Skype and Twitter should merge; we should have one single platform to communicate with people using text and voice publicly and privately using any device. I know it won’t happen, but it’s still a good idea.

Twitter and Skype should merge. Why?

• 1. A combination would simplify the mess of communication use cases and create one single platform for people and companies to exchange information using voice and text, publicly and privately, using any device.

  Each new communication tool, network and platform launches by focusing on one use case (between people, public, private, over mobile network, etc.) and then quickly tries to figure out how to integrate with other communication methods, devices and platforms.

  This splintering and re-aggregation is noisy and wasteful; not only are we are forced to use and participate in a range of tools and networks (i.e. social network fatigue), but as we choose our preferred method of contact (email, phone, SMS, private Twitter, public Twitter, comment, etc.) and our preferred provider (i.e. Twitter, any IM provider, Facebook, Bebo, et. al.) we create enormous inefficiencies and missed communications (i.e. “oh, I don’t check Twitter often.”, “I can’t direct message you through Friendfeed because you don’t use Friendfeed? what gives?”).

  Both Twitter and Skype are really just platforms that transmit information over dumb pipes; the key differences are how information is delivered (voice v. text) and displayed (private v. public); but there is no need for these use cases to be split into separate companies.

• 2. Skype is already pursuing the strategy of powering private communications using any mix of client devices over any communications pipe. Voice and SMS; fixed-line, mobile and VOIP; iPhone, computer, WIFI phone; Skype is reducing the need for use cases to align for communication to happen; people don’t need to think about how the other person is using Skype in order to make a connection (granted, differences in voice quality across devices and networks dictate best options, so that’s still kind of a pipe dream, but it’s not far off).

  Skype has a bright post-eBay future and now has the potential to take on the mobile and fixed-line telecom operators in a way previously impossible; adding a public communication service to their private communication service would allow Skype to take advantage of the broader trend of public communication via micro-messaging.

  Perhaps instead of merging with Twitter they should just create their own public micro-messaging service…

• 3. Each could (Twitter) and do (Skype) earn revenue from facilitating the exchange of information and from providing value-added features. * Combining the two companies would create very interesting opportunities, to say the least.
• 4. Looking at this slightly differently: what do you think Google’s end-game is with Google Voice?

I’m probably wrong, so now it’s your turn; let’s talk about the obvious and non-obvious reasons why they won’t, can’t and shouldn’t merge.

—

* Please don’t turn this into a discussion about Twitter’s lack of / future / non-existent / yet-to-be-turned-on revenue model. Thinking about Twitter as a stand-alone business just isn’t that much fun anymore.

Why is targeted advertising perceived to be a bad thing? The real issue is over our misplaced notion of privacy on the web; the real debate is over control, not privacy. Facebook: Let me make my entire profile public; vendors: let me give you more information about me.

Eliot Van Buskirk in Wired, Your Facebook Profile Makes Marketers’ Dreams Come True”:

Social networking feels free, but we pay for it in ways that may not be readily apparent.

The rich personal data many of us enter into these networks is a treasure trove for marketers whose job it is to target us with ever-increasing precision.

Should that really be a surprise anymore?

More importantly, why is better targeting a bad thing?

In the absence of popularly adopted tools for vendor relationship management (VRM), what if I want to use social media (i.e. the web) to publicly declare things I want to buy?

Wouldn’t I be happy if a company actually followed up with me with exactly what I wanted? I mean, I told everybody (and yet, oddly, nobody) that’s what I want. Worst case, wouldn’t I prefer to get adverts for things I may actually want instead of things that are guaranteed to annoy me?

I want more targeting, not less; I have little objection to the idea of aggregating and structuring data about me to target advertising to me; but as usual, it all comes down to how it’s executed. If all that happens is I get a few more advertisements about cameras and baseball, that’s fine with me (but also pretty limited thinking by marketers); in any case that’s better than getting adverts for the dredge that makes it through spam filters and AdBlock. Better yet: take that richer knowledge about me as an input to develop and deliver on the promise of “relationship marketing”.

“There are huge privacy concerns for social network sites,” said Rotenberg [Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center]. “… The new kind of advertising, which is what happens when Facebook provides an API that allows advertisers to scrape the data stream and news feeds of individual users — that’s a whole new development, with some privacy dimensions. I don’t think users expect that their news feed is going to be used by marketers.”

