the reflexions insider

We were recently hired by a large professional services firm to deploy a social platform that helped senior decision-makers share ideas about new revenue models amidst the changing economic environment. It’s something that more companies should be doing, and - I bet - would be doing if they understood what tools are out there to make it possible.

From a technical perspective, the solution wasn’t trivial but it wasn’t complex either, and we were able to pull from open source platforms to deliver a solution on an accelerated timeframe (in this case, we happened to use WordPress). Partly helped by the client’s streamlined process, customizing an off-the-shelf platform enabled us to deploy an attractive, polished, and functional solution over a long weekend that even a few years ago would have required weeks or months. By all accounts, it was an enormous success.

When a large company with a lot of stakeholders tries to deploy a conversational or social platform, the hurdles are usually organizational or political rather than technical. These types of tools are disruptive by design; their very deployment usually involves challenging assumptions about decision-making process and procedure that have literally been ingrained in an organizational memory for decades.

I think traditional hierarchical organizational structures are being increasingly challenged by social platforms; they’re simply not compatible with distributed, conversational media without awkward [...]

The “prisoner’s dilemma” is an analogy in game theory that’s used to describe everything from crowd behavior to stock markets and employee group evaluations. One variation is this: you and an associate are each arrested and interrogated separately. The first to implicate the other will get a light sentence; the other is imprisoned indefinitely. If you implicate each other you both get a moderate sentence. But if you both stay quiet, you’re both let go. It’s about mutual trust and cooperation for a mutually beneficial outcome. If you look hard enough, economists and behavioral anthropologists will tell you, you’ll find it everywhere.

David Carr wrote an article in yesterday’s New York Times about why newspapers find themselves in this very predicament, but with a twist — there’s no way out unless they cooperate. Cooperating in this scenario would probably mean something like a subscription-based paid content model for a network of websites from large daily newspapers. If you pay the fee, you get unfettered access to all participating websites. If you don’t, you get very little (except what others might be willing to repost, a possible copyright issue lurking in the shadows of what has historically been a free and open [...]

Google is full of really smart people working on really hard problems. This is nothing new. Indeed the image of brilliant young engineers working on game-changing new products has come to define the company’s identity. What’s surprising to me is Google’s relative lack of significant innovation in recent years on its bread-and-butter product: search. Recent rumblings indicate that this may start to change.

The company is understandably hesitant to tinker with its core product, which some analysts estimate generates over 90% of its total revenue, especially given its most recent quarter which exceeded even the most optimistic expectations (in a recession, no less). But the sands are shifitng, and the sheer size of Google means it will be hard-pressed to compete with smaller, more nimble competitors who are starting to get attention, like Powerset and Twitter.

A recent article at Google Watch suggests that Google sees its future in the semantic web, a collection of standards and technologies that seek to deliver more meaning and structure to the web’s content but have largely languished due to a lack of widespread adoption. From the article, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is recently quoted as saying:

“Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in [...]

Like the flying car, teleportation, and artificial intelligence, the concept of micropayments has been espoused for years by some futurists — and many crackpots — as not just a good idea but something that will do nothing less than transform society. Others have been less than thrilled with the idea. But what has happened over the last 10 years or so since real investments were made (and almost without exception, lost) on the concept is startling. Micropayments are fast becoming a part of the fabric of the commercial internet, although in very practical context and mostly due to two companies - Apple and Amazon - who are competing for the future of digital music sales.

The comic artist Scott McCloud made a name for himself during the early 2000’s with unique and visually compelling arguments in his own web comic form for why micropayments were the future of at least one type of digital content: web comics, drawing the ire of everyone from Clay Shirky to Tycho of Penny Arcade (many original links of what became one of the web’s legendary flame wars are dead but see Wired’s coverage of McCloud from 2001 here). Micropayments - a simple and innovative idea in principle if not in practice - has been one of the [...]

Consider this: Twitter didn’t exist three years ago. YouTube didn’t exist four years ago. And Facebook, the second most-visited website in the world on Christmas Day, 2008 (after Google), was started as a half-serious side project by Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room less than five years ago. All of these websites were effectively created after the (now oft reviled) term “Web 2.0″ was coined by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle in 2004.

By any standard, profitable or not, these are enormous web properties. And the timeline above demonstrates how rapidly the web landscape shifts and how fickle are its users.

Below I’ve identified several trends that I think will make an impact over the coming months and into 2010. This isn’t meant to be a “prediction” list per se, but an attempt at identifying how the current dynamics of social media will play out. Enjoy.

Twitter will launch a commercial subscription service that will generate revenue by letting companies use the platform to connect with customers. It will receive additional buyout offers but will remain independent for at least another year. I believe its investors are convinced that it’s worth more than their potential suitors think. And I believe they’re right. But having zero revenue is not sustainable.
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Something extraordinary happened on November 16, 2008.

At 12:02:32 PM (EST) a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Indonesia. Within seconds, users of the microblogging platform Twitter who were located in the affected area had broadcast text messages describing the event. Minutes later, tens of thousands of users had learned about the earthquake as news fanned out across Twitter’s global web of social networks in the form of web updates, RSS feeds, mobile application alerts, and SMS text messages.

About two hours later the New York Times, CNN, and other news outlets “broke” the story. Granted, it was a weekend. But any observer of how Twitter has changed the dynamics of information sharing can see that the days of large news outlets serving as the de facto source of breaking news are effectively over.

As the currency of the web as a communications tool has shifted from documents and pages to blogs and tweets, the following trends have emerged:

1. The discrete units of web-based communication have gotten smaller.

2. The propagation time of information among social networks has gotten faster.

It’s worth noting that these two trends are related. Smaller chunks of content are easier to consume and lead to faster rates of propagation. Information flow becomes more [...]

For anyone who caught the Powerpoint slide deck from what has come to be known as Sequoia Capital’s “Holy Sh*t” Meeting, this is shaping up to be a challenging environment for even the most innovative startups to raise capital or indeed, survive at all.

But if you heard the who’s-who of Silicon Valley venture fund partners that were gathered for a panel at the recent Web 3.0 Conference, or even a recent NYSIA panel discussion featuring Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures, you’d come away with more of a sense of cautious optimism rather than the “OMG it’s the freaking apocalypse” ethos that many seem to have adopted as the the startup worldview du jour.

So for the benefit of those who might have an interest in what some of Silicon Valley’s VC wonks were saying, I’ve compiled the highlights from the discussion in this third installment from the Web 3.0 Conference. The panel was moderated by Rebekah Wu, CEO of Right Hand Partners. I’ve done my best to attribute comments where possible.

On what should make it into a presentation or pitch to [...]