Monday, August 25. 2008
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways
A Friend for All Seasons
This was post was sort of inspired by 3 things - firstly, a comment by Robert Scoble on a post by Louis Gray where La Scoble noted, re the plethora of SocNets LG is on, that.....
I'm very close to getting off this train. What you are writing here won't be understood by most people for two to five more years. So, adding more things onto the plate won't help unless they add REAL value. So far I'm totally not impressed by many of the things in this genre. Even my wife says she doesn't get FriendFeed (and if she doesn't get THAT she certainly won't get other lifestreamers).
I'm scared that, as a group, these are going after a smaller and smaller audience of weird people (admit it, me and you are weird users and don't represent many real users).
Secondly, an ongoing interest in how filtering would work in a "too much information" world, and also thinking through how you would, in a wisdom of crowds environment, screen out those friends, followers, twerps etc who you do not think have as relevant a voice on problem area X. (For the arcane minded, I was following the arguments last night on relevant performance of the F 22 Raptor vs the Eurofighter Typhoon*. It is actually possible to have a fact based discussion on this subject as most of the data is there - if you know how to interpret it - but if you read the blogosphere on the subject, you will find that fact based discussion is the last thing you will get - and hence god help anyone relying on the quality of socially mediated advice in less data driven areas.).
Lastly, I've been playing with Blip.fm for a week or so, and am of course shocked by the appalling taste in music so many of my friends have
. More seriously, I had noted a few weeks ago that I found, in baking off Last.fm vs Pandora over the last year or so, that Last.fm hit a ceiling where eventually it could optimise no further, whereas Pandora - which focusses on the music itself, rather than your friends' music, carries on optimising. A number of others said they had noticed the same - and I wondered if the next stage for Last.fm and other socially mediated filters was to start discarding "weakest link" friends. (For all I know it does this already).And thus I got to thinking about how one could take a "cross network snapshot" of all my friends, and what I could deduce, and what it may look like. And then I thought about all the things that one could potentially fall out with a friend over, as sources of Friction. Hence the chart above. (Apparently Twitter is now populated by Middle Aged Men, and as you know we are prone to "Grumpy Antisocial Networking - hence the Friction Feeder" chart axes
)Feel free to add "axes of evil" to it....
*Raptor v Typhoon is a cost v quality optimum argument of course!
Sunday, August 24. 2008
Identity, Trust and the Kaminsky DNS Vulnerability
In defence of CIO 's
Saw this on the WSJ stream via Techmeme: yet another refrain about the End of CIO's as you know it, this time from Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst at Nucleus Research:
Thats cool - one hopes that the workers will also find ways to integrate it with all the other systems in the enterprise, and maintain and fix it on their own too, and take responsibility for the updates and all the re-jigging required when another system updates itself. (And will decommission it in 6 months time when the next New Shiny Thing comes along )
I didn't think so.......
This sort of reporting makes this interesting assumption that "user delight" rather than "does it work" is the key determinant of a CIO's continued employment,. What people like Ms Wetteman don't get (one suspects because they have little experience of actually running any big IT operation) is its not the User Presentation Layer that is hard to do - which is why N thousand Web 2.0 startups running on shoestrings are blooming. The hard thing is integrating the many complex components at the infrastructure level. A CIO is not fired if the users think an interface is clunky - a CIO is fired if the critical systems don't work.
But, CIO dinosaurs clearly needs to get their priorities right:
Actually, that is exactly a CIO's role - with the underlying proviso that it all has to work. One is tempted to see what decisions Ms Wetteman and her ilk would make re rate of adoption of shiny new things if they were actually put in charge of running a company's IT, and their jobs - and reputation - depended on it.
(Afterthought - that is not to say that better user interfaces are not a good idea, just that they are not a first order priority - consumers, on the other hand, are initially far more "sold" on system UI rather than capability, hence the huge emphasis on that area in consumer systems. There is no doubt that the newer "stuff that works" will be brought into the enterprise, but it will be on a more careful, more selective basis.)
