A smattering of recent quarter-thoughts (half of a half-thought) on the different incentives between a custodian and an owner, what “original” really means, the power of asking questions in public, if decentralized responses are really the best strategy, and how much attention we really pay to everything.

• Fred Wilson, Use the Public Channel For Better Customer Service, my comment:

  Point #4 is the most interesting part; in essence, “defaulting to the public channel” would be a way to flip customer service from a one-to-one response channel (cost center) to a many-to-many interaction platform (profit center).

  Private data sits stuffed inside a data center or company waiting for the owner to make sense of it, but public data is open for anyone to make sense from (and ultimately, profit from); the owner becomes a custodian, a massively different relationship.

• Why do underdogs fail to adapt and test “better” strategies if they can’t adopt the “best strategy”? Malcolm Gladwell, Annals of Innovation, How David Beats Goliath.
• Nothing is truly new;

  #1: “The trick is realizing that the success and failure of everything is all in your head”

  #2: “In the end, I live and die on the inside of my head.”

  Culture reverberates around, similar ideas voiced in different ways; it’s the way it’s always been and always will be. Even the “original” is influenced by the past, consciously and unconsciously; the new is shaped by the boundaries, possibilities, conventions and taboos of the past.

  But current copyright law simply doesn’t recognize what “original” work really is in today’s content-rich world; intellectual property law has failed to catch up with how culture has adapted to new technological realities. Whatever can be copied will be copied; instead of fighting to suppress copying and remixing, shouldn’t we focus on learning and promoting how to do it right?

• Ask a simple question like “How would you compare StockTwits and Covestor”, and in a flash, you get a long answer, StockTwits vs. Covestor. I love it when the Internet works the way it should.
• “Bill [Gates] stole my girls”; stories and motivation from Mark Cuban.
• How Jennifer Aniston hit on Malcolm Gladwell (or not); part of an epic conversation over email between Bill Simmons of EPSN and Gladwell. Dig in to Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 for more about “inliers”, running the full-court press, using a roster efficiency by playing a different game, eliminating the NBA draft, and how the force of individual personalities can shape teams, leagues and strategies.
• David Brooks, Globalism goes Viral:
  

  In these post-cold war days, we don’t face a single concentrated threat. We face a series of decentralized, transnational threats: jihadi terrorism, a global financial crisis, global warming, energy scarcity, nuclear proliferation and, as we’re reminded today, possible health pandemics like swine flu.

  A network of diverse, decentralized actors might be the best foundation for dealing with decentralized events such as swine flu, given the advantages that credible, empowered local actors have to create faster, “test-and-learn”-based responses; but we’ve also seen the downside: massive hype, misinformation and a failure to understand the bigger picture (context) behind these global events, a massive misallocation of time, resources and energy.

  The real question: which type of method for organization, centralized or decentralized, has more room to improve?

• Ed Cotton, People will give you 56 seconds:
  

  The average time for a site visit in March of 2009 was 56 seconds. This puts tremendous demands on the efficiency of web design, meaning designers have to make sure people get what they need as quickly as possible. Perhaps this is why most websites look the same.

  It also calls into question the depth that people want to go into to learn more. It’s not uncommon for clients and agencies to think about putting long form content and long copy into areas of their website, but with this research, one has to wonder if any of this material ever gets read or watched.

  All of that may be true, but my guess is that the average is meaningless; instead, what’s the median? What’s the distribution of site visit times?

  More interesting is the average of 111 domains visited per person; but again I’d like to understand the distribution of site visits over those 111 domains.

  In fact, I’d be impressed if you read this far…

A respite from the next round of esoteric impractical thinking…

• Zach Klein, commenting on the Feltronification of Tumblr:

  It’s not the infographics on the page that interest me, rather it’s the trend of emphasizing a user’s popularity on the network. Lamentably, I think this metric will come to define the experience for the next generation of social networks. The internet’s utility for many people will equate to constant awareness of one’s value, and the play of meaningless games to increase the sum. This in turn will render many networks impersonal and irrelevant.

