Intimacy without being Intimate.

Intermittent, one-way, more of a “crush” than love; the feeling of a shared relationship without it being shared, a benevolent form of stalking; ambient intimacy is what happens when we strengthen our loose ties, by keeping in touch with people by following, reading and caring about another person without telling them you care.

… The Paradox.

But here’s the paradox: as much as I want to decry our expanding loose networks, fracturing attention and fake friendships sustained through our ambient connections, maximizing the power of loose networks and loose ties is the real opportunity; it’s where I’ve met the most interesting people, learned the most interesting things, connected to new opportunities; it’s where we find growth and create new value, it’s where we find new edges; it’s the source of innovation and insights we would not have seen otherwise. It’s why we care about serendipity and discovery; we’re hooked by the positive variable intermittent reinforcement baked into all successful, widely-adopted tools; an insight, an opportunity, a confirmation, a life-changing connection behind every click.

Why is this important?

As Jim Mitchem (@smashadv) pointed out in the comments, “there are amazing opportunities that exist behind each of these human collisions“.

Balancing the benefits and costs of human collisions is the core of discovery, search, serendipity and filtering; it’s why we care about Google, Twitter and the fail whale, journalism, public relations, marketing, social media, blogging, et. al; at the core of every consumer, user, customer, marketer, developer and salesman is a person responding to the incentives that frame their worlds. Deep within the birth, rise, decline and death of any industry or product is a better way to create, understand, structure and balance the human collisions in our worlds.

With that, here’s to maximizing collisions…

Comment on the original post to keep the conversation flowing…

Quoted deep in an article by Blaise Alleyne in Techdirt, Music Fans And ‘Amateur Musicologists’ May Impact Coldplay/Satriani Copyright Battle, three partners in the Intellectual Property Group at Kilpatrick Stockton LLP discuss the role of “amateur musicologists in Joe Satriani’s lawsuit against Coldplay for copyright infringement:

What makes the Internet commentary regarding the two songs particularly interesting is that much of it replicates the type of expert analysis that both sides will likely use if the case goes forward. In music copyright infringement cases, it is rare for parties to rely solely on bare assertions of copying or independent creation. Instead, they frequently engage “musicology” experts to undertake detailed analyses of every element of alleged similarity between the two works and conclude whether all or portions of one work were copied from the other. The parties and their experts in [this case] should consider the analyses of the “amateur musicologists” that have weighed in via the Internet and other media, if for no other reason than they may be informative of how a jury might ultimately view the case…

While Satriani v. Martin may not go to trial for a variety of reasons, it is clear that user-generated content sites like YouTube have the potential to alter the way music cases — and other types of copyright case — are developed. Because advances in technology allow the public to participate in real-time infringement debate, future parties would do well to monitor this “chatter” as it could uncover evidence and theories that may be helpful to the case of the copyright owner, the alleged infringer or both. [emphasis added]

Alleyne adds to the commentary:

The online discussion is largely what has made this case so unique. There have been successful copyright infringement lawsuits over melodies in the past …, but never has the public been able to participate so much in the debate.

…The melodies are undoubtedly similar, but the legal question is whether or not Coldplay copied from Satriani. It’s not just Coldplay’s word against Satriani’s, but music fans and “amateur musicologists” are gathering evidence and providing theories which are having a noticeable impact on the proceedings.

And people say the web is all just noisy chatter; done right, the unorganized mass of people can influence institutions with more power than ever before.

Obviously experts and amateurs have their place: the opportunity is using combinations of both in the right ways and situations.

—

* Even “experts” have their odd deficiencies.
** Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: a “crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do.”

Lost in the woods? Blaze a trail.
Facebook was designed to be closed, created its terms of service around the promise of privacy, developed a user interface and a set of “privacy constraints” that created a false expectation of privacy with its users, neglected the fact that the technological reality didn’t meet the promise, fought through numerous user interface (e.g. Newsfeed) and business model changes (e.g. Beacon, App developer platform) that challenged this misunderstood notion of privacy, implemented technological changes to bring openness to a closed platform, and now faces the unrealized realization that their path will be their own. Time to stop following and start blazing.

Will we still light fires once we’ve all been burned?
Deep within the conversations about Facebook and Twitter is a reminder: privacy is a cultural interpretation, a philosophical question rather than a technological answer, government mandate or legal certainty.

Privacy is a cultural expectation codified into law; technology creates new possibilities for culture to exploit, frame new realities, refresh our governments, rewrite the rules of law.

(A relevant digression: do you think copyright law will remain unchanged by a remix culture?)

What will happen once we’ve all been burned by a private foible becoming unexpectedly public?

Will we still rake our public figures through the coals? Or will be put our hot irons away and as a collective society merely shrug our shoulders, an unceremonious acknowledgment that humans make mistakes, a recognition that we are all public figures in our own spheres?

It’s not about what it does but how it’s used.
Why does this matter? Facebook, Twitter, email, macro-messages, micro-messages, data, the web, the Internet: it’s not about what it does but how it’s used.