There was a time when IT departments could get away with forcing employees to use complicated and hard-to-use software. The average worker didn’t know that better alternatives were out there. But as workers gain experience with consumer-focused software – either in their personal lives or at the office – they’re starting to realize that software can be easy to use and quick to get started on. It started with productivity boosters like instant messaging and collaboration software, but it’s crept into the realm of software that’s traditionally the realm of IT departments, such as sales automation.
“No CIO is going to tell me that [a software project] is going to take 12 to 18 months,” Wettemann tells us. Workers will just find an alternative on their own.
Thats cool - one hopes that the workers will also find ways to integrate it with all the other systems in the enterprise, and maintain and fix it on their own too, and take responsibility for the updates and all the re-jigging required when another system updates itself. (And will decommission it in 6 months time when the next New Shiny Thing comes along
)I didn't think so.......
This sort of reporting makes this interesting assumption that "user delight" rather than "does it work" is the key determinant of a CIO's continued employment,. What people like Ms Wetteman don't get (one suspects because they have little experience of actually running any big IT operation) is its not the User Presentation Layer that is hard to do - which is why N thousand Web 2.0 startups running on shoestrings are blooming. The hard thing is integrating the many complex components at the infrastructure level. A CIO is not fired if the users think an interface is clunky - a CIO is fired if the critical systems don't work.
But, CIO dinosaurs clearly needs to get their priorities right:
An IT pro’s “job is to pay attention to what is going on out there with the humans in your organization, not the servers", and...
Managing tech equipment and maintaining older systems will become decreasingly important. Identifying the best new tools early on and figuring out how to get them into the hands of the people they’ll benefit will be the more important skill.
Actually, that is exactly a CIO's role - with the underlying proviso that it all has to work. One is tempted to see what decisions Ms Wetteman and her ilk would make re rate of adoption of shiny new things if they were actually put in charge of running a company's IT, and their jobs - and reputation - depended on it.
(Afterthought - that is not to say that better user interfaces are not a good idea, just that they are not a first order priority - consumers, on the other hand, are initially far more "sold" on system UI rather than capability, hence the huge emphasis on that area in consumer systems. There is no doubt that the newer "stuff that works" will be brought into the enterprise, but it will be on a more careful, more selective basis.)
Yet more storms in the Cloud
Friday, August 22. 2008
The Future of Broadcasting is in your hands - literally
Some friends from the London Tuttle Club are broadcasting live from the Greenbelt festival this weekend on mobile phones using Qik to test this sort of technology. (Tuttle is becoming quite a hotbed for digital multimedia types, what with another bunch going to Cannes for Seesmic, and Phreadz' founder Kosso a regular among many other luminaries - and there's us of course, but we build back end stuff you never see 
. Anyway, here's the live feed at the moment:
It's not hard to see this will be the way that all sorts of events not currently televised will potentially be broadcast live. I recall some years ago watching the BBC R&D guys experiment with this sort of system in embryo - 3 am-cams and a mixing van gives a pretty pro result. Broadband 'net didn't exist then, but the rest of the technology did - except now its much smaller and cheaper.
. Anyway, here's the live feed at the moment:It's not hard to see this will be the way that all sorts of events not currently televised will potentially be broadcast live. I recall some years ago watching the BBC R&D guys experiment with this sort of system in embryo - 3 am-cams and a mixing van gives a pretty pro result. Broadband 'net didn't exist then, but the rest of the technology did - except now its much smaller and cheaper.
