Category: Four pillars

I try and read every comment made on this blog, I try and follow up every time someone links to me. I want to know what readers are saying about the things I write about. That’s how I learn, through the agreements, the criticisms, the recommendations, the observations.

Recently I noticed that Ian Delaney had linked to me,  commenting on something I’d written a week ago, and there was a phrase he used that I quite liked. The action’s in the actions. And that made me think, it made me crystallise something I’d been thinking about for quite a while. So here goes.

There’s been a lot said and written about social networking sites, so much so that there must be an entire branch of study focused on that subject alone. I don’t pretend to understand all of it.

What I do understand is this. There is something social about sharing news.  That’s what friends do. How are you? What are you doing? How have you been? Did you enjoy your holiday? Are your children well? When was the last time you saw her? If you see her, say hello.

Sure, friends do many other things. They share many other things. But one of the things that friends do is share news.

What I do understand is this. There is something social about sharing experiences. That’s what friends do. What did you think of that film? I hated their new album. Love your new car, how does it drive? Read any good books lately? Would you recommend Morocco as a holiday destination? How was that restaurant?

Sure, friends do many other things. They share many other things. But one of the things that friends do is share experiences.

Sharing news and experiences. That’s what friends do. When I worked in investment banking, I was fascinated by what people did, for example, on Bloomberg. They shared experiences. They shared news. And they shared something else, they could see transactions. They could see prices. They could see the market. Other people’s transactions, other people’s prices.

What is important about the Bloomberg example is that everyone knew. You knew that you could see others’ prices and transactions, others knew that you could see theirs, you knew that others could see yours.

What is as important is that Bloomberg represented a community, with trust and with rules. Rules that governed relationships. And communications. Simple rules, but rules nevertheless.

Every community is built on trust. When you share news and experiences, you do so in an environment of trust. Trust in the relationship, and in the communications that make that relationship come alive. That’s what Cluetrain was about.

Ratings, recommendations and collaborative filtering have all been around for a very long time. Even in their electronic form.

Transparency. Openness. “Perfect information”. “Collaborative filtering”. Ratings and recommendations. So much we can do when we share. As long as we know who we’re sharing with, and what we’re sharing. As long as we share by choice rather than because we have to.

This is why I watch all the debates about “privacy” with interest, sometimes with alarm. Man is a social animal. Let’s keep it that way.

Sharing isn’t just about what you do, it’s also about the way you think. I remember, many years ago, learning this the hard way:

When I lived in Calcutta, I used to be pretty gregarious. We were that kind of family, and “home” had the feel of being a club. People coming and going all the time, a free and easy house. Meals on tap. No real concept of individual or personal space, in fact no real concept of individual friends either: you were either a friend of the family or you weren’t, that was that.

It was “normal” for me to come home and to be greeted by one of “my” friends leaving, saying he may be back later. We didn’t have a large house, so it meant that every room was pretty crowded, with stuff happening everywhere; people playing contract bridge, carroms, cards, cluedo, chess; people listening to music; playing table-tennis; just sitting and chatting.

And eating.

We ate all day and all night. Magically tea and coffee and food would arrive. And it would disappear. Fast. I have no idea how my mother coped with me during that time. I was capable of inviting a dozen (or two) people over to the house, with zero notice, and with the expectation that all would be fed. It was the done thing there. When you went to someone else’s house, food would appear. And you were expected to eat it.

That was then.  A long time ago, in Calcutta, when I was growing up.

Much later, when I’d been married for a while, this mindset caused me to come unstuck. Without thinking about it, I added a couple of people as invitees to dinner one night, just an hour or so before dinner. And my then fiancee looked at me strangely, and I knew I was in trouble. [Not that much trouble, really. We’ve been married over 23 years now, and we get closer every year].

So why did I get into trouble? Well, we planned to serve steak that night, and this meant we did strange things. Strange western things. Like counting out potatoes, three per person, with a handful over. And for that matter counting out steaks….

So we had 10 steaks and 12 people. Problem. And the only way to resolve it that late was for me to “make” two new steaks by trimming pieces off the existing steaks, sort of gourmet large-granularity hamburger I guess. And of course we as hosts had to have them.

