One of the most interesting parts of the article was a sort of chicken and egg discussion of loneliness and its causes. Does Facebook, or any other social platform for that matter, make people lonely? Or does it simply enhance the loneliness that people already bring to the platform? In this context was this intriguing quote:

“One of the most noteworthy findings,” they wrote, “was the tendency for neurotic and lonely individuals to spend greater amounts of time on Facebook per day than non-lonely individuals.” And they found that neurotics are more likely to prefer to use the wall, while extroverts tend to use chat features in addition to the wall.”

This reminded me of a recent Pew Internet study entitled: “Why Facebook users get more than they give”. In the study, Pew found that “the average Facebook user gets more from their friends on Facebook than they give to their friends.”  For me this was a pretty impressive stat, and one that should serve as a barometer for the health and success of any social platform. But the study also pointed out that the reason for this healthy, positive return rests with:

“a segment of “power users,” who specialize in different Facebook activities and contribute much more than the typical user does.”

So if that’s the case, its a simple exercise in logic to say that IF neurotics spend more time on Facebook (especially contributing to the wall) THEN the power users that drive the positive value distribution, (and are responsible for Facebook’s growth), are neurotics

IN OTHER WORDS Facebook succeeds its populated by a lot of neurotics.

Really?

Paul Adams has this marvelous statement at the beginning of his recent fMC 2012 talk, (its at about 4:30 in), discussing how humans have historically adapted to new communication technologies:

“People applied the ways they worked with existing media to the new media”

In the same way I think we are now all too busily applying our own values of society and behavior to platforms and ways of connecting that we simply don’t fully understand.  Into we inject into that equation our own values of loneliness and what it means. What I found generous about Marche’s article is that he’s open to the option that the idea of loneliness has changed over time and that Facebook and other social media are less enablers and more participants. Lonely people in real life are likely to be lonely on Facebook, and extroverts in real life will remain extroverts on Facebook. And neurotics? Marche doesn’t address this in great detail with the exception of a discussion around our changing perceptions of narcissism, or as he calls it “the flip side of loneliness”.

A lot of this reminds me of debates I recall 10 or 15 years ago about getting more computers into classrooms. The reasoning for parents was, aside from more techno gloss, that computers would help their kids would learn more and more effectively. As time passed it seemed that the only thing computers did was help kids create PowerPoint presentations with lots of cheesy transitions. In other words, we learned that computers were a tool and that actual learning still had to be done the hard way. It’s only in the past few years, with initiatives such as Khan Academy or the exciting new programs being developed to teach coding to kids, that we are finally finding a the right place for computers in the education process.

This change took a time and an understanding grown out of experience and failure that new tools, platforms or technologies cannot instantly redefine who we are or create new norms. They are waiting for us to get there. As Marche puts it:

“Nostalgia for the good old days of disconnection would not just be pointless, it would be hypocritical and ungrateful.”

I haven’t had a chance to read the “Information Diet” by Clay Johnson yet or listen to the webcast over at O’Reilly Community, but what I’ve been hearing about this book and its unique approach to dealing with the onslaught of information we all face sounded interesting. So when I did catch this brief interview with him I was struck by something I had missed in other reviews and discussions of the book.

Towards the end of the interview Johnson talks less about his core theme of our responsibility to control our own digital consumption, which he likens to the obesity and diabetes epidemic, and more about the fact that its the feeding the social media beast collectively dumbs us down. The problem, as he sees it, is that the more we consume and especially “like” or share sugary content, (Snooki, kittens, you name it), the more we feed the Facebook algorithm and create a self – fulfilling prophecy for an all sugar all the time diet.

What’s interesting about this line of reasoning is that more often it seems that the main criticism of social Web content has been the whole “the internet makes you dumber” version expressed by books such as “The Shallows” and others. The problem with this kind of criticism is that, while it always had some merit, it also comes with a whiff of cultural elitism that I find very hard to accept.

What’s different here is that Johnson’s problem is less with the content and more  with the fact that through the frictionless support of “liking” and re-tweeting we’re ending up simply feeding the algorithms that end up building up the fire hose of high fructose corn syrup content that confronts us every day. This sweet stuff dominates our what we see online and can become a barrier to consumption of the more nutritious stuff that we know is there.  The ease of liking, which frankly is about signaling that you’ve got a pulse than projecting value, has really become another way of injecting pink slime additive into the protein of what could be useful content. And brands, of course, do the same thing when they get into the practice of buying “likes”. Johnson’s point is that there has to be a way to stop, or at least temper, this insatiable self-defeating machine.

