The Big Giant Head doesn’t know anything

Ajit at Open Gardens makes what seems like a small observation (see Open Gardens: A web 2.0 FAQ), that the principle that should take precedence in Tim O’Reilly’s list of Web 2.0 features is the second: harnessing collective intelligence.

This has led to a number of folks agreeing, along with Tim himself, that all the other stuff is just machinery to support people interacting, and the emergent value that springs from that.

I have to make the point that I have been howling for years about this, that people are the center of the universe. I reprint a post from July 2005, that makes a similar case:

[from Starting From Scratch: Social Design Is Hard]

I am smack in the middle of an experience I have thought about a lot over the past few years. I am getting the opportunity to work with an impassioned group of entrepreneurs who are trying to design a new social application — details omitted to protect my liabilities under NDA — and unlike my usual technology consulting, this is really, really early stage.

We have been talking about various well-known solutions that incorporate social elements — like friends, groups, collaborative filtering, tagging, and so on — and stargazing about what the hypothetical users will want and care about (we even flew in a few to get their insights and thoughts). And what I have realized, after the first day, is how hard this is. I mean, I have designed lots of software in the past, and used a lot of different approaches to doing it, but this is somehow more complex: exactly because it is all about the social aspect.

I feel that we don’t know enough about social tools to have the necessary design patterns defined to construct the social architecture that will surround all future successful social applications. Based on the events of the past day, I am offering a few — perhaps obvious and overgeneralized — observations:

• People Are The Living, Breathing, Beating Heart Of The Universe — Those folks that I know and form my social reality are the center of my universe. Therefore, activities involving interacting with them, learning about them, and perceiving the world through their eyes should be the centerpoint of social applications. I am strongly biased toward the instant messaging buddy list metaphor as a central motif around which social interaction can swirl, but it’s not essential, I guess. The motif of an address book can serve, I suppose, or the network models that underlie social networking apps, but seems to me less helpful than buddy list aggregation into groups. (See Nerdvana posts, for more on this.)
• Artifacts Bind Us Together and Define Us — People create and leave a trail of their social activities, like creating blog posts, comments, tags, links, ratings, posting pictures, even the path that they have taken through a series of pages on a service. These artifacts are actually a more interesting way to characterize people than simply written stuff in a profile. More importantly, some of these artifacts — links to people and posts, ratings, testimonials, and so on — represent the social glue that links us, and is a reflection of emergent value in social networks. When dozens of people link to a book review I post in a hypothetical service, and rate it highly, they are — in essence — suggesting that my post matters, that it should be read, that others would find it helpful, and, by extension, that I, as the author, have made a contribution that is valued. This accretion of meaning through the tens of thousands of individual activities within a social application is larger than the ‘content’ generated: the whole is truly greater than the sum of the parts.
• Social Interaction Is Bottom Up, And So Is Everything Else — Features like tags, user defined groups, arbitrary user-defined relationships, and user defined categories make sense and work because social context is very personal and local, not universal and general. All fans of what I think of as downtempo music will not use that term, and even if they did, they may still not agree with my characterization of a specific album as downtempo. But when you surrender to the bottom-up nature of social applications, that ceases to matter. Over the long haul, those that care about downtempo-ish music will converge toward a more-or-less consistent use of the term, at least consistent enough for the term to be useful in an approximate sense. Which is really all we can hope for in a subjective universe, anyway.
• Social Stuff Absorbs and Trumps Domain Stuff — Imagine a social application dedicated to the love of wine (I’d join!). There is a natural information schema in the world of wine, based on things like country of origin, regions, vintners, vintage, kinds of grapes, and so on. That information structures an intuitive schema that we all adopt regarding wine. The same holds in other areas, like music, books, blogs, and nearly anything that people can obsess about. But you shouldn’t imagine that this domain schema should the primary axis for people’s interaction. That just leads to a giant catalog experience, which basically sucks. The primary axis of user interaction in social applications is human interaction — people communicating, or individual looking at what others say about their obsessions, or finding new potential friends based on shared obsessions, or finding new wines, books, or music based on the recommendations of friends. The natural schemas of the world should be leveraged in the social sphere, but should be subsumed by it. People will want to live in a coffeeshop, talking to people about books, not in the stacks at the library or the warehouse at Amazon.

Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I bet that all successful social applications will be based around the same, shared social architectural patterns, while ten thousand failed solutions will fall by the wayside by adopting some “innovative” take on social architecture that will, in the final analysis, miss the point. Like a social bookstore that forces us to stare, endlessly, at the stacks, and makes it hard to find out what your friends are reading, or to connect with other people that quote Tolstoy in their blogs. Even established realms like Amazon will have to rework their architecture to match the social architecture latent in our wiring, or they will get pushed aside by an upstart that cracks the social code.

Which is just a long-winded way to say that getting the social interactions between people right is more important than everything else, and is the characteristic of what is going on in Web 2.0 that dominates all the others.

Because of my bias toward to the instant messaging motif for online interation, I favor the expression the buddylist is the center of the universe 2.0, which metaphorically carries the same message.

19 April 2006 1 Permalink

Items of Interest: 2006.04.11

An interesting discussion is bubbling all over the place based on the success of 37signals’ Getting Real e-book. Jason Fried shares some numbers here. In 30 days they’ve sold 5800+ licenses, nearly 10% of which are 10 copy site licenses, and they’ve grossed like $120,000, with functionally zero expenses (completely discounting the labor of writing the book). Does this represent a tectonic shift in the tech publishing industry?

David Hansson wants us to think so, but I think Tim O’Reilly’s masterful dissection of the inexorable powerlaws in publishing buried down in the comments of that post undo David’s attempts at Shaking Up Tech Publishing, including this gem:

[from comment on Shaking up tech publishing by Tim O’Reilly]

Normal royalty levels are not some plot by publishers to screw authors: they are a reflection of the real economics of the business.

Tim points out that the 37signals guys are superstars, and that the experience that are having with Getting Real is an anomaly: other authors, even good ones, should not expect the results they are having.

Still… there still seems to be a opportunity to cut out various intermediaries: if not the editorial side of publishing — which Tim suggests is adding a vital function, since many knowledgeable geeks cannot string together grammatical English — then perhaps the retail stores, since in the tech space the readership is very much online.

But self-publishing a la Getting Real may represent a great path for the top 5,000 bloggers out there — those who have a well-defined community, who has honed their writing in the light of the blogoshere, and who have direct connections to a marketplace of readers — but for the rest, I’d guess not.

As Tim puts it:

For many authors, a royalty advance of $8-10,000, plus royalty upside of another $10,000 is more than they’ll see from a self-published book that sells 500 or 1000 copies at $20 or $30, after they deduct their manufacturing cost. And if a book really hits, the access to channels can lead to huge upside. I have quite a few authors to whom I’ve paid hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in royalties over the lifetimes of their books.

[Grig Gheorghiu has a good summary of these are other voices on the subject.

11 April 2006 Permalink

Tim O’Reilly Interviews Bill Gates

Tim O’Reilly posted his pre-interview thoughts about his interview of Bill Gates at the Mix conference, here, and the full transcript of the discussion is buried in this page, at Microsoft’s site.

There are a few places were Tim seems to try to dig into the particulars of Microsoft’s Web 2.0 meanderings, like this question about the possible directions for Outlook:

TIM O’REILLY: So how much is that part of your strategy? We talked yesterday a little bit about Outlook and how it seems like there’s this enormous potential to sort of blow away really the crude offerings of the social networking sites, because at the end of the day Outlook for many people is a reflection of their real social network, rather than this kind of, hey, are you my friend, will you be my friend; you can actually tell who you communicate with.

BILL GATES: Well, I think we’re not going to turn Outlook into MySpace.

