Time for tech to step up with a single truth view

Fake News needs stamping out. It's undermining democracies and right now it's costing lives.

Every time a Covid denier or anti-vaxxer spreads their evidence-empty theories they risk not only many lives, but - no doubt unwittingly - they also support an insidious racism. 

Ask yourself - who would want to target the South Asian Muslim community with the bullshit about pork and alcohol products in the vaccines? Who benefits from creating extra risk of Covid death in a community already over-represented in the list of victims?

Just as we all have a role to play in preventing the spread of the virus, so we all have a role to play in preventing the spread of fake news. So crank up your crap filters. Challenge with facts or just block and walk away (don't feed the troll...)

But we could use some help in this. We have the tech to be much smarter in our response to fake news - and more scalable.

Through data validation and verification - and the application of AI and ML to unstructured data, we have made great leaps in personal identity. Customer Data Platforms enable clear sight of the individual - where-ever you tread digitally - whether that be web, mobile, voice and increasingly in the digitally augmented real world. It's why when (potentially) Alexa listens, Facebook targets you with an ad.

We call it the Single Customer View - aka the one version of the truth. Once established as a kernel it is built upon with each new data discovery - person A is - called X, lives at Y, eats at Z. These remain true until updated - always back to that single person A as the kernel.

Given the alarming and real challenge of Fake News, it's time the same tech guns were turned on fact, rapidly evaluating the source of the kernel of the fact, ranking it for quality and quantity of source to provide an early estimate of accuracy - and then built upon with a network of validation. Posts could be red / amber /green flagged in real time.

Imagine the frustration of the anti-vaxxer whose links to sources are instantly red-flagged for reputation? That might wake them up, too.

Yes, I know, there are questions about whose version of the truth we test by. Google already offers more weight to links it trusts. The BBC already decides what stories it will broadcast and how it will tell them. Our access to 'truth' IS already edited.

The web was meant to be a way that truth could always find a way - overcoming state control or media mediation. But the last few years have taught us that our mass congregation in social networks makes (some, too many of) us vulnerable to influence and control by bad actors.

Those bad actors exploit human vulnerabilities (and build bots to do the same). Now good actors must step up and rebalance - subjecting lies to scrutiny and giving those susceptible to believe them to the tools to alert them to the distinct possibility they are being sold a pup.

Image via UN

What if Facebook is doing us the biggest favour of all?

What if Facebook's scooping up of our personal data is doing us a huge favour?
How can that be? Let's imagine, and think, really big for a moment.

Humans as corporeal beings may be facing an extinction event. We are destroying our eco-system at an alarming rate, making large tracts of land uninhabitable. Sperm count has fallen in developed countries by 50% in four decades. If the rates of decline continue we'll be hitting 'The Handmaid's Tale' scenarios before we run out of Earth to live on.

There are those that argue (Life3.0) that far from dieing out, we may be about to evolve. That evolution would see us abandon our bodies and attain consciousness as digital beings.

To do so would free us from the challenges of keeping our bodies in a decent state - alive for example, and enable us to explore the universe, giving meaning to the vast tracts of it that currently have none (because there is no consciousness out there to experience it).

With me so far? Ok. So how does that mean Facebook is doing us a favour?

AI needs a lot of data to start learning and doing things humans do. It will need even more to recreate conscious versions of ourselves to live in infinity as zeros and ones.

What if this is Facebook, Google, Baidu, Yandex, Amazon's real mission - even if they don't realise it themselves? They are gathering and storing the data - to enable our evolution-as-upload as part of (rather than subject to) The Singularity.

Someone has to do it. If Facebook wants to make use of my data in the meantime to personalise an ad or two - I think that's a very reasonable exchange.

Happy Ishter!

Keep Calm And Get A Relationship

The whole Facebook-Cambridge Analytica debacle can be read as a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from people who like to see the internet as a wild west awaiting their control. But there is an important lesson for anyone using data.

First - why the fuss? There are already plenty of laws and forthcoming rules to prevent the misuse of data.

The General Data Protection Regulation explicitly states that someone's data cannot be used or stored without their express permission, for example.

So, even if you were to grant a company permission to use your data, you can't grant permission to them to use your friends’ data. A company can't ask for that or use that. Even Facebook realised this was a share too far in 2014 and ended the practice (which had until then been employed by 'abusive apps').

