Author: JP

Musing about politeness and “continuous partial asymmetry”

I blame James Governor, Tim O’Reilly and Ross Mayfield for this post. James first got me thinking about the phenomenon of asymmetry in modern communications as a result of DMing me a few days ago with his Asymmetric Follow post, an absolute must-read. He then followed it up with another, looking at Dopplr rather than Twitter; in between, Tim O’Reilly then tweeted about it to Robert Scoble, connecting the phenomenon with Robert’s “DM hell”. And before I’d worked out where my head was at on all this, Ross Mayfield went and wrote this.

Enough name-dropping for you? Don’t worry, that’s not the intention. Some of you may wonder why anyone would bother with all this kerfuffle. Is this just a bunch of “social media experts” theorising about some obscure statistical phenomenon? Not really, there are some very important points being made here. Three in particular are worth emphasising:

  • People in a Web 2.0 network are not uniformly connected; some have more connections than others
  • Connections have directions; the number of inbound connections may far exceed the number of outbound connections, creating an asymmetric environment
  • This is particularly true of “default-public” networks such as Twitter; Flickr is also likely to evince similar behaviour.

I think there’s more to it. Many years ago, I was honoured to receive a visit from Yossi Vardi; I arranged to have a colleague of mine, Stu Berwick, join me for part of the session. When we were discussing IM, Stu made an observation which really struck a chord with me. He said:

In IM, it’s polite to be silent

I knew something was rattling at the back of my mind when I read James’s post; it took me a while before I figured out it was Stu’s comment. I think the particular “politeness convention” that’s in place has a lot to do with the potential for asymmetry. In order for twitter to become asymmetrical, it must be OK for me not to reply to a tweet. If I am forced to reply then it doesn’t work. If I am expected to reply then it still doesn’t work. But if it’s OK for me to say nothing, then it works.

What is this thing that works? Asymmetric follow. Why? Because I am no longer expected to reply to everything that comes in. People who receive a lot of snail mail or e-mail don’t reply to everything that comes in either, so what’s the difference? The difference is in the perception of polite behaviour.

It’s rude not to answer a telephone call; it’s rude not to call back when a voicemail has been left; it’s rude not to reply to an e-mail; in fact it’s rude not to provide sympathetic sounds when listening to someone on the other end of a phone. [That last politeness convention has had an unintended consequence ever since the mobile phone was invented, the regular need to intersperse conversation with “are you there?”].

It’s not rude to ignore a SMS. It’s not rude to ignore an IM. It’s not rude to ignore a tweet. Even an @tweet. Even a DM.

The politeness issue alone is not enough either. This whole thing is exacerbated, beautifully exacerbated, by the 140 character limit of Twitter. Because we can now have “continuous partial asymmetry”. Someone who has 4000 followers can choose to reply to the @s of 400 of the followers, because of two critical things. One, the cost of replying to the @ is low. And two, you can vary the particular 400 you’re replying to. Yes you’re constrained, ostensibly by personal bandwidth, from replying to everyone all the time. But because you manage to reply to some of the people some of the time, nobody feels left out, the weak ties remain in place and everything works.

As a result of this continuous partial asymmetry, there is one more valuable, yet unintended, consequence. A-listing is less of an issue. The conversations that take place extend well beyond narrow echo chambers, there’s always an infusion of fresh voices into the conversation, yet barriers to entry remain low.

Just thinking. There’s something quite important here, and I’m going to have to gnaw away at it.

Working with dummies

Some time ago, Ivo Gormley, a young and gifted filmmaker, came to see me about a project he was working on, on participative citizenship, mass collaboration and the internet, and their implications on government as we know it.

That project became Us Now, a one-hour documentary produced by Banyak Films. It had its premiere at the RSA yesterday, a wonderful location for events of this type. Ivo asked me if I would introduce the film and frame and moderate the discussion to follow, an honour and privilege I was delighted to accept.

If you live near London, do try and watch the film for yourself as soon as you get the chance. There’s a screening due next week, details here. I believe there are a number of other previews planned before general release, and will post the details once I have them. In the meantime, particularly if you don’t live in the UK, there are clips and transcripts available here, with contributions from Clay Shirky (pictured above), Don Tapscott, Paul Miller and Lee Bryant amongst others.

Using examples ranging from Couch Surfers and Ebbsfleet United through to Zopa, Ivo weaves a convincing picture of the potential of collaborative software in a participative society, a narrative that flows effortlessly while punctuated by relevant yet succinct interviews and observations.

The questions that followed appeared to have three themes:

  • Can we do this? Can we bridge the generation gaps between the adopters of these technologies and the general population?
  • How can we do this? How do we actually begin to realise the potential of these tools in government, both local and national?
  • What can go wrong? What about the potential for such tools to do harm? How do we protect against misuse?