His suggestion seems to be to develop an approach to information akin to dieting. Make sure to understand what’s nutritious and avoid the high carb high sugar stuff. But another approach to this issue comes from Matthew Ingram at GigaOm in a post about alternatives to newspaper paywalls. In thinking about alternative options he talks about a reverse method suggested by Jeff Jarvis and by the Guardian’s open journalism model.  In this “velvet rope” model the idea is that more active contributors and commenters would get more of a benefit:

 So instead of just hitting a wall after a certain number of stories, readers who contributed comments or moderated the comments of others — or provided other forms of useful data or labor — might get a benefit that others wouldn’t, whether it’s access to certain content or an invitation to a real-world event they might be interested in.

The problem with frictionless sharing, which admittedly is not going away, is that it builds its content stream by encouraging minimal signaling. Perhaps by tweaking the algorithm a bit more heavily for comments, (which I’m sure Facebook already does already), or figuring out a mechanism to encourage and reward comments beyond simply “likes”, we might be able to purge a bit of the fast food content we have to wade through every day.  While its easy to imagine practicing a diet of conscientious content consumption, we all know that its all too tempting to fall off the wagon when the sweets tray if arrayed in front of us.

Image courtesy of david.nikonvscanon

This morning’s feed opened up with two high profile posts about departures. The one that made the bigger news was Greg Smith’s, featured on the front page of NYTimes, on why he is leaving Goldman Sachs, the second was from James Whittaker, a self described technology executive, on why he’s leaving Google.

It’s not every day that you have such public departures from iconic firms and in both cases the immediate impulse is to think of these as canaries telling us what’s really wrong with company x or y, or at least confirming our worst suspicions. In Smith’s reasons for leaving Goldman easily confirmed my own suspicions, but Whittaker’s reasoning was a bit more nuanced and what links the two is really the issue of culture and business model.

For Smith it’s all about the culture of making money at all costs and a leadership that will no longer support bigger ideals:

The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

For Whitaker it’s also about culture, ideals and money, but from a slightly different tack:

The days of old Google hiring smart people and empowering them to invent the future was gone. The new Google knew beyond doubt what the future should look like. Employees had gotten it wrong and corporate intervention would set it right again.

Smith’s post is easier to digest, a lot of what’s there is very much about confirming all of the expectations we have of Goldman, (and not even the worst expectations). So while it is shocking in its kimono lifting openness, it doesn’t really surprise.

Whitaker’s post is much more complicated. He also has a problem with the money culture at Google, but it’s the culture dedicated to making money from advertising that he has a problem with. He meanders and forth between decrying advertising as a reason for Google to make money to supporting the “old Google” advertising model. But what he’s really talking about is Google’s push into social and its relentless move into becoming as Facebook-like as possible, especially around maximizing and utilizing user information.  In a way, one of the biggest similarities between Smith and Whitaker is in how they see their respective giant corporations denigrating their customers. For Smith its how Goldman looks at customers as “Muppets”. For Whitaker Google “creeps me out” by blending G+ social content into search results and Gmail ads.

Whitaker’s departure from Google seems to me to be about culture and the long standing conflict between engineering and advertising. It’s surprising to see the discussion because Google, as he points out, has been an advertising company for at least ten years. But engineers who are committed to building the best possible product often chafe at the idea that the end goal has to be a better marketing product. After all, their goal is to build the best possible product for their customer.  Unfortunately for the best way to support this type of product development culture is to charge users for the product. But we’re not there yet, or at least Google isn’t.  (imagine charging for Gmail?), so we’re stuck with advertising as the primary way to make money from Web based software.  Google knows this and its move to social, which Whitaker castigates in pretty harsh terms, is part of making sure that the ad revenue keeps growing, at the expense of engineering culture

It’s a tough balancing act. Google has tried to maintain its startup culture, but the problem is that as startups mature, or become Google, its pretty hard to maintain their mojo. This tweet from Brian Morrisey at SXSW summed this up nicely:

sxsw brings together ad agencies fascinated by startups and startups that hate advertising

Whitaker has already decided which side he’s on in this debate. He left Google to go to…Microsoft of all places. Its actually not such an odd decision because he left Microsoft to go to Google three years ago, what is interesting is that he went back a company and culture that had always championed a payment instead of ad based revenue model for software.

