Tag Archive

My Social Graph

I’ve been really thinking about my online profile and the links I have. It’s intriguing to play with the Google Social Graph API even though it’s only useful if you’re trying to build a social app (which - well - everyone is).

I’ve also looked at lots of tips on blogging, especially a recent post from Chris Brogan on Ten Secrets to Better Blogging. I’ve only just started blogging recently, but I know I’m being a little haphazard about it.  I’m probably not even following it for this blog.

I’ve also been looking into my social networks and who I follow and who follows me. I love social networks and I love interacting with them. Twitter and Friendfeed are where I get a lot of information from. The thing is for some reason I constantly feel under pressure to make a difference to people’s lives through my interaction.  Twitter is slightly different, but… why can’t I just be me?  Am I being me or not?

Friending is a currency

Links were the currency of the early noughties, and now friending has become the major currency we’re all trying to achieve.  Things like XFN and microformats have sprung up to help us connect with each other and Google is obliging so that we can get at that information. So, now it’s not just the HTML links we have pointing to our content, it’s also the virtual connections between me and somebody that we have on the web that matters.

So, it’s becoming all about getting “as many friends as possible”.  Having 100,000 friends on MySpace wasn’t (and still isn’t) impossible, but calling them friends is quite blatantly wrong - at least, if you’re primary use of the web is as a businessman.  It smacks more of a marketing strategy and something (shock horror) viral and insipid than of a social network.

Being in Business

Being in business, I am attempting to make money (doesn’t have to be a lot, just enough). In some ways, I find that it’s odd mixing my online business activities and the idea of “friending” with my business. It makes it all the more personal, and less about business.

In some ways, my online profile is me and it’s separate from my business. That separation is blurred now, with LinkedIn and others who force me to portray myself in terms of business.  Facebook is different in that it allows me to be me and gives me a semblance of control over who and what people see of me, and it’s much more personal.

The funny thing is that the people that make a lot of money out of the social networks are the network owners, the people who run the things.  Now, in an equivalent of a dot-com boomtime, we’re in a social-network boomtime, where the VC money is going into things that are about “building communities” around a topic.

Who Am I?

So I come back to my original question. Who am I? Am I the businessman on LinkedIn or am I the friendly guy on Facebook?  Am I the stream of random thoughts on Twitter or am I the stream of life information on Friendfeed.

One things for sure, I don’t think any of these things mean that anybody else can truly know who I am.  The funny thing is, I’m not sure that I always know either.  Maybe the interactions on social networks are part of what shape me?

What do you think?

I’ve realised that Twitter is a great little tool.  I’ve spent some time trying to streamline my life through cutting down on wasted time in work.  So that means:

• Checking email only every hour (and not clicking on “check for new mail”)
• Stopping twittering so much - at least, not just sitting and watching it waiting for something to respond to
• Scheduling time and calls into my day so that things don’t get left
• Looking into getting a virtual assistant (still looking)
• … other stuff

This has done wonders and I’ve got so much more done in the last couple of days, that I’m now a lot happier with where I am.  Still no work, but I’m much more in control of my time and I don’t feel that I’m just drifting through work any more.

However, I realised that I missed something doing this.  I’ve twittered a lot less, and I’ve read twitters a lot less too.  This is great for my time management, but not so great for my keeping up with the world.  Why?

Twitter is acting like my virtual office. Whenever I’ve been in an office, there are emails that go round and conversations over the water cooler that happen that make your day a little more interesting.  I’ve realised that Twitter acts like that for me.  Which is great!

So, I’ve decided to work out a way to incorporate Twitter as my virtual office water cooler. It’s where I keep up with what’s going on with my friends and where I find out about new and interesting things.  I’m not sure exactly how to manage it in terms of time, but we’ll see.  Maybe I just need twhirl to add in a “text-to-speech” thing for it, and I can just “overhear” what’s going on instead of having to converse.

It was well received and generated a lot of discussion.

It was based on this blog post:

http://padajo.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/internet-infinite-feedback-loops/

It generated a lot of discussion around twitter.

