to micro-blogging as well... And why wouldn't he?

Tags: Bill French, David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Dave Winer, lifestreaming, micro-blogging, federation, channels, conversation

Dugg: Geek Army Knife #4 - chatting to Charlie about livestreams

My friendly and knowledgeable colleague Charlie Schick in a podcast interview by Geek Army Knife.

Charlie "(...) spoke about lifestreaming and how it led [him] to thinking about semantics. [He] mentioned a bunch of folks along the way, including Friendfeed, Socialthing, Socialbrain [or Second|Brain?], Lovely Systems, and TagCrowd. (...)"

(Via Charlie Schick)

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Dugg: Who is Who: Interview with David Weinberger | Ulrike Reinhard

Via David Weinberger:

"(...) Ulrike Reinhard, of WhoIsWho, video-interviewed me on our back porch last week. She asked me about the need for serendipity, what an “open” Internet means, the costs of social networks, the new sense of privacy, user-controlled identity systems, Web 3.0, market conversations, categorization and control, Twitter, Obama… (...)"

Serendipity is a fascinating concept. I strongly believe that the way we learn new things and expand our horizons is through serendipity. In order to discover and, if you will, accept something new, this "news" needs to be presented to us in a familiar, trusted, i.e. "old" context.

We hardly ever buy into something entirely unfamiliar. For example, if we don't know the source, we are less prone to trust the news. In conversations, I am more likely to learn something new from people with whom I have, say, 80 percent in common, than from people with whom I have, say, 10 percent in common. If you get my drift...

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Dugg: The Internet Organizes Itself: Here Comes Everybody | Glenn Fleishman

"(...) Clay Shirky's (...) book "Here Comes Everybody" (The Penguin Press, 2008) explains his views on the power of individuals to organize into groups without companies, hierarchies, or outside efforts. (...)"

Glenn Fleishman writes:

"(...) I sat down with Clay on 14-Mar-08 to talk about the book for a short article that appeared in the Seattle Times, focused on the business side of his book. However, the Seattle Times allowed me to publish a podcast of our roughly 40-minute conversation. (...)"

The 40-minute podcast is indeed worth the listen. Clay talks about a lot of stuff, including the notion that we don't yet understand where the Internet will be taking us. And another thing I found quite interesting was his reference to "more is different", i.e. scale changes the nature of things (such as the Internet).

(via Charlie Schick, who adds on a personal note:

"(...) My tongue is bleeding, I am biting it so hard. Though a beer can loosen it, in case you are interesting in a tale of enlightenment, abandonment, discovery, creativity, stealing, cluelessness, and dissapointment. (...)"

Charlie, what's your favorite beer? Come visit and I'll put it cold for you.

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Blood from stone: Don't focus on ad revenue from social networking services | Charlie Schick

Charlie writes: "(...) Your core service drives the interaction with the customer, but the money can come from some other area.

But, be careful where you _think_ you can get the money. (...) Online social networking services thrive because they are a form of social lubrication. (...) Yes, social network is the concentrator, but what the folks end up doing is where the money's at. (...)"

Interesting comment from Stefan Constantinescu: "(...) recommendation engine may sound unsexy now, but they will LEAD the next generation of corporate buy outs and be the foundation for the services we use in the upcoming decade. (...)"

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Dugg: Becoming 2.0: all startpages, the comprehensive review. startpages part 2 | Justin Fenwick

Justin Fenwick: "(...) I looked through 20 different options, which exhausts the lists of other older comprehensive reviews I found. (...) Netvibes is without question the one to beat. (...)"

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Dugg: Ajax homepages market review | ZDnet.com

[A lengthy analysis of the main Ajax homepages (aka personalized start pages), concluding that Microsoft and Google are set to dominate.]

Published February 28, 2006:

"(...) Over the past year many new AJAX homepages, aka personalized start pages, have been introduced to the market. Microsoft and Google have offerings, as do a host of small startups. First I’ll define what an AJAX homepage is, then I’ll do a feature comparison between the leading services. (...)"