Wait, after all the furors over Facebook’s terms of service, Beacon, et. al., shouldn’t we have caught on? Seriously. The login page to Facebook might be the biggest contributor on the web to this mistaken notion of online privacy.

Really, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine data about our online actions being aggregated and structured, we’re not stupid; the real issue is that we just don’t have a real reason to care (yet). The issue isn’t about privacy, it’s about control.

Vendors: give me a way to give better data to you, to have more control over our “relationship” and to scale that across multiple vendors, and I’ll give you even more data about me.

Better yet, Facebook: let me make my entire profile public. Seriously. Nothing would stop people more from posting information they think is private (but isn’t) than by owning up to reality and making everything public.

Tight networks don’t exist on the web; tight networks don’t operate by web economics; give up on the notion of online tight networks and use the web to maximize the power of loose connections.

That’s something I can care about.

(link via Aaron Chua | @aaronchua)

Yes, a “black swan” is an intellectual construct as overused as a “tipping point” and a “long tail”, but they each remain valuable bits of language to express and transmit dense theories and bodies of thought; but using the idea of a “black swan” helps us frame an important question: are our current structures in academia and scientific research suppressing the incentives to pursue revolutionary ideas?

Honestly, I don’t think so; I think the ability for revolutionary ideas to accrue massive gains (public and private) are becoming even larger due to the power laws of the interactions facilitated by the Internet. But I’m open to thoughts.

Mark Buchanan at PhysicsWorld.com, In search of the black swans:

The publish-or-perish ethic too often favours a narrow and conservative approach to scientific innovation. Mark Buchanan asks whether we are pushing revolutionary ideas to the margins.

… The price to pay for not moving to re-establish such independence will lie in a failure to realize the huge and unpredictable discoveries that move science forward most in the long term — discoveries made possible only when individuals leap out of what is comfortable and accepted, and wander out into spaces unknown. It is the true enormity of the potential gains that makes this goal of reaching the “efficient frontier” so important.

If today we seem to have a dearth of new Einsteins, Smolin suggests, this may just reflect that we have become a little too risk averse. New Einsteins, he points out, will not be working in areas that have been well established for decades. … New Einsteins may be slipping out of view and out of science altogether just because our scientific culture currently simply has no way of encouraging them.

To beat an idea to death, it all comes down to incentives:

Creating tactics without building a strategy is the same as building a boat without a blueprint; creating a strategy without understanding the underlying incentives of the players is the same as creating a blueprint without thinking about the basic physics behind how boats work; in short, not a good idea.

What happens if lose sight of incentive structures?

• Compensation tied to short-term time horizons leads to decisions to maximise short-term return (until we figure out how to tie compensation to value creation present and future);
• “Win and I win, lose and you lose” structures redistribute private risks to the public;
• “Attempts at local maximization create global minimization.”

Need I even explain how we’re seeing this today?

How do we start re-framing incentives?
With conscious attention to our lives, thoughts, actions and attention, today and tomorrow; by capturing richer data about the full impact of our lives and the externalities we impose on our worlds; by structuring data about our lives to change our behavior.

You’ve probably already read and listened to these, but check out…

• Umair Haque on behavioral innovation at BRITE ’09 Conference (video)
• Umair Haque on Constructive Capitalism
• Umair Haque, Why Ideals are the New Business Models

Selected highlights from an Edge Roundtable talk; click through to the Edge site to check out the video for a richer experience and read the rest of the transcript to dig in deeper, including bits about Mirror Worlds, asynchronous communication, The New Tork Times, McLuhan and more.

John Markoff and Clay Shirky talk to David Gelernter, An Edge Roundtable: Lord of the Cloud:

On Cloud Computing

GELERNTER: But the [cloud computer] field during the 1980′s said … “This is a very pretty idea. This is a beautiful elegant idea. It’s stupid because it’s impossible. It will never work. It is grossly inefficient. There is no way that you can take information, just float it out there, and expect people to search this whole vast collection, or somehow or other find what they want. And, you know, how are you going to find out what computer to put it on? How am I going to know what computer to look for it on?”

We said from the very beginning that those questions are in a larger sense irrelevant because software develops the algorithms it needs to provide the service users want. In the final analysis, the question is not, what can software engineers build? It’s the question, What do users need? If we identify our user need, the software technology will come along — in combination with hardware, obviously, and interconnect technology.