  Displaying social data changes social behavior; most of our statistics publicized by our various social networks, blogs and other websites measure and encourage talking rather than listening; with the increasing ease of broadcasting or “contributing” via sharing, “liking” or reblogging, is the discussion getting dumbed down? In response, should we raise the bar of the conversation, make it harder to create and publish, or find better ways to filter through the noise?

• Mike Speiser, Diversification = Mediocrity:
  

  Proponents of diversification argue that it takes the edge off of making a mistake. That would be a good argument if people acted the same way independent of their ownership in an outcome. But human beings do alter their behavior based on how much skin they have in the game. When costs and benefits are divided amongst too many, accountability is lost. Excessive diversification makes participants passive, dependent on the actions of others who are dependent on the actions of others, and so on. A free rider at best and a sucker at worst.

  Read the rest of the post; also, vaguely reminds me of one of the lessons I’ve learned through failure.

• Noah Brier, Neuroscience and the Creativity of Connections:
  

  Essentially it’s been my feeling that the best ideas really just come from people paying attention to the stuff that doesn’t make any sense. While most of the world ignores or gets angry when things don’t work, inventors see an opportunity to fix a problem (or at least think about why things are the way they are).

  How do we rectify the need to focus and the need to explore?

• My comment, reblogged, in response to a video about Jay Parkinson describing Hello Health:
  

  Very cool indeed; instead of changing the entire system, [Jay Parkinson]’s creating a new system [via Hello Health] that works around the existing; it will start in current un-served and under-served segments and spread to the currently mis-served segments once they realize how much better the solution is; a “quiet” revolution from the quiet masses; I’m excited.

  Very meta.

—

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—

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.

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.

Continuing the discussion from the last (real) post, Invest in the venture system, not venture capitalists…

Click on the graphic “Mapping Innovation Clusters” below to view larger.

CREDIT: McKinsey

A couple questions to start:

• Can governments create entrepreneurial hubs?
• What routes have governments taken to seed and direct innovation hubs?
• Is there a natural linkage between creating an environment for new ventures to creating innovation hubs?
• Typically entrepreneurial hubs require a base of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to flourish; can governments replace venture capitalists?
• Will wee see a different kind of entrepreneurship hub (and innovation hub) emerge and flourish on its own terms in a world of a more distributed, collaborative and distributed system of value creation?

I have a feeling these themes are going to underline a lot of my upcoming thinking…

—

Starting with three separate but related thoughts:

• Paul Graham, Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe.:

  A lot of cities look at Silicon Valley and ask “How could we make something like that happen here?” The organic way to do it is to establish a first-rate university in a place where rich people want to live. That’s how Silicon Valley happened. But could you shortcut the process by funding startups?

  Possibly.

  Read the rest of Paul’s thoughts for the concerns, processes, issues and practicalities.

  … I realize the chance of any city having the political will to carry out this plan is microscopically small. I just wanted to explore what it would take if one did. How hard would it be to jumpstart a silicon valley? It’s fascinating to think this prize might be within the reach of so many cities.

  Although Paul wrote specifically about US cities, the idea applies to any city around the world. Alan Patrick describes how the idea could apply to London; by his estimation, not easily, or cheaply.

• McKinsey: What Matters: Building an innovation nation:
  

  Our analysis of the world’s must successful clusters shows that they have first established themselves as world-class players in an emerging specialty before expanding. This focus allows locations to concentrate limited resources, such as labor and capital, on developing competence and credibility. When successful, the result of these first two steps is the emergence of what we call an “innovation hot spring”: a small and fast-growing hub that relies on a small number of companies to establish itself as a relevant world player in a narrow sector.

  McKinsey identified three primary paths, which essentially break down to the usual: build (direct and indirect), buy (import) and luck into (R&D -> commercial success). Yes, I’ve over-simplified; but still, McKinsey over-focuses on “big innovation” and neglects the kind of daily innovation that occurs throughout the world every day as people adapt and create solutions to address their unique, local opportunities and problems.

  The graphic at the top of this post comes from McKinsey; while it’s interesting, it’s possibly misleading (focusing on patents as measures of innovation) and more worryingly, focused on an incomplete view of what innovation can and will be.