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Dugg: Netvibes Ginger is now open to everyone | Tariq Krim / Netvibes.com blog

Posted March 4, 2008: "(...) Netvibes ginger is now open to any netvibes registered user. (...) Ginger features and performance improvements:

•     General startpage loading time improvements
• Prefetch feeds features
•     Flash audio player improvements
•     OPML import/export improvements (now available in adcontent/add a feed section)
•     Mobile and iPhone versions improvements
•     Feedreader content is not updated if marking all items of a tab as read
•     New Ginger thumbnails
•     "Send to my universe/Send to my private page" feature improvements
•     New Premium Widget : Stechworld, L'express, Usa Today, FranceTelecom, Computer World UK
•     Widgets Improvements: myspace, digg, FeedReader, Weather, multiple feeds widgets (Premium widgets), preconfig widgets

(...)"

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Dugg: The only real social networks are personal ones | Doc Searls

Doc Searls writes:

"(...) The best collections of [social networks] for me aren’t on facebook or LinkedIn. They’re in my IM buddy list and my email address book. (...)"

My comment:

Couldn't agree more on Facebook and LinkedIn being walled gardens.

However, it keeps amazing me how the transformative power of mobility just doesn't seem to sink in on the other side of the Atlantic, even among the brightest scholars of the computer networking age.

Doc, I don't want to sound funny or anything, but the best collections of my social networks are found in the contacts application of my mobile phone.

For a good introduction of where mobility may take us fairly soon, I suggest Stephen Johnston's excellent essay in two on Nokia's innovation story: part I and part II.

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The End of Channels?

Summary: The two aspects of social media that I'd like to view as qualitative departures from the past are: (1) 'The Dilution of Channels' in that online conversations happen all over the place; and (2) 'The Wisdom of the Crowd', social software helping people navigate their way through online conversations.

[ADDITION, October 26, 2007: I've added one more charasteristic to the social media mix: (3) 'Participation'. See also the addition towards the end of this post]

My local professional communicators' association wishes to pick my brain on "social media". So it's about time I captured the concept in writing.

The media have, of course, always been "social". Any form of human communication (where there are messages sent by senders and processed by receivers) is social. The Internet is a disruptive technology that accelerates certain properties of everything social, in particular human communication, including what we call "the media". In other words, to some extent "social media" is a pleonasm.

Also the Internet has always been a social space.

For homework I Googled the term. The Wikipedia entry, Robert Scoble's entry, and some other references I found seem to position "social media" mainly as something that has more "capacity" than "traditional media": online means faster and more immediate, easier to interact with, easy to copy and share, unlimited space...

Quantitative or qualitative?

Are we really talking about quantitative differences only? Or should we make some qualitative distinctions as well?

The concept of "conversation" as in the Long Tail of Conversations

I'm preparing to have a conversation (okay, a presentation) at the MindTrek 2007 Conference in Tampere, Finland, early October. My topic is to do with the Long Tail of Conversations, and how we might connect people to the conversations across the Long Tail distribution graph that matter most to them.

(I was kinda getting there in one of my previous posts: 'Look at the Long Tail for the highest-value conversations'.)

When I submitted my draft conversation (ok, yes, presentation), one of the organizers asked me to elaborate on my understanding of the concept of "conversation". That was really good feedback, because it caused me to realize that I was using the term in different ways for different purposes, and it forced me to think about defining them better.

So here we go, sketchy at best:

Look at the Long Tail for the highest-value conversations

Excerpt: Where do you think creativity and innovation is born? And where do you think that the best-match conversations about the things you are interested in are taking place? The answer is: in Long Tail conversations!

[UPDATE, July 29, 2007: Whoa, I just noticed on Technorati that it's Doc Searls' birthday today. Happy "round" birthday, Doc! (I just celebrated my 40th on 070707)]

Not perfectly sure how and why Doc Searls associates my excerpts from the Cluetrain Manifesto with Ben Peters' talk about close reading of text (particularly since I haven't heard Ben's talk), but I hope he means he can see that I've read the cluetrain closely  :-)

Doc: "1) I haven't read the book in years;"

I was somewhat suprised to read that, although surely the contents of the book are so much part of Doc's being that in practice, he may never really feel the need to go back and look things up. (I do.)