Author: JP

I loved this video: Melvar and Lien building a physical scale model of their web site.

And I think there’s a very important lesson in this. For too long, too many of us have assumed that people who excel in virtual worlds are useless in physical worlds. Get a life before you get a Second Life, that sort of thing.You know what I mean. But we’re wrong, very wrong.

I remember reading a Pew Report which indicated that the super-communicators in the emergent generations actually spent more time face to face with their friends than the rest of the population.

We have to keep remembering this. When Generation M, the mobile multitasking multimedia millenials, spend time online, they’re not sacrificing face time with their friends and family.

They’re sacrificing TV time. And advertisement time. And everything else that goes with it. Particularly when you compare them to earlier post-TV generations.

So they’re going to do what we never managed to do enough of. They’re going to choose what they do in their leisure time. Choose whose recommendations they trust. Choose whom they spend time with. Choose who they share their intentions with. Choose.

[It should come as no surprise that I found out about this site and project via Scott Beale, who knows a thing or two about virtual and physical worlds. Thank you Scott.

Stu Berwick told me about this via Twitter: Stimulus Watch. What Stimulus Watch does is to take the list of “Ready-To-Go” projects published by the US Conference of Mayors, convert them into a wiki and thereby empower readers to comment on the projects, enrich the data, “vote” on the projects.

There’s lots to like about the initiative. The UI is simple and intuitive, at least for me. The projects are actually listed before decisions are made. Descriptions are intelligible in the main, and contain useful information beyond budgets, such as job-creation. In each case the question posed is simple: is the project critical? Here’s an example:

I touched on some of this in my Clay Shirky at the ICA post. One of the key issues that came up that day was the issue of identity, how to make sure that the right person voted, how to make sure that the person voted once and once only. This is not resolved here either. But it can be.

There are a million people out there who will criticise this thing to bits. Let me not be one of them. I like the transparency. I like the fact that someone has invested time and effort to take public domain information and make it more shareable, more enrichable, and as a result perhaps a little more comprehensible. I like the simplicity of the UI, a search-based front and a consumable wiki. I appreciate the existence of an excel file with all the source info, available for download.

For democratised action to have any meaning, citizens need to be informed. The more informed they are, the more likely it is that their action will have value.

The availability of tools like Stimulus.org is a good sign. [One of the first things I am going to do is to mutate the tool in order to make it useful for enterprises to prioritise their projects!]. The very existence of the data in a downloadable form allows for mashups to be created with relative ease, particularly those with geographical overlays, as in this example taken from epolitics:

There’s a long way to go, many problems to solve. But there are encouraging signs. Views?

PS it is worth going to stimulus.org just to read Jerry Brito’s paper on Hack, Mash and Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency. You can find it in the About Us section.

When I look at the digital implementations of social networks of today, they appear to have a core made up of five things:

• a directory or address book
• the ability to group people in the directory
• support for different modes of communication between people
• the ability to schedule meetings between the people
• a way of notifying changes to the four things listed above

Membership of groups and subgroups; multimodal communication; meeting and event scheduling; notification of changes; all these have existed for centuries. We can probably draw a line from jungle drums and smoke signals through the invention of the telephone all the way to e-mail and IM and communities like Bloomberg chat. None of them created the kind of noise and buzz generated by the social networks of today. The question is why.

I think there are three reasons:

• Standardisation
• Persistence
• Exposure

Standardisation. Historically, social networks did not scale. They didn’t grow easily; their geographical coverage was limited. In the digital realm, some of these problems are done away with, there is greater standardisation. In the past, all we could do was to interconnect islands of community. But the communities remained communities, distinct and separate. What is happening now is that we are moving beyond the interconnect paradigm; new, virtual, communities transcend the physical and cultural and linguistic separations of the past. It’s no longer about being interconnected. It’s about being connected.

Persistence, as in persistent communications. It’s been around for centuries as well, from the time man learnt how to draw. Again, you could think of persistent communications as having been around for a very long time, but as distinct and separate islands. Disconnected from each other. Today’s social networks seem to be powered on today’s esperanto, primarily English-based, but evolving as a mishmash of influences of multiple languages. Evolving, alive, as any language should be. When I look at my twitter feed, it is multilingual. By choice. After all, I choose to follow the people I follow. Again, in language, it looks like we used to be interconnected, now we are connected.

There’s something else happening with persistence. We’ve had persistent communication for a long while, but not searchable retrievable communication. In the digital world, our communications are Tivoised; archived and replayable at will, free-text searchable in many cases. This too moves us from interconnected to connected, it helps us all understand more about other languages and dialects and usages.