Ivo’s film has started the debate, it makes sense to continue it at the Us Now blog, so please direct your comments and questions here.

So what does all this have to do with the title of this post? Simple. I wanted a reason to point people towards this wonderful blog, Quite Human: Meeting people who work with dummies. How did I get to that blog in the first place? Well, yesterday, before the screening, Ivo introduced me to his father. A gentleman called Antony Gormley. I wondered why his name seemed familiar, why his face seemed familiar. But then I forgot all about it and went out for dinner with friends. Today, while having a cup of green tea with Malc, the subject came up and he reminded me. Which led me to some lazy surfing this evening, perusing Antony Gormley’s works. Which in turn led me to this entry:

Songbird 1.0

Came home after a long day, checked my mail and was delighted to find that Songbird 1.0 had shipped. I’d been waiting for it for a while. You may remember I’d blogged about it two years ago. In between I’d been following the blog, checked out some intermediate versions but felt I could wait.

So today I read the notes and the licences, downloaded it and played around with it. And you know something? It was worth the wait.

  • An opensource music player.
  • Platform agnostic: Linux, Mac, Windows.
  • Format agnostic: MP3, FLAC, Vorbis on all; WMA, WMA DRM on Windows; AAC, Fairplay on Windows, Mac.
  • Integrated web browser
  • Scrobbles from last.fm
  • Provides a decent mashup of band/artist details
  • Community-based extensions and ecosystem
  • Good bunch of add-ons already, covering lyrics and album art amongst others
  • Tagging/folksonomy support

The device support, while rudimentary, looks promising. There’s no CD rip service as yet, and video is still some way off. I’ve taken a quick look at the licensing, and on the surface there doesn’t seem to be anything objectionable. Installation was a doddle. Importing music was even more of a doddle.

It’s still early days yet, but on the face of it, this is typically the kind of start I would want to see from an opensource music player, particularly one that is destined to evolve with and around community contribution and ecosystem development.

If there was one thing I would want quickly, it would be a variant of TwittyTunes. Explicitly for Songbird.

Views?

IP city twinning and habitual patterns and stuff like that

I just love this video clip. NYTE, the New York Talk Exchange, “illustrates the global exchange of information in real time by visualising volumes of long distance telephone and IP (Internet Protocol) data flowing between New York and cities around the world.”

What fascinates me is the grouping, the concentration. Somewhere in my mind’s eye, New York is twinned, in IP terms, with a bunch of cities in the rest of the world. And the grouping is different for different cities. The top ten cities that New York twins with will be different from the top ten cities that Boston twins with. And it is in that difference that we learn new things.

I remember reading a study some time ago on the use of mobile phones, and finding out just how habitual, how predictable, how localised we really were. The study, by Marta Gonzalez and Cesar Hidalgo of Northeastern, along with Albert-Lazslo Barabasi (of Linked fame) looked at understanding individual human mobility patterns, proving that there is a “high degree of temporal and spatial regularity” in “human trajectories”.

We may have conquered time and space, so to say: we can Tivo-ise anything, record for later playback, and the web allows us to assume the death of distance. We’re heading towards ubiquitous affordable always-on connectivity, in a device-agnostic open-platform world. But. There’s always a but.

But we still assume people will use these devices in specific ways, based on models deeply ingrained with “hit culture” notions of “content usage”, ways that themselves pave the way for draconian DRM and content management solutions and regulation and even legislation.

It’s as if Hollywood and the music industry are the only reasons people would ever want to be connected, anywhere, anytime. It’s as if everyone will only use their ubiquity and affordability of access to consume entertainment. [Heavy accent on the word “consume”.] It’s as if it’s okay to seek to criminalise everyone as a result of the models. Intriguing.

Soon, we’re going to take these debates more into the open. Base them on data. Data that will suggest human beings are creatures of habit, they move around in predictable loci, they talk to the same people at the same time, they belong to a number of overlapping networks, they rely on trusted relationships, they exercise long-tail taste in their entertainment choices once they have that choice, and they are actually qualified to create and share “content”, not just consume it. And they’re not criminals.

Soon.

In the meantime, studies like the Gonzalez paper and the NYTE simulation help me feel good about the future.

Missing the Whale: Will we soon pay to see it?

Twitter stayed up throughout the Mumbai terrorist crisis; at least that’s the way it seemed to me, everything just worked. Never spotted the Whale.

And then today, a few minutes ago, there it was, in all its splendiferous glory, reproduced here for newcomers:

Sightings are getting rarer and more fleeting. So, according to traditional scarcity economics, we should soon be willing to pay to see it, right? :-)