Winning by Sharing

NextWeb 2008: Quick roundup

  next web poster 
  Originally uploaded by ixtlan

NextWeb 2008 Event   Don't have time for a full write up, so here are some trends that caught my eye;

Aggregation.  There seems to be a trend in aggregation.  Lots of talk about FriendFeed and a couple of start ups planning either content and/or profile aggregation.  UberVu hasn't launched yet but will be a space where conversations (community) can be started around your content.  Postmachina's social hardware will synchronise and aggregate social network profiles on the web.

VC.  Venture capital is looking for BIG ideas, new approaches (to old problems) and growth sectors (e.g. mobile) - according to the founder of TheFunded - a social network for funded CEOs.

Business models.  At last! A social network that extracts value from member data.  Wakoopa is network for serious software developers and end users (.Net, Adobe, Mozilla, etc) that gathers statistics about people's usage and opinions of end user software tools.  It sells this data on to the software vendors. NetLog founder reported over 30m users and a revenue stream that is 80% advertisement and 20% premium services.  They also report massive demand for Group Pages and plan to launch a mobile, location based social network. Not bad for a company of only 43 people.

Other points to note;

Zilok seems to have gained a lot of traction.  A place to rent anything.  Proper contracts and insurance and a decent web experience for monetising everything from lawnmowers to saxophones.  Very localised (because people have to meet) so some potential social benefit by enabling relationships between parties that are previously unknown to each other.

eBuddy is bigger than I thought.  A meebo clone with tools that enable advertisers to reach the IM community.  Love the way eBuddy hosts all their press and media info on Flickr!

Adoption of Cloud Services is very high amongst west coast start ups.  The founder of Lookery, a Facebook advertsing tool says that he and most of his entrepreneur friends consider it the only way to go.

BIG hat tip to Nova Spivack of Twine who gave a "semantic web for dummies" master class. By far the most informative, insightful and profound speaker over the two days.  His entire approach to the semantic web, and indeed his entire ethos, is coincidentally very Winning by Sharing.

I missed the talk by one of the founders of Dataportability.org but wanted to enjoy Friday afternoon in Amsterdam with my wonderful wife!  Lunch at Gaucho followed by shopping and an afternoon nap back at The Grand hotel.  Nice!

Overall an excellent experience and very well organised by Patrick de Laive and his team.  Well done!

Robert Scoble poses with Leon Benjamin?

  Leon Benjamin and Robert Scoble 
  Originally uploaded by ixtlan

Or should that be the other way round?  In any case, Robert Scoble delivered a key note speech on day two of the NextWeb 2008 event.  It was short and to the point;  Have you noticed how social software really sucks if you don't have any friends?  When you sign up for Twitter, Pownce and other social software services your initial experience is so poor you wonder what the point is until of course, you add your friends.   Robert described this as the Friend Divide.  This is in stark contrast to traditional thick client software where everyone has the same experience (Excel, Word, etc), irrespective of the type of computer they use. 

Robert's talk only lasted 30 minutes and was designed to create more time for people to ask him questions.  An area he's investigating right now is mobile video streaming. He conducted a live demo of QIK - a new service that enables mobile phones to stream video to the web in real time.  It's also integrated with Twitter, more details at this Crunchbase article. He's off to Israel to interview the founders of a similar service - possibly more sophisticated.

This is going to seriously change news gathering and distribution because in a few years time, the quality and sophistication of devices will be good enough to deliver news programmes.

The value of social networks

A friend of mine told me in 2006 that an executive he knows at an oil company was willing to pay 20p-50p for instant (over 24 hours) opinions from a demographically suitable population of people.  This is several orders of magnitude greater than the advertising model (with the exception of the usual suspects with billions of page impressions every month).  I've argued for many years that the source of value in social networks is behavioural/opinion data, particularly those arising from digital conversations. Selectricity (Voting machinery for the masses) appears to be a robust tool for implementing it.  SwarmTeams - has similar utility.

Key to creating a movement at scale is figuring out the model of trust (the exchange of value) and the feedback mechanisms back to the community.  Feedback is crucial because prizes and other material incentives won't work (You want me to pay? I want you to pay attention).  They are obviously entirely inappropriate for cause related communities.

