Collab-Or-Ate

What I mean is, when a website offers “friending,” or social networking capabilities, is that valuable enough in itself to be a marketable product? Or is it just a necessary tool or feature that is part of a larger software solution? Can a company make money just from the fact that it offers social networking and a lot of people use it for connecting?

The Economist has an interesting article that poses this question (Social graph-iti, October 22, 2007), in which it said basically says “No. It is not a product.” Facebook’s $100 billion valuation may be overestimated by those overly-enthusiastic about the possibility of marketing products through social networks. (Sorry, Facebook, I don’t mean always target you in my blog posts. It is just that you are the biggest target right now.)

The article has some interesting points:

• Facebook’s value seems to be based on its large social network. Where as the user experience innovation in Facebook is around two things: the friends-centric newsfeed and the importing of applications. These features are being replicated by other sites as we sleep.
• Social networks do not scale in usefulness, meaning that they do not become infinitely more useful as they grow in size. Once everyone is in the network and everyone is connected to everyone else, there is limited information to be learned from the network and limited utility in using its paths for accessing information. Bad investment!
• Observe how exclusive social networking sites are popping up everywhere (aSmallWorld and Ning are two examples). Exclusive networks have special powers and it is these that marketers and advertisers should want to get into.

I’m back! I’ve decided to make a concerted effort to blog more frequently. It is a great way to reflect on what is going on in the world and I haven’t been taking the time to do that recently. And now that I’m back from a vacation and nearing my one year anniversary of working at IBM, I’m in the mood to make a few adjustments.

Since I hate blog posts that are all about “sorry for not posting!” here is a picture from my recent vacation to Berlin. Berlin is a totally awesome city and I can’t wait to visit again!

… isn’t happening yet. Yea. So I upgraded to Notes 8 with great enthusiasm last week, and OMG, it is SO awesome. (Caveat: I’ve been using Notes 7 for a year, so my ability to determine what is truly “awesome” for an email client may be somewhat distorted.) But seriously, Notes 8 is a great, great upgrade.

Until you try to sync your Blackberry with it. Oh well. RIM still has to come out with a patch so that the Blackberry Desktop Manager works with Notes 8. You can read about it on the blackberry forums. So my calendar and address book will suffer for a while until someone figures this out. There’s no way I’m going to stop using Notes 8.

Yesterday, Warren Sack visited IBM to talk about his latest research thoughts about how to evaluate software, in particular the aesthetics of information visualization. Here is an excerpt from his talk’s abstract:

This presentation is a part of a larger project to articulate critical criteria for
evaluating information and communication technologies (ICTs): criteria of democracy and the public good. It is hoped that these evaluative criteria offer alternatives to the way hardware and software developments are usually evaluated by computer scientists and
information architects.

My interpretation of what he said, and a point I heartily agree with, is that we embed our values into the technology we design. A nice example he gave is of object-oriented programming paralleling the structure of modern top-down, distributed corporations. We believe that is how efficient programs and companies should be run. In some situations, the applied value structure is not the best design and it can be hard to break away from certain structures because our value systems are so ingrained into our models for thinking about systems. In particular, he is focusing on issues of democracy and deliberation (see his project Agnostics for some of this).

You know how once something is pointed out to you, you see it everywhere? Well, you have to read Walt Mossberg’s column yesterday, entitled “Free My Phone.” Mossberg is voicing a frustration that many cell phone users have over the limitations of the technology. He describes the problem as a conflict in values. There are two value systems at play: that of the cell phone service providers and that of the creators of the Internet. He claims the cell phone service providers are applying a “Soviet Ministry Model” (obviously that means it is evil) and the Internet was build upon the values of a free market and of free-flowing information (capitalism and free speech, can’t get less evil than that).

Here Mossberg outlines his values:

I refer to the big cellphone carriers as the “Soviet ministries.” Like the old bureaucracies of communism, they sit athwart the market, breaking the link between the producers of goods and services and the people who use them.
…
But, in my view, they shouldn’t be allowed to pick and choose what phones run on their networks, and what software and services run on those phones. We need a wireless mobile device ecosystem that mirrors the PC/Internet ecosystem, one where the consumers’ purchase of network capacity is separate from their purchase of the hardware and software they use on that network.

You will probably agree with him because you wish your phone were cooler and you were able to customize its applications. But do you agree with his value statement that the phone industry should reflect the Internet’s “ecosystem” that was largely invented by libertarian academics? If you are reading my blog, you probably do. But you should be aware that one value system that works for one technology may not be the best model to apply to the next. Our libertarian politics might be great for most things, but are these always the right values for all circumstances?

I think Facebook is killing itself with its applications. If you use Facebook, do you find the applications (and the associated notifications, installations, un-installations) to be overwhelming? What happened to Facebook being a lightweight way to keep up with what your friends are doing? I am having a really hard time filtering through the clutter (not to mention the ads) to keep up with people’s genuine activity.

This is hilarious and one of the many examples of how Facebook is going to way of MySpace: “New apps put the hate in online networking” (Boston Globe)