The talk is in PDF format here: How to break the internet

Update: The presentation is now on slideshare - How to Break the Internet

I I’ve been playing with twitter for a long time, and I’ve recently also created a friendfeed account. These are fun tools to keep in touch with my techie friends and to discuss how often twitter goes down.

Now, I had the idea a few days ago, that given that friendfeed is an aggregator of my online content (and there’s a lot - not as much as some but a lot nonetheless) was it be possible to create a feedback loop?

So how do you go about doing that?

A feedback loop is very simple.  Something that gets posted to the in one place gets reposted by an application reading that feed back to the same place. An infinite loop.

So, to test this theory I setup 3 things:

1. A twitter account for extremefeedback
2. A friendfeed account for extremefeedback
3. A Twitterfeed account

I setup the friendfeed account to read from the twitter account. I setup the twitterfeed account to blog the RSS feed from friendfeed. So a post on twitter should be read by friendfeed, and then posted back to twitter via twitterfeed.

I then posted 1 tweet to twitter… and since then, that tweet has been retweeted from friendfeed by twitterfeed. I have created a feedback loop! It’s only on a 30 minute timescale (that’s what twitterfeed will do) but it still works.

Why is this important?

Basically, it was very easy, and because it was very easy, this could be a problem given that there will be a proliferation of aggregators in the not too distant future.  The reason being that a single post is consumed without any thought to the ID of the post - in other words, what is the original post and how do we know?  This means that a feed cannot currently (or chooses not to) recognise the same post being reposted.

As there will be a proliferation of aggregators, there will be a growing problem with reposting of the same content across the internet.  Assuming that somewhere someone will make an RSS to twitter (or friendfeed etc) that is quicker than 30 minutes, it’s entirely possible to see a situation where internet posts fill the internet and cause either a meltdown or at the very least a proliferation of pointless content.  Aggregators and microblogging applications beware!

It’ll be the blog equivalent of spam!  Maybe it should be called Aggregation Feedback

I think we need to revisit how programmers for things such as friendfeed are going to consume content from other sites.  Without it, we could be in trouble on the net!

I like Web 2.0. It’s a great idea and a fantastic buzzword. It allows me to seem “in the know” to people who are only just beginning to get Web 1.0.

But the problem is that Web 2.0 seems to have a slight identity crisis, certainly within the business world. A lot of discussion has happened and is happening around the idea of revenue and cash flow for web 2.0 businesses.  This comes on the back of Twitter securing $15m funding for continuing to grow it’s business, when there are many in the business world who are asking where the business model is.

This article in the FT a few days ago, it suggests that most financiers are at the very least unsure about why they should invest in a company.  Web 2.0 to them is about social online behaviour, and so far, very few of the recent startups has shown enough promise to start making money.  Twitter, for example, is being backed because of the strong early adopter user base it has grown very quickly.  The interesting thing is that there’s still no obvious business model, even now and it’s been going a while.

But maybe the key is that it is changing our online behaviour.  It used to be just about email and phone, then came online ads, and now it’s about putting out your online personality.  This will create groups (I don’t want to use the word “crowd” here) that can then start to become the next business communities.  So maybe, Twitter will just become a community around which business is done.  What business and how much that will make for the users or for Twitter is unknown, but Dell and others are beginning to use Twitter to get information out there about their businesses.

Some of the other businesses that are touted as Web 2.0 are Slide (how it’s worth $500m I will never know) and Ning. Because all of these businesses start with open source software and tend to be beta versions at launch, then the technology tends not to be the valuable part.  The value appears to be in the number of users that they can get as quickly as possible.  So making something that is “useful” and/or “fun” for a large number of people appears to be how to make a Web 2.0 startup. Monetisation is not the key.

Jemima Kiss points out that it’s not simply enough to look at the finances of a business.  Web 2.0 is still young as an industry (if indeed it is a separate industry to the “normal” web) and these businesses springing up are less about the traditional and more about the innovative side of business.  Maybe Web 2.0 is the future of all business and maybe it is going to be much more disruptive than even we are seeing now.