That episode, a quarter of a century ago, taught me something. I never had meals in India that I couldn’t expand at will. Just add rice. Just add a few vegetables. Just add a bit of this and a bit of that.

Sharing is something that’s in your head. That goes for information too. Take collaborative filtering. You get out of it what you put into it, and something more. Of course you need to have choice, you need to be able to choose whom you share with, and what you share. Of course there are different decisions to make in terms of the sharing architecture, in terms of the way you implement collaborative filtering. Is it an opt-in or opt-out model? How granular is that option? Is the shared data anonymised or not? Should it be?

There are many things to be resolved, many classes of person to protect, many classes of action to look out for.

But it all begins with one thing. A belief in sharing.

Let’s not kid ourselves. I meet too many people who criticise social software, who rant against open communities, who come up with reams of excuses as to why virtual communities aren’t designed right, why there are a lot of problems with privacy. Most of them don’t like opensource either; most of them don’t like to see current IPR “regimes” being attacked; most of them don’t believe in wisdom-of-crowds.

Most of them don’t really believe in community.

Sharing is community. They don’t like that.

One of my friends twittered : Gort, Klaatu Barada Nikto :  a little while ago, and it showed up in his Facebook stream. That took me back a while. I had seen that phrase in so many contexts over the years that I began to wonder whether someone had bothered to write a Wikipedia entry for it, given its unusualness.

I wasn’t disappointed; here it is.

I’ve rarely seen a phrase like this, one that migrates into multiple and different cultural contexts. Any better offers? Even the Inigo Montoya quote (the part where he says : Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die). doesn’t quite make it into as many contexts.

I really enjoy reading The Believer. Just the kind of magazine I need to read at the end of a long weekend, after completing my Sunday evening chores.

You see, I’m with Doc. I believe in VRM. I believe that in the 21st century, product-driven advertising is fundamentally flawed. Personal recommendations, whether direct or via collaborative filtering, count for a lot more. Recommendations from people I know and trust, recommendations that scale now that I have the tools and the technology to discover the recommendations and act on them.

So I enjoy reading magazines that have no ads in them. Magazines printed on good paper, with loving care taken on format and layout. Magazines that cover a range of subjects, enticing me into finding out more about things I know little about. Magazines that have copyright-free content. Magazines like the Believer.

While reading an article in the latest issue headlined The Modern Lovers: Ten Contemporary Artists Who Make Images of Their Beloved, I “discovered” Keith Arnatt, and as a result I’ve ordered a recent book by him. I was particularly taken with his “Notes from Jo, 1990-1994” exhibits; Jo, his wife, sadly passed away in 1996; Keith has chosen to share some of the notes she wrote to him, notes of the kind usually stuck on fridges or pinned on kitchen notice boards; notes that have a sense of easy familiarity that I cherish, that reflect a warm and worthwhile relationship.

So thank you Believer, thank you Leanne Shapton for selecting Keith Arnatt, and thank you Keith Arnatt for sharing Jo’s notes. And thank you Jo for writing them.

My eldest daughter’s mobile phone decided to go to that great hunting ground in the sky. Without warning. So she in turn decided to get another one, and to use the opportunity to get it this time in her name rather than mine. Her bill rather than mine. Which meant she shopped around for deals, and the best deal required her to change her number. Which she did.

[Oh these rites of passage, when your young ones go and acquire their own bills and reduce yours]

That’s when it got interesting. She updated her Status on Facebook, as you would expect, saying that she’d changed her phone number. She then did something else. She set up a new Group, and invited a bunch of her friends to join. The invitation told other people about her change of number.

Fascinating. So I asked her why she did it. It was because she was really using some of the granularity of Facebook privacy. Not everyone on her friend list could see her status changes, many were on Limited Profile. She used Groups as a way of getting to the ones she needed to.

I think we’re going to see a lot of this happening. Variants of “giving someone a missed call”, we are going to see Generation M using things like Facebook creatively and differently, using the functionality in ways we do not expect. More importantly, using the functionality in ways that may not have been designed for, yet remain possible.