  Curious why?

• John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, The Case of Institutional Innovation:
  

  … existing institutions, firmly rooted in the world of push, will require significant redesign in order to effectively harness the potential of pull. Institutional innovation – redesigning the roles, relationships and governance structures required to bring participants together in productive endeavors – will be a key requirement. In fact, institutional innovation will trump either product or process innovation in terms of potential for value creation.

  … pull institutions will need to re-orient completely with regards to talent as we re-imagine corporations and other institutions as places where talented individuals experiment, learn, perform, and thrive. This will in turn require far-reaching changes to strategy, organization, operations, and technology.

I’m becoming increasingly interested by the examples, best practices and case studies around the roles governments can play in creating innovation and entrepreneurship hubs (and yes, those are separate entities) through direct government intervention and indirect incentive and system structuring.

But are governments paying attention to the right kind of innovation?

—

Aaron Chua (@aaronchua on Twitter) from Singapore’s Interactive Digital Media (IDM) Programme Office recently contributed to a great conversation on my recent post about the various ideas around a “entrepreneur / venture capital stimulus package” to jumpstart the US economy. Aaron has written extensively around the opportunities, challenges and processes behind government investing in startups in Singapore on his blog and has commented extensively on this blog; where are the examples from other governments throughout the world?

There are many, many opportunities for entrepreneurs, investors and innovators outside the US; where are the best places to read more about innovation and entrepreneurship outside the US echochamber?

I’m ready to dig in far, far more…

—

Lastly, food for thought: Michael Lewis, Wall Street on the Tundra.

Links for…

• Reviewing: Nate Silver, 538: Politics Done Right: Some Post-Oscar Thoughts on Forecasting.
• Deep, deep thinking: John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison: Why do companies exist?:
  

  … our economy is chock-a-block with businesses that exist to maximize efficiency at scale. Businesses presuming predictability in order to push out mass produced products supported by mass marketing programs. Businesses relying on command and control in a world that’s increasingly difficult to command or control. Businesses losing their leadership positions at an ever-faster rate because they continue to push in a world gone pull.

  Yes, the death of command and control has been greatly exaggerated for years now. The early prognosticators, however, mistook the lead times required for deployment of the new digital infrastructure. They also missed how long it would take to develop the new social and business practices needed to harness the capabilities of our new infrastructure–capabilities that are only now becoming visible on the fertile edges of business and society.

  What we need, rather than a managerial philosophy based on the communications and transportation infrastructures of the 19th century, is one geared to the digital infrastructure of the 21st. We need a new rationale for our biggest private and public sector institutions–to re-imagine them in line with the world around us. Rather than scalable efficiency, we need scalable connectivity, learning, and performance. Rather than push, we need institutions that pull.

• Revisiting: Paul Graham, Startups in 13 Sentences.
• Noting: My comment on Ethan Bauley’s post to social / viral marketing lessons:
  

  Interestingly, I think we may be in a world where knowing HOW to use information (and information asymmetries) may be more important than the information itself. Information is a commodity, but how we structure it (and what we do with it = strategy) is still a source of competitive advantage.

  For now …

• Using: Cameron Moll, 20 tips for better conference speaking.
• Exploring for a day or two (or three): Big Bend National Park.

Catch you on the other side.

From a week in the mountains and plains of Colorado…

• Larry Bowa reacts to Brad Penny:

  Put that on the (expletive) dot-com.

• Jan Chipchase, Lubing the Edges of the Internet:
  

  There is a place at the edges of the internet where the level of friction makes content and data grind to a halt. It’s largely unregulated. And it just got seriously lubed.

• James Gardner, What kind of innovation does your bank do?

  My comment (highlighted by JJ Hornblass):

  Whether you’re driving incremental or breakthrough change, they are both innovation. Honestly if it’s delivering value (short-term financial, long-term strategic positioning, etc.) it doesn’t matter what it’s called.

