FTOTW

We restarted this series in my previous post.  First, Nancy Dixon, a top expert in Organizational Learning has a brilliant post on the history of KM.  Hal Sperlich will be proud of this – 619,284.5 Miles on a 1971 Mustang and still going strong. Sean Platt has a great post on Creative Inspiration. SP Rajeshwaran has a great post on being a Code Monkey .  Brilliant article on what goes on inside a baby’s brain by Jonah Lehrer in the Boston Globe.

Prolog

I have been on Twitter for the past 1.5 years and I have been smitten. Given my interest in social technologies, i have been thinking about why Twitter is an important development. There have been several rah rah posts about Twitter recently, but i am not satisfied with the inferences.  Like all series starter posts i have done in the past, this post has some thoughts from me to get the community started. I promise to analyze and publish the wisdom of the community, as always.

History

To really understand the power of something, i believe that we should delve into the history a bit. There have been several perspectives of the Web including the highly popular 1.0/2.0 view.  In my view, that classification does not help us understand the Twitter phenomenon adequately.

Therefore, i decided to categorize the web into 3 eras as captured by the diagram below:

In the first Algorithmic Era, most of the focus was on using algorithms to tame the web, Google’s brilliant citations-based (or incoming links-based) algorithm being the chief amongst them.

Then came the Crowd Era, which saw the launch of several crowd platforms like Digg, Flickr, Youtube etc. which allowed us to use the crowds to make sense of the web content as well as to add fresh content.  I included Blogs also in this era because it is very difficult to tame the massive base of 40+ million blogs.  Though bloggers do have an identity, the massive size of the blogosphere reduced bloggers to a crowd [Inside the firewall, we have managed to create a powerful community using blogs  which is difficult to do on the internet due to the crowd effect].  Even the highly popular Wikipedia is a crowd phenomenon – you still don’t have an easy means to understand who the top contributors are, their reputation etc.

In the next era, which i decided to call the Community Era, we have 2 major categories – Facebook, Linkedin, Orkut  etc in what i would term a closed category and Twitter in an entirely new open category. The open category i think models the real world better and that is why it is very powerful.

Three Real World Parallels

1. Asynchronous Friending

If you look at Facebook or Orkut (i use both of them), you need to friend someone first and only then can you exchange anything.  In fact, Facebook won’t even allow you to look at someone’s profile before friending them.  Whereas on Twitter, you can follow anyone and if they like they can follow you back  and if they don’t like you at all, they can block you.  The twitter model is more akin to what we do in the real world.

2. Fine-grained Relationships Dominate

In the real world, all of us participate in many communities  – our neighborhood, our relatives, our coworkers etc.  We have relationships in these communities of varying degrees of strength.  Most relationships are built over time based on a number of fine-grained interactions (low amount of time per interaction) over time – meetings, get-togethers, parties, games, religious/social gatherings etc.  We also have coarse-grained (high amount of time per interaction)  interactions with a few people like our immediate coworkers, supervisors, immediate family/close friends  & close relatives. But most of our network growth comes from the fine-grained relationships. You can analogize a tweet to a fine-grained interaction with your followers.  Additionally, a tweet is very simple and consumes little effort. This is why using blogs or youtube or flickr to build networks is harder because to produce a good blog post or a good photo or a good video takes significantly more effort.  Additionally, the followers also need more effort to appreciate a blog post or a photo or a video.  The problem with Facebook or Orkut or Linkedin is the lack of a tweet-like simple fine-grained interaction mode (although lately Facebook has been copying twitter heavily).

2. Asymmetric relationships

In the real world also, we have asymmetric relationships – the strength of the relationship with someone that we perceive maybe different from the strength of the relationship perceived by that someone.

To make some sense of a large number of relationships – Orkut allows you to grade the relationships. But that is not how we do it in the real world -  our perception of the strength of the relationship is subconscious and is based on perceived quality of  interactions and the frequency of interactions we have.

In Twitter, you can do the same thing, the Twitterers you interact with subconsciously grow on you over time, which could lead to a mutually rewarding relationship. In most

Are there other ways in which Twitter resembles real world community-building?

Epilog

Do you agree that Twitter marks a fundamental tectonic shift? If  so, what impact is it going to have on the web?  That is what i am trying to contemplate. I have some thoughts. Look forward to yours. I would also like your views on Facebook, Linkedin, Orkut etc.

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Prolog

On my internal to company blog i had introduced a new idea a few months back – in the prolog section of every blog post, i provide a link to interesting posts i had read that week. To my surprise, this has become very popular. This is somewhat like the FTOTW (fine tastings of the week) series i used to run on this blog. I decided to try the same idea on this blog also.

FTOTW

First, A. Prem, one of Cognizant’s Social CRM experts, blogs regularly about Social CRM on his blog. He has a tremendous grasp of the subject. He writes one of the leading blogs inside the company as well.  Rachel Laudan, one of my food anthropology blog friends, lives and blogs from Mexico. She has some great updates on the Swine Flu epidemic.  Bob Sutton paraphrases Scott Berkun to explain how managers become a**holes. How Apple Cofounder Steve Wozniak gets things done.  Saraswathi, a former colleague, who now works in the social sector, had written a brilliant post on relationships a while back. must read.

