'Pataphysical science in the home

Harmony is curation, curation is harmony.

The curation is king meme is having a day in the sun. This is the kind of article that editors love to publish — it declares a winner in a zero-sum game between the old champion Content and the contender, Curation. The article posits that Old King Content has been ousted “because it isn’t scarce. It’s everywhere, it’s overwhelming, and it’s gone from quality to noise.” Of course there’s too much for any one person to slog through, but if content is of secondary value, then what are we curating?

But Rosenbaum has got it very right on one crucial point:

He also seems to be saying that this victory of curation is a recent event. I’d take issue with that. The first Yahoo! directory was, at the time, state-of-the-art curation, not particularly scalable, rather unsocial and opaque, but it was curation. And, of course, Google’s revolutionary insight to use inbound links as a fundamental page ranking metric took people-powered curation into new territory.

Right on. Let’s drill down into the humanity angle.

The word curate derives from the Latin curare, meaning “to take care of“, something that we humans do for people and objects that are meaningful to us.

The Tummelvision crew (@heathr, @debs and @kevinmarks) have been exploring this human side of how digital communities and conversations are born and thrive. They’ve adopted “Tummel” as their verb of choice. It’s a Yiddish word used to describe the act of catalyzing others to action and I highly recommend tuning in to their show.

Just as Suw Charman-Anderson blogged about this way back in 2006, it still is fresh and true today:

Curators already exist. Some are people: Bloggers who sift through tonnes of stuff in order to highlight what they like, and who, if you have the same taste as them, can be invaluable to discovering new things to like. Some are aggregators: Site that gather lots of little bits of stuff and present them in aggregation and help us find the bits that the majority find to be good. Some are algorithms: recommendation systems and search.

What would I do without Kevin Marks’ curation?

In Three Tips for Curating Your Audience, John Sviokla writes about taking care of your audience, also known as customers if you happen to be in the business of selling stuff. (I’d take issue with the term audience for these reasons.)

Taking care of your curators means finetuning the curation. In socially-powered services like Facebook and Twitter we curate the people that we choose to friend or follow by keeping them interested in what we have to say and we also adjust our flows by un-friending or un-following in a more or less constant feedback loop.

And now, let’s bring on the ants!

Social bookmarking is a shining example of people-powered curation and was brilliantly executed by the creator of Delicious, Joshua Schachter. But what is stigmeric curation, HUH?

Did you ever wonder how ants manage to organize themselves into those superhighways of efficiency to bring the food back to the colony? Well, that’s stigmergy in action and this survival-oriented curation mechanism is how we create our own superhighways of inter-linked information  I actually wrote about this back on October 16, 2003. Take a look at “What do blogs and ants have in common?” to learn more. It’s a much shorter post than this one!

What are the “economics” of curation?

I was talking about this notion of online generosity with my friend ocrampal the other day, and he questioned whether curation was primarily generosity-powered as I was saying. In fact, I think he’s right, the answer is more subtle. Social networks and community-powered curation works not so much from generosity as from the very good deal that participation offers.

Let’s call it fair price curating. In other words, contributing to the system is the price you pay to get value out of the system. More often than not I get more out than I put in. It feels like I am getting my curated information below cost —  that I’m gaining much more than I’m spending in terms of time, effort and satisfaction.

I guess that’s because once everybody contributes their info bits, it costs the system very little to redistribute the information in infinitely variable combinations as requested by huge numbers of people and ever more sophisticated technological tools.

I haven’t yet read Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, but I intend to and would be curious to see how he sees it.

I also think about generosity in the context of personalized Q&A services like Hunch, Quora or Aardvark. Adrian Chan frames the problem this way:

Both questioner and answerer must have a satisfactory experience for the service to work. In fact the service really hangs on the experience of the answerer. The questioner has an immediate and present need or interest — not so the answerer. His or her motives for participation have to be incentivized or contextualized by other means.

Are earning a good reputation and earning increased self-esteem by virtue of knowing the answer sufficient social drivers? Time will tell what the sustaining factors really are as these services grow and evolve.