  The bigger problem is when we mislabel our efforts to try to position incremental innovation as breakthrough “Play to Win” innovation; the two types of innovation (although I admit it’s more of a continuum) require different operational, financial and strategic commitments. We’ve got to be honest about what bets we’re making and how we’re playing them, or we run the risk of tremendous intra-organizational resource misallocation.

• Lynette Luna in FierceWireless, A Nokia-Facebook combo is a no-brainer.
• Phil Goldstein in Fierce Wireless, Android’s absence: where was the platform at Mobile World Congress?

  There were conflicting opinions about the absence / abundance of new Android-powered devices at the recent Mobile World Congress. It’s interesting to watch handset manufacturers and carriers balance their product development, handset replacement and hardware and service rollout plans in an industry undergoing massive infrastructural and consumer usage shifts.

• Duke Stump, Building a Bonfire Brand. My comment:
  

  The odd thing is that if attempting to water down products and messages for the “mainstream” never creates the desired mainstream appeal and usually angers the core. I try to hold the phrase “Be Undeniably Good” in my head whenever I’m making a product, business or life decision, and it’s impossible to be “undeniably good” to everyone, especially the broad swath of the mainstream.

  Attempting to be everything to everyone is a guarantee of being nothing to nobody.

• David Hornik, The Evolution of TED.

  I wonder, as TED evolves and continues to grow, will it spawn a conference to replace the “old TED”?

• And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention:

  1) Umair Haque at the Daytona Sessions, “Constructive Capitalism” (video on Vimeo).

  2) Umair Haque, The Responsiveness Scorecard:

  Who can develop better kinds of ownership that create value for everyone? Advantage will flow inexorably to those economies – and companies – who can.

  … Whoever can invent better kinds of contracts for the 21st century will realize a tremendous advantage.

  …Responsibility, accountability, and transparency aren’t just buzzwords – they’re the keys to radically altering the costs and benefits of management.

  Organizations, incentives, compensation structures, measuring and valuing “externalities”: until we can change these underlying institutions and constructs then any stimulus will be vastly misdirected.

  We can’t go forward by trying to fill the holes of the past.

Topics better left to others to cover today:

• The loss of solitude, the near-omnipresence of ambient shared information, intermittent positive reinforcement, promoting status, embracing technology, the disassembling of the digital self or why the social web is like crack.
• The debate over freemium business models, pursuing traffic v. revenues, the death of advertising or the cult of free.
• Redefining brands, conversational marketing or advertising as content.
• The death of the newspaper industry, the irrelevance of the dinosaur journalist or the genius / banality of “citizen journalism”.
• Self-promotion, the redefinition of celebrities, the cult of the visible self, cyber-hedonism or the inertness of a “personal brand”.
• The closed routes for IPOs, the slump in overpriced acquisitions, the “death” of venture capital or the lack of disruptive thinking and actions by the new venture industry.
• Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed or blogging, the death of email, the threat of technology, the value of serendipity, the loss of the personal touch or the sad, fractured state of communications on the web.

Sometimes a good ramble is fun…

Strategy, innovation and openness to change…

• Scott Anthony, Solving the ‘More with Less’ Problem:

  And after decades of continuous improvement programs, most companies don’t have much fat to trim.

  Really? Most companies don’t even have an idea what fat is, not to mention an idea of where to find it or how to productively trim it. Perhaps instead of trimming the fat they need to cut out the bone.

  Most companies have been “continuously improving” the wrong things; but why?

• Prince Campbell, Art, Rocks and Obama (Or how to live in the age of the perpetual remix):
  

  …The rules we created in the 20th Century are now practically archaic. And when you attempt to use them on 21st Century situations they sound ridiculous to current sensibilities.

  Everything introduced to the public will be remixed and used in purposes that is only limited by imagination.

  It’s the age we live in.

  You have to accept that you never know where things will end up.

• In an environment where the foundations of our economies are constantly shifting, perhaps the greatest opportunity is to experiment with the basic foundations of organizations.

  I’ll explain more later, but start with this thought from Michael Lewkowitz on The proprietary/open balance in startup mode:

  I believe in the principles and power of peer-production but am finding it a constant tension as we build the for-profit startup. A big part of that I’m sure is my experiential conditioning. What’s been most recently tested is how much of our business strategy and development plans should be in the public domain.