Science  & Technology Careers in America

As someone who had lived in the USA for 10 years, i feel sad about the fact that American kids don’t take up science & technology careers as much as America needs them to.  The huge skills shortage that America faces is either filled by immigration or by outsourcing to other countries like India and China.

The stats from graduate programs and PhD programs also don’t bode that well. As of 2006, over 51% in grad programs in EE were foreign nationals and 71% in PhD programs were foreign. I don’t know how accurate these stats are. But the general perception in America is that Americans don’t like science & technology careers.

Paradise of Science

During our time in America, we used to wonder about, the kind of resources that are available to an American kid that Indian kids can not even dream. Every small city has a well-stocked library, a science center in the vicinity, several museums.

Even if one is a wee bit scientifically minded, there is plenty of resources to tap into.

By contrast, a city that plays host to over 6 MM people, Chennai, India does not have one well equipped museum or science center or library.

But Indian middle class kids, are taught right from when they are in the womb, that science  & technology careers are the be-all and end-all of living in this world.  Yes, this does create a large stereotypical population. But hey, how does that matter? When we want to find folks for science & technology jobs, we can find them easily without having to import them.

I am trying to find out, why American kids consider science & technology careers boring or geeky or nerdy or whatever?

What can be done to change this attitude of the American kids?

Epilog

If i am lucky, i may get to work in a project to improve American kids’ attitude towards science & technology careers. Please help me with your wisdom.

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“Seattle Post-Intelligencer Will Shut Down Paper, Go Online Only”

“Detroit newspapers to end daily home delivery”

More and more I am seeing articles predicting the demise of news paper as we know it. With internet and devices such as Kindle, Sony reader what is the future of news paper business? Newspapers such as NYT, Washington Post have spoilt their readers by offering the www version for free. They probably cannot start charging now, and even if they did, how would that be? Would someone who is used to getting it for free be willing to pay, and if so how much? And how many papers would a customer be willing to subscribe? I do no think online ads are sufficient to keep funding these papers.

Even if the news paper print version becomes a stripped down version of what it is now, how will they survive and what will the business model be? Will it be pay-as-you-go and micro transactions – perhaps 5 cents for each article purchased? What is an optimum value for an article? How much would you be willing to pay?

What are the other value-adds that a paper would have to provide to entice customers? Would newspapers under a conglomerate combine to offer subscription – such as all of Murdoch’s publications for $20.00 a month? SF chronicle has reduced its staff of reporters and even some of the ones retained do not have a space in the print version. They maintain a blog and to add additional value, they have taken to twitter like real-time blogging during sporting events.

I understand the article is U.S/Euro centric in that this is more of an issue where internet access is easily available to a majority of the population. Just like cell phones, would there be a leap-frogging of this business model in countries like India and China? Do you anticipate these readers becoming cheap enough for it to become affordable in emerging countries? Or will readers on cell phones become sophisticated enough? Perhaps, news papers will tie-up with carriers to make data available via such devices?

Please do provide your thoughts on this topic.  Also, if have you tried devices such as Kindle, Sony reader etc., do share your experience.

I did try and read a chapter via the kindle app in my iPhone. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to upload a book/chapter from the amazon website into my iPhone. Even the reading experience was good – no obtrusive buttons or icons; just shows the black text against clear white background. Do not know if I will ever get a kindle, but will certainly use the iPhone to read a few things here and there.

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The last concept hack i did called the iPod SD became a popular post. Too bad, Apple never built the product

Yesterday, i came across this interview of Steve Wozniak (via Techmeme) where he mentions an iWatch.  I decided to daydream about the iWatch.

At a minimum the new concept should cure a disease of mine that has me embarrassed down to the bones – one that possibly afflicts most people that have reached a ripe old age like me I am walking around, someone comes around and says “Hi Sukumar, how are you doing” with such affection and familiarity, that it has me cringing – oh god! – i don’t remember the person’s name.

Wouldn’t it be cool, if i could have a camera, built-in to my spectacles, that would recognize the person and whisper the name of the person in my ears.

I knew that oakley had built mp3 sunglasses which gave me the hope to pursue this idea. I proceeded to look for sunglasses that had a camera built-in.

W00t! There is a whole range of spy cameras that are available that have cameras builtin to sunglasses and other sundry items. The only issue is that they all looked like the ones robocop would wear – not meant for humans

After some searching, i found one made by Brando that i thought i could wear with some alterations. I had to add a earbud headphone similar to the oakley so that i could hear what the sunglasses would eventually tell me. Then I wanted to strip out all the memory and other electronics needed from the sunglasses and leave only the bare essentials needed for the camera to work. That way i figured i could convert the Brando into a sleeker one that normal humans would consider wearing

That meant that i have to store all the electronics somewhere else and use bluetooth to communicate with the sunglasses. Additionally i realized i needed some kind of platform to run my face recognition program that would analyze the picture and whisper into my ears. Similar to my decision on using my spectacles to host the camera, i wanted to use something else that i always have with me to host the back-end electronics for the camera – the wristwatch.