However, the argument is that all that data has already been hoarded by the bad guys. But GDPR will make every item they hoard subject to compliance. So even in the case of old data (which  loses its salience by the second in any event) the hoarder must make it easy for anyone to remove their consent and retrieve their data.

That's going to be a challenge for bad actors. And when the auditors come calling they will face fines for every single data point. And these are fines at the scale of 'put you out of business'.

The short term issue for Facebook and, therefore, for much of digital marketing and communications, is the breach of trust. This is based on the notion that we didn't understand the scale of what could be done with the posts and likes and comments we gave away in exchange for better connection with people and information that was useful or interesting to us.

Facebook could act on this, at least re the instance of Fake News. They could set their engineers to work creating an algorithm to automatically add links to fact-checking or cross-checking validated sites.

They could of course do the same for their adverts. Imagine the potential to cut through the lies...

However, these are only solutions if you have difficulty filtering truth from deceit. In reality we humans have a brilliantly well-developed ability to see through bull.

Large parts of our brains are dedicated to sorting the trustworthy from the cheats. (Martin Novak's Super Co-operators says this was essential to our ability to live in co-operative societies). Target me with all the propoganda you like, I won't be voting Nazi.

So we do have a responsibility in this as individuals. We choose what we are willing to believe, and we must ensure we apply our innate abilities to spot the fraudulent at all times.

And naturally - any business or organisation handling data must do so with care and with all due respect for the owner. It is this respect for the owner that points to the most critical learning.

If the digital industry takes one thing from Facebook's woes, it should be this:

Since the value of data rapidly decays, the relationship with the human behind the data is always going to be of far greater value than the data assets themselves.

Data is not the relationship. It is the output of a relationship. Get one.

Twitter: Where investors can have their cake and eat it

Image courtesy: Bakerella.com

Things I wish I'd done... registered for the Twitter IPO. I took interest far too late. By the time I was ready to put my money where my mouth was I discovered I needed to jump through some hurdles (filling forms, sending them to a postal address etc) to be allowed to trade in US shares.
Oh well. Yesterday (before the float) I thought they'd rise about 15-20% on day one (I was guestimating they'd hit $30 to anyone who'd listen).
As it happens twitter went ballistic - up 93% on the day. I expect a lot of profit taking over the next few days as the market takes stock of that.
For the record - I warned against investing in the Facebook IPO at the time.
Personal investors in Twitter would be wise taking enough profit to cover what they've paid - and perhaps leaving the rest in for the journey. Essentially you get to have your cake and eat it too.
And it looks like it's going to be some journey - there are more than 200 new jobs being advertised by Twitter on Linkedin.com right now - more than a dozen in London. From what I recall of the size of the London office, they're going to have to find new premises. Scale that around the world and you can see this is going to be an exciting few months for twitter.
It's rather wonderful that a company that describes itself as operating at the 'extreme of the open wing of the open party' is finding a very significant place in the world.
For why I think Twitter is worth its IPO asking price (and a little bit more right now) take a look at the post I wrote here.

Click the 'incorporate this group' button

"The idea of membership has gone away.  Facebook is not very good at dealing with  named groups, they’re not very good at saying, “We’ve got this book club and I’m a member and you’re not.” But membership is one of the precursors to a lot of social action. My bet is that the group pattern — the named group that can do things like open a bank account or take some kind of coordinated action in the world — is an overlooked pattern that someone is going to reinvent."
Clay Shirky in Wired

As ever - another powerful insight from Clay. This speaks to the belief that what the internet is brilliant at is enabling groups to form around what matters to them.
That lowers the cost of action. But that lowering could be further supported by formalising membership.
Imagine an 'incorporate this group' button, which, if clicked by enough members, signs them up to be part of a co-operative group working to achieve X and sharing in the benefits of its provision. It would enshrine an agreement between those members about its functions and intent.

Life may never become quite that simple, but that's the principle we're looking at here.
Clay isn't saying our desire for membership has gone away - but that our ability to make that meaningful has been neglected by the platforms we've had so far.

To enable all the value that self-forming groups can deliver, that neglect will have to end.

Related articles

• Clay Shirky: There Are No Rules To Creativity [Video]

  ---

• Clay Shirky: How we will read, and how we will publish

  ---

• On Bubbles, Facebook, and Playing for Keeps: 10 Questions With Clay Shirky

  ---

Create value as if the world exists

There is a final disruption charging at full speed through the old world. It promises to be more fundamental than the disruption to the business of content creation and distribution, more disruptive even than our ability to self-organise to shape what we care about.
It is that we can self-organise to pay for it.