Real Limits to Virtual Worlds
Article in my Economist today on the real limits to Virtual Worlds, specifically the Google world, Lively - here is the online version:
Not very surprised - we did a small comparison piece about 18 months ago on various worlds - Second Life, The Sims, Runescape, WoW, Cyworld and Habbo Hotel being the main ones studied. It was fairly quick 'n dirty - the main work was on the economics of virtual worlds - but the chart below sums up the views we came to. Below the curve = FAIL
The more complex worlds like Second Life also have a minimum time you have to invest to get much benefit - we reckoned it took about (very broadly) 14 hours play to get to a level of basic "unconscious competence" in 2nd Life, and thus felt it was way out of the realm of the mainstream user unless it was simplified. That is represented by the vertical line.
Similarly, my teenage son - the tester of Habbo, got bored with it after about an hour - to quote "Dad, these guys look like Lego men but don't do anything" Granted, an early teenage boy isn't really into "pure" social networks - he is captivated by World of Warcraft (Runescape is seem as a "tweens" game in his mileu as it happens), and it acts as game and social network (and voice telephony system).
But the point is made - it took about 1/2 hour to master Habbo, 1/2 hour to check it out, and then - well the point of decorating your room and talking was lost on them. Buying virtual knick knacks is a staple of virtual world economics, but there is - in our view - a limit to the utlity of just being a social network - which is the horizontal line on the graph.
(I put the "limit to social networking" line a bit into 2nd Life, because my observation was that 80% of the people there hung about in bars or tried on new clothes - and I don't know how many of those stay long term but I suspect thats where the higher dropout rates come from).
By the way, The Sims is the most interesting dynamic - watching teenage boys "game" the system to maximise it is an exercise in human cynicism - god alone knows what they will do with the insights it gives them into people's underlying motives. The girls I watched (older teenage girls) don't play it this way, acting more in the constraint of the game* (and before you go off on your high horse, I must note that is just a game - but not an inaccurate one)
* I think real life experience impacts how you play a game - I learned to play various dogfighting flight sims first by learning to fly, then to shoot etc - the kids learned it by throwing the 'planes around the sky, guns blazing all the time, crashing repeatedly until they got it....
By the way, check out this amazing 2 - world journey from Laurel Papworth's blog. Respect....
Lively is a simple environment, amounting to little more than a series of 3-D chat rooms. To enter, you must first download and install a plug-in for your web-browser. You can then choose from a list of rooms, the most popular of which are (inevitably) themed around sex and dating. And although some popular rooms—“Love Sweet Love” and “Sexy Babes Club”—have had thousands of visitors, the number quickly drops into the double digits further down the list. Hardly anyone is using Lively.
Why has it been such a flop? “There’s nothing to do in Lively if you’re not talking to someone,” says Greg Lastowka, an expert on virtual worlds at Rutgers School of Law in New Jersey. Second Life, he says, offers “commerce and creativity”, and Club Penguin (a popular virtual world for children, owned by Disney) has lots of built-in games.
Not very surprised - we did a small comparison piece about 18 months ago on various worlds - Second Life, The Sims, Runescape, WoW, Cyworld and Habbo Hotel being the main ones studied. It was fairly quick 'n dirty - the main work was on the economics of virtual worlds - but the chart below sums up the views we came to. Below the curve = FAIL
Real World Limits
The more complex worlds like Second Life also have a minimum time you have to invest to get much benefit - we reckoned it took about (very broadly) 14 hours play to get to a level of basic "unconscious competence" in 2nd Life, and thus felt it was way out of the realm of the mainstream user unless it was simplified. That is represented by the vertical line.
Similarly, my teenage son - the tester of Habbo, got bored with it after about an hour - to quote "Dad, these guys look like Lego men but don't do anything" Granted, an early teenage boy isn't really into "pure" social networks - he is captivated by World of Warcraft (Runescape is seem as a "tweens" game in his mileu as it happens), and it acts as game and social network (and voice telephony system).
But the point is made - it took about 1/2 hour to master Habbo, 1/2 hour to check it out, and then - well the point of decorating your room and talking was lost on them. Buying virtual knick knacks is a staple of virtual world economics, but there is - in our view - a limit to the utlity of just being a social network - which is the horizontal line on the graph.
