Social network modalities
The fuss last week about asymmetric follow got me thinking about communication modalities in social networks. It seems to me that this is yet another case where there’s nothing really new, just fresh perspective. Social networks appear to support the same modalities as data networks, so perhaps it’s worth looking at the old labels and seeing how this applies to emerging use cases:
Unicast:
Unicast
The classic 1-2-1 pattern. This is what happens with instant messages (IMs), direct messages (DMs) and to an extent good old email (though the use of distribution lists fogs the picture a little there). It’s also what happens with the @name convention in microblogging or something like directed social bookmarking.
Multicast:
Multicast
In data networks we use multicast groups, and it seems that in social networks the groups concept is the same, so when we post a link, update a status or whatever then it goes by default to a group defined by our immediate social graph (our ‘friends’), or it can be directed at a specific group.
Privacy:
With both unicast and multicast there are clearly ways to have some privacy, with a trade off against the broader collaboration potential. This depends to some extent on whether the defaults are private or public, and whether users normally tinker with those defaults.
Broadcast:
Broadcast
This is the uncontrolled, anybody who’s listening option. There’s probably an important distinction between broadcast and public multicast, and this may well be the nub of what asymmetric follow is all about. Frankly I don’t see that much difference between pub/sub asymmetries in regular blogging and microblogging.
Filed under: e2.0 | 3 Comments
Tags: asymetric follow, broadcast, multicast, privacy, social network, unicast
The end of persona?
I’ve spent a lot of time this year talking about persona, which makes it a little ridiculous that I find myself writing now about its possible demise. We’ve barely got started.
The problem is ‘the end on online anonymity‘, where Sarah Perez argues that the Lori Drew case will cause us to lose the freedom to use a pseudonym or alternate persona. If this was true then I feel that it would be very bad, but let’s unpick the details a bit:
- This is a classic knee jerk reaction of a legal system to an awful event. Things have far from stabilised, and as one of the commenters points out the scope is very limited for the time being.
- The US != the internet, and that becomes more true every day. From my own local perspective the UK has become all too adept at importing stupid stuff, but there’s latency there and a hope of balance being brought by the EU.
- This is about web site terms and conditions. Most of the popular social networking sites seem to have taken a line that you have to be yourself. That’s fine, though I think enfolding Ts&Cs in legal precedent is bad; they’re often just as abusive of real legal rights as most EULAs (which is why we need reasonableagreement.org). Forcing you to be yourself isn’t the case with MMORPGs, and I’m sure that there are plenty of other corners of the web where alternate persona makes commercial or social sense and will thus be allowed by the Ts&Cs.
I therefore think the end of persona (and the anonymity it may confer) isn’t yet nigh. The sky isn’t falling, and the trolls can still hide under there bridges. If you don’t like trolls, then probably best to avoid bridges.
Filed under: identity | 1 Comment
Tags: anonymity, identity, law, persona, privacy
Perhaps I was being a bit dull when I first read through Andrew McAffe’s The Ties that Find, as I seem to have missed the key point, which is that weak ties are where new information comes from. Thanks to Dr Felix Reed-Tsochas for calling this out so explicitly during his section of the networks masterclass at the recent SVCO event. I should also say that Mark S. Granovetter’s original paper on The Strength of Weak Ties is well worth a read – what wonderful insight for something written more than 25 years ago.
This gets me thinking that there’s probably a gravity analogy lurking here – once something falls inside a field of influence then it becomes less useful because it has lower entropy.
There’s also a potential molecular chemistry analogy here – that weak ties (like covalent bonds) take less energy to get reactions going than strong ties (like ionic bonds).
If enterprise 2.0 is looking to encourage innovation, to get those reactions going, to suck in that entropy, then we need to facilitate those weak ties. If we keep the enterprise 1.0 blinkers on and stop things at the electronic borders that wrap around our buildings then that’s not going to happen very well.
and that’s why enterprise 2.0 shouldn’t be ‘enterprisey‘.