Image courtesy of Striatic

The best thing I’ve seen this week has been the launch, and irresistible launch video, of Dollar Shaving Club. With all of the hoopla around the new, battery draining, connection apps debuting at SXSW when we look back next year we’ll probably remember DSC first. We may even be using its blades by then because because of how the video has redefined social spread by taking the typical hockey stick growth curve and turning it into something that more resembles a flagpole.

But what’s even more interesting for me is what this launch says about startups and how we need to think about them. All too often startups are synonymous with mobile apps, interesting data viz and disruption of spaces where information, utility and entertainment are controlled by worn out standards. DSC has done something different here, actually getting into the grimy world of physical products and using innovation in its business model to take on the long-standing razor & blades sales paradigm. By recognizing that blade manufacturing technology has become commoditized, and cheaper, they had the smarts to layer over a subscription model that likely came from understanding the problem and some careful customer development. DSC isn’t the first to do something like this, Airbnb’s approach feels very similar although it sits more in the collaborative consumption space. Pointing startup thinking onto the more mundane world of physical products may be a little more boring, but the opportunity can be huge. And nowadays, when we hear the most inspiring talk at TED exhorting us to focus less on technology and more on the real world, a dose of razor and blade startup can be very instructional. A really good video helps too.

As someone who’s been working from home, alone, for the past six months I was interested to see this article on The Rise of the New Groupthink in Sunday’s Times discussing how people working in solitude were more creative than those working in large open offices or teams.  I was hoping that it would add another silver lining to my not being in a traditional office space, but in some ways it left me confused.

Lately it feels like theories of creativity and work effectiveness are about as common as fad diets, and just as bewildering.  So much of what I’ve read, and experienced, on effective creative processes has been about random collisions, collaboration and getting people to interact. The idea of the lone genius has been pretty much tossed out by smart folks like Jonah Lehrer and Steven Johnson, and now here’s an article quoting some smart psychologist sand neuroscientist telling me that I would do a better job staying alone.  Somehow I’m beginning to wonder if this whole field hasn’t reached a point of oversaturation.

Where the article really makes more sense to me, and perhaps its real target, is when it criticizes the falsely energized “team-player” mentality created to fulfill a promise of inclusion which ends up shutting out its most creative members and producing little of value. Except for maybe a feeling of false togetherness.

In the final analysis its probably all about all things in moderation and striking a balance between individual time to think alone and the ability and willingness to interact. I did very much like the point the article made about brainstorms being the “worst possible ways to stimulate creativity”. It points out what we already all know about the lack of value of focus groups. What WAS interesting was the discussion about the effectiveness of  “electronic brainstorming” where asynchronous discussion and the lack of face-to-face group dynamics made for better group creativity. Maybe this is a signpost for all of us who work alone, but should look at making better use of our connected infrastructure to build on our lonely creative potential.

Thinking about the reaction to Google’s Search Plus Your World (SPYW?), (how about Search+), has got me thinking about networks. Reading Danny Sullivan’s interview with Eric Schmidt the night of the Search+ launch it became pretty clear that what Search+ is about is establishing Google+’s position as a bona fide social media network. No more questions about how many are really using Google+, if you look at the torrent of reactions to Search+ its clear that no-one is going to say that Google+ is irrelevant. It’s now really one of the Big Three social networks.

But when I think about “Big Three” I can’t help but thinking about another Big Three, the Big Three television networks, and how in their pre-cable heyday they captured the bulk of the TV audience and the ad revenues that went with it. What Google is doing with Search+ is trying to ensure its position as one of the parallel Big Three social networks along with the advertising revenues that are already following.

But there’s a problem with this analogy that has to do with abundance. The old Big Three got you to watch their content, and ads, because of scarcity.  They had exclusive content and if you wanted to watch it you also had to endure the ads.  Social networks operate in a world of abundance of bth content and access. The scarcity they have to deal with is the time we can devote to each or any of them. Each of the Big Three, Facebook, twitter and Google+, (sorry LinkedIn but, well…), require an investment of time and effort in order to maintain “viewership”.  They each make efforts to build loyalty and mass following, but compelling exclusivity or scarcity? There’s not much to speak of, I mean, is Timeline a reason to spend MORE  time on Facebook?

