Jyri Engestrom founded Jaiku which was later acquired by Google and is involved in some of their most interesting social networking products including Google Latitude.  In his session, he started by giving a quick run down of successive social networks from the past emphasizing that despite media coverage of facebook (and more recently twitter), the game is far from over:

Firefly, grew to 2M users, acquired by Microsoft
Six Degrees, grew to 3M users, folded
Friendster, grew to 90M users, collapsed under it’s own weight
MySpace, tens of millions of users, acquired by Fox
Facebook, over 250M users, still growing and independent

The game is not over. We are still talking about a segment of the population. Social Networks have not (yet) replaced e-mail, sms, or the telephone as the lowest common denominator way to get in touch with someone.

Jyri went on to describe how social networks are built and what differentiates a successful social network from others that fail. Most importantly, social networks are about connecting people but there needs to be a catalyst to drive that connection, something with a tangible incentive. Using the metaphor of kids gathering to play together on the beach, Jyri explains that they gather together around a common object, such as a ball. In this same way, people connect around something he calls a “social object.” Think of all the successful social networks and you can see this pattern:

YouTube - video clips
digg - links
flickr - photos
last.fm - music tracks
good reads - books
slideshare - presentations

In each case, there is a shared object that drives the connection and draws outsiders into a conversation. Bringing up the case of Russell Beattie, Jyri talks about LinkedIn. It’s a useful but only as a profile service, a place to showcase your resume and people don’t connect around profiles. I would argue that LinkedIn has been improperly categorized as a social network when, in fact, it’s more accurately a crowd-sourced recruitment database.

Jyri then went on to list out the steps towards designing a successful social network:

1. Define the Social Object.
2. Define the verbs around the object. For example,
- eBay - buy/sell
- flickr - upload/favorite
- dopplr - add a trip
- upcoming - add/watch an event

The Activity Strea.ms group has been doing some work here and their wiki and mailing list is a great resource.  They have catalogued a number of common verbs and are attempting to unify these verbs to enable broader sharing and connectivity across social networks.

3. Promote the sharing of objects with easy to use tools
- ensure all your objects can be adddressed by permalinks which can be emailed
- create embedable widgets so that bloggers can promote attractive galleries of your social objects. Think flickr badges.
4. Turn invitations into gifts. Each invitation sent by your members should have an immediate value attached in the payload of the message. The days of “Register or click here to see more” are long over.
5. Charge publishers, not the spectators. The people that use your platform to further their financial goals should pay to access your audience.

Finally, Jyri spoke about the future. I’ll add my own observations in here as well because I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this too.

As with the Russell and LinkedIn, the days of connecting just to goose your numbers are over. Twitter is the latest to inherit this behavior and while it may be valuable to have a large number of followers, it makes little sense to follow too many people yourself. As Robert Scoble has realized, the less people you follow, the better the signal.

Future behavior on social networks will be to enhance what Jyri calls, “social peripheral vision” Citing examples such as the head’s up display on World of Warcraft, Jyri tries to imagine a world where your physical world is annotated with data about their interaction your social network.

Today it is still very early in the game. Each of us, with our lifestreams and status updates, are firing off signals like “pulsars into space.” The tools we use to monitor and keep up with are friends are still very primative and much of the talk is about trying to keep up or make sense of it all. In this sense, as we consume a combined lifestream of all our friends, we are not unlike ham radio operators, sifting through the radio bands and sharing notes as we look for a signal, a pattern.

Jyri concluded his talk describing something he called “nodal points” which is he uses to describe a, “pattern or algorithm that pulls information out of data.” It is this pursuit of nodal points that we are seeking. Each social network should have it - it’s where the collective commentary draws a pattern that represents a greater intelligence. Think of flickrs’ Shape files, the clusters of headlines on Techmeme, or the still fallible trending topics on twitter. These are nodal points and each successful social network should have them.

So here’s Jyri’s checklist for a successful social networks.

1. Define a social object
2. Define a set of verbs & actions which can be taken on the object.
3. Aggregate the social objects and annotations by the community to create nodal points.

The concept is simple. The quadrants of the circle light up randomly, one at a time and you have to roll at least two wheels over the quadrant before the next quadrant lights up. There is music playing in the background so if you take too long, the music begins to slow down, letting others in the room know you’re not doing too well.

It’s a very effective exhibit because kids immediately know what to do and it teaches you very quickly the limitations of moving a wheelchair around in a tight space.

I hope my kids have a better appreciation of those in wheelchairs next time we ride the train or bus!

There is something about human nature which makes us want to prioritize information by how recent it is, and that is the fundamental appeal of real time search. The difference between real time search and regular search didn’t really crystallize for me until I had a conversation with Edo Segal, who sold his real time search company Relegence to AOL a few years ago and holds three patents on the subject. “Real time taps into consciousness,” says Segal, “search taps into memory. That is why it so potent. You experience the world in real time.”

Like a moth to the flame, we are drawn in by the seductiveness of the freshest information but when we get too much of it, we’re overwhelmed with the banality of everything by everybody at the same time. It’s like listening to 1,000 CDs at once - perfect resolution saturates the senses.

What we really want is a way to zero in on the patterns that matter. Like the proverbial early bird, when you get fresh information that’s relevant and actionable, you can go further and faster on less. Back in start-up land I would use all my alerting tools to jump on new technologies that I knew would get buzz so that we could piggy-back on their eventual coverage. Just the other day, I noticed that Marshall Kirkpatrick was trolling for ideas and I jumped on that and was rewarded with a mention in his story about Augmented Reality.