At the end of the day…

Curation is the central issue of our socially networked culture. This mutual mediating, to riff on Kevin Mark’s coinage, turns the firehose of our collective activity streams into a refreshing drinking fountain.

Call it curating, crowdsourcing, stigmergy, page rank, social networking, lifestreaming or a thousand other terms, its objective is to deliver information and entertainment that may be useful or surprising, silly or serious, funny or annoying — when, where and how we want it.

Curators add to relevance by stripping away the irrelevant and the unneeded and the shoddy.

In order to improve consume-ability and relevance, curators need the tools to do this. There are two ways these tools will come about, the “nice” way and the “nasty” way. In the nice way, the producers and distributors make it easy for people to point to, package and pass on the relevant pieces.

I'm the mayor of this blog. So? Now what?

Location, location, location

If you haven’t heard about Foursquare, Gowalla, Latitude, Scvngr, MyTown, Loopt, Geodelic, Brightkite, Where, Check.in, and could care less about other location based services, just enjoy the Pongo illustration and don’t bother reading any further! (I want to mention Layar here, even if it is not strictly in this category of applications. If you haven’t seen this yet, you really should check it out. It’s described as an augmented reality browser. Using the geo-location, compass and camera functions of your mobile device, it displays information about the stuff around you as you aim your camera from place to place.)

This guy with the crown has checked in here lots of times, using an application on his mobile phone. In order to keep him coming back here, I let him earn a crown and the title of mayor. That may be enough for the honeymoon period, but I’ll probably need to start offering him free drinks as long as he keeps coming back and keeps on broadcasting his presence to his friends.

What is the business model that will emerge from this scenario? I’m just going to wait and see, quite a few come to mind…

Hyperlocal, not hype-local

But there are three startups that are coming at the issue from a different perspective and I wanted to mention them here, Lasso, PaperG and BlockChalk. They all are focusing on the hyperlocal experience, the places where we spend most of our time and, not incidentally, most of our money.

Lasso and PaperG are quite interesting from a business point of view because they are sitting at the crossroads of a very real problem — local newspaper advertising revenues are shrinking, yet local media still have a sales force to sell advertising (and other promotional services) to small local businesses that a digital pure-play would have a hard time reaching due to the high overhead of selling to small advertisers.

First up, Lasso, who are building a kind of self-help hyperlocal ad server with a dash of Google AdWords:

Lasso is a platform positioned to enable local media companies to reach small and medium-sized businesses with attractive new offerings: integration with social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and distribution through customizable widgets throughout a media company’s website…

“We [Lasso] have combined internet marketing expertise plus newspaper DNA. An effective product has to have the right metrics, and in terms of landing it appropriately, it has to be done in terms that newspaper ad sales people understand,” Treadaway said. “If people don’t feel like they’re getting value, the churn will be very high. The product demos very well, looks very slick by newspaper standards. Most of the response has been: ‘when will you come train our people.’ (from LostRemote)

PaperG takes a different approach:

PaperG is testing a software system called PlaceLocal that automatically generates ads for local businesses by crawling the Web. The system scrapes the Web for basic information about a business such as its address, phone number, and opening hours. Even if the business doesn’t have its own Web page, data can often be pulled from third-party services such as Yelp or Google Maps. The system then uses semantic analysis to find and extract photos and positive reviews, and it builds an ad automatically using Adobe’s Flash software. The business owner or newspaper ad sales representative can customize the ad, so if PlaceLocal didn’t choose the best photo or review, it’s easy to select another.

Lee expects PlaceLocal to help representatives sell ads in the first place. “The sales rep can have a beautiful ad designed for every lead sheet,” Lee says, “which makes a real difference in the conversation.” (from MIT’s Technology Review) (The NYT writes about it here.)

BlockChalk is taking a much different approach, the social media classic — build traffic and figure out how to make money once they get traction. The only reason I’m putting them in this post is because of their unique usage model. You don’t have to sign up to the service to use it, and you remain anonymous until such time as you decide to share your identity on a case-by-case basis with other users of the service.