The biggest challenge brands face in their attempts to create customer communities and engage/interact with social networks is actually changing some aspect of their product, service or policies as result of the feedback they receive.  They also must communicate and attribute the benefits of that change back to the community.

To do this well they must start from the inside.  That is, create, learn, and experiment with social software. The first step is to discard the company Intranet, a largely one way broadcast medium, and replace it with systems that enable conversations, connectivity and peer-to-peer sharing.  This is probably stating the obvious but to participate in a network, a company must itself be network centric.  Unfortunately this means taking a conscious decision to dismantle hierarchical organisation.  Democratising decision making (crowd sourcing), creating openness and transparency is a big step for large organisations in particular.  For most of them, this is still a step too far.

Some more commentary here in an interview with MyCustomer.com.

Pick 'n' Mix Business: Heads in the clouds?

This article was first published in 2004 and inspired by Graeme Burnett's original paper (XML & the Role of Web Services, 1999).  Article starts with;

Imagine being able to build an entire business by walking into a store and buying the pieces you need, in the same way you would if you were building, in a do-it-yourself fashion, a new kitchen, bathroom or garage.  The common components of these businesses would be functions like open an account, create a bill, process a credit card payment, lookup credit rating and auction this item on eBay.  Like the DIY construction industry,  the implications of  the 'end user' supplying itself are far reaching.

In 2008 at least two ventures have launched that prove the veracity of the predictions here.  Rollbase offers "a growing library of web-based business applications that can be installed into your Rollbase account with a single click."  Coghead lets you easily build your own applications and then lets you share them with anyone, any time, any place.  And of course Microsoft's bid for Yahoo is about control of the Cloudsphere - a 'place' where all these applications will reside.

The web services paradigm is for those who belong to upstarts, who don't have anything to lose, and the risk-takers among big companies, who are willing to bet more heavily on the future than they do on the past.

The network is female

The New York times ran an article  on the effectiveness of Chris Bowers' initiative to expose the hypocrisy and inconsistency of Republican candidates ahead of the US November congressional elections.  It leverages Google's search engine algorithms by linking the names of prominent Republicans to trusted, accurate news sources on the web that expose the gulf between what they practice and what they preach.  Bloggers have legitimately managed to ensure that the search term "miserable failure" produces the official web site of President Bush as the first available search result (Google has now altered its algorithms to prevent this type of 'gaming of the system'). 

This reminded me of the uncompromising news produced by The Yellow Times which was forced off the web by the Republican war machine prior to the  US/UK invasion of Iraq.  Paul Harris, a Canadian freelance journalist, wrote a superb article a couple of years ago called Women have ruined the world that illustrates a point I want to make. In it he says;

"It has been my experience over a half century, most of that alive, that women tend to be much better people than men: more honest, more loyal, more caring, more thoughtful, more trustworthy, and much less dangerous. But women are to blame for the state of the world because they have utterly failed to take charge of it."  He goes on to say;

"I am proposing a "new world order" - not that crap that George Bush the Elder was always talking about or even the biblical stuff that believers are always trying to force on others. I mean something real, something substantive; something designed to fix the mess we're in. I am proposing a political movement whose sole purpose is to convince all the nations of the world to change their laws so that only women can hold political office."

The article ends with;

"Think this is an idiotic notion? Then think on this: If men don't run things, there is no Hitler. There is no Mussolini. There is no Napoleon. There is no Hirohito. There is no Attila. There is no Genghis Khan. There is no Inquisition. There are no Crusades. There is no Robert Mugabe. There is no Ariel Sharon.  There is no Stalin. There is no George Bush.  Wouldn't that be a safer and happier world?"

I happen to agree with him.  When men are in power, the difference between rape and seduction is only a question of salesmanship.  They exercise power in a manner that is actually weakness disguised as strength.

In general, my experience of participating in online communities in the past few years is that despite their male dominance the posture, attitude and expression of these communities are predominantly female.  By this I mean people are genuinely welcoming, offer unsolicited benevolence, guidance and assistance and freely give the most valuable thing that anyone can give; their time.  This isn't normal for other types of patriarchal organisations.