SHIRKY: The other thing I think is so striking about it … is that you [Gelernter] were flying in the face of the dominant view of the computing industry. What you said, which is simple economics but radical to the industry is, computers will become abundant because people care about them. And when they become abundant enough, we’ll stop caring about them. … Because then we can take them for granted.

In ’91, no one was ready to take computers for granted yet. They were the fetish object themselves. What I got … was the sense of, “oh right, this is going to fade into the background and the computer stops being the object you care about.” That movement from object to fabric was absolutely prescient.

On Lifestreams

GELERNTER: Well, Lifestreams was already my idea that instead of keeping my information in separate pieces of digital Tupperware with some of it in this app, and some of it in that app, and some of it in the file system, and some of it in my Web brower, and some of it on my laptop, and some in my palm, and some in my cell … — I didn’t want to do that. I wanted every information object I owned arranged in an electronic diary or journal or narrative. Or ‘Lifestream’ is what I call it.

So, in principle, the first thing would be your electronic birth certificate. Then every piece of electronic stuff you either generated or received, including all of your e-mail and every draft of every paper you wrote and every photograph and snapshot and thing you scanned in and your receipts when you travel and your tax returns … it would all be on this one stream. So any computer and device that I used, whether it was portable or large screen, or whatever, I would tune in this Lifestream.

… There was a thesis in the late 90′s and Eric Freeman [who had written this PhD thesis] had a really hard time. He almost got thrown out of there because people said, “Well, are you talking about saving everything? Indexing everything? You’ve got to throw things away and you can’t index everything. And you need a file hierarchy — you’ve got to put things in files. …” Nobody believed it then.

“Too early is wrong.”

GELERNTER: You know, in a sense, there is a window of opportunity and being too early is as bad as being too late.

SHIRKY: “Too early is wrong.”

GELERNTER: Exactly. I mean Babbage had brilliant ideas about computing in the nineteenth century. It didn’t do him a hell of a lot of good at the time. …

SHIRKY: We all make our living, in a way, on positive externalities [of] ideas that are 50 years old. And the funding climate now seems, both on the commercial and on the industrial and on the government side, all to be about three to five year paths. A seven-year timeframe for research — that’s long-term thinking right there. And I wonder, is the university the last place that’s got a long enough time horizon to hold what we used to get from a lot of different sources.

On the persistence of data and lifestreams

GELERNTER: This is not just a small software thing. This is going to be your life. I would love to be able to inherit a Lifestream from my grandparents and see what their lives were really like and there is no reason I shouldn’t leave my Lifestream to my children and my descendants. There’s no reason why these shouldn’t go for centuries or millennia. Or let you immerse yourself in the lives of your forbears, the lives of an earlier time. In such a radically a-historical world as ours, it’s important. But on the other hand, there are cases where I want to suppress the past and it’s important for me that I be able to do that. Certainly it is conceivable. It is doable.

MARKOFF: Except that there are multiplicities of Lifestreams and you may delete a portion, but your life intersected with those of others, which will not reflect that, given search. It gets very tricky.

GELERNTER: It gets very tricky very fast. …

SHIRKY: In the digital world, privacy is the right to insist on incomplete information.

GELERNTER: We live in an environment in which the industry — and certainly computer science or the research field — is always thinking that people care more about privacy than they do. I remember, it wasn’t all that long ago in the mid late 90′s, when people were saying, “Well, what will be the killer app on the Web? You know, mainly it’s going to be for pornography. Right? People are never going to send their credit cards over the Web.”

… They don’t care. The point is that the convenience obviously trumps a very marginal risk in their minds. And in the larger context of privacy, I think people have been aware subliminally, or at some level, for a long time.

In October 2007 I wrote a short bit about how using Twitter detracts from one’s “real” life. In short, I was wrong; at the time I had barely tried Twitter, I knew nobody using the service and I drew artificial line between my online and offline lives; but by now I use the tool daily to access and connect with people and information online and offline.

The continued convergence of our online and offline lives into one single “real” life points out an enormous opportunity; web-enabled tools can help us capture and structure the data we created through our offline lives to help us understand and change our behavior. Realtime data about our “real lives” will shape real decisions.

October 2007, me, On Twitter: How using Twitter detracts from being social:

I tested twitter this past weekend in SF. Having been staunchly against using it, and without any of my friends using it, there never seemed to be the need to use it.

But since I love to test things out, I decided to give it a whirl.

In short, I still don’t care for it.

How I was wrong.

