Finally, The Internet As Intended.

Yahoo! has launched their new social network called mash. Looks like a 360 replacement from what I’ve read. The service is invite only right now - anyone have any an extra invite?

A system ordered largely by unbalanced positive feedback will continually amplify that feedback. I learned this in 7th grade with my mock fender and gorilla 12 watt amp. So why does Duncan Watts piece in the NYTimes today describing a study proving that popularity affects web site user’s decisions, have many in the blogosphere trumpeting the ironic death of Web2.0, collective intelligence, transparency, and the network effect?

Watt’s article describes his study that was published last year in Science, where more than 14,000 participants registered at their Web site, Music Lab (www.musiclab.columbia.edu), and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants.

The results indicated that songs that jumped to an early lead in number of downloads tended to stay at the top on the web site that provided download numbers; and these popular songs were very different from the ones choosen by users that were not provided that “social” information. Thus, there is a “cummulative advantage” provided to the early downloaded songs - and these early leaders are effectively random, they are simply the preferences of the first users.

So what should we take away from this? Many are using the simple experiment to knock the very core principles of transparency, wisdom of crowds, collective intelligence, and the network effect that are at the core of the leading approach to succesful web sites and systems. Scott Karp - whose sanity amid the Web2.0 hype I always appreciate has really dropped the hammer:

All of a sudden it’s crystal clear what Web 2.0 really is — the greatest platform ever for harnessing randomly imitative social behavior. Before Web 2.0, achieving utterly arbitrary results took time and effort. Now, with platforms like Digg, we can get nowhere in a fraction of the time it used to take.

While on one hand, it’s nice to see something we know intuitively - that things already declared popular receive more attention than items without that distinction - proved to be true. On the other, the experiment as performed dramatically over-simplifies the situation for one very big reason: positive feedback loops.

The most successful emergent systems, those where valuable order arises by individuals acting autonomously, are successful through a balance of positive and negative feedback. Everything from thermostats to a human’s sense of balance to ants’ decisions on the best place to store their waste. Can you tell I just read Stevn Johnson’s Emergence?

How dramatically would the results change if you simply gave users the ability to vote songs both up and down? Hard to say, but I would have to guess it would make a difference.

Creating a system that produces quality from simple rules is amazingly complex - netflix is offering a cool $1M for one that improves their movie recommendations. I wouldn’t dismiss the crowd’s wisdom from an experiment that doesn’t allow the wisdom to emerge.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Ross Mayfield says it’s tipped, Stowe Boyd agrees, and John Edward’s every move is public. It appears that Twitter has blown up. The tool seems amazingly frivolous at first glance. I setup an account 7 months, posted one message, and stopped. Then this morning I saw this - http://sxsw.twitter.com - and you start to get it. How do we set one of these up for NTEN in DC?

 

 

 

To start a social network today you need only flip the switch. Ning, KickApps, Pligg, GoingOn, are all players in the ever growing space of social network providers. The rapid commodification will have two major impacts on the nature of social software in the near future:

1. Social Networks are Features

Om Malik got it right when he said social networks are features, not properties. Friends lists, collaborative ranking, private messaging, public commenting, widgetable profile pages - this collection features strengthens any site.
2. Unified Identity Becomes Essential

The proliferation of social networks as a site feature means a proliferation of personal profiles, which makes identity management more and more of an issue for Joe User. He wants to participate in the social network features of the sites he visits, but managing multiple identities is a pain.

So, if you’re considering the addition of social networking features to your site (and you should be), you should be also be looking at the new identity standards and tools - and the one with the most momentum right now is OpenID.

powered by performancing firefox

I don’t need to rehash the recent flap-up on Social Media Press Releases, but Stowe Boyd at /Message has really stirred the pot. Stowe, as much as I agree with you on many many things (I’ve never met Stowe, but have been a reader for along time), I think you might want to tread a bit softer on the whole "people formerly known as the audience" idea that you describe as the type of thinking that proves corporations are simply "not getting it". 

Why tread softer, well…  just click the upper left banner on /Message. Yes, the one that says "Advertise here with FederatedMedia.net". Here is what you get:

 

 

Yahoo will open source mail. I’m not sure how I missed this announcement - now a few weeks old, but I really like this move. Here’s why:

• Yahoo is a media company. Letting enthusiastic programmers riff on your codebase has *zero* financial downside if your software is free anyway.
• Enthusiastic programmers = enthusiastic users. Enthusiastic users = higher viral adoption. Higher viral adoption = high page view driven advertising. 