Since anonymity opens the service up to spam and all sorts of abuses, and denies the service a registered user base and profiled social graph, I am really interested to see what kinds of checks and balances they build into the system. But the really cool part to watch will be to see what kind of behavior users will adapt on their own in this wild west of a service. What will be the equivalent of the Twitter hashtag, what cultural norms will people develop and adopt?

That is if it lasts long enough for a culture to develop…

The Cool Tool, aka hammerhead

Is it a good strategy to base your web business idea on a cool tool? Well, if you’re the talented Loren Brichter, the answer is probably YEAH. He created and distributed the premier Twitter client for the iPhone, an application that cost me €2.39 on iTunes. His 1-man shop made a good income from sales and then was acquired by Twitter and he was hired on, in a presumably pretty sweet deal.

Yet the percentage of developers who are able to make a living from the sales of client applications is rather small and once a few big applications gain traction, it’s going to be very difficult to compete. And let’s not forget that in most segments there are a plethora of good enough clients being distributed for free.

It makes a lot more sense to think of your cool tool as facilitator, one that does not call attention to itself, but that enables, simplifies or reveals an experience in a way that is better than what currently exists. The business opportunity will be found in the value that you can create in the experience, not necessarily in the tool itself.

As an example, this is what Foursquare, Facebook and the other slew of mobile location-centric applications are all about. The holy grail here is to help connect local businesses with existing customers and for them to be introduced to potential new customers. Putting it together correctly, businesses will be happy to pay for more, and more frequent, customers while users of your cool tool enjoy the benefits of social discovery, special deals and the nearly magical power to know the best nearby places even if you’ve never been there before.

A Neutral Mask in Pongo, by me.

The future is wearing a neutral mask.

If I were to characterize the world right now, the operative word would be liminal — not quite here anymore and not quite there just yet. We exist in a threshold hurtling through space, in a future in the past tense world in which the present never seems to catch up to itself.

Sometime between 1948 and 1956 Jacques Lecoq, the influential French acting instructor created the neutral mask in collaboration with the Italian sculptor Amleto Sartori. By putting on the neutral mask, an actor could enter into liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”), a transitional state of in-betweenness in which identity is ambiguous and meaning must be gleaned from context and movement.

I bring this up because as I was sitting in a conference room last week, listening to a panel of experienced, well-informed and well-spoken people trying to explain the social media to a business audience, I was doodling in 3-dimensions with a hunk of white plasticine modeling clay. My best stuff comes out when I stop thinking and let my fingers take over. I realized that I had made a sort of neutral mask, shown above.

Well, of course it would be… The panel discussed issues, alternately hailed as panaceas or condemned as mirages, such as the contradiction between the desire for online popularity and that for privacy, the ethical issues raised when public-facing brands use Facebook or Twitter profiles and the growing power of the people formerly known as the audience. But from the exchanges during the Q&A, it became clear that different people were experiencing these concepts each in their own way.

Check it out, check it in.

Once upon a time, the verb to check-in was something that you did at a hotel or an airport, and only at a hotel or an airport. Not any more. Popularized by foursquare, the check-in is becoming a standard gesture, one that will be baked in to many social applications, to indicate your physical presence at a specific location. And, OY, the once innocent verb, like, is now poised to take over the civilized the world!

So maybe grammar is a helpful framework to think about the future of this device-mediated social future of ours. We will follow, like, dislike, share, bookmark, invite, post, buy, listen to, broadcast, check-in, read, create, delete, favorite, join, leave, gift, friend, play, connect, tag, save and tummel around issues, articles, lists, photos, videos, music, people, groups, applications, events, discounts, games and more. And we will do some of these things online and publicly, and others privately with physical tools or else in an endless variety of combinations.

Jyri Engeström has been talking about building services around social objects and the verbs we use to animate them for quite some time. I’ve recently started to follow the work of the activitystrea.ms group, another instance of the object/verb approach for describing and standardizing the evolution of online behavior as observed in the wild.

Yet despite all the observing and describing, many ambiguities remain. Remember, on the Internet nobody knows if you’re wearing a mask.

That will bring us back to Do-Re-Mi.

Is the pace of change going to remain so frenetic as to create a state of permanent liminality? Will we always be betwixt and between?