It is this disruption to mass, centralised blocks of capital, the switch to widely-distributed ownership and leadership that this entails, that will have the greatest long term impact on how our society is organised – on how we live our lives.

The web has been like a Big Bang to business as usual – disrupting media, marketing, customer service, new product development, the business of elections, the business of who governs us, how we are educated, how we are cared for and so much more.

But disruption of this people-power kind alone has limits. Even though we can find other people who care about the same things as we do, and in so doing lower the cost of action to achieve the shared purposes we have, long lasting and valuable change is slowed by the huge inertia of big capital.

There are those who argue big capital is just too big to be undone from the edge. But who thought the arrival of the internet would one day herald the end of big media? Today more people read Twitter each morning in the UK than read all the national newspapers put together. The power shift is almost complete in media; The content and distribution monopolies gone.

And so for big capital?

Make no mistake, big capital is holding back real change. Take Facebook. First the VCs have to get paid. Haven’t developed a business model to meet the needs of the networked world? F**you! Pay me! And so we get traditional broadcast style ads interrupting your FB time.

Then the VCs are replaced by Big Capital. Who want dividends. Fast. No time to develop a new model. You’ve caught all those fish in a barrel – let’s go spear them...

Where is the interest in long term benefit to the users? To their communities? To their society?

Clay Shirky has a nice line about news websites which are (shock!) “designed as if the web exists”.

Member-led, peer-funded partnerships offer the opportunity to create value as if the world exists. By which I mean value creation which goes beyond the back slap in the boardroom and the bottom line on the balance sheet, value creation which acknowledges that resources are finite, that people, communities, societies and ecologies are connected and matter to each other.

As I described in a recent post about Mindful Consumption, this kind of approach isn’t for a happy clappy hippy utopia, it provides a genuine competitive advantage: In a connected world where to win is to work together with ever greater numbers of people who care about the same things you do, few are going to sign up to support businesses who are damaging the ecosystem in which they exist.

Exploitation which damages our connected well-being has never been welcome. The fact is that exploitation is visible now more than it ever has been before: The web has revealed our interconnectedness like nothing in history before.

And that is a genie which is not going back in its bottle.

Change will come, big capital inertia can only slow things. And where we are frustrated, where we care most, where we see the most significant damage to our future and to that of those we care about, we will vote with not only our connectedness, our collaboration, our action – but with our personal funds.

Sure, it’ll be slow. We’ll chip away at first – Kickstarter by kickstarter. But one day big capital will wake up to find itself in the place newspapers have.

Related articles

• 
  How crowdfunding can kickstart the Big Society

  ---

• 
  Video: Launch of Big Society Capital

  ---

• 
  The Business Model for Disruption

  ---

• 
  Organising against the enemies of internet freedom | Naomi Wolf

  ---

Facebook's journey to monopoly or bust

I have no objection to the nice chaps at Instagram getting a billion dollars for their baby. Providing someone, somewhere on the planet is putting a similar sum behind a platform to make real change that matters.

Not happening though is it?

There’s something fundamentally wrong about a world where we’ll spend $1bn on an app but not on a way of creating value we can all benefit from. The key wrong bit is in the allocation of resource.

Projects like kickstarter point the way ahead. Resource allocation is shifting to the edge. And the edge won’t choose apps – we’ll choose change.

Which means The edge is unlikely to choose Instagram’s acquirer Facebook either. Big central blocks of cash might (the institutional investors). The odd geek shareholder? Perhaps. But for the most part, the edge won’t play.

Facebook paid $1bn for Instagram, not for a company, not for a business, (there is irony in the fact that Kodak, creators of the Instamatic, are now dead and buried as a business) but for an idea that threatened its dominance of the important image-storing/sharing sector.

Our concern should be that Facebook appears to be so 'valuable' now that it can simply buy the next idea that challenges it – at almost any price. And that’s a significant step on the road to monopoly.

But Facebook only gets to do this based on a valuation of itself which is in turn based only on the idea that it is valuable.

It’s buying ideas at inflated prices based on the idea that it itself is valuable.

That worries me in a very credit-crunchy kind of way.

When our collective belief in that is diffused by the realisation that communities don’t function like audiences then that bubble will deflate.

There is a more hopeful scenario – it is that Zuckerberg has the foresight to think acquiring creative connectors of the kind who ‘love’ Instagram has a potentially higher value for co-creating outcomes (rather than 'audiences' of folk sitting around waiting to be advertised at). And he can build a new, real, co-created and sustainable valuation around that idea.