My opinion is that Web 2.0 companies are here and here to stay and I like them.  I still fail to see how Twitter is going to make a lot of money (and certainly not out of it’s current user base) without someone there creating a micro-payment model (of some sort) on top of it.

The key to a successful Web 2.0 company appears to be finding the right angel to invest at the start (if needed) and the right VC to fund it after the initial launch, and the right company to purchase after a short-ish amount of time.  It’s less about the business model and more about fashion.  Maybe the business model is more like that in that it’s more of the web’s “luxury item” than previous companies were. Luxury and fashion may be the way to view Web 2.0.

I’ve found that the readers of my twitter stream are wide and varied. My twitter stream is consumed by various applications, including the twitter facebook status application to update my facebook status from twitter and I have many comments (especially from people at my church) who think I twitter too much and I’m always top of their mini-feed!!!

So I thought (for all those people that read my twitter posts but aren’t on twitter) I’d do a quick intro to twitter.

What is Twitter?

It’s what’s called a microblogging application. These applications allow you, in a short amount of characters, send a status update, or in the words of twitter “what are you doing right now?”.

But “What I’m doing” is obvious

As my friend Bezzer says, there is only one answer and that is “I am twittering” but that’s just going a bit far and too literal.  Basically, it’s an opportunity to tell people who might want to know what you are actively engaged in at that moment. So you could be “walking the dog” or “thinking about my friend” or any number of things.  Bloggers people often use it to say they have created a new blog post.  It gets very interesting and bizarre finding out what people are doing!

Why twitter so much?

Well, twitter only matters when you have friends who twitter as well.  Twittering in isolation is dull (believe me, you don’t want to know what you were doing last year).  It’s much more interesting finding out what people around you are doing.  So letting them know is fun for them.  But to know that, you have to follow people.  Once you start to follow people (calling them your friend is a bit wrong) you start to receive their updates into your friends stream.

Finding people to follow

It’s simple really - search for people. The BBC news has a twitter stream you can friend. Not only that but you can track twitter and get a message every time someone uses a certain phrase.  So if you want to find people that talk about premiership football, you might track premiership. You will then get messages from people who twitter about that and can follow them if you like what they say.

Twitter via a client, Instant Messenger (IM) or mobile phone

The thing is, if it’s all on the net, you never view it unless you go to twitter. This gets tedious after a while, so the best way to view tweets is through a desktop application like twhirl. You can also get and send tweets direct to your mobile phone as an SMS or via IM through Google’s IM platform gtalk.

Then, you will receive tweets from other people (those you folow) sent directly to you, and you can twitter very easily, without having to go on the net.

What’s the @ and the # all about?

If you see someone’s twitter and want to respond, you just put their twitter username in and put and @ at the start. So instead of it being a true twitter, it’s more like a comment on another person’s twitter. Putting a # in front of a word means you’re talking about a specific subject.  It just helps in searching.

Official commands

There are other commands that help with twitter, and these are defined in the official commands.  Take a look!

Want to know more?

Probably the easiest thing to do is to setup an account, download twhirl, find someone on twitter (like me), and follow them. Then, start answering the question “what are you doing right now?”. It’s really very simple.  I may even follow you back!

I was just chatting with my mate James Ogley (a curate in the Church of England down in Bursledon and also a SuSE evangelist) and we were just trying to figure out if it’s possible to create a feedback loop.

While it may or may not work (or be socially/internet responsible) it is something that should be considered.

If networks such as friendfeed did something like auto-post comments to another social network, and then that network auto-posted those comments back to friendfeed you could end up with a feedback loop very easily.

The thing is, has this been done, and if it hasn’t how do you stop it happening?

Every post must have a unique URL against as an identifier of course, but if when you pull a post from somewhere else it gives it a new unique URL, then what’s to stop it being a perfect feedback loop?

I’m not suggesting this is a good idea as it’s likely that at least one of the networks online would be overrun and brought down because of it.  However, maybe there needs to be a more robust solution for handling posts posted in one place being sent to another.  Maybe a post should only have 1 unique URL.

The problem is, that if you use a multi-posting client like twhirl then one post to twhirl can create 3 identical but essentially unique posts elsewhere.  Which one is the master post?

