Month: January 2008

Thinking about capillary conversations and choice

I’ve written two posts about capillary conversations so far (linked for your convenience here and here), and they seem to have elicited a reasonable level of comment and question.

Three questions seem to repeat themselves:

How often should I tweet?
What should I tweet about?
When should I take the conversation offline?

These are not simple questions, and we will throw away a lot of value by trying to answer them prescriptively. Let me try and answer them “provisionally”, let me share where my thoughts currently are. On the question of tweet frequency, I think that it’s a subtle negotiation between each person and their followers. One tends to get some sort of feel, a sense, of what the right level is. I tend to go up every time I learn to do something within Twitter, and then, once I have learnt enough, I revert to some prior base level. At least that’s how it feels to me.

Tweet frequency by itself can become an irritant to others. I have had at least one Facebook friend, someone I’ve known for 20 years (but not particularly well, we were nodding acquaintances who met maybe a dozen times over the two decades) comment that he couldn’t handle the level of updates he was getting in his Facebook mini-feed when I started tweeting my status. So far I haven’t had to unfollow anyone; I have blocked a few auto spammers, and I have gone for turning Notifications off for many people; it was part of learning how to use the tool.

For some people, tweet frequency is inextricably linked with tweet topic; this can have positive and negative effects. So I’ve had some people tell me I was tweeting too often about what I was listening to, while others have engaged with me more often as a result of the music tweets. Some are interested in discussions about restaurants or meals, some not. Some are relaxed about sharing domestic details, some less so. What should I do?

The answer, for me, lies in the third question. When should I take the conversation offline? If I turn that question around on its head, and ask When should I share something? When should I use twitter public rather than a DM. Now I get a clearer answer. I should only share something when I think it will be of value to the group. This is even true of @person tweets…. they should be DMs unless there is some benefit for the group in seeing the @person tweet.

So far so good, but all this is theory. I spent some time looking at what I did, and what I saw other people doing, in Twitter. And I began to realise that there are maybe three legitimate uses:

1. For the benefit of the group, the followers.
2. For the benefit of the tweeter, as in a hoosgot or similar question.
3. For the benefit of both, as in when a new feature or function is being trialled.

Now all this has been stated from the perspective of the person doing the tweeting; there is a lot we can learn from the alternate view, that of the follower, the watcher, the listener. And here the only analogy that comes to mind is a mixing desk or a graphic equaliser. For each person I follow, I’m going to need one of these, so that I can “turn up the volume” for the things I am interested in, and reduce volume for the things I am not interested in.

I have seen people make the mistake of thinking this is about topics of interest and preferences, I wish it was that simple. You see, I may be interested in person A’s book taste but not his music taste, and in person B’s music taste but not her book taste. Which means that I can’t just have a topic-driven set of preferences. They have to be by topic by person.

At least that’s how I’m thinking about all this right now. The tweeter has a duty of care, a duty to his community of followers, to adjust the tone, the frequency and the topics in response to community feedback. But that’s at community level. In addition, the tweetee needs some slider controls per tweeter, set a bit like the privacy controls in Facebook, indicating what kind of information is wanted and what is not wanted.

We are going to make mistakes as we play with these tools. We are going to see a lot of value generated from these tools. But much of that value will go to the early adopters; not because there’s a secret sauce, but because the early adopters will have one advantage the rest won’t have…… they’ll be able to attract the cream of the crop of the new generation entering the marketplace. [I thought of saying the workplace, but changed my mind and went for marketplace].

In the end it’s all going to boil down to choice. Choice made by the follower, the tweetee. Choice made both physically as well as logically; as the tools get better, capillary conversations will become more and more sophisticated.

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Thinking about digital divides

Regular readers of this blog will know my views on enfranchising those that are currently disenfranchised, be it for physical, economic or social reasons. More specifically, I try and do whatever I can to push towards a goal of ubiquity of access to information, to information tools, and to connectivity. Which is why the very concept of the Digital Divide concerns me greatly.

With this in mind, you can imagine how I felt when I saw the ClustrMap for this site as of this morning; I know it’s very unscientific, and that my readership is infinitesimal, but for some reason the sample seems representative of the Divide.

www.confusedofcalcutta.com-world

Capillaries can carry compressed context

I’ve been playing around with FoxyTunes, installing it in Firefox, getting the TwittyTunes extension. And it’s not just because I like music. I think what’s happening here is very powerful.