I’m not holding my breath.

I guess it’ll be Pinterest next:  $2bn to Google anyone? Seems as good a fit as any to me.

If my daughter’s use of the web is any guide then Google needs to get Pinterest-hot at visual search as soon as it can. At 7 and reading and writing fluently,  she continues to search the web through pictures – just as she has ever since she first started playing with search. A pointer for the future.

See also: Facebook Should Be Working Harder for its $100b valuation

By what and by whom do we want to be remembered?

Forbes reported this week that 'CMOs must prepare for the next technology revolution’.

The revolution in question is the shift from org-owned CRM (customer relationship management processes) to customer-owned VRM (Vendor Relationship Management - as Doc Searls has pioneered ).

This 'revolution' is, of course, far less tech/tool related than described. It is for more attitudinal and requiring of cultural shift (as often the case, observers confuse correlation with causality).

The basic notion is that the customer gets to own their data and share it with whom they choose to their own ends and benefit (as opposed to the organisation laying claim to customer data). 'Personal' is one example of the output of such a cultural shift in thinking.

All of which surfaces some questions about data ownership that have been gnawing at me.

What is the difference between your actions being recorded in a digital database - and being recorded by our human collective memory?

Do human memories decay faster, do digital ones do a worse job of delivering context (and therefore meaning)? These are the 'technical issues'. They are questions of effectiveness.

By what and by whom do we want to be remembered?

Let's set aside for the moment that memory and data may be different things - that memory may be the story through which we understand the data stored in our and other people's collective memory. In my view that applies equally to data stored in databases; it makes no sense without a story applied to it, derived from experience and with context.

By whom or what is it anything from 'ok' to be remembered, all the way through to 'desirable' to be remembered?
We want our friends and families to remember us. Is this different from data being stored in a database. If so, how and why?
We want our favourite restaurants and hotels to remember us.
We want society to remember us.
We want posterity to remember us.

Throughout history the remembering has been done by other humans, creating context around the data in the stories they tell, write, record and film.

So why not have Google storing your data? Why not Facebook? Why not the brands you consume? Perhaps they can record the source material more accurately than has been possible. The stories that make the data comprehensible, that gives it its context, will still require humanising.

I ask these questions because I think we need to be clear about what the risks and benefits of who owns data really are.

Related articles

• VRM, Fourth Party and the Empowered Consumer (realtea.net)
• CRM Strategist Brent Leary on Social Media and Customer Relationship Management (VIDEO) (bizblog.blackberry.com)
• Will Data Collection on User Behavior Be Forced to End Soon? (readwriteweb.com)

Facebook needs to try much harder for its $100bn

Facebook's valuation is - apparently - justified by how much more accurately it will be able to target folk for 'conversion' very soon.
Not a religious thing, but that greater than ever ability to spot you and sell to you that you've been waiting for (ah hem).
Hmmm.
Our pension fund holders are really going to pile into Facebook based on last-century's ad model?

Let's review for a moment.
Facebook is not an audience. It is an aggregation of small groups of people who care about each other (mostly) and a few that circulate around brands (mostly as a badging excercise or in hope of being thrown a fish or two).
I don't know of any groups that formed to be marketed to (either on Facebook or elsewhere). Facebook could test this by setting up the 'I signed up in order to be better targeted by advertising' group and counting the likes...

The broader point is this: targeted advertising - no matter how clever - remains advertising - a broadcast bodge job being unsatisfactorily applied to a networked medium.
I'm reminded of this, from ex-Facebook employee Jeff Hammerbacher:
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."

It's a shame that Facebook's share of the big brains can't be refocused, that Facebook can't take the opportunity to build new relationships between brands and their customers, to help shape alternatives that do fit the networked model.
Where is Facebook's product suite for innovating with customers - for making customers partners with brands in pursuit of things they both care about, for example?

I thought we'd all established we don't want to be targeted, we don't want to be marketed to, we want to join in, we want to market with.

We don't want better messages - we want better things.

Of course, we've said all this before (see below). I guess it wasn't a £100bn question last time.

The Death Of Advertising: Omexpo Madrid 2010

View more presentations from david cushman

Seriously, Facebook, try harder. You've got an opportunity to change the future for the better, not simply hone the past.