(I put the "limit to social networking" line a bit into 2nd Life, because my observation was that 80% of the people there hung about in bars or tried on new clothes - and I don't know how many of those stay long term but I suspect thats where the higher dropout rates come from).
By the way, The Sims is the most interesting dynamic - watching teenage boys "game" the system to maximise it is an exercise in human cynicism - god alone knows what they will do with the insights it gives them into people's underlying motives. The girls I watched (older teenage girls) don't play it this way, acting more in the constraint of the game* (and before you go off on your high horse, I must note that is just a game - but not an inaccurate one)
* I think real life experience impacts how you play a game - I learned to play various dogfighting flight sims first by learning to fly, then to shoot etc - the kids learned it by throwing the 'planes around the sky, guns blazing all the time, crashing repeatedly until they got it....
By the way, check out this amazing 2 - world journey from Laurel Papworth's blog. Respect....
OTT PR - TCUK FTW.
TechCrunch UK's slightly testy thoughts about a Jason Calacanis post led me to read the latter, and I found myself in the curate's eggy position of violently agreeing and disagreeing with it:
First this:
This is the same argumument that musicians etc should sell music for free and make money on T shirts - its fine if you are a well known "A Lister" but not very practical if you are not. (Or as one wag put it on Twitter, Calacanis' advice for Tech PR is to be Calacanis
)
Then this:
As we showed in our post on typical S curve growth, there is a "below the radar" stage that is usually long and arduous - and you can't buy your way into it, except for short term "pop" goods. PR helps, but in my experience, in most cases, if the real demand isn't there, it reverts back to its nascent state as soon as the hypercharging switches off.
Then the TCUK testiness - I think it's useful to read Mike's commentary on Jason's "10 points for PR success" as a useful translation for dealing with the "Out of USA" world.
If I may be so bold, having lived in the US and a few other countries, the issue is that the US, culturally, is acclimatised to - ahem - "putting your best foot forward" 24/7/365. The Rest of World, with some exceptions, finds this somewhat irritating, especially if it is continuous. If there was a "roll your eyes" function on Twitter I think some of the SV "community managers" and digigurus would probably be quite taken aback
First this:
You don't need a PR firm, you don't need an in-house PR person and you don't need to spend ANY money to get amazing PR. You don't need to be connected, and you don't need to be a "name brand." Today, many bloggers lament how much press folks like Kevin Rose and Robert Scoble get. They say that they get too much attention and that they got this attention too quickly and without earning it.
This is the same argumument that musicians etc should sell music for free and make money on T shirts - its fine if you are a well known "A Lister" but not very practical if you are not. (Or as one wag put it on Twitter, Calacanis' advice for Tech PR is to be Calacanis
)Then this:
What's funny about this is that "A-list" ceWebrities like Scoble and Kevin Rose are overnight successes 10 years in the making. Scoble and Rose have been everywhere for a decade. Me? I've been everywhere in this business since 1994 when I was 23 years old in New York City trying to get any meeting I could (for those of you who wouldn't meet with me back then I totally understand--chances are I wouldn't have met with me back then).
Things that look like an "overnight success" typically are not.
As we showed in our post on typical S curve growth, there is a "below the radar" stage that is usually long and arduous - and you can't buy your way into it, except for short term "pop" goods. PR helps, but in my experience, in most cases, if the real demand isn't there, it reverts back to its nascent state as soon as the hypercharging switches off.
Then the TCUK testiness - I think it's useful to read Mike's commentary on Jason's "10 points for PR success" as a useful translation for dealing with the "Out of USA" world.
If I may be so bold, having lived in the US and a few other countries, the issue is that the US, culturally, is acclimatised to - ahem - "putting your best foot forward" 24/7/365. The Rest of World, with some exceptions, finds this somewhat irritating, especially if it is continuous. If there was a "roll your eyes" function on Twitter I think some of the SV "community managers" and digigurus would probably be quite taken aback
Music futures - iBay, not eBay
This is responding to a blog post by Ian Delaney re a conversation we had last night, the context being the weird distribution (to me, anyway), of stuff you can find on Blip.fm.