To this day, I have no idea what particular combination of software, ethos and policies these networks have implemented, that attracts people to exhibit these female qualities online, but it's basically changing people's behaviour, and that behaviour is female in nature.

This was written almost 3 years ago.  Since then, now the United States, UK, New Zealand, Singapore are many other countries have predominantly female members and overall across Facebook it's a 64%F/36%M split.  See Techrunch for the detail.

Survival of the nicest?

This is not a post title I thought of, although I wish I had!  My brilliant friend and occasional mentor Frank Dunn coined the phrase as a chapter description of a book he's writing to explain life, the universe and everything - mathematically.  It describes cogently and succinctly why "Winning by Sharing" is fundamental to human survival and opens with;

One of the key discoveries so far of Complexity Theory is that co-operative processes in general seem far more likely to survive than isolated, rampantly selfish entities.  This moves successful evolution away from the original 'principle of natural selection'; which was rather reductionist in that it placed the key stress on individual survival; to a more holistic, symbiotic view of adaptability, wherein survival is a group or team effort.

The examples most often quoted to illustrate this are typically a biochemical feature: an autocatalytic process.  There are many groups of proteins within our bodies and those of many other organisms that depend on each other for synthesis and production from their simpler component parts.  In other words, they simply cannot survive in isolation; but need to co-exist with each other.

In fact, with hindsight our social history is almost embarrassingly about collective effort, rather than individual triumph: all primates form tribes and engage in degrees of communication; the family 'unit' in primates invariably involves the male as much as the female; ancient civilisations worshipped their ancestors as symbols of the 'collective wisdom' of their culture.

I so hope this book is published.  It will rank amongst the most disruptive and thought provoking discoveries in recent times, not unlike Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science.

Recent ground breaking research at the Max Planck Institute used the Ultimatum Game with chimpanzees, the result, reported in Science, is a telling outcome.  "A number of researchers in the field of human evolution think that a sense of fairness—and a willingness to punish the unfair even at some cost to oneself—is humanity's “killer app”.

The Economist article goes on to say; "It is what allows large social groups to form. Without it, free-riders would ruin such groups, because playing fair would cease to have any value. Dr Jensen's previous experiments have shown that chimpanzees are willing to punish actual thieves. But his new data add weight to the theory that the more sophisticated idea of fair shares, which underpins collaborative behaviour, appeared in the hominid line only after the ancestors of the two species split from one another."

In other words an individual's sense of fairness is genetic.  Of course this is dangerous ground to tread but reading this reminded me of the experiments carried out by Bob Altemeyer described in his book The Authoritarians.  This is a fascinating account of the analysis and results of a game he devised for small teams to represent a country or region.  The teams choose leaders and negotiate deals for their people.  It's a sort of offline version of Microsoft's Age of Empires where 100 years is played out in less than a day. The experiment, carried out hundreds of times in US universities and colleges pitches two distinct types of group against each other; Right Wing Authoritarians (think politicians, leaders, businessmen, petty tyrants) and Liberals (everyone else).  With few exceptions, RWAs always end up completely destroying the world.  In many cases, the game was stopped early to advise RWAs their course of action would lead to global destruction, and given the chance to restart the game.  Guess what?  Yep, they destroyed the world again.

So perhaps the future is about Survival of the nicest?

The definitive statement on climate change

"In both the short and even more the long term, any economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment".  Sir Crispin Tickell, director of the Policy Foresight Programme, James Martin Institute at Oxford University and chancellor of the University of Kent at Canterbury, England.

See Business-as-Usual on Climate Change is Not an Option

 

The Network is Female

The New York times ran an article this week on the effectiveness of Chris Bowers' initiative to expose the hypocrisy and inconsistency of Republican candidates ahead of the US November congressional elections.  It leverages Google's search engine algorithms by linking the names of prominent Republicans to trusted, accurate news sources on the web that expose the gulf between what they practice and what they preach.  Bloggers have legitimately managed to ensure that the search term "miserable failure" produces the official web site of President Bush as the first available search result. 