Why? Using Twitter, shooting short notes into the void, detracts from just enjoying the moment, from enjoying the face-to-face interaction, to enjoying the world in front of your eyes. Why do we feel the need to always connect to the network? Can we exist offline anymore? Am I just hopelessly out-of-touch?

… Perhaps my negative viewpoint is caused by the low utility the service offers to me: since none of my friends use it, I only contribute to the cacophony of ideas chucked into the void, without getting any feedback.

Suffice it to say, times have changed. I was wrong; I hadn’t learn how to use Twitter, I hadn’t engaged with other people using Twitter, I hadn’t paid attention to the community and modes of conversation.

But my main contention to using Twitter is that it detracts from being social. Instead of just enjoying it in the moment, we are thinking of what we saw and how we can interpret it in a 140-character note.

… A bit of our mind is thinking about the void, and less of it is focusing on the moment, the people in front of us, and it just shows a bit of disrespect to who we are with to be distracted by the void.

This thinking reflects a shortsighted focus on just one use case; I was only considering using Twitter as a status update (to a faceless, non-existent audience, talking to “nobody and everybody”) rather than a communication tool; granted many of the applications and interfaces to Twitter were not available, but the basic ability to find, follow and communicate with people was right there, and I missed it by not paying attention, failing to explore and rushing to judgement.

Why I was right.

By constantly sharing little thoughts with others, we are taken out of the moment, and fail to piece together these micro-chunks of thought into cohesive, weighty ruminations that span multiple experiences.

… technology is changing the way we converse, share, even think, and not all for the better. Only by working to understand how it is changing how we interact can we truly leverage the new potential. I still have hope. We’re still in the beginning.

A year-and-a-half later, and we’re still just beginning.

Our conversations have indeed become more fractured, our communications shorter, our thoughts scattered, our minds challenged by multi-tasking, our attention challenged by the incessant beeps, vibrations, blinking lights and pop-up reminders of our multiplicative communication tools; our asynchronous tools and processes are being challenged by the increasing availability and use of realtime data.

But that’s nothing new, of course; we’re just continuing to slide down the scale in the same way since we first learned to communicate and exchange information.

Our strategies have yet to catch up to our tools; even as we spend an inordinate amount of time “talking about talking”, we’ve spent little time thinking about how the tools change our lives, online and offline.

Why this is important.
The one recurring theme: all of our tools and for communicating and organizing people have changed over time. To think that how we use Twitter right now is how we will always use Twitter is to neglect the lessons of history, the Internet, the shifting nature of communication and basic, fundamental human needs.

Instead of focusing on what technology does, let’s focus on how it can be used; how will technology change our behavior? What incentives do new technologies create, reinforce or eliminate? What’s the biggest user needs? Yes, we spend more of our time online, but we still exist in a physical offline environment; how can we use online tools to improve our offline lives?

The real opportunity: structuring the offline data created through our online and offline lives by capturing, storing, aggregating, filtering, threading, analyzing, sharing, promoting and getting relevant, personalized feedback.

Realtime data about our “real lives” will shape real decisions.

That is something I can get excited about.

—

Unrelated: How would you explain the web to Thomas Jefferson?

Related and unrelated Sunday reading on innovation in business, life and career:

• Valeria Maltoni, How do You Become an A-Player?

  A couple points: 1) Know that it’s all invented, 2) Stop measuring everything, 3) Be a contribution, 4) Work on improving your skills constantly, and 5) Think “can do” as a default.

  In short, being an “A-Player” isn’t about money, or “friends”, or “followers”; it’s not about anything that’s easy to count or measure; it’s not about trying to be an “A-Player” but simply being one.

• David duChemin, How I Got to The Why:
  

  Why drives how.

  … Whether I am seen to have succeeded or failed at any one endeavor is not the point. The point is that I had a chance to do it, to create, and in so-doing to fan my creativity to flame, to feed my soul, to stretch my mind, to make a difference and leave – I hope – the world a little better for my being here.

• Margart Talbot, The New Yorker, Brain Gain: The underground world of “neuroenhancing” drugs.:
  

  “More and more of our young people are using these drugs [neuroenhancers such as Adderall, Ritalin, Provigil, etc.] to help them work,” Farah said. “They’ve got their laptop, their iPhone, and their Adderall. This rising generation of workers and leaders may have a subtly different style of thinking and working, because they’re using these drugs or because they learned to work using these drugs, so that even if you take the drugs away they’ll still have a certain approach. I’m a little concerned that we could be raising a generation of very focused accountants.”