In the press release Yahoo! sites tapping into the innovation of programmers as a primary driver for the decision:

"Yahoo is a very large company but we can’t build every applications that a user might want," Dickerson said in an interview at Yahoo headquarters. "You can imagine tens of thousands of niche applications (springing) from Yahoo Mail."

That’s clearly true - but the real value isn’t in "making yahoo mail better" - its in building a way to distribute adviews beyond the borders of Yahoo Mail itself. For any company whose business model is ad supported software-as-a-service, open sourcing is will be strategic long term benefit. Here’s my soundbite - Open is the new lock in. Catchy eh?

Henry Abbott, the sportswriter behind TrueHoop.com (worth the daily read for any hoops fan), wanted information, and now he’s got the world working to get it - with a wiki. On September 7th, 2006, Abbot posted a TrueHoop blog entry titlled "Things that Should be Online, But Aren’t". Number 1 on the list: A complete list of NBA agents and their clients. One month later, TrueHoopWiki.com is making that a reality.

In four short weeks Abbott went from wishlist to growing online resource - a great testimony to the power of the network and simple online collaboration tools.

Here’s how it unfolded:

September 7th:

Abbott Laments the Lack of an Agent-Player List with a Blog Post

September 8th, 11:03 AM:

Doug, a TrueHoop blog reader comments:

Someone should start a collaborative site where fans can postagent-player links. Whenever a player’s agent gets mentioned in a localpaper story it could be posted on the site. Just from reading Pistonsarticles from the last few years I’ve compiled a list of the agents ofall their current players. Though it’s tough to know when a playerswitches agents.

September 8th: Later that day:

Abbot Reiterates the Need

let’s just set up a wiki and collaborate on making that list. Everytime any one of you sees in an article somewhere that it says somethinglike "Al Harrington’s new agent, Arn Tellem…" then you could updatethe wiki.

…and sounds the Wiki call:

I’m not exactly Mr. Technology, so I have been poking around: is there an easy way to put a wiki like that on TrueHoop?… Anyone out there feel like spearheading the technology of such an effort?

3 Weeks in September :

Abbott hooks up with TrueHoop readers Rolando de Aguiar, J.P. Given, Engineer Scotty, and Matt Bailey - the build TrueHoopWiki in 3 short weeks.

October 3:

TrueHoopWiki.com is released into the Wild

Here’s how we hope it will work. If you see an online article about a certain NBA player that mentions their agent, please update TrueHoopWiki (which already has "stub" entries for every current NBA player, or darned close) with the name of the agent and a link to the source article. With lots of people contributing, it shouldn’t take long to have a fairly complete and up-to-date agent resource.

technorati tags:wiki, collaboration

Blogged with Flock

VOIP is being banned by third world countries to protect government sponsored telecom monopolies. That is isn’t too suprising, but this is:

San Jose State University, just down the road from Skype’s parent company eBay, has apparently decided to block all Skype use on campus.

You know your technology is disruptive when it starts being unexplicably banned.

technorati tags:p2p

Blogged with Flock

In late May, The Edge.org published a fascinating dialogue among many of the web’s most respected pundits in response to Jaron Lanier’s essay Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, in which he casts the desire of web software to harness collective intelligence as dangerous and potentially destructive to the individual.

Quite an A-list weighed in with responses: Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, and Howard Rheingold. I caught wind of the debate belatedly via JP Rangaswami’s post lamenting that he too had only belatedly discovered the conversation.

I’ll let you read the dialogue for yourself - and if you are interested in the future of social software, you should - but Kevin Kelly had the most insightful remark, for me. :

…Our technological systems are marked by the fact that we have introduced intelligent design into them. This is the top-down control we insert to speed and direct a system toward our goals. Every technological system, including Wikipedia, has design in it. What’s new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much "hive" in it as we have recently made with the Web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can be design and hive. In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations. We are tweaking the dial in hundreds of combos: dumb writers, smart filters; smart writers, dumb filters, ad infinitum.

- Kevin Kelly

It puts a finger on what Lanier did not recognize, that social software isn’t the hive mind - it is, for the most part, individualist design attempting to extract wisdom from it. It underscores a few things I’ve said before, that successful Web 2.0 companies and applications are baking the power of the network right into their offerings. And that excellent social software is bionic - it does not simply playback user participation, it amplifies it intelligently.