Twitter has become a valuable asset to me and a part of my everyday reading and writing. So, I’m a fan. But.

By now you’ve probably read the fawning Time magazine article by Steven Johnson, “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live“. Now I don’t want to be contrarian just for the hell of it, but enough is enough.

OK, sure the media outlets love the Hollywood story that is Twitter. Of course Twitter’s high profile investors have a vested interest in evangelizing the phenomenon. And who could expect less from the Twitter-addict community? Even I have tasted the holy Kool-aid!

But when Twittermania flavors serious journalism, we need to be more critical.

For starters the article asserts that Facebook’s audience “is still several times as large as Twitter’s”. In fact Facebook’s audience and user base are most likely 20 times larger than Twitter’s, the churn of new users on Facebook is considerably lower than Twitter’s and Facebook is still growing much faster in absolute numbers.  “Several times as large” is just misleading. This is neither pedantic nor picayune.

And why is it that Johnson makes no mention of the Nielsen study about user retention?

Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent… Compare it to the two heavily-touted behemoths of social networking when they were just starting out. Doing so below, we found that even when Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now, their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today.

The Nielsen study is not perfect and raises more questions than it answers, but it surely merits examination in any discussion of the Twitter phenomenon.

Another recent study (published too late to be included in the Time article), “New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets” by Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski, adds fuel to the fire.

Twitter’s usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production… This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

Again, a lot more research needs to be done, but as one of those Twitter members in the active 10%, I do get the sensation that we are projecting the value that we get from Twitter onto the greater Twitterverse, without a shred of evidence to support this thesis.

It is paradoxical that the openness that Twitter, the company, says it embraces, from its API’s to its user-generated feature set, is so lacking when it comes to sharing their proprietary statistics, the politics of their suggested follow list or their plans with respect to providing access to their firehose and archives. Twitter is a privately held company and does not owe this to anyone, but then it should stop sending its executives around saying that they want Twitter to be like a public utility. They can’t have it both ways, but it won’t be for lack of trying.

The article correctly points out that Twitter’s deceivingly simple forumla — “the follower structure, link-sharing, real-time searching” — will become part of the fabric of our communication web regardless of how the Twitter the company fares.

They didn’t really invent any of the individual elements that make the service compelling, but they did stumble upon the recipe for mixing them together to create a tasty soufflé. Note that this word means “to blow up” or “puff up” and, of course, once taken out of the oven a soufflé tends to fall rather quickly.

Is this an apt analogy? Discuss.

I thought I’d take a shot at riffing on Google Wave, “a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web”, according to its creators. But before we get into the details, just to get into the mood, check out this BBC video — a gorgeous slow motion view of a surfer on the perfect wave. Wow:

Or see the high definition (HD) version here. It’s worth it.

That was also my first reaction to Google Wave, well, “wow” in lower case. It’s an evolutionary step that rhymes with so many parallel developments all around the net that it already seems inevitable just a week after its presentation.

I am most interested in watching just how open source the Wave platform will actually be. And just how open the API’s and protocols will be. I think we have good reason to be optimistic that they will remain true to the spirit of openness because it is also in their interest to do so.

Why is that? Well, the more that Wave’s protocols and syntax are open, the faster it will grow with a developer community going out there and building tools, containers and services with wild abandon. Do you think that Google might be positioned rather well to provide search within the Wave universe? Messages, media, documents, location and social graphs all crawlable. This looks to be an, um, a challenge for our privacy protection. Can we get some of you smart developers thinking about that now? Thanks, and please revert soonest!

Compare this scenario to today’s realtime darling Twitter. (Sarcasm? yeah just a little bit, but I am a Twitter member and have gotten a huge amount of value from it.) The Twitterverse consists of a central platform, a basic hosted service on the platform and an extremely active ecosystem of third party clients and applications that make it just barely usable.

In what other environment is there great competition among free client applications? Email comes first to mind and let’s not forget instant messaging. In both cases there is huge value obtained from the fact that the protocol is standard and open. It was not always so in instant messaging land, and still not universally the case, but today I can use Pidgin, Meebo, Digsby, Adium or Trillian to talk to my Jabber, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, iChat and AOL friends on one roster. So that seems to be where Twitter is headed — to be a protocol, and the biggest platform on the block adhering to that protocol.

