Ozmota

This morning I stumbled on a great post by Dave Winer titled Why
didn’t Google Wave boot up? where he writes

So why didn’t Google
Wave happen?

Here's the problem — when I signed on to Wave, I didn't see
anything interesting. It was up to me, the user, to figure out how to sell it. But
I didn't understand what it was, or what its capabilities were, and I was busy, always.
Even so I would have put the time in if it looked interesting, but it didn't. 

However, it had another problem. Even if there were incentives
to put time into it, and even if I understood how it worked or even what it did, it
still wouldn’t have booted up because of the invite-only thing. It’s the same problem
every Twitter-would-be or Facebook-like thing has. My friends aren’t here, so who
do I communicate with? But with Wave it was even worse because
even if I loved Wave and wanted everyone to use it, it was invite-only. So the best
evangelist would still have to plead with Google to add all of his workgroup members
to the invite list. The larger your workgroup the more begging you have to
do. This is exactly the opposite of how you want it to work if you're in Google's
shoes. 

This is an important lesson on the value of network
effects on social software applications. A service that exhibits network effects
is more useful the more of my friends use it (e.g. having SMS on my cell phone is
only useful if I have friends who can send & receive text messages). By definition,
a social software application is dependent on network effects and needs to do everything
in its power to promote them. Placing artificial barriers that prevent me from actually
using the product as a communication tool with my social network works against the
entire premise of being social in the first place.

Google definitely learned the wrong lesson from the success of Gmail as an invite
only service. Being invite-only worked for Gmail at launch because my friends don’t
have to use Gmail to receive or send messages to me. So word off mouth could spread
because the people who used it would sing it’s praises which caused anticipation amongst
those that couldn’t. On the other hand with Wave, the people who got invites couldn’t
get to the point where they could sing its praises (if there were any to be sung)
because it was too difficult to get their friends on there. By the time they made
the service open to all, it was too late due to what Joel Spolsky called The
Segway Phenomenon

PR grows faster than the quality of your code. Result: everybody checks
out your code, and it’s not good yet. These people will be permanently convinced that
your code is simple and inadequate, even if you improve it drastically later. I call
this the Marimba
phenomenon . Or, you get PR before there’s a product people can buy,
then when the product really comes out the news outlets don’t want to do the story
again. We’ll call this the Segway phenomenon.

Some may point to Facebook as an example of a network that was invite-only but still
managed to have network effects but there is a crucial difference in how Facebook
regulated growth before opening up to all. Facebook opened its doors to entire networks
of people at a time (i.e. everyone in a particular college, all college students,
people from select employers, etc) not to arbitrary swaths of people on a first come,
first served basis.

Hopefully more startups will keep this in mind before jumping on the invite-only bandwagon.

Now
Playing: Eminem – Hell
Breaks Loose (featuring Dr. Dre)

Continue Reading

I’ve spent the past week going over the ideas in Chris Dixon’s excellent post titled graphs and
thought the ideas were powerful enough that they are worth reiterating. The thesis
is simple, in recent years many have been focused on social graphs (i.e. graphs bidirectional
or one-way “friend” relationships between users) but there are other ways in which
users can be connected to each other besides whether they are friends or not. The
key points from Chris’s post are excerpted below

Facebook’s social graph is symmetric (if I am friends with you then you are friends
with me) but not transitive (I can be friends with you without being friends with
your friend).  You could say friendship is probabilistically transitive in the
sense that I am more likely to like someone who is a friend’s friend then I am a user
chosen at random. This is basis of Facebook’s friend recommendations.

Twitter’s graph is probably best thought of as an interest graph. One of Twitter’s
central innovations was to discard symmetry: you can follow someone without them following
you. This allowed Twitter to evolve into an extremely useful publishing platform, replacing
RSS for many people. The Twitter graph isn’t transitive but one of its
most powerful uses is retweeting, which gives the Twitter graph what might be called
curated transitivity.

…

Over the next few years we’ll see the rising importance of other types of graphs.
Some examples:

Taste: At Hunch we’ve
created what we call the taste graph. We created this implicitly from questions answered
by users and other data sources. Our thesis is that for many activities – for example
deciding what movie to see or blouse to buy – it’s more useful to have the neighbors
on your graph be people with similar tastes versus people who are your friends.

Financial Trust: Social payment startups like Square and Venmo are
creating financial graphs – the nodes are people and institutions and the relations
are financial trust. These graphs are useful for preventing fraud, streamlining transactions,
and lowering the barrier to accepting non-cash payments.

Endorsement: An endorsement graph is one in which people endorse institutions,
products, services or other people for a particular skill or activity. LinkedIn created
a successful professional graph and a less successful endorsement graph.