Let’s start with Twitter, it looks harmless and gormless, what possible use could it have? After all, what can you do in 140 characters? Let’s see.

First off, I can send messages that look like the one below. I typed it in myself, it described what I was doing at the time.

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What don’t I like about it? Well, it’s not good enough for the 21st century. For starters, I shouldn’t have to type it in. Something should be scraping what I am doing, capturing it in a way I can choose to share with others. Choose, we must remember that word. And what else? Oh yes, wouldn’t it be nice if I could enrich the information I was sending? Provide more information about the artist or group, maybe YouTube video links, maybe Wikipedia links, maybe Flickr links, maybe even the homepage of the band or group. How about a link to the song itself, so that someone else can sample it, try it out, decide for themselves if they like it? Maybe even a way to search for more information, and the tools to buy the CD or DVD in physical or digital format?

Chance would be a fine thing, but ….. how can I SMS all that? But wait a minute, the 140 character limit isn’t a real limit, not if I send a short url linking to all that. Or even better, having someone do that for me, a web service like tinyurl.

So now all I need is for someone to build an app that scrapes what I am listening to, figures out what it is, goes and collects the enrichments and conveniences I want to send with the information (band links, YouTube, Flickr, Google, Amazon, the Facebook fan page, maybe a Netvibes collection of related feeds, the Wikipedia entry and so on) and then packages all that into a small space using something like tinyurl.

Which brings me to TwittyTunes and FoxyTunes. Now my Twitter message looks like this:

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It does the scraping, directly out of my iTunes. It lets me choose whether to share what I am listening to with others, song by song. It sends the message on to Twitter. But that’s not where the value is. For that, you, the “follower” of my tweet, need to click on the link, and hey presto, you get something that looks like this:

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You see, this is why I play with things like Twitter. Not because I want to appear cool. But because I am so old and grey and slow that the best way I learn is by playing. Now I can really see how something like Twitter can add value in the enterprise. And I’m secure enough in myself to want to share what I find out, openly and freely. Which is what I’m doing here. [Without a business model or a monetisation plan in sight :-)]

It’s worth bearing a few things in mind. First there was the web. Then there was SMS. Without SMS there is no Twitter. Without the web there is no Twitter. Now we’ve had tinyurl for a long time, but it starts coming into its own when we start using something like Twitter. As a result of all this, someone else could build something like FoxyTunes (which looks like Netvibes meeting last.fm), and then building TwittyTunes to connect up with the Twitter world. And then suddenly everything else waltzes in to enrich what we can see and do, ranging from text to audio to video, from search and syndication and conversation to fulfilment.

What strikes me is the power manifest here, the power of connecting simple things like SMS and tinyurl and Twitter. Small pieces loosely joined, as David Weinberger said.

We are moving into a world where open multisided platforms will dominate, with simple standards and simple tools connecting up wide open spaces. We are seeing it happen now. This post is not about FoxyTunes. Or TwittyTunes. Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Google. Or Amazon. Or iTunes. Or Flickr. Or YouTube.

It’s about all of them. It’s about all of them, and the apps we don’t know about yet, the ones that will emerge tomorrow. How we can find ways of bringing all of them together and moving information around them, linking information between them, enriching and sharing that information beyond them.

By the way, we do stuff like this in the enterprise already. This is what we use e-mail and attachments for, this is why we use mailing lists and address books and spreadsheets and documents and presentations. All the things we’ve grown to love.

Or, in my case, hate. If you’re like me, you’ve had it with those tools. Absolutely had it. H.A.D. I.T. They are so not fit for purpose. Or. looking at it another way, there is a generation of tools out there that are so much more fit for purpose.

We’re not dealing with firehoses any more. We’re dealing with capillaries, as I discussed in my post yesterday. And these capillaries carry and distribute information nutrients, and process and eject information waste and toxins. The real power of all this lies in the increasing transportability of context.

Oh, incidentally, in the past, I’ve found the tools for grabbing screenshots frustratingly complex and time-consuming, so I’ve tended not to use them. It is fitting that this time around, I could do all this easily. Because of a project called Jing, and because I then had simple and seamless ways of going from Jing to Flickr to iPhoto to ecto to WordPress. And guess how I found out about Jing? Through someone’s tweet.

Also incidentally, it would be worth looking at the role played by the opensource movement in making sure we can move around so freely between all these applications. Which brings me to a strange conclusion. More a hypothesis. Am I right in considering the possibility that VRM is necessary only because everything is not opensource? That good opensource obviates the need for VRM? Doc? Don? Steve? Chris? Chris? Anyone out there?