I am hoping that Wave will be the catalyst to bring about the birth of a thousand new Twitters, truly open protocol and evolving realtime micro-messaging services, accessible through third party clients. XMPP has worked this way for years and it’s not for nothing that underneath Wave you find the XMPP protocol.

I was reading this article Your Morning Commute is Unique: On the Anonymity of Home/Work Location Pairs, by Arvind Narayanan, and it got me thinking. (Thanks to @jamespage for pointing to this article.)

He starts out by citing this study by two PARC researchers and concluding that “for the average person, knowing their approximate home and work locations — to a block level — identifies them uniquely.” Isn’t it amazing how fast anonymity breaks down?

Now just having those two data points alone would leave your anonymity intact, but the potential danger comes in if this information is able to be shared by or among mobile connectivity providers, credit card companies, government agencies, advertisers and social networking services.

It could be that my paranoia level was increased after having seen this article in New York Times describing the amount of data mining and interpretation currently being used by the credit card industry.

The exploration into cardholders’ minds hit a breakthrough in 2002, when J. P. Martin, a math-loving executive at Canadian Tire, decided to analyze almost every piece of information his company had collected from credit-card transactions the previous year… Martin’s measurements were so precise that he could tell you the “riskiest” drinking establishment in Canada — Sharx Pool Bar in Montreal, where 47 percent of the patrons who used their Canadian Tire card missed four payments over 12 months. He could also tell you the “safest” products — premium birdseed and a device called a “snow roof rake” that homeowners use to remove high-up snowdrifts so they don’t fall on pedestrians.

By the time he publicized his findings, a small industry of math fanatics — many of them former credit-card executives — had started consulting for the major banks that issued cards, and they began using Martin’s findings and other research to build psychological profiles.

So when people start to use their cell phones to pay for merchandise, location information will be added to the database, too. Conspiracy theorists, novelists and filmmakers, rejoice! There are some great storylines to be made from this stuff. But, seriously, should we be worried about these developments?

Late breaking: With respect to U.S. constitutional law, the New York State Supreme Court ruled that tracking a suspect via the global positioning system without a warrant violated his right to privacy. A stalker could be uniquely linked to the victim by GPS tracking, for instance. Hat tip to @stoweboyd for the lead. [Added 15 May 12:30 CET]

Many of you will remember the early days of the web when The Next Big Thing was “always on” — fast, cheap bandwidth that would liberate us from the curse of dialup and would naturally enable new business models to emerge. We normally thought about this in terms of Internet connectivity, separate from mobile telephony. Since those days we have seen the blurring of the lines between voice and data due to the emergence of VoIP, 3G mobile, smartphones and (still too expensive) flat rate data pricing.

I just came across this article in the NYT, A Pocket-Size Leveler in an Outsize Land, by Anand Giridharadas. And it really hammered home the reality of where we are heading as a planet as far as digital connectivity is concerned.

But the technology has seeped down the social strata, into slums and small towns and villages, becoming that rare Indian possession to traverse the walls of caste and region and class; a majority of subscribers are now outside the major cities and wealthiest states. And while the average bill, of less than $5 per month, represents 7 percent of the average Indian’s income, enough Indians apparently consider the sacrifice worth it: if present trends continue, in five years every Indian will have a cellphone… There are 65 times more cellphone connections than broadband Internet links, and the gap is widening.

A huge percentage of the world’s population is coming online not through PC-based Internet, but through their cell phones. There are 3 billion active mobile device users in the world, 92% of them outside of the US market. (Stats are from Tomi Ahonen.)

What does the social web look like, how does it feel, when your first and only window into that world is a handheld mobile device? Like the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant, your perception is determined by where you touch the animal.

A mobile device is by its very nature always on. Since there is little doubt that even the cheapest cell phones will be able to send and receive pictures and videos, listen to and share music and navigate the so-called mobile web in the not too distant future (as many already do), it is fascinating to think about what kind of new social networking businesses will be built to scale to, um, billions of members.