Local: Location-based startups like Foursquare let
users create social graphs (which might evolve into better social graphs than what
Facebook has since users seem to be more selective friending people in local apps).
But probably more interesting are the people and venue graphs created by the check-in
patterns. These local graphs could be useful for, among other things, recommendations,
coupons, and advertising.

One of the things that has been interesting to watch is how many services have tried
to build this other sorts of relationship graphs on top of Facebook
Connect. Quora has tried to build an endorsement
graph from Facebook Connect as a basis while Yelp has tried to build a location graph
using Facebook’s Instant Personalization and
Facebook Connect as the foundation. As more of these sorts of relationships graphs
between people and other entities are created it is slowly becoming clear to me that
there are many scenarios where Facebook’s graph is not the best starting point.

Take this screenshot of the Facebook
Friend’s Activity plugin on Engadget as an example.

What this plugin does is show which of my Facebook friends (i.e. mostly family, coworkers
and high school friends) have found interesting on Engadget. I couldn’t help but think
back to what Chris Dixon mentioned about Twitter being an “interest graph”. I realized
that this feature would actually be more useful if it showed me what Engadget articles
people I follow on Twitter found interesting rather than what my Facebook friends
did.

As the utility of the social graph grows beyond providing a stream of updates from
people in that graph to being reused in other contexts, the lack of universal appeal
in some of these relationships will grow more obvious. Using Twitter as an example,
I suspect if asked to chose between a widget on TechCrunch that shows what articles
are interesting among your Facebook friends versus who you follow on Twitter a non-trivial
amount of people would pick the latter.

Similarly I wonder how soon till we start seeing some of the endorsement graphs being
built on services like LinkedIn and Quora being leveraged in other places where you
need to vet the opinions of strangers such as Amazon or even Monster.com.

There are times I’ve debated with others whether there will be one social graph to
rule them all and whether that graph will Facebook’s. Now I ‘m convinced that although
their graph is likely to be the largest and most generally applicable in the long
term, there is a market for social graphs based on relationship types other than whether
someone is a “friend” or not which can still significantly improve the user experience
on the Web.

Now
Playing: Eminem – Untitled

Continue Reading

One of the things I’ve noticed while working on Windows Live is that it helps to think
about communications tools such as email, IM and social media sites as being parts
of a continuum as opposed to being rigidly defined product categories. They are all
ways we share our thoughts, ideas and interesting things we’ve online with others
where the main difference is really how public or private the communication channel
is and how synchronous we want the conversation to be. Once you start looking at communications
tools this way it starts opening the door to asking how we can bring some of these
experiences closer together.

Over on the Windows Live blog there have been a number of good blog posts on this
topic. Piero Sierra wrote in the blog post Sharing
2.0

Our data is everywhere

People store their stuff across the web, their PCs and their mobile phones, leading
to fragmented access and fragmented sharing. Take the example of photo-sharing. A
study we ran in September 2009 showed that people stored their photos across up to
15 different types of technologies. Here are the major ones:

It would be nice, not only to have everything in one location, but also to be
able to access all this stuff and share from wherever you may be, especially from mobile
phones and PCs that you may not own.

We’re putting it all out there

It seems like our appetite for using technology to connect with each other is
bottomless, whether it be directed communications with the people we love (email,
IM), sharing with groups of friends (email, social networking), or full-on public
broadcasting (blogs, micro-blogs, photo & video dedicated sites, etc.)

Whenever a new medium emerges, it doesn’t replace the previous
ones – it adds to it. That is, people today are sending email and IM and updating
their status on social networks and uploading photos everywhere. They’re sharing
their thoughts and their memories to stay in touch with each other. Sharing and consuming
shared data has become the primary internet activity for many of our customers, right
up there with shopping and reading news.

With regards to email and sharing specifically, there’s another good blog post on
this topic by Dick Craddock titled Email
in a World of Social Networking where he wrote

Recently, we surveyed 2,000 people in the US, where nearly 10 million additional
people have started to use Hotmail actively over the last year. Our goal was to refresh
our understanding of how people use their personal email accounts, particularly in
this day of heavy usage of social networks for communications. We surveyed people
who use AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail – 500 people for each service.
Here’s a bit of what they shared with us.

• You’re still very attached to your personal email accounts. We asked the
  survey group which communication method they would choose if they were allowed to
  keep only one to communicate with friends and family. Of the choices – email, texting,
  IM, or the ability to post to their favorite social network – most people told us
  they’d choose email over all of the other communication methods and tools.
• Email is today’s tool of choice for managing and sharing documents, interacting
  with businesses, tracking online activities, receiving and responding to social networking
  alerts, communicating with friends and family, dating, and so on. Your inbox is your
  job search strategy room, your filing cabinet, your to-do list, and your social center
• Email is your online photo album, too. People send
  and receive over 1.5 billion photos each month on Hotmail alone, and email is still
  the most popular way to share photos.