How do you monitor the hourly hum and look for emerging patterns before they become obvious? That problem is as old as the weather forecaster looking for hurricanes or the stock broker parsing the wires for tips.

When does gossip become news? In the financial industry you need to strike the right balance between moving on privilaged information. If only a few people know something, it’s not going to move a stock - it has to be common knowledge in order for the masses to place their bets.

I used to sell financial news wire subscriptions in Tokyo to equity traders and there was one broker that wouldn’t replace her Reuters subscription with one from Dow Jones even after I showed her several examples where DJ beat Reuters on market moving news. In Tokyo DJ was an underdog so it was a tough sell. She wouldn’t budge, insisting that she needed to see the same news others in the market. She didn’t want to have to think and weigh each piece of news, she looked at her quote screen and would use jumps in price to draw her to the news feed. It was a cleaner signal, albeit a commodity.

Finding relevant emerging patterns before they become trends, that is the challenge. I’ve said it before, better filters will be the next great algorithm war. We’ve all become enamored with twitter search which we all know is imperfect and self-selecting but compelling nonetheless.  I think we’ll also find that getting real-time alerting right on a broader scale is going to be more art and less science.

In 2005, the helipad of the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai was converted into a tennis court for a promotion featuring Agassi and Federer.

Today, perhaps in response to the broad coverage about the Find my iPhone story I blogged about, they reminded me about the Remote Start feature where you can start the web server via an SMS message which you can send to your phone.

We would like to remind you about the remote start feature. In the unfortunate situation that your phone got lost somehow, it would be possible for you to start the server if you are not having it always on. . . When the server is online you can see who has been calling, read the messages or if you are uncertain where it is, use the positioning or web camera to locate it.

For more details, see the Mobile Web Server user guide (pdf) or wiki site.

While Kevin’s friend walked the streets of Chicago with a broadband modem-enabled laptop, they homed in on the actual person who had taken their phone and confronted them.

“Have you got it?” I asked as I marched up to the guy, acting far more intimidating than I felt. Our iPhone-pilfering friend apparently works at the sketchy bar, and as he fished around in his bag, he gave a questionable alibi about having found the phone, intending to return it, but being intimidated by “all these scary-looking messages” that kept popping up on the display. “Um, yeah, those were from me,” I replied curtly. He pulled my phone out, totally unharmed, and handed it over. I resisted the urge to giggle.

Kevin acknowledges that this wouldn’t have been possible if the phone’s battery died

I’d been amazed that the phone had enough battery life to make it through the night and still beam its location; the moment its battery was dead, then it would be game over for our little scavenger hunt. I unlocked my phone and saw almost 20 missed calls. And then, at that very moment, the iPhone shut down and displayed the “Connect to power” icon. My phone’s battery literally hung on until the second it was in my hand. I wuv you, iPhone.

Beautiful.

UPDATE: There’s a Nokia version of this product too - a bit more geeky but if you know what you’re doing, quite powerful.

I’m even prouder of my son’s namesake who won the Stanley Cup after just one season with the Pittsburgh Penguins.

For the past four and half years we have been living in Alameda, an island in the East Bay, about 20 minutes from San Francisco, over the Bay Bridge. We settled here because, Izumi, spotting Alameda on a map noted it’s location in the middle of the Bay, making it most convenient to most locations.

It took two months of intense house hunting (remember, this was 2004, the peak of the housing bubble) but we finally found a place that we could call home. We lucked out and were fortunate to find a neighborhood that we loved on a block surrounded by families with children that really bonded with our kids and grew up together over the years.

Tyler started in kindergarden when we moved in and just finished forth grade, Julia’s  finished first grade. Edison School, where we walked our kids to school each day, is the only school that our kids really know. It’s been tough for them to imagine what their life will be like in Finland so it’s been hard for them to leave.

Izumi too has made many friends here and as we walk the island people often wave or honk their horn, it’s that kind of place. Because English is not Izumi’s native language and she didn’t grow up here, she sometimes misses some of the cultural references people make in casual conversation but the community embraced her and Izumi really came to feel like one of the community. It’s been rough for her to uproot herself and get ready for our move and the past few days have seen a lot of teary goodbyes.

It’s sad to leave but it also represents a new beginning, a fork in the road. We’ve had the good fortune to live in Tokyo, Princeton, and Alameda. Now we have a chance to live in Helsinki, in a semi-socialist country with a totally different climate - a place where we’ll live with a built-in sauna, the schools and hospitals are excellent, and when we arrive it will be light out until 10pm. We been given the choice to live day-to-day in Europe and add that to our life experiences. What we do with this experience and what we make of it is up to us.

We’re leaving Alameda today but are making plans for a reunion in Europe next Summer and hope to make it back for a visit the Christmas after next. Thank you Alameda for taking us in and keep in touch!

Photo by Tyler

Share]]> http://everwas.com/2009/06/goodbye-alameda.html/feed http://everwas.com/2009/06/twitter-card.html http://everwas.com/2009/06/twitter-card.html#comments Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:39:46 +0000 Ian Kennedy http://everwas.com/?p=2207 I’m not so sure how the whole Facebook namespace landrush is going to work out for me (cheeky of them to have us all sit around camped out facebook.com on a Friday night!) but for now I’m going with this twitter card as a way to get my social media dialtone for now. To make you’re own, just edit the source at twitter.com and crop to fit. Or, if you’re lazy, you can use the Twitter Meishi Generator.