This could be a problem folks…

Is this true?

Of course, there’s limits to what twitter can achieve aren’t there?  It’s not got anything physical … oh wait, it has a house attached.

So what can’t be done with twitter?

Over the past few years, I’ve watched and been a part of several social networks. My favourite (currently only) is twitter.  I have developed lots of friendships over the years, some entirely online, and some I’ve made online and continued in real life.

What I’ve seen before, but I’m noticing more and more is something I like to call spamship. What this is is a person making a cursory link between themselves and yourselves on a social network.  The better ones at it make an attempt at a conversation, but there are enough out there who are just setting up profiles to gather “connections”.  The worst ones are those who think that the number of friends on a network somehow signifies either popularity or value or expertise.  It’s rubbish.

An added extra that has emerged is distributed spamship which is even more annoying.  Someone “friends” you on one social network, and then “imports” their friendships from that network into another network.  What happens if you’re on both networks? You’re automatically joined to them there too.

It makes the idea of friendship less and less useful and more and more annoying. It is friendship spamming and it’s something that I don’t like. The only beneficiary is the person who is doing the spamming as you end up with pointless connections that have zero value to you elsewhere.

I like the idea that twitter uses of followership. Where you choose to follow a person, and they can follow you, if they want. There is no need to reciprocate if you don’t want to. Twitter puts me in control of my own friends and means that I don’t have to follow anyone I see as a spammer that chooses to follow me.

What will emerge in the future is that followership is going to become a much better guide to expertise, popularity or value than the number of friends a person has.  I know this isn’t new, but it is going to emerge.

We need to organise our lives around something. The internet allows us to have massively connected networks but we just can’t cope for long periods with so many relationships. We will have to focus our time and energies on certain niches and networks whilst staying aware of the outside world.

Spamship will decline as networks mature.  We will need to be more in control of our networks than we are currently, but there will always be a need for openness and collaboration, and we shouldn’t stop people who wish to watch/follow from doing so. We’re all open for collaboration.

It’s amazing to me that I can still have the “What is Web 2.0?” conversation, even with people who’s business it is to know something about the web (web designers, techies, IT directors).

There is no definitive answer here (or it wouldn’t be asked), although there are characteristics that a lot of Web 2.0 businesses share.  The most important thing to remember is that “being Web 2.0″ appears to be about open collaboration.

It’s not about sharing. There seems to be a misconception that if a company opens up it’s API and it’s data that there will at some point be a reciprocity just because you’ve opened up the data. That’s just not true.

Some examples might be in order here!

Collaboration is the correct term. The big companies have realised this and will often only open up the data it holds if it’s going to have some return benefit to itself.  Google Maps is a case in point, as Google realised that it could give away the maps, with an API, so long as it was branded Google. It meant that everyone had access to a mapping system for use in their application, but that everyone knew it was Google’s Mapping system. Mashups were born!  That meant that more people used the system, and built systems on top.  Google Maps became a platform and meant that it was a key collaborative component for other people’s systems.  Google is about selling advertising, and the more people that use it’s maps, the more likely it is that people are going to see their adverts.

Twitter is also a platform. It’s essentially a message queuing (MQ) system in the background and people use it to send messages to each other and to systems that use it.  You can get the data off twitter via RSS and via their API.  It integrates with mobile as well, in that you can have messages sent to your mobile. Not only that, but you can get data sent via Instant Messaging through GTalk which allows you to send info back to twitter too.  Because of all this ability to use twitter to send messages, people are beginning to twitter-up their house.  It’s not obvious where twitter makes their money, but it’s certain that if twitter disappeared, there could be problems for some web applications

There are many other web 2.0 companies and applications, including flickr which allows you to share photos with others.  It’s the platform that people use, and you can build on top of it.  But you always know it’s flickr.

I haven’t even touched on Web Services, RSS, blogging, podcasting, User Generated Content (UGC), virtual worlds etc.  There are many different web 2.0 technologies that facilitate collaboration.  It’s important to note that the companies using these technologies are in business for a reason, to make money somewhere, somehow.  They have realised the importance of these technologies for creating collaborations, but their aim is to increase value for their business.  It’s not enough just to blog or create a system for UGC to be called “web 2.0″.