One of the things that became clear from us from this data is that there’s a good
overlap in the kinds of activities that go on in email and what we see in social networks.
Some of your friends share photos with you by posting them to Flickr while others
send emails with photos as attachments. Sometimes you find out about new comments
on photos you posted to Facebook by going to http://www.facebook.com and
other times you discover this because you got a notification email. Either way, there’s
a lot of overlap in the actual problem being solved although the technology may differ.

So what are we doing to simplify things in Windows Live’s Wave 4 release? Glad you
asked.

Emails with Photo Attachments and Messenger Social

One of the goals we set out with for Wave 4 was to ensure that people should be able
to keep up with what their friends are sharing with them no matter where their friends
are. This is the motivation behind the integrations we’ve done with popular social
networks like MySpace and Facebook. However as you can tell from the blog posts mentioned
above, email is also an important way for your friends to share updates and media
with you. What we’ve done in this release is to bring in emails that are used for
sharing photos from your contacts into the Messenger Social feed across all experiences
where it is displayed.

On the web:

On the desktop:

Emails from your Social Networks and Messenger Social

The goal of the Messenger Social feed is to keep you up to date on what your friends
are doing. One of the things your friends do is comment on the stuff you post on various
social networks. Invariably you get a mail about these comments and we thought to
ourselves that these email updates are just as valid to show in your feed as the comments
attached to people’s updates that are typically in the feed. Thanks to diligent work
of the Hotmail folks who built a bunch of excellent technology around recognizing
and categorizing emails from social networks, you now get updates such as

in the Messenger Social feed.

What Do Customers Think of the Blending of Email Content in a Social News Feed?

Since Messenger is still in beta and Hotmail has just begun to roll out not a lot
of people (relatively given over 350 million users) have seen this feature yet. Anecdotally,
I’ve heard lots of positive feedback about this feature from a bunch of beta users
but my favorite is the following comment taken from the reviews of the Windows
Live Messenger iPhone app from the Apple App Store(comment #33).

Now
Playing: Waka
Flocka Flame – Oh
Lets Do It (remix) (feat. Gucci Mane, P. Diddy & Rick Ross)

Continue Reading

Continue Reading

Continue Reading

Last week John Panzer, who works on Blogger at Google, wrote about some of the work
he’s been doing on creating a protocol for syndicating comments associated with activity
streams in his post The
Salmon Protocol: Introducing the Salmon Project. Key parts of his post are excerpted
below

A few days ago, at the Real
Time Web Summit, we had a session about Salmon,
a protocol for re-aggregated distributed conversations around web content.  I
was hoping for some feedback and to generate some interest, and I was overwhelmed
by the positive reactions, especially after Louis Gray's post "Proposed
Salmon Protocol aims to unify Conversations on the Web". Adina Levin’s "Salmon
- Re-assembling distributed conversations" is a good, insightful
review as well. There’s clearly a great deal of interest in this, and so I’ve gone
ahead and expanded Salmon’s home at salmon-protocol.org with
an open source project, salmon-protocol.googlecode.com,
and a mailing list, groups.google.com/group/salmon-protocol.

Louis Gray’s post on the topic includes an embedded presentation which captures the
essence of the protocol

Before talking about the technical details of the protocol it is a good idea to understand
the end user problem the protocol solves. For me, it solves a problem I have in the
way that RSS
Bandit integrates with Facebook. The problem is that although there is a way to
get regular updates on changes to the user’s news feed by polling Facebook’s stream
and getting
data back in the Activity Stream format there isn’t a mechanism today to get updates
on the comments on items in the feed. What it means in practice today is that once
an item rolls off of the news feed, there is no way to keep the comments up to date
in RSS Bandit.

The Salmon Protocol aims to address this problem by piggybacking on PubSubHubBub as
a way for applications to get real-time updates on comments on items in an activity
stream not just updates on new activities.

There have also been several mentions of Salmon being a way to aggregate distributed
conversations on an item (e.g. this blog post is syndicated to  FriendFeed and
there are comments there as well as in the comments on my blog) but I am less clear
on those scenarios or whether Salmon is enough to solve the various tough problems
that need to be solved to make that work end to end.

Any API for posting comments to a site needs to solve two problems; identity and dealing
with comment spam. I decided to take a look at the Salmon
Protocol Summary to see how it addresses these problems.

The meat of the Salmon Protocol format is excerpted below

A source provides an RSS/Atom feed of content. It includes a Salmon link in its
feed:

<link rel="salmon" href="http://example.org/salmon-endpoint"/>

An aggregator reads the feed (ideally via a push mechanism such as PubSubHubbub),
and sees from the link that it is Salmon-enabled. It remembers the endpoint URL for
later use.