  (via Jason Kottke)

• James Gardner, Innovation Consultants:
  

  [An innovation consultant's] opportunity is to show these companies how to build scalable processes that can take a large number of incremental improvements, and move them through to completion at volume.

  … the same processes that work for incremental innovation also scale up to breakthrough and disruptive innovation as well. So from the perspective of the innovation consultant, showing a customer how to do incrementalism well leads, eventually, to them doing the kind of high visibility, big bang work they wanted to do in the first place.

• Ashlee Vance, Does H.P. Need a Dose of Anarchy?
  

  H.P. faces a fresh set of challenges as the second stage of Mr. Hurd’s tenure begins. Most pressing is widespread concern that Mr. Hurd has built an inflexible, solipsistic giant so obsessed with schematics and data-driven fiscal machinations that it has lost the ability to deliver that prized and perennial Silicon Valley trick: to surprise and astound.

Enjoying a rich offline life, continuing a couple thoughts about online conversations; in short, instead of creating new tools to publish knowledge, we need to focus on better tools for creating wisdom…

Michael Lewkowitz, Dead of Alive – the future of hashtags:

A couple of weeks ago, Scoble had a epiphany that ‘hashtags are dead…’. That epiphany was really more about realtime search than the future of hashtags. If anything, inline tags (hashtags) are going to be an increasingly important aspect of the realtime web.

… Hashtags are just the beginning of in-line tagging in public micro-messages. They will enable explicit threading and permissionless participation in the realtime web in a natural and extensible way. Chris Messina’s original post had some great details, some of which which I believe will be part of the core infrastructure of the realtime web. And as public micro-messaging services proliferate, inline tags will help enable cross-platform threading with the potential to weave the web and even our offline data.

My comment:

I wouldn’t really call Scoble’s proclamation an “epiphany”; I don’t think we’ve ever used #hashtags terribly well.

The openness of hashtags is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness; I believe using #hashtags will only be popular and well-understood when it makes economic sense for a person to use it; i.e. only when using a hashtags helps someone (promote themselves, be understood better, quicker, easier, help participate in a conversation) will people use them regularly with any rigor.

Meaning:
1) Given that the ability to understand the context of messages (micro- and macro-) through natural language search and contextual analysis (or through semantic web-type architecture) is difficult…
2) … we depend on users to use hashtags to self-identify important parts of messages….
3) … but there isn’t any real meaningful need for people to use hashtags until people can privately capture the externalities behind free public metadata.

Until threads are meaningful (e.g. public, searchable, indexed, promotable), #hashtags are useless.

What is the point of using tags to supply metadata around a conversation until we can use them to improve the conversation? The real value in data isn’t the data itself but in structuring it to help us understand and improve our lives.

Meaning: hashtags are a start, but what we really need are threads.

Information and “knowledge” is easy to find, but where is the wisdom?

—

Of course, these aren’t new topics of mine; digging into the archives to highlight a couple related thoughts:

• Splintering Conversations, May 2008:

  Instead of helping to solve the natural problem of communication that is called “being human”, online communication tools have only added to the complexity. Discontinuous. Fractured. Lack of context. Asynchronous communications scatter across our various inboxes, comments litter the web, incomplete conversations are lost amid the noise. Group conversations evolve, devolve, tune people out as the meanings and topics change, change from private to public to private.

  … Social media has provided us a plethora of tools, devices, methods and new standards for communicating. We know these tools: they have infiltrated our personal and professional lives, changed the ways we live and interact. But we are still at the very early stages of learning how to use them.

• Are “Online Conversations really conversations”, Dec 2008:
  

  Where is the tool that extracts meaning and not just knowledge?

  … We’re a knowledge culture; in our race to create and acquire knowledge we’ve forgotten the meaning and power of wisdom.

  Perhaps it’s impossible to create a web service to extract meaning and create wisdom; perhaps that’s why we need people and not just algorithms. Perhaps that’s why we still need to connect with individuals…

So, what do we do about it?

A temporary digression…

A little known fact: despite my range of geeky interests, my deepest area of knowledge is actually baseball. Always has been, always will be. In another life I would have been a General Manager (GM) of an major league baseball (MLB) team in the United States.