And finally we have exposure, openness. APIs and their equivalent. What do I mean? It’s what is represented by facebook as a developer platform, what android represents as well from a slightly different perspective. A way of building things for a community to use, without having to belong to that community in the first place; without having deep knowledge of that community. Most importantly, an ability to build things for a community, things that lower the friction of communication and scheduling and sharing and belonging. Moving us from interconnected to connected.

Sounds like semantic argumentative tosh, doesn’t it, my harping on about interconnected and connected? Perhaps it is. But there’s something in my head that won’t let go of this notion, that things are different now, that these differences are caused by the drivers of standardisation, searchable persistence and exposure. That the effect of these drivers is to allow people to be connected in ways that were not possible before, on a global, multilingual, multicultural basis, with tools that allow asynchronous and multimedia communication. That the catalyst to move all this forward at breakneck speed is the concept of the open multisided platform.

Instead of standardisation, persistence and openness I could have just said one word: the internet. Instead of describing the distinctions between interconnect and connect I could have said just one word: the internet.

It’s all about the internet. And the new possibilities afforded to us.

The possibilities are tremendous, possibilities for doing harm as well as good. So what we’re doing now is learning. About those possibilities for  good and harm. How to handle privacy and confidentiality, both personal as well as corporate. How to keep this new area safe for children, and for parents. How to deal with the avoidance of lock-in. How to empower humans “at the edge”. How to take the friction out of current social practices, practices we see at work and at home. How to make sure we don’t disenfranchise people by accident or design. How to derive value from all this for education, for health, for welfare, for government. How to use all this to become better stewards of this earth.

That’s what all the buzz is about.

Learning how to do good with these new tools, and how to avoid evil.

And on the way there, finding out how to make all this available to everyone in an affordable, sustainable manner.

Just musing. Comments? Views?

I spent a little time reading this Pew Internet survey on Twitter and Status Updating.

It feels strange to be close to the edge of this classification:

Twitter and similar services have been most avidly embraced by young adults. Nearly one in five (19%) online adults ages 18 and 24 have ever used Twitter and its ilk, as have 20% of online adults 25 to 34. Use of these services drops off steadily after age 35 with 10% of 35 to 44 year olds and 5% of 45 to 54 year olds using Twitter. The decline is even more stark among older internet users; 4% of 55-64 year olds and 2% of those 65 and older use Twitter.

I think the key trends are that Twitter users are racially and ethnically more diverse than the population at large, and that they are more likely to be using wireless devices and smartphones. Of course, as the report suggests, this may be due predominantly as a result of the relative youth of the Twitter user. But I think it’s more than that.

I think we need to recognise that Twitter lowers barriers to entry, reduces the cost of participation. Which means more people get enfranchised, are able to take part. Twitter is not necessarily about high speed internet connections and industrial strength desktops. I think there is a class of person who is attracted to Twitter just because of that. Nothing to do with age.

I have some friends who talk to me exclusively through Facebook. My phone and my e-mail are displayed there for my friends. But most of the time, they talk to me through Facebook. Currently, the number of Facebook friends is somewhere in the 700s. They cover my family, my school, my university, my church, my work, my profession and my community.

I also have a number of friends and acquaintances who are connected to me via LinkedIn. But for whatever reason, the primary interaction I’ve had in LinkedIn is to accept a request to link. I think I’ve had less than 25 messages to do something other than link to people ever since I joined LinkedIn, and that was five years ago. Years. Currently, the number of LinkedIn connections is approaching 500. They’re mainly business contacts and relationships. A small number of the LinkedIn connections are also Facebook friends, primarily colleagues and ex-colleagues. But I would put the overlap at maybe 50. LinkedIn connections can send me emails; my blog is also made known to them, but not my mobile phone or e-mail address.

I’ve given away my business card to hundreds, possibly thousands, of people over the years; since I haven’t been much of a job-hopper (6 companies in three decades) it means that a large number of people can get hold of me if they really tried. I’ve had the same home number for over a decade, and only two mobile phone numbers during that time.

A slightly larger number of people appear to read my blog regularly. There are over three thousand subscribers to my feed, and I appear to get upwards of a thousand unique visitors daily. Some of the uniques are behind enterprise firewalls so the actual number may be a little higher. Some time ago, I had my blog hacked, and for some reason I forgot to put up any contact information when restoring the blog. And it’s been that way for the last three years. Most of the conversation on the blog happens via the comments, and I appear to have about three hundred regular commenters. Over the years I’ve met most of them in person, perhaps as many as two hundred and fifty. It’s a great feeling, when you meet a linker/commenter. Occasionally, someone wants to get in touch with me via the blog; what they do is leave a comment, and, most of the time, I use e-mail to respond to them if that is their preference.