Filed under: e2.0 | 1 Comment
Tags: e2.0, social networking, SVCO, weak ties
This post has been stewing for some time, and perhaps the fuss today over the launch of the .tel domain gives me a good reason to serve it up.
It’s my view that telephone numbers were THE original digital identity scheme. Of course like most pioneering activities things weren’t thought through particularly well, and we’ve seen various changes and kludges applied along the way. The system still works though, and most people (even amongst the less technically savvy) are aware of the limitations without even giving them much thought.
Security seems like a good place to start. For some reason my colleagues in the IT security world seem to turn purple and start ranting when I talk about telephone numbers being a type of digital identity. “They’re not secure”, I hear the cry. Let’s put things into perspective – a number is just a type constrained special case of a string format address. Less constrained cases (that are also used for the purposes of digital identity) include email addresses and OpenID URIs. None of these things are inherently secure or insecure, but we tend to associate them with the various degrees of badness embedded in the common implementations. When I dial a number I could be misdirected elsewhere (by an attacker, or just some clever call forwarding), and when I receive a call with caller line identification (CLI) it could be spoofed. It is true that the telephony system that we mostly use today is riddled with security hole, and that there are few good ways of establishing trust, but that’s mostly not the fault of the numbers.
Namespace management has been a key problem over the years. As the use of telephone numbers for personal identity became more common we see the same growing pains that we’re presently encountering in the journey from IPv4 to IPv6. Corporate exchanges were a bit like NAT, but corporate citizens came to demand personal addresses (=numbers), and sometimes more than one (for fax machines etc.). We also bump up against some cognitive psychology issues here – too much namespace = too long to remember. For those of you with kids you can think of yourself as being an expensive NAT router next time you answer their calls :)
Geographic anchoring is somewhat related to the namespace management issues. This is of course a hang over from the days where the physical location of exchange switching equipment was meaningful, but it continues to affect us. I’ve been trying for some time to run with ‘one number’ – a single telephone number that will reach me wherever I am in the world, on whatever device I choose to have with me. The mechanics behind this work surprisingly well; all of the issues are around social etiquette that’s annealed around our use of numbers. People still get offended when I don’t give them a ‘mobile’ number, and others find it impossible to grasp that dialling something that’s purportedly anchored in London will actually reach me in office in NY (or wherever else). I’m told that in some parts of the world great significance is attached to which class of number (from many on a business card) should be used at any given time.
Of course ‘one number’ isn’t a panacea. People still worry about things like long distance costs and roaming charges. +44 may alienate those from +1 or +34 or whatever (it may even be blocked on some corporate exchanges and pay as you go mobiles); so what I may really need is some identity virtualisation, and luckily services to do this already exist.
So, rounding up, telephone numbers were there being digital identity before the term was even coined. Since we still use telephones a lot we still have to consider the use of telephone numbers as part of a broader identity landscape, and that’s particularly important when the conversation moves onto unified communications – something that I’ll probably post about another day.
PS I’m intrigued by the utility of putting contact data into DNS versus something webby like Portable Contacts, and would love to hear stories of how this will be used in anger?
Filed under: identity | 5 Comments
Tags: .tel, digital identity, identity, numbers, portable contacts, telephone
Why do they never learn?
They in this case are the machines that we use every day, or more specifically the software running on them. By using language like ‘they’ perhaps I’m already using a person like metaphor that’s inappropriate to the situation. Regardless, we’re confronted each day by machines that make us do repetitive tasks rather than taking them on for us.
This post was originally going to be called something like ‘bookmarks with input’, as such things would solve a tiny subset of the trouble at hand. Certainly bookmarks with input would solve the issue that got me thinking about the broader problem space.