Musing about Capillary Conversations

There’s something I find truly fascinating about the way we converse. At home, when I was growing up, the house was always full of people, of different ages, speaking different languages (primarily English, Tamil and Bengali), waltzing between bilateral and multilateral conversations. At school, it was more of the same, except the ages were less diverse, there were fewer bilateral conversations, and the languages were English, Bengali and Hindi. The college canteen exhibited similar characteristics, as did that Mecca of college canteens, India Coffee House, College St, Calcutta. Photos below courtesy of Lecercle.

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The location didn’t matter as much as the way conversation flowed, how the adda worked. How the participants in the adda provided emergent governance and kept things moving. Of course you had the bores and the bombasts, but somehow the adda coped with them. Managed them, digested them, ejected them. And flourished.

Talking about addas, here are a few definitions that I’ve tried to cull from the article I linked to above:

adda n.

the fine art of socialising
relaxed conversation about anything and everything
one of the favourite pastimes of the people of Bengal
where elders used to discuss their politics at a local place
literary sessions usually rounded off by the serving of exquisitely prepared snacks and cups of tea
a dense fog of cigarette smoke, an assorted aroma of food and coffee, and a loud hum: the sound of several addas
a stream of visitors from early morning to late evening
serious, articulate and dignified elderly men deliberating on a serious topic
my grandmother regally presided over her own meetings
every topic under the sun was discussed, and of course family gossip was exchanged
elders acted as arbitrators in family or local disputes
sometimes, even marriages were arranged in these feminine addas

You get my drift? The adda was a social network, but it wasn’t electronic. It was a blogger’s meet, without a computer in sight. It was the blogosphere before the blogosphere existed. It was a place, yet it was everywhere.

Addas were fantastic. They are fantastic. They continue to be fantastic.

But. Addas didn’t scale. When we had multiple addas, there was some conversation that transcended addas, but it was limited. And for sure it didn’t transcend time or space. Everything was now and here. Sure it was “live”, and of course that was fantastic, but there were a few drawbacks. The conversations didn’t persist, so if someone wasn’t there tough luck. No replays, no recorded highlights. If the conversation was in a language you were less than fluent in, tough luck. Everything was now, no time to translate. If you couldn’t remember the names of the people you met, or if you weren’t introduced to everyone when you came in, then tough. Too bad. You see, addas weren’t like business meetings, with fixed start and end times and endless droning by people who liked the sound of their own voices. People walked in and out of addas. Freely. You weren’t always introduced, you didn’t always know everyone either. But usually there was someone who knew you, who greeted you as you came in, and that was good enough for the others.

So there were good things and there were drawbacks, but on balance they were fantastic.

For a long time now, I haven’t been able to come up with the right way to describe what I saw happening in the verandahs and streets, the college canteens, the India Coffee Houses.

[I’m not sure I’ve got it now. But then that’s what makes blogging so valuable. I can stick something out here and invite comment, watch you improve on it or cut it to shreds or even do both — at the same time — without getting hung up about it.]

What changed? How come I feel good about the descriptions now, when I didn’t even a few months ago. I’ll tell you what. Twitter. That’s what changed. Here’s another extract from the adda link I provided earlier:

Come evening, and parks and important street crossings of Kolkata attracted adda-loving young people. Idly watching traffic and people go by, casual conversations assumed new dimensions. The middle-aged and the elderly frequented neighborhood shops or dispensaries. The day’s experiences were related, with the shop owner or the homely doctor joining in. With time hanging heavy on their hands, unemployed young men chose two places for their adda. The roadside ground floor verandah (known as the rok) of a house, or the roadside tea stall. Occasional lewd remarks, aimed at passing girls, caused much resentment among the seniors of the locality.

Markets are conversations. By watching the interactions between the physical world and the electronic world, by observing what was happening at work and at home, connecting the family and the workplace to Facebook and Twitter and mobile devices, I began to see something that reminded me of something else. Which was this: When I had my heart attack in 2006, I started learning more about how the heart functioned, which included understanding how arteries and veins worked. Which meant I started seeing diagrams like the one below, reproduced courtesy of Wikipedia.

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Now let me add and emphasise some of what is said below this diagram in Wikipedia:

Blood flows from digestive system heart to arteries, which narrow into arterioles, and then narrow further still into capillaries. After the tissue has been perfused, capillaries widen to become venules and then widen more to become veins, which return blood to the heart.