The only real scarcity that social networks command is the scarcity of their members. But that isn’t enough to command loyalty. I go to Facebook primarily to catch up with local and ex-work acquaintances and to spy on my, (adult), kids, but there is little else compelling to make me want to stay there exclusively. I go to twitter because its where I fine like-minded professionals, (that’s a whole other problem), and I go to Google+ because, well…it has these cool hangouts, I can write more than 140 characters and I have just enough time to do that.

But unlike the old Big Three, the new Big Three are trying to achieve what feels like an all or nothing kind of world. They wall their gardens because they fear that if they don’t have all the users all the time they will lose command of the airwaves internet. The funny thing is that in the days of the old Big Three, total network domination wasn’t as much of an issue. The networks competed, but the assumption was that viewers would move between shows and that no-one could have an absolute lock on all eyeballs.  Sure, some shows dominated and lineups were created to try and get you to spend an evening without making the huge effort of clicking a remote, but that was about as far as it went and generally with poor results.

Search+ carried to the extreme is Google’s effort to achieve dominance by using its search position. That’s one reason for the big outcry. But the problem is that, just like the old Big Three, there’s no reason for any social network to be “dominant” because, frankly, have nothing really unique or scarce to offer except for their members. On the other hand if you look at Search+ as a dare by Google to force the other networks to open up and share in, albeit Google’s, level playing field maybe there’s a chance this will force the Big Three to become like their elders and get better at creating deeper value through scarcity.

I was talking to Amanda this morning about the role social media might have played in the growth of Cyber Monday traffic this year. There’s plenty of questions about what kind of role, if any, social media has in driving to purchase, but a couple of posts I happened to see begin to point to how social media is becoming a growing force in retail, as well as some potential pitfalls.

The first was this update on the PayPal blog:

“As of 11 a.m. PST, PayPal is already seeing a six-fold (514%) increase in more mobile payment volume on Cyber Monday 2011 compared to the same time period on Cyber Monday 2010.”

When I see mobile growth like this I have to believe that there is a strong social element involved. Mobile is an accelerant, and an especially powerful accelerant for social. The ease of getting a tweet from brand a friend and then acting on it is all about how mobile can accelerate the decision process.

Which brings up the role of Social Proof which was covered very nicely in this post by Aileen Lee. What’s particularly relevant here for Cyber Monday is Lee’s postscript mention of Fear of Missing Out or FOMO. FOMO is really what Cyber Monday is all about. The fear of missing out on a great deal, (even when studies are showing that these deals may not be the best), incents shoppers to follow brands and more importantly incents them to tweet out their deals to their friends so that they can generously make sure that they won’t miss out either. Its easy to imagine how the immediacy of mobile combined with FOMO converted many hesitant Cyber Monday shoppers.

With all this potential the real problem brands face is how to convert today’s frantic Cyber Monday social shoppers into sustainable, loyal year round social media consumers. Today’s McKinsey Quarterly sheds some light on this challenge by pointing out that of  the marketers it surveyed “few are taking the structural steps required to benefit from selling online or engaging consumers through new technologies such as social media.” And while they may understand the potential of mobile and social tools, most of them only plan to deploy them in the next 2-4 years. Part of this gets into everything I hate about Black Friday and Cyber Monday; the fact that they are just celebrations of rampant materialism. But if marketers and brands can learn how to take the mad, social rush for deals and turn it into a beneficial social relationship between themselves and consumers then maybe we’ll have inched forward just a bit.

http://www.computerhistory.org/

Up until a few years ago I had a big, garish yellow squarish carrying case that we kept in our attic. I must have gotten it from someone in the late 80’s. Heavily padded around the insides, it was a Mac bag that would help you make an early Mac, (pre-SE I think), a portable computer. We all laughed at that idea at the time, even though the bag included a brochure with photos of handsome executives lugging this bag around with smiles on their faces. It was never quite a laptop although the aspiration was always there.