If you had to do a 2x2 matrix of "Great Music / Crap Music" and "Old Music / New Music", you would expect - in a freebie system - to see a lot of "Great / Old" music - but you can't at present on Blip.fm (Only one song by The Who, for example - and even the great bands who there there have the weirdest selection of songs put up - not a "greatest hits" compilation in many cases). However, the thing that interested me was the over-representation of "Crap / Old" music. (Think of any 70's Crap Glam Pop Band and check it out for example.....)
Anyway, while batting ideas back and forth as to why this was so, Ian used the gaming term of "Abandonware" in this context, which i thought was an interesting - riffing on from my response to Umair's "Platforms are Markets" post, I wondered if this was a manifestation of an emerging "Freemium" model for music.
In other words, if iTunes were a bidding market, you may see a premium for Great Music, and a premium for new music, but Old/Crap would be effectively free. In other words, imagine if the 79p / 99c standard rate on iTunes was left to a market mechanism. The eBay for music as it were (aka iBay)
Now I realise this is not a new thought per se, but it is in the context of trying to find a way through the impasse of the Industry / User standoff today. We know that:
By crap free I also mean sans DRM, and by reasonable I mean a price that deducts the redundant physical transport and clear profiteering costs in the sold good
iTunes broke the bulking of songs into albums, the next logical step is the pricing of music to market value.
This would leave the industry free to price the elements that had value, and admitting that there is a slush pile of abandonware (heck, look at the $2.99 compilations you can buy) would also allow it to move forward.
This market would also allow the "niche" musicians in the long tail to extract value from their clientele, rather than have to rely on offset - and non-scalable - funding from for example T Shirts and Gigs.
(Niche here means the lesser known stuff I do like, Crap is the lesser known (and better known) stuff I don't like )
If you had to do a 2x2 matrix of "Great Music / Crap Music" and "Old Music / New Music", you would expect - in a freebie system - to see a lot of "Great / Old" music - but you can't at present on Blip.fm (Only one song by The Who, for example - and even the great bands who there there have the weirdest selection of songs put up - not a "greatest hits" compilation in many cases). However, the thing that interested me was the over-representation of "Crap / Old" music. (Think of any 70's Crap Glam Pop Band and check it out for example.....)
Anyway, while batting ideas back and forth as to why this was so, Ian used the gaming term of "Abandonware" in this context, which i thought was an interesting - riffing on from my response to Umair's "Platforms are Markets" post, I wondered if this was a manifestation of an emerging "Freemium" model for music.
In other words, if iTunes were a bidding market, you may see a premium for Great Music, and a premium for new music, but Old/Crap would be effectively free. In other words, imagine if the 79p / 99c standard rate on iTunes was left to a market mechanism. The eBay for music as it were (aka iBay)
Now I realise this is not a new thought per se, but it is in the context of trying to find a way through the impasse of the Industry / User standoff today. We know that:
(i) Its by and large easy to get anything for free
(ii) It is illegal, however
(iii) iTunes has shown that most people are happy to buy good quality, crap free music, at a reasonable price.
By crap free I also mean sans DRM, and by reasonable I mean a price that deducts the redundant physical transport and clear profiteering costs in the sold good
iTunes broke the bulking of songs into albums, the next logical step is the pricing of music to market value.
This would leave the industry free to price the elements that had value, and admitting that there is a slush pile of abandonware (heck, look at the $2.99 compilations you can buy) would also allow it to move forward.
This market would also allow the "niche" musicians in the long tail to extract value from their clientele, rather than have to rely on offset - and non-scalable - funding from for example T Shirts and Gigs.
(Niche here means the lesser known stuff I do like, Crap is the lesser known (and better known) stuff I don't like
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