TIM O’REILLY: I’m not talking about MySpace, but -

BILL GATES: You’d actually like it to be this idea of your contacts, who you communicate with. There’s a lot of rich data that Outlook sees that can help you in your communications, and that definitely is something we want to do driving forward. The idea of making it easy to see schedules, see multiple schedules, the traffic kind of activity you had, we have some of that in this next version of Outlook, but we could go a lot further in the idea of the communication network.

TIM O’REILLY: And you have some of that in the live contact feature in Messenger as well.

BILL GATES: Right, so that if someone updates the contact, then it automatically can come down onto your local store.

But, I wonder, why doesn’t Microsoft try to turn Outlook into the world’s most potent business social network, instead of just a Plaxo replacement? It staggers the mind that Gates turns away from a big, and tangible opportunity (one that could lead to who knows what), and instead continues the endless strategy to win all wars with all competitors. In this one interview, we wander from OS strategies, to handhelds, tablet PCs, the iTunes/iPod dominance of the music business, games, navigation in cars, and everywhere else.

Microsoft continues to define its strategy as winning all of these critical battles, and gaining leverage through that. But Microsoft cannot possibly win all of these wars, and it is certainly falling behind in areas where it can’t afford to lose. The recent announcement of Vista slipping past Xmas is just one glaring example. Sony mismangement of the PS3 is giving Microsoft breathing room in the games area, but, as Om Malik recently pointed out, that is more than countered by the near monopoly of Apple in the music player space, and the likelihood of Apple’s dominance in the ongoing battle for the livingroom.

But more interestingly, the inheritors of all the cool Web 2.0 apps companies — Google, Yahoo, and eBay — are moving at a blinding rate to sew up the future. Del.icio.us, Flickr, Writely, and the other legion apps companies, have built what may be an unassailable innovative lead that Microsoft, middle-aged and slow-footed, may not be able to close, no matter how many times they reorganize engineering management. Google is moving forward with a vision of the Web OS, and planning how to get that onto our devices; Microsoft continues on with a smaller, parochial vision, of getting Office onto the Web, and holding onto all those paying customers in companies everywhere. The new offering from AjaxWrite, pushed Mike Arrington to ask the question “Will things like AjaxWrite have an impact on Microsoft’s Office revenues over time? Yeah, it must. Even so, Bill Gates says that he just doesn’t understand our infatuation with thin client versions of Word.” Mike had lunch with Gates at Mix, and was struck by his unresponsiveness to this market dynamic:

[from So I Had Lunch With Bill Gates Today]

I asked a few questions, specifically about what Microsoft’s plans are around an online version of Office. Bill responded at length without really giving an answer. He did say that he thought people were too infatuated with the thought of an online version of Office, but that they were really focused on the idea of cloud storage for office files. This fits right in with their strategies around Office Live, of course…

I think it represents an obsession with big picture, dinosaur, Soviet-style five year plans to conquer the world, while smaller, more agile Web 2.0 companies are nibbling away the edges of the Empire by rolling out apps that will support migration from the big cash cows that Microsoft is basically banking on: Office and Windows.

The stock market answered the slip in Vista’s release by paying 72 cents less a share for Microsoft stock, now at $27.02: a 3% loss. I am predicting — despite what the pundits say — that continued erosion of the core of their business will lead to an additional 20% or higher drop in that stock price before year’s end.

Too many battles to win means that they will surely lose. Their fate is to become the IBM of the 21st century, and to be eclipsed by some upstarts who did not even exist when they were in their heyday. It’s not a terrible fate: IBM is still a large, and successful company. But they aren’t the dominant force in technology that they once were, back when mainframes were a hot new idea. In the future, we will think that desktop applications suites were a neat idea once upon a time, too.

[Update: 2:47pm ET 24 Mar — Mary Jo Foley points out that now Office is going to be delayed as well, so things are actually worse for Microsoft than I reported this morning.