The walls of capillaries are composed of only a single layer of cells, the endothelium. This layer is so thin that molecules such as oxygen, water and lipids can pass through them by diffusion and enter the tissues. Waste products such as carbon dioxide and urea can diffuse back into the blood to be carried away for removal from the body. Capillaries are so small the red blood cells need to partially fold into bullet-like shapes in order to pass through them in single file.

Capillary permeability can be increased by the release of certain cytokines, such as in an immune response.

When I see pictures like the one above, when I read descriptions like the one above, I start thinking. Is that what Twitter is? Is Twitter a set of capillaries, connecting arteries of conversation in the physical world to veins of conversation in the electronic world, connecting the home and the physical workplace to the electronic social network, the virtual world and the mobile device? Is there something special happening between Facebook and Twitter and the phone, set in the all-too-real contexts of home and work, cutting across ages and genders and places and subjects?

Is this something special happening because we can now do things we couldn’t do before? Is it because the conversations are persistent, because they can be archived and retrieved, subscribed to, searched, found? Is it because the conversations can be participated in more freely, because we know who’s in the conversations, because we no longer have to rely on memory? Is it because the barriers to entry and exit of the adda are lower, we no longer have to be fluent in every language, we can translate after the event?

Is it because the relationship between the physical and the virtual world isn’t about either-or, it’s about and? Physical and virtual.

Maybe we do have capillary conversations.

Twitter isn’t a fire-hose, it’s a collection of capillaries. That’s what pub-sub is about, capillary action. Where nutrients get diffused and distributed, where waste products get diffused and ejected. But Twitter is useless on its own, it needs the arteries and the veins. Which is where physical and electronic social networks come in. Twitter augments and is augmented by Facebook. We just haven’t got used to it.

And it’s not just about Twitter and Facebook either. It’s about Flickr. And YouTube. And Dopplr. And Netvibes. These are just different collections of veins. Without an e-mail in sight.

[An aside. When I looked for photographs of India Coffee House, and found Lecercle’s set, I was very taken with his descriptions. Here’s the text that accompanied one of the photographs I used:

All around, people were drinking coffee with an accompanying glass of cold water, reading newspapers and eating samosas or their 23 rupee Chicken Afghani. As elderly turbans waiters in faded white uniforms drift from table to table. Everybody knows about the Calcutta’s love for talk especially about exalted topics. It usually a careless chatter about anything from Dosteovsky to the vagaries of Indian cricket selectors. It usually involves some amount of talk about cricket, politics, football, Calcutta, food and always a footnote about the songs of Tagore. The Coffee House permeates this talk, a bright hum insulated by the coffee house’s high vaulted ceilings and the noise of the Calcutta Street.

Maybe you get an idea as to why I love blogging, and a bit about the roots of this blog.]

Musing about relief maps and Saturdays

Don’t worry, I am not about to become a sudden expert on physical geography; this is about a different kind of relief map. The Sellar and Yeatman kind. I loved 1066 and All That, loved And Now All This even more. Which brings me to the point of this post.

The extended title for And Now All This reads:

And now all this : being Vol.1 of the hole pocket treasury of absolutely general knowledge in X consoling sections, with numerous memorable diagrams, 1 anagram, 2 test papers (bad luck), 3 relief maps, several pounds of figs, only 5 appendixes

The 3 relief maps they mention in the title are fascinating. Just the kind of thing a schoolboy needs in the middle of a deep textbook. The “maps” consist of box-like diagrams, maybe 3 inches square, inserted at random into the text, with notations like Figure 1: relief map. The authors suggest that readers should stare at the “map” whenever stressed, and thereby gain “relief”.

And that’s the way I wanted this post to go. I wanted to provide some weekend links for you, links that you can enjoy light-heartedly. And today’s choice is Yossi Vardi. Two videos by him, one at TED and one at Le Web 3 last month. I had the joy of watching Yossi give the second one “live” (I have yet to make a TED, not for want of trying).

Here are the links. Do visit them, you won’t regret it. Enjoy.

Yossi at TED: Help Fight Local Warming

Yossi at Le Web: Wi-Fly

Yossi is one of a kind, they broke the mould when they made him. If you don’t know him, don’t assume he is just a comedian. Check him out via Google or Wikipedia or whatever you use to do the checking, or follow the Edge link I provided. Thank you Yossi.