I grew up reading and re-reading box scores, digging into baseball box scores to pick out interesting lines, figuring out the impact of each day’s lines on overall season statistics, looking for signals in the daily randomness. I used to love the USA Today’s expanded box scores (as opposed to the streamlined lines published by other papers in the 80s and 90s); give me a USA Today Sports section during baseball season back then and I could spend an entire day just digging into box scores. I used to pick out individual lines and re-write starting lineups, bullpens, rotations and 25-man rosters using various sets of days’ box scores.

Bill James changed my life.
The first time I read one of Bill James‘ Bill James Baseball Abstracts it opened my eyes to an entirely new way to look at baseball. Bill James was an outsider who meshed his love for baseball, a critical eye towards baseball “truisms’ and statistical genius to create the real study of baseball statistics; Bill James appealed to my naturally contratrian, fact-based mind and I read and re-read every bit of analysis of his I could find.

Bill James is why I played baseball in high school (and given that I played baseball like a statistician, it showed).

Despite their forward thinking Bill James and SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) used to be fairly unrecognized voices, but the Internet changed that; an explosion new voices and content opened baseball fans and analysts to a deeper world and gave hard-core Sabermetrics enthusiasts access to broader sets of data and the ability to publish their own research and engage far broader audiences (early examples: sites like the Baseball Prospectus, the Hardball Times and many other Sabermetrics-inspired websites).

Baseball is a dream for statisticians; each action on the field has a variety of potential results and an innumerable number of concurrent states, creating an enormous mix of situational data to be mined by careful eyes.

Yet few observers were open to new ways to analyze the game; traditional print and TV baseball “analysts” remained stuck in their traditional ways, hidebound to baseball “truths”, dismissive of new metrics and methods to analyze performance.

Structured data changed sports management.
Up until the 1990s teams were run exclusively by consummate insiders, guys who had grown up in and played the game. Sandy Alderson of the Oakland Athletics was one of the few progressive minds; Billy Beane, his successor as GM of the Oakland Athletics, was the first upper-level baseball executive to really blend new analysis tools with traditional scouting methods. Beane’s creative and non-traditional methods for player analysis and team construction were the subject of Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball. Moneyball was divisive and controversial within baseball because it was grossly misunderstood by traditional analysts; as I wrote last year, “Moneyball was about strategy, not tactics: constantly measuring and re-evaluating tactics and alternatives, not about determining and defining the “winning tactic”. But few understood that at the time.

It’s a vastly different world today.

Teams across sports leagues have realized the potential of creating and analyzing structured data to find an edge, to find better ways to structure teams, measure the “marginal revenue product” of players, predict future player performance, analyze trades and decide on salaries, compensation structures and contracts. Baseball teams were the first; along with Beane, Mark Shapiro and their hires of non-traditional Assistant GMs (and future GMs) like Paul DePodesta, J. P. Ricciardi, Dan O’Dowd, Josh Byrnes and Jon Daniels, progressive thinkers have continued to propagate through the baseball executive ranks. For example, following his work at Baseball Prospectus Keith Law worked as Assistant GM for the Toronto Blue Jays for a couple of years (still the only MBA * that has worked in an upper-level management role in a MLB front-office); Theo Epstein of the Boston Red Sox later hired Bill James as a consultant; former investment banker and private equity analyst Andrew Friedman now runs the Tampa Bay Rays (and was name Baseball Executive of the Year last year as the Rays made it to the World Series).

But NFL and NBA teams have started to catch up; examples include the Houston Rockets’ Daryl Morey (the only MBA running a major-league professional sports franchise in the US), entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban and the magnificent baseketball statistics site 82games.

The future is in creating strategies, not copying tactics.
This past baseball off-season was fascinating; the economic recession brought new constraints to teams and forced all participants (teams, players, agents) to adapt to the shifting environment and create new strategies for constructing teams. Free agents faced a limited number of teams willing to sign players, and beyond the marquee free agents signing for well-capitalized teams, players were faced with vastly fewer options, lower salaries and contracts with fewer guaranteed years.

Granted, some teams vastly misjudged the market, but the constraints of the market forced many teams to search for new ways to gain an edge. For example, defense has traditionally been one of the hardest aspects of player and team performance to measure and translate into impact on wins and losses, but in this past off-season defense became one of the focuses for many baseball scouts and executives searching for new ways to construct teams.

But teams have started to copy tactics much faster than since the days when Moneyball was first released; much like the broader web and business arena, creating enduring strategies by structuring data and capitalizing on fundamental trends is becoming even more important. Playing the game by copying the newest tactics is waste of time, a recipe for activity without accomplishments.