So the answer to “What is Web 2.0?” is open collaboration. The technology is not the important part of it.

I think I’m becoming a twitter addict.  I just added a load of people to follow from WhoShouldIFollow? and I’m probably going to be figuring all the more out after that.

I really enjoy twitter. I’ve probably spent too much time on it, and this blog is probably going to make me twitter more, then blog more etc.

I find out stuff first mostly on twitter now. It’s odd, but I’m far more likely to click on links from people on twitter than anywhere else.

Ah well, time to stop blogging again!  Trying to keep them shorter for more commentability.

A twitter conversation between me and (mostly) Prokofy Neva

paul: thinking: You are a product of the communities you inhabit

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet hell no, not me : )

garethj: @pjnet Communities are defined by the people that inhabit them

paul: @garethj communities self-perpetuate types of people

paul: @Prokofy those communities may require you to be belligerent and annoying to others in the community - it’s a “type”

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet does it make you feel innovative and clever to typecast people?

paul: @Prokofy - you’re arguing my point about communities in http://www.mixedrealities.com/?p=189…

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet I simply don’t believe in prescribing Social Darwinism for others, imagining up little deterministic scenarios for “communities”

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet most of the time, there isn’t even any such thing as a “community.”

paul: @Prokofy you are the kind of person that encourages people to find out about stuff

paul: @Prokofy not sure what you’re getting at - I think you’re confusing my thoughts with something else

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet no, I’m responding directly to your your tweets. You said people r defined by communities. I say, no, they aren’t & they don’t exist.

paul: @Prokofy communities don’t exist? People are defined by the communities they inhabit - it’s a choice which communities we join

paul: @Prokofy even an anarchist is part of a community no?

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet no? I realize that’s just awfully clever, gosh, you are a product of what you rebel against but no, I’m not a social Darwinist they pretend that they create, empower, link, blah blah “communities”. They don’t. It’s a vast fiction -fake friends list isn’t a community.

paul: thinking that lots of people can’t see the other part of this twittering about

paul: @Prokofy you choose what you believe - you choose what you follow - i haven’t mentioned social darwinism at all

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet I absolutely refute any such determinist and all-encompassing notion of human nature, as “dictated by its community”

paul: @Prokofy I’m not just talking about online though - in fact, the thought came from thinking about offline communities

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet this is one of the deep, deep, corporativist, nay, fascistic fallies of Beth Noveck and Clay Shirky’s group fetishizing and groupism

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet they would have you defined online as always and everywhere “in a group” that grooms and conforms you to norms. No thanks!

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet no, you just practice it : )

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet no, that’s just your doctrine. People aren’t defined merely or even especially by communities. Many other factors are at play.

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet it’s a basic tenet of the Western liberal idea that the individual is unique and free and not subject to these restrictions

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet but I do realize that you simply don’t believe this; you may not even understand it.

paul: @Prokofy blog your thinking and I’ll comment

Prokofy Neva: @pjnet I just did : )

paul: thinking that it’s far easier to be rude and unsociable if you’re an avatar and hiding your true identity

paul: @prokofy We don’t live in isolation. We all live in communities. All different. All individual. Soc. Darwinism is about conformism - th …

paul: @prokofy link to the blog post? Haven’t yet seen it

paul: pjnet enjoying being challenged by @prokofy

I just found this a bit weird. It was an off-the-cuff thought that I was musing over, and the conversation got hijacked and rude very fast.

The conversation was interesting though. There’s a wikipedia page on Social Darwinism.

I do think however that we are changed by the communities we interact with. It’s all about which communities we choose to be a part of.  They can be big or small, and can have big or small influences. But you can’t be a part of a community without being changed in some way by it.

I’ve realised that I have a lot to say, and that I’m useless at keeping to 140 characters. So I’ve decided to start blogging instead of just twittering.

I’m hoping it’s going to facilitate more discussion and conversation than my twitter’s do.  We’ll see!

Watch this space.