A couple of thousand people now follow me on Twitter. I tend to follow back all real people, manually. (If I haven’t followed you back the most likely reason is human error. Mine. My apologies. Just ping me and I will correct it). As with the blog, maybe some 300 people converse with me regularly via Twitter, sending me @ messages and DMs.

My e-mail and telephone number are visible on Facebook and on my business card, and nowhere else. Nobody really uses LinkedIn to do anything of consequence with me, possibly because I’m rarely hiring or being hired. My Twitter account leads to my blog. And my blog leads nowhere.

None of this was intended or planned, it just happened. But after a while it seemed to make sense.

And so I come to the reason for this post. Whether what I am doing makes sense. [Sometime earlier today I tweeted about this, had a horde of replies, replied back to pretty much every one, and probably lost a few followers as a result.]

You see, I have this theory. That there are two types of people who connect with me, those who have a single preferred way of communicating with me, and those that choose according to the circumstances.

The ones that have a single preferred way are the “exclusives”, the ones who stay strictly within one particular network or communications modality. They seem to associate the choice of network or modality with an expected size and frequency of communication, and are uncomfortable when that changes. So, for example, when I used Twitter to update my facebook status, some of them howled. They weren’t prepared for it. They wanted to choose how to consume me, as it were. So I stopped doing that. Now they can still do so, via the FriendFeed integration into Facebook, but they’re in control when they do that. They choose, not me.

The ones who choose the path according to the circumstances tend to do so across all my so-called networks. And sometimes I get the feeling that it’s the same three hundred. Three hundred who are in my facebook contacts, my twitter followers and my blog commenters. Three hundred who mostly have my cellphone number and my e-mail address, or can get them easily. Three hundred who are my “Dunbar’s Number”. Largely because the cost of grooming such friendships has reduced sharply in this persistent, searchable, Tivo-ised world of communications, rather than because something strange has happened to my neurocranial capacity.

One way of looking at it is this. Those who stay locked in one form of communication with me, serene in their comfort zone, don’t need my e-mail or phone. They can look it up but rarely do.

As against this, those who choose how to communicate with me depending on the context, they also have all my contact methods and are relaxed about using multiples. Sometimes I get a DM and an e-mail and a text message at the same time from the same person!

So who am I really providing contact information for? Sometimes I’m not so sure. The only thing I’ve considered is making sure my Twitter profile is clearly visible on my blog. But then I have 2000 followers without doing very much, so do I really want to increase that number vastly? I don’t think so.

Which brings me to the naming issue. I’m JP Rangaswami, I get called JP, I can be found easily via Google using either. But JP is very hard for me to reserve when signing up to stuff. So I go for the next best thing, “jobsworth”. My private e-mail address, based on the codename for one of my favourite projects, when I sought to replace all the PCs at my place of work with Macs. (Jobs’ worth meets jobsworth, couldn’t resist the pun).

Chris Locke convinced me I should start blogging, way back in 2001. By 2003 I was playing seriously with the medium, and Doc Searls, along with Halley Suitt, encouraged me to start blogging externally. That took me a couple more years, during which time I practised by posting internally within the firm. But when I started, I didn’t feel good about calling it “JP’s Blog” or even “Jobsworth’s Blog”. So I chose Confused of Calcutta, and it’s stayed that way ever since.

JP, jobsworth and confused of calcutta can all be googled easily back to me. One’s me, one’s my twitter id, and one’s my blog. Simple as that. There was no grand plan to create this master brand or anything like that, and there still isn’t one. Nor will there be one.

So today I have three different-ish identities showing up in three different networks. Some friends know me in a narrow context, but not because I hide the rest of the context. I just don’t bother advertising the other contexts actively. Sometimes I include my twitter id in a post; sometimes I include my e-mail in a post, a tweet or even a comment. There’s no hard and fast rule.

I’ve received a large number of comments to my tweeted question. Many say I should make it easier for people to get in touch with me, many say I’m fragmenting and compartmentalising my identity for no good reason.

I don’t really intend to change my name or twitter id or the name of my blog. But if you guys thought that putting down my contact details everywhere and cross-connecting all this is the right thing to do, I will do it.

What’s your experience been? Is any of this making sense to you? How can I be better at this?

The key issue for me is if in some way I was disenfranchising someone. In which case please point it out to me.