After some Googling, i found this Hyundai wristwatch cell phone – it is a full fledged GSM cellphone+mp3 player+camera+bluetooth stuffed into a watch form factor. Conceptually i could take the camera lens and the mp3 speaker out and have it talk to the modified Brando sunglasses i described above.

The problem with these watchphones is that there are too many buttons making the user interface too clunky and complicated. I wanted something like the iPhone – a multi-touch based watch phone which had a superior user interface.

Dame luck smiled on me again. Yankodesign has published a concept phone called Cobalt that fit the bill perfectly – oozing OLED goodness. Yanko Design had it made like an old time pocket watch. I had to crop the picture to get the design that i wanted.

Drumroll please, here is our concept hack – the iWatch.

The spectacle piece is on the left and the watch piece is on the right. The watch is showing the time, temperature, a recent text/sms, the date/time, voicemail and email notifications.

If you are wondering where the camera is, i decided to give you another view of the iWatch.

The spectacle piece has the camera highlighted and the watch piece is showing the mp3 player.

With this on, i hope to recognize you when you come say hello Not just that, the iWatch can replace the mobile phone, digicam and mp3 player that i need to carry around.

Hope you liked the concept hack. How would you enhance this concept hack further?

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To Nick’s credit, it has now become quite fashionable to take a dystopian view of technology with virtually all the gurus of the tech world falling over themselves to toe Nick Carr’s line. ABC News joined the party declaring that GPS technology may make us dumb (this story made it to the top both on techmeme and digg).Vinnie Mirchandani is saying GPS could affect your manliness, ouch!

John Battelle made a feeble attempt to counter Nick. [John, you could have done better than that]. I decided to take this topic up because some crucial points have been missed so far.

GPS makes us dumb?
Let us get the easy one out first, eh! First of all, to argue that having an immaculate sense of direction is a sign of great advancement, already plays into the hands of technology. If we were still in the hunter-gatherer or even agricultural-rural life style,we hardly needed to step outside our immediate vicinity.  Due to that, a sense of direction was unimportant to survive and hence relatively useless from a evolutionary standpoint. It is only with the advent of automobiles that we started to spread out far and wide and we started to need maps etc to navigate. GPS has simply made the chore of managing directions very simple.

In other words GPS has simply took the complexity out, which was actually an artefact of urbanizing technology. Therefore, to now argue that GPS technology is making us dumb is ludicrous . To cite another example, not too long ago, oceans had to be navigated looking at the stars, so one could argue that modern ocean going technology has made us dumb. Ultimately, technology makes lives complex initially and over time technology will figure out a way to make things simpler again albeit in a different way. This is the inexorable march of technology.

Internet
The Internet, is a somewhat different animal. It has created an information explosion unparalleled in the history of humankind. The reasons for that are obvious, so we won’t get into that. Nick’s article definitely made me think about the problem a little more deeply (Ironically, that is what he is claiming we don’t do these days!). When i was reading up on the subject, i found this insightful comment on the John Battelle post.

Saurav Sahay, who posted the comment, pointed me to Herbert Simon, a brilliant cognitive psychologist who was utterly prescient in talking about the phenomenon we are seeing today.

Attention Economy

Herbert Simon said this in 1971:

“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” (Simon 1971, p. 40-41).

If you read the statement above, it is pretty clear that is the exact situation we are in. Because we are bombarded with so many pieces of information, advertisements, television, games, sports there is not enough time to focus on any one thing. It is our inability to manage the explosion of information that is causing this phenomenon. If you have deep interests in Cognitive Psychology, there is also an emerging consensus about a new type of effect, that this is having on us – continuous partial attention.

A massive opportunity for technology

Technology,overall, makes lives easier and saves time for us to solve bigger problems, that are yet to be solved – like energy, sustainable development etc.

In the context of this post, taming this information explosion is probably a mammoth opportunity for technology, where the next Google could take root. The current Google doesn’t cut it yet, because it is a post-facto organizer of information and does not do that good a job of organizing the information as it is getting published (I don’t agree that Google News is good enough for this job yet).

Newspapers did a good job of this in the past when our concerns were highly localized but now with our global outlook, newspapers are passe.

Is there some hope? As the eternal optimist, i look at Techmeme.com for inspiration. Before i discovered Techmeme, i used to subscribe to around 100 A-list tech blogs to understand what is going on. I have now unsubscribed from all of them. If they write anything interesting, it appears on techmeme, anyway. You can also make the case for Digg.com and Reddit.com playing a part in bubbling up what is truly worth noting, but both Digg and Reddit lack the focus that Techmeme has and hence don’t do as effective a job.

Epilog:
What is your take on this? How do you handle the information explosion?

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