My frustration began with the browser on one of the mobile devices that I lug around with me. I use it quite frequently to check railway timetables, and then use the information from those timetables to determine which station to head for, or train to jump onto. Like most mobile devices it’s design can best be described as read mostly – doing input is a pain, and also bandwidth is limited, so browsing through many pages to get to the right place is a slow process. So… rather than repeatedly making me input the same variables why doesn’t the device do this for me (or at least let me save a given input set for rapid future reuse)? This is less of a problem on the desktop, where both browsing and input are higher bandwidth experiences, and yet we still sit there like robots – repetitiously pointing and clicking. The server side for many services don’t help either, by insisting that some sort of session state be established and maintained, and sliding you straight back to square one if you dare to let things time out or ask a question without hoping through the right sequential steps and up the right ladder.
How do we stop ourselves being robots playing snakes and ladders? The geeky answer is scripting. In anticipation of the comments that might say ‘you can do all that with Greasemonkey‘, I would like to ask ‘why don’t we do all that with Greasemonkey, or indeed any other scripting environment’? I think the answer is that scripting is for geeks, because scripting is hard – it’s another place where the machine makes you think like a computer rather than a computer learning from our actions.
Things get much more interesting if the script is automatically generated, perhaps by observing pattens of repeated behaviour. More interesting still if the generated script can then by edited in a simple and meaningful way. I think that’s what Platypus does, but that still leaves me wondering why such functionality is in an add-on to an add-on rather than part of the everyday out of the box experience?
Filed under: software, wibble | Leave a Comment
Tags: browser, greasemonkey, machine learning, mobile, platypus, scripting
Reversion marketing
Reversion marketing is the evil twin of conversion marketing. The reversion marketing experience from a consumer point of view is about receiving such dreadful service that you choose to leave. Why would any organisation do this? Well, it’s a way of getting rid of unprofitable customers without directly saying to them ‘we don’t want you any more’. It’s the corporate version of the person who can’t say to their boy/girlfriend that they don’t want to see them anymore, and instead behaves like a jerk so the other party breaks off the relationship. This is dark side of customer segmentation. Whilst the textbooks are full of what you should do to extract more revenue from the most profitable customers they have little to say about what to do with the unprofitable ones.
So why can’t organisations say ‘we don’t want you any more’? Is it more or less damaging to brand values and perception to be transparently pruning customers, or to be delivering bad service to those customers so that they self prune? In a socially network world full of feedback and reviews, can the reverted customer do a lot of damage; or would a declined customer be even worse?
From my own perspective this is a practice that I see most often from large and resilient brands, which gets me wondering if I’m mistaking incompetence for malice? I’d love to hear from any insiders whether reversion marketing is an actual process anywhere?
Filed under: marketing | 1 Comment
Tags: customer, marketing, segmentation
Digital ego?
I spent yesterday at the Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford (SVCO) event, which I can heartily recommend to anybody interested in hearing about the intersection of technology and entrepreneurship from the horses mouth.
There were many highlights to the day, but for me the most interesting presentation was by Susan Greenfield on ‘The Brain: neuroscience of the computer’. The central question behind the presentation was what would it take to digitize our personal identity (and establish digital consciousness)? This clearly is digital identity on a scale way beyond the scrum of tokens and federation. So much so that I wondered whether digital identity is the right label, or whether it should be digital ego? It certainly seems to me that Freud’s (translated) Id isn’t relevant to this discussion of a broader concept of ID. I also feel that until we get the foundation concepts of digital identity sorted out – so that the tokens and federation and all that stuff actually work, we’re in no place to build a digital ego.
Filed under: identity | Leave a Comment
Tags: digital identity, ego, id, identity, virtual people
My experiment with directed social bookmarking seems to be working out well, though I still don’t have an appropriate feedback vehicle. Nudge, nudge to those that have offered to help.
One of the interesting things that’s happened is that people who I direct stuff towards are starting to become significant in my tag cloud. This got me thinking about whether that might be a bit of a privacy problem, and how such a problem might be solved.
A seemingly obvious answer would be to use meaningless but unique numbers (or identifiers) MBUNs. I could then tell the target of a directed feed which MBUN to subscribe to, and off they go. This could however be problematic for me in terms of remembering who is represented by which MBUN.