Focusing on Facebook and Twitter on their own is a nauseating endeavor; Twitter and Facebook are the latest case studies to be misunderstood and misapplied, the latest incarnates of the broader technological and cultural shifts framing our lives:

• The shifting roles (and power) of individuals and companies, the clash between the economic returns available to individuals, non-structured groups and hierarchical organizations;
• The fundamental economics of scale butting up against its new technological realities, creating new strategies to capture the shifting returns to scale and scope;
• The mixing of the online and the offline, a rationalization of what a “real life” truly means;
• The increasing importance of ideals, the shift of returns from hard assets to soft assets, the decreasing returns from controlling differential access to an asset and the increasing returns from understanding what to *do* with access to an asset;
• Shifting transaction costs reframing the value created by communication, demonstrated by the shift of the time and attention spent between work, entertainment and communication, human nature’s hardwired quest for stimulation reaching the next plateau;
• Some things getting easier to create (content), some things getting harder (making sense of content), reframing our notion of experts, leaders, people, networks and connections.

Yet all trend lines break once we stress systems to their breaking points; as humans, we’re exceedingly good at tearing down our own systems.

Will economic returns always flow towards openness? No. Will we always care about privacy? Not in the same way. Will being connected always be important? Not in the same way. Will everything we believe to be true ultimately prove to be true? No.

Depression, recession, expansion, growth, decline; these are mere manifestations of greater subtexts, proofs of the continued existence of humanity. Facebook will not be the last social network, Twitter will not be the last communication platform; we have needs we have to realize, there are moguls and captains of industry we haven’t met yet, markets yet to be created, bubbles and bursts yet to be experienced, shocks to systems we have yet to create.

More importantly, why and how are people changing? Where is the value flowing? And where are you headed?

—

Updated 5/5: Yes, I changed the title; the initial title “A brief rant: Three notes on privacy, communication, technology and culture” simply wasn’t that good.

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)

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?

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?

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…

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…

Will realtime networks force us to restructure our usage of the term “friend”, the impact of Dunbar’s number and the convergence of conversations and entertainment”

On realtime, search, tagging and structuring the cacophony:

• Aaron Chua, Twitter as social VRM, a big idea:

  To prove that this is viable, I did a simple experiment on Twitter Search using the phase: I am looking for. The results are pretty interesting. This simple search alone has revealed the intentions of many people that ranges from dating, to products, to jobs etc. The opportunity then is to build tools that allow vendors to respond and for the user to control these responses.

• Alan Patrick, The Future of Twitter: Social VRM, my comment:
  

  Agreed Alan, the opportunity:

  - Isn’t about directly aggregating and controlling but instead facilitating open access
  - Isn’t about creating the applications and monetizing directly but increasing the underlying interactions and monetizing indirectly (by making it easier to app developers to access and use data and then take a share of the value created in the interactions)
  - Isn’t about overtly cataloging, structuring and selling data (interactions = tweets) for companies to mine, which would cause people to change behavior (kind of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of public conversations), but about providing better routing and context behind interactions (tweets, in this platform) so that intent can be easier, more meaningful, less mystical, more direct.

  Companies and people still need a lot of work in structuring and understanding “the flow”; good times ahead…

• Nic Brisbourne, Realtime search and shared data services come together?, my comment:
  

  The interesting bit you point out is the persistence of presence, the ability to link actions together by a specific individual over a period of time to get a more reasonable and true look into their intent. Browsing history and cookies were just a start; Twitter and Facebook (and blogs, and delicious, and any site where we create and curate content) helps to piece together the story, but as Iain points out, the next step will be tools based on the VRM philosophy that will provide the reasons (and incentives) for people to provide a clearer view into their actions. Right now we hide our intent in varying degrees of plain sight, but I’d hazard a guess that we’d change our behavior if we could see the value.

• Aaron Chua, Pull platforms need powerful coordination mechanisms:
  

  Any mechanisms that help us to sort through the proliferation of options and find the resources that are truly useful to us will have great value. Mechanisms that capture and build on the insights and experience of others will be even more valuable because they will create a classic increasing returns opportunity. That’s the potential of tagging – if it can scale.

• Aardvark Blog, Social Search is the New Search:
  

  Just like Web Search provided a revolutionary way to find web pages that have the information you’re looking for, Social Search is a revolutionary way to find people that have the information you’re looking for. In both cases, intelligent search indexing is a vast improvement over the manual process of following links or browsing through directories.

• Michael Lewkowitz, A new foundation for distributed collaboration and collective intelligence:
  

  Twitter has been experiencing extraordinary growth and the the use of #hashtags has enabled a new dimension. As we tag, we build threads. These threads weave throughout the Twittersphere, linking interests, communities and conversations. As we tag we’re collectively weaving a tapestry that both describes our world and crafts the edges of what creates it. Over time I’m fascinated by the potential reach threads can have and see them as a launch-pad for new collaborations. And as these things happen, I can only imagine what these threads will be able to tell us about our selves and where the world is going. Only time will tell.

  [Full disclosure: I'm a bit biased, but I'm really excited about the potential of thread.io and the next iterations of the idea...]

Search, tagging, social search, threads… can we ever solve the problem of overabundance of information and complexity in a rich content world, or is our nature to stress systems to their breaking points simply an intractable human condition?