Related articles

• Facebook's Revenue Growth Strategy: Ad Targeting By In-App Behavior (techcrunch.com)
• Facebook to file for IPO as early as this week (buzzom.com)

Top Stories reveal Facebook’s broken strategy

Some quick thoughts on Facebook’s latest iteration (as revealed at F8 last night).

The moving 'stream of news' from folks you know has been pushed into the wrong place. It should be in the centre. Facebook should instead push top stories to the edge (as Twitter does with Trends).

The reason they have got this wrong is the reason Facebook is headed in the wrong direction full stop. It can’t find a way of making value without slapping ads on. It is therefore forced into thinking it is a mass media play.

When you think like that you get led by the lowest common denominator (most ‘liked’ over most relevant) that leads you to ‘top stories’ and to placing them in the centre.

Facebook is treating your ‘friends’ as one big community. You only get to choose who you share with once. It should at least be every time you share.

Twitter’s trends is another (in some ways worse) case in point. It surfaces the most shared, not the most relevant - among everyone.

Top Story is kind of ‘trends among friends’. Which is something I previously advocated twitter should do. But now I see it in the flesh and actually working, I realise how even this delivers most liked, not most relevant – even if it is ‘most liked/shared’ among your friends.

For example, when I checked in on Facebook this morning my experience of it was a top story which was a very funny video involving British chef Nigella Lawson (also available on Youtube, on the open web).

The video is entertaining. It would entertain many. But it sure ain’t relevant. Because it gets liked and shared by many of my friends (and presumably their friends) it stays on top story position.

Meanwhile, in a side-thought at the side of the page potentially more relevant stuff ticks by.

What is needed is a way in which you can select, every time, who you wish to share with. Friends may have things in common but that does not mean they share common purposes. Communities do.

And communities of purpose are much more adhoc in nature than Facebook is built for. They are much more like the way conversations develop in twitter – aggregating around a common thing for the time that thing matters to those taking part, moving on to the next as and when the need is solved or the next emerges.

Communities of purpose get together to achieve things – from answering a quick question to making a solution to shared need. Friends hang out.

And this is Facebook’s challenge. Communities of purpose have to be much more adhoc than it is built for – yet this is where the true value (making things with people rather than sending messages at them) resides.

The Top Story thing reveals how far off Facebook is from cracking this, or perhaps even understanding it. It is why, instead, they must attempt to be a media platform. Because media platforms are nice and simple for selling ads on - instead of coming up with ways of creating real value with communities.

Related articles

• The New 'Top' Story: Facebook's Flow Of Change (npr.org)
• Facebook Enhances News Feed and Introduces Ticker (hubspot.com)
• Facebook Now Has 800 Million Users (mashable.com)
• We don't connect to be marketed to (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)

We don't connect to be marketed to

Facebook's announcement that it is to enable a 'subscribe' button so you can follow interesting things and people (provided they are sharing publicly) is the latest shot in the battle for hearts and minds among the big players. 'Subscribe' is essentially Twitter's follow (or Google +'s for that matter).

So it's yet another case of Facebook being late to the party. The extra it adds is enabling you to select how much of someone's stream you want to subscribe to - giving a little control to the follower (though frankly this has varying value depending on your personal experience of the volume of content - which has always been controlled by who and what you friend or follow in any event).

But it got me thinking: Subscribe takes us back to our online social roots: You just have to love blogs and blogrolls, RSS and hypertext linking. A glorious place of freely forming communities of purpose.

All the rest; Facebook, Twitter, Google +, etc etc, all the rest are at best filters of simplicity or, at their worst, silos of data. Some sit further along to the left of that scale, some to the right. But sit on it they do, in a way that blogs and rss well, don't.

The social platforms have taken down some serious technical barriers to entry - itself a silo of some significance. My wife would never have written a blog. But she's at home and connected with facebook. This is a good thing.

But ultimately we will call time on the nannying. The tech difficulties the platforms solve for us will become problems no longer. A level of what we now call technical know-how will simply become common sense. Like being able to cross a road, most folk will grow up knowing how. They'll call it common sense rather than know-how because it will, of course, be common.

At that point we no longer need the platforms. We'll need and will have the common sense to publish, to discover those who share our needs, problems or desires. And the ability to connect in self-forming groups.

And guess what Facebook et al? We won't be doing this to be marketed to.

