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 [...]

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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Razorfish recently released a presentation entitled “Portable Social Graphs - Imagining Their Potential.” You can download it here on Slideshare. It’s an insightful and thought-provoking look at what the next few years might hold as social web applications take their first steps toward meaningful integration - sharing profile data, relationships, and even authentication across the traditional “walled garden” model of separate and distinct platforms.

This concept isn’t entirely new. Standards like like “friend-of-a-friend” (with awkward moniker “FOAF“) have attempted to provide the mechanisms necessary to share structured social data in an intelligent and contextual way. But historically, proprietary social networks have failed to embrace open standards and have declined to enable their users - and competitors - to use their members’ data, arguably their most valuable asset.

And perhaps the most useful aspect of FB Connect is that it simply saves the user time. Blog platforms and comment systems like Disqus have already plugged in to FB Connect so that you can comment on a myriad of blogs without having to register an account for each one. That yields a real, tangible time savings for a huge audience and lets users carry their identity with them from site to site with minimal effort. The time saved is the [...]

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 [...]

When it comes to fragmentation of audiences, markets, and media, the trend line is clear: we are collectively becoming not a single audience of billions but a million audiences of thousands, hundreds, or even one.

It’s a fascinating long term side-effect of media decentralization that’s been predicted for decades by media visionaries like Marshall McLuhan (pictured right) and, dare I say, Andy Warhol. The one-to-many paradigm of network television and weekly newsmagazines understandably has a homogenizing effect, both in reinforcing a common identity and in shaping public opinion. The many-to-many model of social media and its various manifestations (blogs, wikis, social bookmarks) has been turning this model upside-down.

Of course marketers have been using this to their advantage for years, from the highly targeted narrowcasting as seen in political campaigns to highly personalized direct mail. But the social web is both responding to and further cultivating this fragmentation.

Social platforms like Ning have emerged to provide ad hoc and on-demand networks meant to service everything from 5-person knitting clubs to Jay Z’s millions of fans. The single-network solutions like MySpace and Facebook have been incredibly powerful in generating public awareness of social networks. But they have discovered that the users of today’s web are a fickle bunch, [...]

If the web of today was the music industry of the 1960’s and if memes were bands, then social networking would be The Beatles. And startups have been chasing after the next killer social networking app like so many crazed schoolgirls.

Tech axiom #1: innovation and perceived innovation are not always the same.

What’s difficult about analyzing social applications and to what extent they will actually change the landscape of the web is discerning the real innovation from the me-too-isms that too often pervade the business plans of web startups. And some of the biggest social networking sites are essentially a rehash of similar concepts from an earlier web. I’m not really sure why MySpace is that much different from Geocities circa 1995 with an embedded mp3 player but maybe I’m missing something.

Tech axiom #2: the most innovative companies are not always the most successful (see also: Xerox PARC).

Despite what some social web evangelists might have us believe, these tools will not fundamentally alter the dynamics of human social behavior. Instead the most successful applications will model and improve upon those dynamics. Finding a good doctor in the 21st century won’t be much different from the 20th or 19th centuries: simply put, you ask recommendations from people you trust. [...]

Image via Wikipedia

When you’re in the business of working with technology — in our case at Reflexions Data, building web applications — it’s easy to forget about your roots.

The culture of web development is rooted in a unique blend of other more forbidable cultural legacies: those of digital art, interface design, software development, and information architecture.

The web as an experimental intersection of art and technology was best represented in its early years by publications like Wired Magazine and Mondo 2000. Editorials by technologists like Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, and Nicholas Negroponte appeared alongside expositions on cyberpunk, digital art, and virtual reality. Experimental digital artists jostled with computer scientists, techno-utopians, and post-humanists in their attempts to express the shifting landscape of the late 20th century. These trends seemed so fundamental as to provoke Wired magazine in 1998 to predict a 20-year “long boom” that would result in worldwide “hyperwealth” and a new egalitarian golden age of cultural and technological achievement (only two years later Wired’s outlook would be somewhat less optimistic, the magazine itself having been sold off to Condé [...]

Now that the Web 2.0 Expo is over I’ve begrudgingly returned to the east coast. For a New Yorker in the web development business, the bay area is like a mythical forbidden city where technology people are a kind of ruling elite. There’s no doubt that New York is a hotbed of web innovation, but web companies are still small potatoes compared to the other industries that call New York home: finance, fashion, art, music, publishing (and you thought Rodney Dangerfield had a hard time getting respect).

Coming from New York the energy around the valley is palpable. The cities themselves are woven into the history and culture of this industry. Names like Cupertino and Mountain View conjure up glowing corporate logos. And then there are the legendary hotspots like San Jose, Palo Alto, San Mateo.

At the Web 2.0 Expo you could almost sense the 6- and 7-figure deals taking shape in the bustling corridors of the Moscone Center. The San Francisco Chronicle had a special column dedicated to the event in the Business section. Web engineers, social media gurus, user experience consultants, web 2.0 designers. All there. And all using this new, amorphous language that seems to spout from Tim O’Reilly like beat poetry.

Just a few of the terms that [...]