This reminded me of the uncompromising news produced by The Yellow Times which was forced off the web by the Republican war machine prior to the  US/UK invasion of Iraq.  Paul Harris, a Canadian freelance consultant, wrote a superb article a couple of years ago called Women have ruined the world that illustrates a point I want to make. In it he says;

“It has been my experience over a half century, most of that alive, that women tend to be much better people than men: more honest, more loyal, more caring, more thoughtful, more trustworthy, and much less dangerous. But women are to blame for the state of the world because they have utterly failed to take charge of it.”  He goes on to say;

“I am proposing a "new world order" - not that crap that George Bush the Elder was always talking about or even the biblical stuff that believers are always trying to force on others. I mean something real, something substantive; something designed to fix the mess we're in. I am proposing a political movement whose sole purpose is to convince all the nations of the world to change their laws so that only women can hold political office.”

The article ends with;

“Think this is an idiotic notion? Then think on this: If men don't run things, there is no Hitler. There is no Mussolini. There is no Napoleon. There is no Hirohito. There is no Attila. There is no Genghis Khan. There is no Inquisition. There are no Crusades. There is no Robert Mugabe. There is no Ariel Sharon.  There is no Stalin. There is no George Bush.  Wouldn't that be a safer and happier world?”

I happen to agree with him.  When men are in power, the difference between rape and seduction is only a question of salesmanship.  They exercise power in a manner that is actually weakness disguised as strength.

In general, my experience of participating in online communities in the past few years is that despite their male dominance the posture, attitude and expression of these communities are predominantly female.  By this I mean people are genuinely welcoming, offer unsolicited benevolence, guidance and assistance and freely give the most valuable thing that anyone can give; their time.  This isn’t normal for other types of male dominated organisations.

To this day, I have no idea what particular combination of software, ethos and policies these networks have implemented, that attracts people to exhibit these female qualities online, but it’s basically changing people’s behaviour, and that behaviour is female in nature.

Trust is the killer app

An excellent piece of research produced by IBM  concludes; "Individuals in higher-trust societies spend less to protect themselves from being exploited in economic transactions. Trust is an economical substitute for extensive contracts, litigation, and monitoring in transactions and thus economizes on transaction costs."

Organisations (of every size) pay for a lack of trust over and over again and it is the absence of trust that is choking innovation and productivity.  This does not mean that contracts should not exist between business counterparties, but the rules and acceptable use policies of networks and the reputation metrics of individual members means they can be lightweight, equitable, and in some cases, redundant.

However crude these reputation metrics are, one team of researchers  states that “reputation systems are performing commercial alchemy (in auctions), where they enable trash to be shuttled across the world and in the process transmuted into personal treasures”.   Breakdown of trust is just about the only thing eBay has to fear, and if it can sustain its largely positive environment of trust, it will likely dominate for many years to come. 

William Davies has since moved to the Institute for Public Policy Research and recently published another ground breaking paper  that examines the role of the government in the increasingly decentralised social and political activities taking place online.   He states there are three sources of trust: State, Community & Online Community.  Notice the absence of corporations.  He goes on to say that “out of nowhere trust has become the most talked about abstractions of our times” and notes that online communities have an unusual propensity to create environments of trust. 

One of the most comprehensive studies of the open source community was conducted by Yochai Benkler  to understand how Linux, a free operating system, and a slew of other Internet facing software products (e.g. Apache), have come from nowhere to challenge mainstream, paid for products from Microsoft, IBM and others.  Benkler concludes:

“Removing property and contract as the organizing principles of collaboration substantially reduces transaction costs involved in allowing these large clusters of potential contributors to review and select which resources to work on, for which projects, and with which collaborators.”

In 2003, for the first time ever, Microsoft formally stated in its annual report the threat from Linux to its revenues.  It has even started to play this new game by releasing portions of its Windows code ‘open source’ style.  The big question is, does the world trust Microsoft?  If it doesn’t, not even its gigantic fortune can save the company.  Howard Dean, a former US democratic presidential candidate, recently inferred that command and control is all over in the next generation of political activism. "We discovered that the path to power, oddly enough, is to trust others with it."

Trust is the killer app.

The Big Picture

The next edition of the book will include cartoon illustrations.  Many thanks to Mike Flanagan for this great sample on the Big Picture.