Related articles

• Facebook Launches Twitter-Like 'Subscriptions' (techcrunch.com)
• On Google+, circles and silos and internal communications (sharemarketing.wordpress.com)
• How to use Twitter and tweet like a bird (vodafone.com.au)

Learning to love the truth (even if you don't 'like' it)

Nice deck here from my colleague Ninety10 Group CEO Jamie Burke, issued as a wake-up call to those who set out to harvest 'likes' - detailing the risk to reality that delivers.

Stop worrying about likes and learn to love the truth

View more presentations from 90:10 Group Ltd.

Size - not growth rate - matters for communities

Tokyo - by http://www.flickr.com/photos/oimax/

I read all the claims about the rapid growth of google+ ‘use’ and I still feel unmoved.

Perhaps it’s for the reason that I put ‘use’ in quote marks: Google + feels very much in its nascent, gave it a try, walked off, may-be-back-if-enough-other-folk-find-it-interesting-to-remind-me-about-it-later, phase.

Which, to be fair, is how I started with Twitter. But also with a hundred other new kids on the block.

But perhaps my reticence is also because of a remarkable scaling effect which happens in communities. I say communities, it looks to me like this has only been applied to cities thus far, so bear with me...

I came across an interesting article by Marcus Du Sautoy at the weekend. This is the chap who has written and is presenting the current BBC series The Code (http://www.bbc.co.uk/tv/features/code/)  – which looks at the mathematics which appear to govern, well pretty much everything.

Du Sautoy cites the work of British-born theoretical physicist Geoffrey West who used maths to discover fundamental laws governing cities. 

“...it can be understood by a single magic number: 1.15. Each time the population of a city increases by 100 per cent (in other words doubles) the social and economic factors scale up by 115 per cent.

“So, if you compare a city with a population of one million people to a city of two million, then instead of the larger city having twice as many restaurants, concert halls, libraries and schools, you find instead an extra 15 per cent on top of what you’d expect. Even salaries are affected by this curious ratio...”

In other words the value of being part of a community (my derivation) grows by an extra 15% each time that community doubles in size.

And while Google+ has reached its first 10m users in a spectacularly fast period of time (16 days compared with Twitter’s 780 and Facebook’s 852) its value to the members of that community is similarly spectacularly limited by its relative lack of scale.

Let’s try the maths (not my strongest point so feel free to point out flaws and correct me:

Based on Facebook having 640m users and Twitter having 175m (Wikipedia August 1, 2011). Then the social/economic advantage conferred over Google + users is: approximately 200% greater for Twitter users and 230% greater for Facebook users.

Simply – Facebook and Twitter ought to prove at least twice as valuable to current users thanks to the scaling up of value delivered by the sheer size of community.

Growth rate has no impact on that.

So until we have a Google + with at least 100m users (and likely twice that) there’s little chance of it delivery the user experience either Twitter or Facebook can.

The dodgy maths bit:

How did I get to this? I took 10m as the base value (Google + users after 16 days). I doubled this, then doubled the outcome and doubled that (etc) until I reach the scale of Twitter and then Facebook (an approximate in the case of Twitter).

Taking ‘1’ as my base value for ‘social-economic factors’ generated, I multiplied by our magic number (1.15), for every time the base community doubled in size.

eg 10m users x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 640m (= Facebook).

Therefore social-economic factors multiply thus: 1 x 1.15 x 1.15 x 1.15 x 1.15 x1.15 x 1.15 = 2.3 (therefore a growth of 230% compared with original 10m strong community).

Related articles

• Marcus du Sautoy interview: 'There's a geek chic about maths now' (telegraph.co.uk)
• Google plus invite and DMS thoughts on Google+ (dms-internetmarketing.co.uk)
• 5 things Google+ does better than Facebook and Twitter (venturebeat.com)
• Opinion: Why Twitter is obsolete (macworld.com)
• Why size isn't everything - at least for communities... (thewayoftheweb.net)
• Google+ grabs record 25M unique visitors, but it's not fair to compare to Facebook (venturebeat.com)

What is happening to my internet?

We can Haz your Internets?So while Facebook busies itself remaking the internet in the way Governments would have liked it, Google (in Google+ ) comes up with a social answer of the kind McKinsey would have arrived at had it done the math (Nova Spivak said that first, not me - so good I had to repeat it).

To be fair, Google hasn't graced me with an invite to trial Google + yet (update: theyvdid about an hour after I published this). I do worry though about all the 'friend-management' that is being referenced in news reports about it.(I'll feed back in due course).

Which makes me ask: What is happening to my internet? To your internet? To the wonderful adhoc, fuzzy-edged, self forming internet?