There must be a more elegant way of doing this?
Well, I think there is, but maybe it’s not quite ready yet. What if rather than having an RSS feed as the conduit for a directed feed I used an personal AMQP queue instead. That would I think be cool. The plumbing and name space management aren’t there yet, but I don’t think they’re insurmountable problems.
Please comment on other cool things that could be done with personalised (or should that be personalised) queues?
Filed under: e2.0 | Leave a Comment
Tags: AMQP, e2.0, enterprise 2.0, identity, MBUN, persona, rss, social web
The Myth of Software Support
I’ve been too quiet of late, and part of the problem has been this blog post, which has become something of a mental bolus. It’s time to get it out.
The title really says it all. It’s my assertion that software support, or at least big company support for enterprise customers, is a myth. Not just a myth, but a costly myth that we seem to desperately cling to for reasons that elude my understanding.
When was the last time you phoned up a major software supplier’s support desk and said ‘I’ve got a problem with your stuff – it doesn’t work like it should do’ and they came right back and said “gosh – thanks for pointing that out, we’ll get right on with fixing that, and let you know as soon as possible when the fix will be ready”? It just never happens. My typical experience seems to be modelled on the stages of grief:
1. Denial – there’s nothing wrong with our software. You must be using it incorrectly.
2. Anger – how dare you suggest we make anything other than a perfect product. It’s supposed to work like that.
3. Bargaining – we can do a fix for you, but which of your high priority feature requests for the next version are you willing to give up so that we can still make the shipping date.
4. Depression – the fix is done, but we can’t let you have it as it needs to go through our regression testing cycle. We’d much rather you lived with a broken system than give you something that’s not properly tested.
5. Acceptance – here’s your patch, it took us so long to do it that we’ve rolled it up with a bunch more and called it a service pack.
So… software support is just like grief, except you pay something like a 25% annuity for the privilege. No wonder they call it S&M ;-)
I could leave it there, and let the debate rage in the comments; but maybe that won’t happen. The blogosphere has become a surprising write only medium of late. So what do I think should be done about this?
Let’s start by looking at where good software support still happens (it does) – Open Source and startups. Startups do good support because they’re desperate to have a working product and happy customers. This is how things should be. Open Source lets you fix it yourself (if need be) or pay the original authors, or some third party that thinks they’re a bit handy with a text editor and compiler, to do it for you. There is maybe a boundary condition with Open Source, which is where enterprises pay for huge OSS S&M contracts, which I feel are just as bad as huge S&M contracts for proprietary stuff.
I think the general principle for a working system looks like fixed price pay per incident. The problem with this is that it’s victim pays; and there’s also a temptation for ‘incidents’ to be closed before they’re thoroughly resolved. However, I think it would take a LOT of incidents for any enterprise to run up a bill that looks like their present S&M bill.
The pedants amongst you will now be wanting to comment about the ‘M’ bit for maintenance being an options contract on upgrades to future versions. I know, so let’s keep the discussion about support.
Filed under: software | 4 Comments
Tags: software support
Directed social bookmarking
One of my colleagues spends a lot of time seeing how we can introduce more enterprise 2.0 technologies to the workplace, and when I come across good stuff in that field I tend to throw it over the wall to him. It therefore struck me as insane that when I was reading this from Andrew McAfee and specifically looking at a picture depicting how bad email is for collaboration, that I sent him links by email.
This got me thinking that there should be a better way, but I quickly realised that the shallow streams of consciousness that we get from the social web aren’t directed enough. Once again a problem seems to have come up that is identity dependent and fine grained. So… we’ve started a little experiment of using del.icio.us tags that are directed at each other. I’ve borrowed the @name convention from Twitterees as a mechanism for doing this.
The missing piece seems to be a feedback mechanism (other than an email saying ‘thanks good link’ or whatever).
Filed under: e2.0 | 8 Comments
Tags: del.icio.us, e2.0, email, enterprise 2.0, social web
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