There’s a big difference between copying and creating. Which do you want to do?

It’s a fun world we live in…

—

* And not just any MBA, but from my alma mater…

The @tag should work as a communication tool across the web, not just on Twitter.

Aaron Chua, Why social tags are more powerful than tags:

The evolution of tagging as an organisation tool to a social gesture mechanism is an important one.

As a social gesture, tagging has become more viral and people centric. Its communicative nature has open up new ways which coordination can be done.

My comment:

Great point; using tags for communication could be a very powerful way to point data towards people. Imagine if someone could point information or communicate with me simply by using the @tdavidson tag, or I could pick up any bit of data tagged @tdavidson on any platform (web, micro-message et. al.), not just Twitter?

Running a Google Blogsearch or Backtype comment search for @tdavidson simply doesn’t work well enough. Yet.

I take that back, it actually works ok; and extending the reach using Yahoo Pipes to include Flickr, Friendfeed, Twitter and Delicious increases the utility; check out my quick hack of an @me service on Yahoo Pipes.* It would be pretty simple to extend this to allow people to input their own @name, select which services they want to search, filter the results to exclude duplicate results and then select their desired way to receive the results from a variety of push and pull methods. But that’s for real hackers to do…

—

* I excluded the Twitter @replies because I already receive them through other means…

Continuing the discussion from “Developing “personal APIs” will be the key to scaling collaboration.”, “Filtering firehoses, embracing constraints and sparking creativity.” and Michael Lewkowitz’s “The real-time web. Game on!” …

Aaron Chua asked: “…filtering is always valuable but does it need to be real time? When does real time make a big difference in the value?”

Data frames future decisions; Realtime data shapes realtime decisions.

We live realtime online and offline lives; realtime data will ultimately drive use cases and business models in mobile, fixed, online and offline environments.

For example, powerful, timely, structured data available in realtime has been the long-lost key to many proposed mobile application products and business models. While the only successful mobile applications using realtime information exchange to date are a) voice and b) text/SMS, key changes in device user interfaces, upgrades in device processing power, faster data transmission speeds over mobile networks and the increasing availability of personalized structured data are starting to provide users and developers a taste of the possibility.

Continuing the thought: Jan Chipchase, The End of Form / The Beginning of Form:

The world around us contains many computationally easy-to-recognize, known-location, pre-defined shapes waiting to be augmented – street signs, street furniture, and yes, advertising hoardings – which is where the fun begins.

… Just as the battle for ‘control of the internet’ centered (for a while) on the consumer’s means of access – the web browser, so the battle for our ear-drums and eye-balls will hone in on the source. The company that provides the primary filter through which you view and experience the world will have incredible amount of power.

Mobile application developers have struggled with wireless telecom operators for years over operators’ tight control of the “deck” of applications on people’s phones; operators built “walled gardens” and controlled the presentation of applications on the limited screen and storage space on mobile devices to attempt to control and monetize a scarce resource. Application developers locked out of the prime deck real estate struggled to survive on “off-deck” mobile business models.

But that’s changing; while the various mobile app stores aren’t entirely open, their popularity is demonstrating that “open beats closed”.

Continuing with Jan:

… But is there sufficient pull for mainstream consumer’s to turn to some form of nearly-always-worn data glasses? Imagine knowing the tax-bracket of everyone around you – drawing on publicly available tax records and the means to identify an individual in near to real time. Imagine this from the point of view of a would-be lover, a salesman, a charity worker. Extrapolate with mash-ups with Facebook profile, knowledge about your last vacation; previous convictions. Now imagine the advantages you get from access or subscriptions to ‘premium channels’ – data only available to the select few: from the realtime cop feed; to the wolfpack view of the city; to real-time, real-space casual encounters.

A generation hooked on real-time data so compelling that heading out on a friday night just ain’t the same without the buzz of a good feed. It’ll never happen? How many times a day do you check your email? Facebook? Your phone? Your twitter stream? People addicted to data? Of course not – it’ll never happen.

How will this change our urban landscape? Advertising hoardings, entire buildings, indeed entire cities that are computationally more or less desirable to augment. It might be the end of form as we know it.

It might very well be the beginning.

As devices, networks, applications and structured data all continue to develop, the failure of current methods for filtering and processing realtime data will become more evident; but problems create opportunities…

@aaronchua, you’ve now been tagged…