Why do folk keep trying to put it in a box and make it behave like it were part of the old broadcast world, of mass, of control and ownership at the centre, of take not give.

I was only half joking when I tweeted (when stories about Facebook's IPO) broke that we should all leave for a bit of a laugh - and then see how much it got valued at.

Control and ownership from the centre.

The internet The Government would have given us had we asked.

But we didn't ask did we? We just did. One task at a time. Flocking. Failing, Flailing.

Don't tell me it's time the internet grew up. It's time we removed the silos and gave it back the freedom from which it flourished.

Social networks of the Facebook kind have delivered a wonderful thing - they gave everyone and their mother access to the group-forming value of the web. Once learned though, do we still need the stabilisers on?

Don't forget folks, blogs remain the single least silo'd bit of easy-user tech available to most of us through which to self form groups.

Maybe it's time to give yourself back the freedom to self-form beyond the safety zone set and owned by Zuckerberg and co? Mark, your work here is done - the kids have grown up. Let them go.

Related articles

• Google's Facebook Copycat, Google Plus (blogs.wsj.com)
• Google Social Network Nears Release (steverubel.me)

The world's best advertising, marketing, media, PR and digital blogs

FasterFuture has landed itself a spot in the Brand Republic 200 (#BR200). Please note if you want to take a look at the list in full for yourself you will need to register with Brand Republic. It's free to register - but an inconvenience all the same.

The intention of this particular top 200 is to "list...the best advertising, marketing, media, PR and digital blogs from around the world, ranked in terms of traffic and social influence."

FasterFuture comes in at 54 on this global list.

The methodology:

Brand Republic ranked the blogs by influence using an algorithm that weighted factors including traffic, Mozrank (determined in part by the number of inbound links) Twitter data, and social presence on, for example, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.Where there were multiple authors writing on a single blog, their individual social presence on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn was also considered. 

12 years left to adapt or die

Disruptive technologies generally take 20 years to make their broad society-wide impact felt.
The first commercially available mobile phone network opened in Japan in 1979. 20 years later everyone and their mother had a mobile phone.

in 1900 London the horse was still king of the road. 20 years later the motor car had become ubiquitous.

Social networks - and the technologies of social media, have only really been with us in user friendly form since around 2003. I pick that since that was the year MySpace was founded. (Image courtesy PetruzzoPhoto)

Yes there were social technologies before MySpace - just as there were cars before 1900 and mobile phones before 1979. But in all three cases using them (be it social technologies, cars or huge cellphones) was relatively cumbersome and/or time consuming, complex and expensive. MySpace made the peer to peer connectivity of the internet something everyone could do. On a global scale. Easily.

And by 2008 it was pretty well on the way to making the concept of social networking ubiquitous. Facebook built on that. And today as the race for 1bn users advances at a high rate of knots, it's hard to avoid the impact of this user-friendly driver of self organisation - whether it be for customer complaints or armed insurrection.

The ease with which groups of purpose can organise in social networks is something that wasn't so easily enabled on forums and in newsgroups of emails. And not as many (and perhaps not enough) people understood or were driven to understand what they could do with the web - until the nice easy interface of the social network showed the way.

When new tools become truly ubiquitous then, and only then does their full impact on society become clear. In this case I'm suggesting the new tool wasn't simply the internet, it has been the refinement of social networks to the point at which they are delivering self-organising groups of purpose on a global scale.

The process of using social networks has educated a new and huge generation in the value of real-time synchronous communication which is the guts of the formation of communities of purpose.

The future is not digital - it is self organised. That is what social networks reveal.

Everywhere this process touches it disrupts. The media industry lays witness. Others will, of course, follow. Most dramatically throughout the Arab world currently, the disruption is to centralised control. Every where there is centralised control, every where there is mediation - so adhoc self-forming communities of purpose have the power to disrupt.

Given the standard 20-year life cycle of a technological revolution, and my assertion that 2003 is the year zero for this revolution, then we can expect the complete impact to have been wrought by 2023.

In two years time we will be half way through. Half way.

The old ways have 12 years to transform or die.

Related articles

• 5 Failed Social Networks Even Worse Than MySpace (huffingtonpost.com)
• MySpace for sale, News Corp has given up (downloadsquad.switched.com)

Two new jobs at 90:10 Group

London-based social business consultancy 90:10 Group (UK) is seeking to recruit both an Executive and an Associate to help us change the world - niche by niche. Both roles are based in London, UK.

