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)

What makes you share?

I’ve been wondering about the etymology of ‘Conversation’. The ‘con’ bit has been worrying me.

It’s been nagging at me ever since some social media auditing I was involved with (many moons ago) revealed that an online news article with positive sentiment attached (the Holy Grail for many a PR) more often than not triggered a deluge of negative sentiment in the comment stream.

This came up for me again recently when speaking with journalists at The Guardian about influence (which, for the record, I argue must always be thought of in-context and as emerging from relevance.)

It’s almost as if to generate the greatest volume of positive sentiment you should duplicitously create content which argues the contrary position to that which you want people to take (and more fundamentally, express that they take). (Image courtesy Toban Black)

Turns out the ‘Con’ part of conversation isn’t the part I should be concerned about (ahem) more the ‘versa’ bit – which is from the Latin versus and does hint at the argumentative nature of much of our dialogue.

The flip of this is that much conversation is much more of the social grooming part of our behaviour. We agree on the niceness of the weather, that policemen are looking younger and other such trivialities. By agreeing, we reveal how alike we are, bring loose ties a little closer, prepare the ground for doing stuff together should the need arise.

By taking contrary positions we are also sharing our identity – expressing where we are in conflict and through this discovering others who are in accord with us.

Now, whether or not taking a contrary position or agreeing with fellow humans is the most effective way of generating positive or negative sentiment is of marginal interest to me. Learn too much about this and seek to gain from it and I doubt you’ll end up feeling particularly clean.

What encourages others to express what they think – one way or the other? Now that does matter.

It matters because the only way we can find others who care about the same things we do is through one or other party expressing that concern. Until you share your thoughts they have no value to you or your network. They contribute nothing to making your life better or the world a better place.

But the simple act of sharing what you care about can make change. When you share you allow others to access your thoughts and to discover you. And bringing people together around things that matter to them is what changes our world.

So what drives you to share? What would make you share more?

Why I love Twitter's 'People Similar To You' feature

I've only just noticed a Twitter feature which I think is a very healthy development: People Similar To You.
Click through to your twitter profile page and you'll find a small collection of people Twitter has run an algorithm against and decided are people 'similar to you'.
On further investigastion I find it's been trialled quietly since the summer - but only with limited numbers of users. Please check and let me know if you are seeing it on your profile?
If I had to stab a wild guess I'd say it was using similar matching technology as found in @MrTweet - which always had a pretty good hit rate for me.
I have to say the first four 'People Similar to You' delivered to me (and it was just four on the evening of November 25, 2010) were all people I'm comfortable with being described as 'similar to'.

Whether or not the others are we shall see. I'll tweet them all to ask for thoughts shortly...

In the meantime - I really like this development. I like it because it suggests Twitter is taking much more seriously our interest in people very similar to us (not just who, for example, use the term social media marketing from time to time - clogging up the twitter arteries with 'internet marketer' spam).

I've never thought much of Twitter trends. They reveal only the lowest common denominator and smack of a broadcast approach being layered on to a seriously adhoc network play.

Which is why I shouted out for Trends Among Friends - revealing what is important among my friends seems more valuable to me.

People Similar To Me seems like exactly the kind of building block that can make Trends Among Friends work.

While I'm really not too fussed about how appalling Gillian McKeith has been on this evening's I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here (ITV 1 in the UK) I am concerned about the metadata being expressed by Tamara, Tony, Neil and Mark.

It could prove to be another wonderful way in which twitter enables us to discover people who care about the same things we do, right now.

And if they are wise they will use this not to message us, but to bring us together to help add value to the thing we care about through intelligent and scalable co-creation.

I have my fingers crossed for it. Though I will note, because I expect others so to do, Twitter will be wise to throw in a little serendipity. The role of the publisher is often to introduce us to things we didn't know we needed to know. The risk of a sealed silo of similarity  is clear and one I'd expect any org with the clear understanding of group forming network theory that twitter appears to have to be very careful to avoid.

I mean, it doesn't want to be Facebook, now does it?

Related articles

• Twitter Food for Thought (theflack.blogspot.com)
• Twitter Is More Fun And More Profitable When You Follow The Right People (wassupblog.com)
• Your Friends, My Friends, Our Friends (webupon.com)
• Twitter Tests People Finder Tool (informationweek.com)
• From Social Graph to Interest Graph: Twitter Tells You Who to Follow (briansolis.com)

What if everyone on twitter followed everyone on twitter?

Image via CrunchBase

Having lots of followers on Twitter is a good thing. No really, it is. Don't knock it. I won't say no to more (but please don't assume that means I'd like regular spamming from those who promise they can find me 100, 1000 new followers a day... I'll stick to the organic and relevant, thanks...)

Managing real time relevance is the only issue: how do I find what matters to me, right now, among the deluge of human thought.

Imagine if everyone on Twitter followed everyone on Twitter (except for the spammers, obviously). That's around 40m people following everyone else. The number of peer-to-peer connections are calculator boggling.

Apart from giving @ev and @biz heart attacks, the result would be a very close match with the real-
time expression of meta data required to bring together communities of purpose on a global almost-out-of-the-silo; people who care enough about an issue and are available right now to collaborate to do something about it.

If all you do is read your own tweet stream this will prove difficult. Picking the relevant out of a 40m strong stream would be all but impossible.