When an aggregator’s user leaves a comment on a feed item, the aggregator stores
the comment as usual, and then also POSTs a salmon version of it to the source’s Salmon
endpoint:

POST /salmon-endpoint HTTP/1.1

Host: example.org

Content-Type: application/atom+xml

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>

    <entry xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom'>

    <author>

      <name>John Doe</name>

      <uri>acct:johndoe@aggregator-example.com</uri>

    </author>

    <content>Yes, but what about the llamas?</content> 

    <id>tag:aggregator-example.com,2009:cmt-441071406174557701</id>

    <updated>2009-09-28T18:30:02Z</updated>

    <thr:in-reply-to xmlns:thr='http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0'

       ref='tag:example.org,1999:id-22717401685551851865'/>

    <sal:signature xmlns:sal='http://salmonprotocol.org/ns/1.0'>

        e55bee08b4c643bc8aedf122f606f804269b7bc7

    </sal:signature>

    <title/>

</entry>

The commenter is identified in the published comment using the atom:uri
element. How this author is authenticated in situations outside of public comments
on a blog such as RSS Bandit posting a comment to Facebook on my behalf isn’t really
discussed. I noticed an offhand reference to OAuth headers which  seems to imply
that the publishing application should also be sending authentication headers as well
when publishing the comment. How these authentication headers would flow through the
systems involved is unclear to me especially given the approach Salmon has taken to
deal with spam prevention.

The workflow for dealing with spam comments is described as follows

A major concern with this type of distributed protocol is how to prevent spam
and abuse.  Salmon provides building blocks to allow in-depth defense against
attacks.  Specifically, every salmon has a verifiable author and user agent. 
The basic security flow when salmon swims upstream looks like this:

1. aggregator-example.com: "Here is a salmon, authored and signed by
   'acct:johndoe@aggregator-example.com'; please accept it."
2. Recipient: "I know that this is really aggregator-example.com due
   to its OAuth headers, and it has a good reputatation, but I do not trust it completely;
   I will do a double check."
3. Recipient: Uses Webfinger/XRD to discover salmon validation service for
   acct:johndoe@aggregator-example.com, which turns out to be hosted by aggregator-example.com.
4. Recipient: "Given that johndoe has delegated Salmon validation to
   aggregator-example, and I know I'm talking to aggregator-example already, I'll skip
   the actual check." (Returns HTTP 200 to aggregator-example.com)

The flow can get more complicated, especially if the aggregator is not also providing
identity services for the user.  In the most general case, the recipient needs
to take the salmon, discover a salmon validator service for the author via XRD discovery
on the author's URI, and POST the salmon to the validator service. The validator service
does an integrity / signature check against the salmon and returns 200 if the salmon
checks out, 400 if not.  The signature check means that the given author (johndoe
in this case) signed the salmon with the given id, parent id, and timestamp. 
It does not attempt to do a full, XML-DSig style verification, though such a service
is another reasonable extension.

This flow seems weird and it is unclear to me that it actually solves the problems
involved in distributed commenting. So let’s say I post a comment to Facebook from
RSS Bandit, in step 3 above they are now supposed to use WebFinger to
lookup my email address provider and determine which service I use for digitally signing
comments. Then they ask it if the comment looks like it was from me.

Hmm, this looks like a user authentication workflow in disguise as a comment validation
workflow. Shouldn’t the service receiving the comment (i.e. Facebook) in the example
above be responsible for validating my identity not some third party service? Maybe
this protocol wasn’t meant for sites like Facebook?

Let’s say this protocol is really meant for situations when the comment recipient
doesn’t intend to be the sole identity provider such as commenting on Robert
Scoble’s blog where he allows comments from anyone with just an email address
and an optional web page URL as identifiers. So each commenter needs to provide an
email address on an email service provider that supports WebFinger and validates
digital signatures in the specific situation related to the Salmon protocol? Sounds
like boiling the ocean. I wonder why this can’t work with OpenID validation or some
other authentication protocol that has already been validated by developers and is
seeing some adoption?

At the end of the day, I think the problem Salmon attempts to solve is one that needs
solving as activity streams become a more popular and intrinsic feature across the
Web. However in its current form it’s hard for me to see how it actually solves the
real problems that exist today in a practical way.

Of course, this may just be my misunderstanding of the protocol documents currently
published and I look forward to being corrected by one of the protocol gurus if that
is the case.

Now
Playing: Chris
Brown – I
Can Transform Ya (feat. Lil Wayne)

Continue Reading

It’s not a skill that’s been widely understood until quite recently, however community management has begun to move to the forefront of discussions about enterprise social computing as the use of social tools begins to climb the maturity curve. Now it’s increasingly proving not just useful but a critical component of Enterprise 2.0 efforts despite an often vague understanding of what it is and where it should be situated in the org chart.

Continue Reading

Continue Reading