EXECUTIVE
The Executive role is a first step on an exciting career path for someone with a passion for the tools and techniques of social media and the desire and ambition to join a vibrant, fast-growing organisation in a sector bursting with innovation and opportunity.
During your first year you'll receive exceptional training and guidance, preparing you for promotion within 12 short months. We recruit into this role with your long term development very much front of mind.
We expect the successful applicant to be capable of becoming a share-holding partner within three short years and a director of their own arm of the business within 5-6. On joining you will have a clear career development path mapped out with rewards and incentives marking the way.
Our career structure is designed to recognise and reward the work and experience our employees gain at 90:10 and give each member of the team more to inspire and aspire to.


The role:
The Executive role functions as the one-year entry point into the 90:10 Group business.
The Location:
Our London office at 88 Kingsway, Holborn.
Function: You will provide vital day-to-day support to the London office and its team while gaining an understanding of how the office / business operates. You will gain hands-on experience in community culture - the 90:10 platform approach to delivering business efficiencies through social technologies and techniques of co-creation.
You will be trained in the best online community auditing/monitoring and data processing tools and techniques with expert leadership. You will also be supported in responding to day-to-day client management issues.
You will be required from time to time (with any necessary training) to update our own web resources, take notes in meetings and support the senior team in a variety of administrative roles.


Essential: Excellent written and communication skills in English. Computer and web literacy. Business and client focus. Excellent eye for detail and accuracy. Must have the right to work in the UK (you will be based at our office in Holborn, London, right next to the tube).
Advantageous: Knowledge of/experience in social media monitoring technologies. As a multinational, multilingual business, additional languages are also clear advantage as is evidence of effective personal participation in social media. A qualification in Research or Communications OR equivalent working experience will make you stand out, too.

ASSOCIATE 
THE ROLE:
The role of associate is a client-facing role which requires a year’s experience within 90:10 Group or equivalent skill sets. We expect the successful applicant to be capable of becoming a share-holding partner within two short years and a director of their own arm of the business within 4-5. On joining you will have a clear career development path mapped out with rewards and incentives marking the way.
It is a continuing development role in which you will perform the following functions and develop the following skills: 
Functions: Support the Group and the London office in the following ways:

• Create report documents, coordinate meetings and provide clients day-to-day service. 
• Manage the delivery of social media monitoring reports, audits and local accounts.
• Attend presentations to clients
• Interpret industry news for your local office.
• Develop hands on experience in community engagement (outreach etc)
• Perform Data processing/Social media monitoring
• Support executives in their training in data processing/social media monitoring
• Identify and share best practice both in London and throughout the group.
• Monitor development of social media activity in relevant markets 
• Monitor developments in the brands and orgs we work for with specific focus on accounts you are responsible for.
• Identify and share, and where directed, pursue new business opportunities

Demonstrate and develop an interest in and understanding of :

• Managing large local and / or multi-regional accounts.
• Leading all listening and audit presentations to clients and their agencies
• Using audit and listening outcomes in marcomms planning processes, idea creation and strategic support.
• Co-creation initiatives and workshops through all their phases.
• Creating and sharing slide-decks and demonstrating strategic capability.
• Costing of projects and invoicing of clients.

Further your interest in and understanding of :

• Ninety10's approach, products and services
• The businesses, brands and organisations we work with
• Your blogging and other areas of expertise to demonstrate thought leadership in social media.
• All aspects of our social media monitoring processes - from commissioning to delivery - including technical and client-relationship aspects.
• Business transformation through social technologies

Essential: Experience in and off social media monitoring and reporting is essential for this particular Associate role. Must have the right to work in the UK (you will be based at our office in Holborn, London, right next to the tube) and have excellent communication skills in English.


Advantageous: As a multinational, multilingual business, additional languages are a clear advantage as is evidence of effective personal participation in social media. A qualification in Research or Communications OR equivalent working experience will make you stand out, too.
 
We intend to appoint to these roles immediately - there is work waiting to be done! If you or anyone you know would like to discuss these rare opportunities please email me david@ninety10group.com with your CV, current salary details and availability today.





View Larger  Map

Related articles

• Head of Research at 90:10 Group (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
• Secrets of a social-media headhunter (smartblogs.com)
• People on the Move in the Social Business Industry: March 1, 2011 (web-strategist.com)
• The social media skills and credentials (successnetwork.wordpress.com)