The first real Apple computer was a Mac IIx. With a laser printer and monitor it cost my first business around $20,000. I still manage to impress a few people in the “can you believe how much my first computer cost” discussions when I mention this. I remember jumping on it the moment we set it up and getting into my first, pre-internet, timeless reverie of playing, gaming and worrying about how to turn it off, only ended by realizing that suddenly it was 11 PM. I’d been on the computer for 5 hours and hadn’t really done anything. Some things never change.

I also remember the instruction manual, which for all of its brilliance and user friendliness pointed out that if we had a problem we couldn’t figure out we should “ask other Mac users if they’d experienced the same thing”. The idea that maybe somehow we could figure it together smacked of some sort of corporate irresponsibility to me then, but is almost second nature today.

Our shop was a Mac shop and in a bizarre twist I became the de facto network administrator. AppleTalk was so simple and intuitive at the time that it was second nature to dive right in, figure out the problem and look real smart in front of whomever I’d just solved the problem for. It was pretty much the same for everything within that early Mac ecosystem. It was simple and approachable. It made me into a techie without even trying.

At the same time, early 90’s, we couldn’t afford a new home computer so we bought an Apple IIe for next to nothing through my father-in-law. I remember buying floppy disks via mail order and reading the prophetic advice in the user manual that someday computers would include something called a hard drive which might possibly, some day, hold as much as 5 Megabytes of information!!

I discovered the Web and moved to PC’s at the same time. PC’s weren’t my choice, it was mandated by my jobs. Windows 3.1 shocked me with its DOS prompts, but I got used to it. But Mac’s were for the creatives now; I was working more with words, spreadsheets and PowerPoint (though I did really miss Persuasion). At the same time I found that my facility with computers stayed and grew mainly because of the fact that my Mac experience was like my first language. Macs created the syntax and the grammar that informed my computing experience. I judged everything else based on that experience and that experience made everything else more readily approachable.

One of the first things I did after leaving my job was go to the Apple store and buy a new MacBook Pro. I’d been on PC’s for over 15 years and it seemed to me that this would be a perfect, symbolic break from the world that I was leaving into a world where I would be back to defining my own path. There were other reasons too. I was already totally invested in other parts of the Apple world: iPhone, iPad and even a Nano on a watchband. Using it for the first time and hearing the clunky startup bong felt like a welcome back. As I’ve used it more and more I’ve found plenty of reasons to fall in love again. I happen to love the OSX swipes, the plug and play ease is still there, and the design keeps delighting me. At the same time I’m disappointed in the Apple closed system mentality, especially around images, and I just can’t get around under the hood like I used to.

Macs were my introduction to the world of computing, but more to the idea that I could extend my mind, my fingers and eyes into possibilities I hadn’t really imagined. In a way the Web was just a natural extension of that experience. Macs gave me the initial boost and head start into this world. They weren’t perfect. They were high priced, elitist and headstrong, just like one of their inventors. At the same time their elegance, delight, simplicity and hardheaded persistence of vision, just like their founder, has been grateful company for me.

I saw this video yesterday as part of a great Brain Pickings post about “vintage versions of social media”. It contains two things that I really love: Data Viz and a parallel look at how social media ideas of influence and connectivity have actually  been with us since the dawn of time.

The video is from a Stanford project which has been tracking the “Republic of Letters”, the correspondence between the European intellectual community between 1500 – 1800. As part of the project the team mapped the correspondence between some of the great minds of the 18^th century such as Locke and Voltaire and overlaid them on a map of Europe based on connection and frequency.

The information that was exchanged was vast and built multiple connections and influence across geographies. Much like social media today, the Republic of Letters was a complex social network that allowed for discovery, serendipity, growth and creativity. There were even early mashups, like the astronomical observations made in the Americas ended up in Newton’s Principia. All in all a distant window that demonstrates that things weren’t so different back then in terms of discovery and information exchange.

But at 1:08 of the video there’s an interesting note. Viewing the map of Voltaire’s connections, the researcher points out that he had almost no correspondence with England, something that apparently wasn’t appreciated until this correspondence was mapped out in this fashion. Now I’m hardly a Voltaire expert, but a quick peek at Wikipedia shows that he actually lived in England for three years and had great respect for the British political system, (at least compared to the French monarchy).