27 March 2006 Permalink

On The Conference Thing: Etech, SXSW, Unconferences and Monocultures

ETech has turned into one of those events — like many others — where the real value for me is coming from the myriad conversations in the hallways. Not to detract from the presentations, per se, but that’s seems to be where the real deal is for me, here.

A few highlights from 8 March 2006:

• At a press lunch dedicated to the upcoming Where 2.0 — now on my calendar — I met Di-Ann Eisnor, one of the founders of Platial. Several members of the fifth estate seemed intent on trying to rip her guts out because there are stalkers in the world, and they might decide to use a geolocational tool like Platial, so what is she doing about that? Wow, was that over the top, or what. Nat Torkington, the conference chair who was trying to steer the lunch discussion, finally stepped in and shut down the idiots that seemed to be clamoring for editorial review of all user content at Platial. Oh sure. Tim O’Reilly made some insightful visionary statements, but the feeding frenzy of a few self-appointed protectors of the greater geosphere really dominated the whole lunch.
• Tom Coates of Plasticbag.org and Yahoo gave a great talk on the Web of Data, laying out principles not only of design but a higher order goal of participation in the edge-based infrastructure of Web 2.0. Nice.
• Clay Shirky spoke, which I have already posted about (see Social Software is the Experimental Wing of Political Philosophy). Very cool.
• Jon Udell presnted on Attention Focusing Strategies, which helped me focus my attention on the topic, at least so long as he was on the podium.
• The Data Dump session, subtitlted Fun with Graphs and Charts, was real fun. Speakers included
  
  • Marc Hedlund, Entrepreneur-in-residence, O’Reilly Media — I came late, so if he presented something I missed it.
  • David Hornik, General Partner, August Capital — when the world’s funniest (and most insightful) VC looks at six months of his email content, what do we learn? VCs are lazy bastards who do nothing but talk about wine, vacations, and the occasional IPO.
  • Ian Kallen, Architect, Technorati, Inc — There’s a lot of splogs out there, but thank god they don’t cover their trails very well.
  • Eric Lunt, Co-founder and CTO, FeedBurner — Really cool visualization (with audio!) about the rise of feeds, culminating in 200,000 feeds under management at Feedburner.
  • Roger Magoulas, Director Market Research, O’Reilly Media, Inc. — what we can learn about tech trends from book sales and job postings? Ajax and Ruby are really, really hot.
  • Adam Messinger, VP, Product, Gauntlet Systems — As we always suspected, 80% of the work is done by 20% of the programmers, based on his analysis of a bunch of open source projects.
  • David L. Sifry, Founder and CEO, Technorati, Inc. — An update of his State of the Blogosphere preso, showing that, yes, the blogosphere continues to double in size every five months. Most interestingly, he answered a few questions that I sent along recently. 28% of blog posts now have tags using the rel=”tag” microformat. What he didn’t answer — he hasn’t dug out the data — are these questions:
    
    1. What is the average number (or distribution) of tags per tagged post?
    2. How many posts reference the average tag?

I found refuge in the hallways, since the ETech format is highly structured, and the sessions were all jammed. Most of the sessions had people sitting in the aisles and leaning against the walls. I was also surprised — it’s my first ETech — at the depressing ratio of women to men. Perhaps its inevitable that a conference that is constantly referring to its audience as the “alpha geeks” would be so skewed, but it’s still annoying to me. I am not suggesting some nefarious scheme here, to marginalize women or something, just that the whole tone of the show is hyper geeky. As a complement to that — because geeks are as conservative as cats — the structure is a series of parallel tracks just crammed with techno-goodness: technologists with a never-ending parade of powerpoints. Very little organized socialization — not even a defined IRC backchannel! My recommendation would be to go single track, and drop 2/3 of the sessions, and open up the schedule for more loose stuff: but O’Reilly is probably delivering exactly what the alpha geeks want.

9 March 2006 1 Permalink