But that's where improving Twitter search comes in.

The follow mechanism is a great way of lassooing a pool of people who are very likely to share your any- given-purpose. And through open conversation, this group is always fuzzy edged. In this way Twitter helps us find people we didn't know we needed to know.

But our focus on the followed/follower means we may miss out on the bigger win.

It is perfectly possible to go looking across the whole of Twitter for people sharing your purpose right now. That's search and automated alerts.

But how many of us are ready to try this in reverse? To understand that each tweet is to everyone and a can be a call for people like you to come together with them, to act?

That requires us to actively use search to search for people calling out for people like us to help them on something we collectively care about.

That's a search engine with some new and heavily human (and likely semantic) fields; such as -

• is like me; 
• is trustworthy;
• is helpful; 
• collaborates well 
• etc
  

Currently the followed/follower mechanism is our best human-powered version of just such a search engine. I'm sure it and our other recorded social interactions could and should be included in that future engine.

But what I'm also fairly sure about is that the followers/following model is not robust enough and can't, alone, scale to deliver the real time connections we need to access the greatest value enabled by global, real time communities of purpose.

Can it connect me with anyone anywhere who, like me, wants to solve problem x right now?


That's where our future lies.

Related articles by Zemanta

• We're trying to change the world - not report on it (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)
• Twitter Revamps Following and Followers Pages (mashable.com)

My Christmas Wish List

The fabulous Dan tagged me in this little bit of fun.

If you get tagged you have to blog your Chrstmas Wish list too - and link back to the person who tagged you (me, if you're reading this - that's me :-).

But just because you aren't tagged here and now doesn't mean you can't join in; it just means you don't HAVE to!

These mid-winter thoughts also remind me the year is coming to an end. So it will soon be time to drag out my annual predictions from last year (not much time left for some of those now!) and make another wild stab for next. (image courtesy)

Always fun!

But back to my Christmas wish list. Of course at the top is health and happiness for my nearest and dearest - and for you and yours.

But beyond that, what else could Santa deliver. (appropriate on a day on which its entirely possible I may be spotted in a Santa outfit myself... More of which another time.

1. An end to silos.
The more our metadata can leak beyond them the more we can bring value to one another. Maybe I want one big silo everyone can swhirl around in. Less structured database, more primordial soup.
I happen to believe it would go a long way towards us understanding each other and caring about eachother. Which would help with my next little request.

2 Peace.
Peace has a great chance when it's powered by the flattening of inequalities. Inequalities are the result of exploitation. Exploitation is a good deal harder when we are all publishers, advertisers' marketers and ultimately producers. It's tough to exploit people in the world of the eighth mass media.

3. One more node to share my network, doubling the value for all of us.

4. More of you to pledge to undertake some community action in the offline world. You'll be giving us examples of the generosity of spirit emerging from and required of the networked world.

5. To finally meet Jp Rangaswami in person and hand him the signed copy of The Power of The Network he flattered me so much by asking for. :-)

And I'll tag

Alan
Neville
JP
Stowe
Andrew

You the channel

Microsoft Research was kind enough to invite Bauer Consumer Media (the company I work for) behind the doors of its Cambridge (UK) facility today.
I was joined by our Head of Technology Gus Swan and, along for the fun of it, Communities Dominate Brands' Alan Moore.
My very sincere thanks to Natasa Milic-Frayling for putting together a sparkling agenda and group of brilliant people which sparked some fascinating conversation.
Microsoft Research is the blue sky arm - where new stuff gets toyed with - often ideas that are years from being turned into a product, if they'll ever see the light of day.
And for that reason I'm not going to repeat the bulk of what we were shown.
However, one thing Natasa demo'd is in the public domain and I think it's very interesting indeed: WeConnect.co.uk.

Early in the afternoon we discussed Reed's Law (Group Forming Network Theory) and the idea that navigation and real-time discovery of people who share the same purpose is the thing that unlocks the potential of Reed's Law.

The problem that needs solving is: how do I find people who want to achieve the same as I do right now?

One limitation to overcome (and a pretty significant one at that) is the fact that the tools which enable this kind of connection, social networks, even social mediums like twitter, are still, no matter what their scale, silos.

The long term and monumental win is in a platform-agnostic solution. It is where we are the platforms. We, the nodes, connect through the internet as a whole, not a small subsection of it.

Which is why I find WeConnect.co.uk so interesting.

At this stage it's a series of platform-agnostic personal broadcast channels. I take a picture in Venice - I can share it with you on your mobile, or to my online picture gallery, or directly to your desktop; one-too-one or one-to-many. The connections are between us (via Internet Explorer in this case). The device we use simply realises that connection. There is no social network or medium involved.

Natasa and co are thinking about adding some of the kind of commenting we come to expect of social networks, but know that this will also bring complex design issues.

As it stands it's a brave first step.

Imagine an internet in which there are only blogs and those blogs exist nowhere other than at the point at which they are realised, or rendered, on a device. Imagine a place without platforms or silos, instead a place where groups attract through the implicit and explicit data each of these blogs exhibit. In real time. To and from any enabled device.

(nb, these are my imaginings, not those of microsoft, at least not on this occasion!)

A few steps to go then, but I like the direction WeConnect points.