All of which makes me wonder, what if Voltaire had had access to an 18^th century version of Klout? Could this have helped? Would an 18^th century ranking of influencers have helped him connect to with high scoring British philosophers? Would his ideas have improved with feedback from Locke? Would philosophy and the march of ideas have been moved forward hundreds of years? Or would the dissemination of ideas through high scoring sources have disrupted the flow of information for the worse?

In his book “Where Good Ideas Come From” Steven Johnson talks about the concept of the “adjacent possible”, how creativity can spring from ideas and objects that are available within one’s immediate reach or environment. For us this environment includes the overwhelming flow of links, articles and random thoughts we confront every day across social platforms. While tools like Klout can measure and rank focal points of social connectivity, they can’t tell us if these focal points are relevant adjacencies or just a rush of information running through a very fat pipe. So I’d guess that Voltaire probably had enough adjacent possible in France for his needs and if a connection could have arisen in Britain it would likely have been through direct, relevant contact instead of an 18^th century compendium of top letter writers.

It’s pretty much the same feeling I have today for tools like Klout and Empire Avenue. Their goal seems to be to try and make social media into mass media channels, but the result feels like it moves us further away from what brought us to social media in the first place, the delight, serendipity and discovery of the adjacent possible.

About 12 years ago I sat in a big hotel meeting room in Hartford and listened to an investment banker tell the CEO of the online pharmacy I was working on that it was worth was many, many times more than its existing brick and mortar operations.  An older, lawyer-type turned to me with a what’s-this-world-coming-to look and said, “I can’t believe this, it makes absolutely no sense, it’s a total fantasy”. I chuckled and thought: “You just don’t get it, everything’s changing and you’ve either got to get on board or get left behind.”

Now that I’m a lot closer to his age I realize that we were both right. He was right because it was a fantasy. The online pharmacy still exists, but at nowhere near the valuation it was pegged at back then. I was right because everything did change in, and in ways that we couldn’t imagine at the time. But I was also wrong: no-one was really left behind, unless of course, it was those who made some bad investment decisions. In one way or another we all moved forward.

So when I hear all the bubble talk going on now I end up thinking more about the benefits that came out of the last bubble along with the benefits that might come of the coming one. Take one of my favorite flops of 1999, Boo.com. A high-end online fashion site, it featured a multi-lingual avatar named Miss Boo, who would function as your guide to the world of fashion. At the time I’d never seen anything as daring and audacious. I’d also never seen anything as slow and ponderous as it tried to serve up interactivity to 56k and slower modems. It soon became one of the many stock jokes around the office about sites that reached too far, exceeded their business models or just didn’t weren’t ready for where the world and culture was at. Or, consider the startup I worked with who had the idea of creating a portal that listed out-the-beaten-path resorts with details updated via user comments, ratings and a direct reservation service that if I recall worked via fax (fax? really?).

There’s a lot to hate about bubbles, the complete irrationality of the boom/bust cycle, the enormous financial benefits that go to a chosen worthy, and unworthy, few and the blood on the streets mentality of the marketplace. But bubbles can also be powerful incubators that surface and test ideas that may be ahead of their time. Ideas that in their own time may lack proper technological or cultural underpinning, but once technology and culture catch up, sometimes end up being the answer to questions that we hadn’t thought of yet.

This bubble will be no different. (And yes, it’s a bubble. Face it, if everyone is arguing about whether it’s a bubble of not, then it’s a bubble), (Update: Steve Blank has a great post on this question here). I don’t think it will end in as explosive a decompression as the last one, especially as the global economy is in much worse shape than in 2000. I do think that this bubble is less about a technology disconnect and more about a cultural disconnect than the last one. We’ve got the bandwidth and infrastructure to support much of the startup ideas. The bigger questions that have come up have been around the implications of these ideas around societal and cultural issues such as privacy. And then there’s the business model question. Already we see the cracks in Groupon’s business model, ponder the slowing Facebook’s adoption rate, and wonder how soon Zynga will run out of “’villes” that it can gamify.

What is true is that these companies and others crowding around the IPO feeding trough have pushed innovation that we’ll be working through in the years to come. While I hate the growing drumbeat of “hype finance” I just hope that when the bubble pops it does so as gently as possible, so that when I find myself using the same arguments I did 12 years ago I can at least pretend that I might be half right.