  … As I’ve sat with it now for a couple of days, I’m actually questioning what if anything should be kept private. It comes down to speed of execution and I also think that the more broader the engagement the greater defensibility we have – provided we execute. If people are a part of it, they’ll rally to support it.

  What do you think? Is there anything that should be kept private? Why? What are the risks? What are the benefits?

  Right now I’m feeling ready to open everything up and push this experiment even further.

  Can business strategy be created in the open?

  Should a startup discuss and debate key strategical decisions in the open?

  What could be possible if we did?

There’s only one way to find out.

—

Related: The Mark Cuban Stimulus Plan – Open Source Funding:

… I was looking for an idea that hopefully could inspire people to create businesses that could quickly become self funding. Businesses that just needed a jump start to get the ball rolling and create jobs. Im a big believer that entrepreneurs will lead us out of this mess. I just needed a way to help.

So here it is. Some people will love it, some will hate it. It is what it is.

You must post your business plan here on my blog where I expect other people can and will comment on it. I also expect that other people will steal the idea and use it elsewhere. That is the idea. Call this an open source funding environment.

From a Sunday morning curled up with the laptop and the cacophony of the web…

• The operating leverage of web businesses is rooted in the power of capability leverage.

  Fred Wilson, When Talking About Business Models, Remember That Profits Equal Revenues Minus Costs:

  The web can create incredibly high operating margin businesses.

  … if [these companies in our portfolio] continue to do a lot with a little, their business models will be built on operating margins that are very high and can create a lot of value without a lot of revenue.

  I think that’s an important part of the economics of the web that are left out of most discussions of Internet business models. Yes, we are turning analog dollars into digital pennies in many cases. But we are also doing the same thing on the cost side, maybe even more so. And I think that “operating leverage” is going to create a lot of value.

  How are these small businesses able to create “operating leverage”?

  The high margins of small web companies are rooted in the idea of “capability leverage”. John Hagel, Exploring New Forms of Economic Leverage:

  Capability leverage—the ability to access and mobilize the resources of other companies to add more value to customers—is a powerful force for creating value in markets. Rather than one company trying to do everything, it can mobilize a broader network of participants to deliver highly specialized and flexibly tailored value to individual customers.

  (Thanks to Aaron Chua for the reminder of the power of “capability leverage”)

• “It’s open to the mainstream on their terms.”

  Jan Chipchase, Stickier, Less Complicated Relationships:

  There are a number of factors that suggest that (some form of) [businesses using Twitter] will become mainstream: it’s opt in and easy to unsubscribe should you decide it’s not for you; there’s an element of ‘personal’ yet it’s not intrusive; its delivered in formats appropriate to the customer … ; there is very little friction … ; it leverages existing infrastructure – no new hardware or software required. If not the next neighbourhood flyer then a useful additional to. It’s open to the mainstream on their terms.

  Taking it one step forward, how can we start to think about integrating all the tools? Hutch Carpenter, How to Integrate Social Media into Product Marketing.

• How do we build “capability leverage” into our lives?

  Related: a look into the history behind Twitter: Dom Sagolla, How Twitter Was Born (via Noah Brier).

  As I noted in a comment to Noah:

  Amazing how simple insights can lead to something far grander, all by being open to human ingenuity.

  Taking the idea further, how can we create better structures (technological, organizational, cultural and legal) to empower human ingenuity in a constantly disruptive world?

  I’ve got a couple of ideas; peer-production, the social venture commons and VenTwits are starts towards creating the open, flexible and transparent platforms to:

  Enable us to develop the funding and organizational models…
  … to incubate and “scale our lives” by creating personal ecosystems…
  … to power our personal “freemium” life models…
  … by enabling us to create and “exchange” social capital…
  … and lower our inter-personal transaction costs…
  … and create cheaper context behind our value-creating actions…
  … to create our own hubs on the edges of value creation.

  But as you know, it’s less about what exists and more about how we use them. Let’s try and find out what’s possible.