co>innovative » Social computing

The Power of Crowdfunding: Diaspora

Tom Powell — Tue, 18 May 2010 02:56:08 +0000

Whoa, Nelly! The largest Kickstarter project ever: 4 soon-to-be grads from NYU posted a project to fund their internships for the summer with a request for $10K to build the beginnings of an open-source, distributed Facebook. Man, did they get their timing right. As of right now, they have reached $177K! They have essentially raised a strong angel round, with no strings attached, no experience, and not a single line of code written. And they still have 15 days to go.

They hit this at the perfect time. Anti-Facebook sentiment over privacy issues recently hit a crescendo and they got some great press on the NY Times blog DealBook. I had the same thought as Jason Fried that these guys may, in fact, be hampered by this huge windfall. It’s too much money for 4 guys with no experience for a summer internship. Wouldn’t the money be better spent on different teams working on several pieces of the distributed social puzzle? (New term alert: “distributed social”. You heard it here first. Maybe.)

I bring this up on Co-Innovative because it demonstrates the amazing power of Kickstarter; to promote, distribute, and collect funds for a project. As I wrote back in October, Kickstarter is a killer platform. Further, a completely centralized network such as Facebook will not survive long term as they exist today, and neither will Twitter. Diaspora is a brilliant marriage of these two concepts. I’m looking forward to whatever these guys produce. Who knows, maybe in 3 years it will evolve into a Facebook killer.

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The reason for Twitter’s downfall

Tom Powell — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:40:51 +0000

Going against sensible practice I am making the prediction that Twitter as a company will ultimately fail to live up to its current expectations — or at the very least, survive as a shell of its former self. Twitter as a concept, however, will succeed. To explain.

Many have listed their reasoning for Twitter’s ultimate demise ranging from spam, to lack of monetization, to a steep dropoff of new users, but I believe the best argument has been articulated in various forms by Dave Winer and Marc Canter who have been saying for a while that the service Twitter offers should not be controlled by a single company and in fact cannot be controlled by a single company long term. A single owner creates a bottleneck, fail whales, and stifled innovation. A communication platform such as this will be subsumed into the web as a distributed service. There is no one Email Company, no RSS Company — these are distributed services that interact through standard interfaces.

What if every email in the world was forced to go through a single company? A single bottleneck? It would make no sense. Within a couple of years a standardized set of protocols will develop such that there will be thousands of Twitter clearinghouses through which messages travel — with robust new features and use cases that haven’t been imagined yet.

“Take a look at internet history: News Groups (NNTP), Email (SMTP/POP3), Web Pages (HTTP), Voice over IP, Video Conference, etc. All have standards and generally operate in a distributed fashion.”(Via Sumolabs)

Facebook has already moved in the direction of testing Twitter-like status updates in that one can open up their updates to everyone on an individual post basis. Add the ability to follow other people’s public status updates without requiring a reciprocal relationship, and most of Twitter’s utility disappears.

The original innovator is rarely on top when the market shakes out, so Twitter better sell out to a larger company soon or evolve to accept the future open standards.

A further opening of the system through open standards (extensively laid out by Marc Canter) will pave the way for the next incarnation of posts of status updates, photos, videos, links, etc — the concept of Twitter which will live on. This type of communication, asymmetric following, and sharing will not be going away. It will evolve and expand through thousands of decentralized services… one of which will be Twitter.

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The Fractured Digital Life: How many more social and media sharing sites can we handle?

Tom Powell — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:56:02 +0000

I have always been an Internet geek. I’m not ashamed to say it — well maybe a little. Having been online for 15 years now, I have seen the evolution from the beginning as a user and we find ourselves today in an untenable position. A fractured landscape of occasionally walled-off content services and media sources and a schizoprenic online experience.

To illustrate, my personal Internet media habits consist of publishing:

Comments: rarely.

And consuming — nee devouring! — content from:

And I have tried to limit this list, while more heavy users would list dozens of sites.

What doesn’t exist yet is a useful, intuitive dashboard that allows for digital lifestyle aggregation and seamless lifestreaming: one place to go in which I can easily interact with, consume from, and publish to all of these disparate services through the use of various media. It may end up being impossible to handle all in one place, but who knows.

The problem is some content I don’t want to miss — certain feeds, contacts from friends, emails — while other content I am happy to look in on occasionally to see the latest stuff — Twitter, links posted by friends, news sites. On the flip side, when I’m posting content sometimes I want to share it with the world at large — this article — other times I want to share it with just my family or just my friends — Facebook. Throwing in another wrench is the fine line between business and professional related online interactions and personal interactions.

It’s a confusing mess involving a ton of different sites. Just posting photos is annoying: “I want to post this for just my family as my friends will be bored to tears.” “One of my friends in these photos isn’t on Facebook…” What comes along with this is a certain amount of inexplicable, ridiculous anxiety; “Am I missing something awesome?” “I better document this and remember to post it.” “I’ve got to get through my emails and my RSS feeds.” While there is some inherent attraction to capturing and aggregating everything digital in your daily life from books you rate highly on Goodreads to a Flip video, there is no easy way to set it all up in a nice looking centralized site, though Posterous is pretty close. But really, is it of value to anyone to see EVERYTHING you do? Few people care and they only care to a point. It might be satisfying for you to see and to look back occasionally on what was going on at a particular time, but that’s about it.

Selectivity in publishing will make the online experience better for everyone.

Facebook is getting close to solving some of these problems but still has a variety of issues. Further, a centralized service is not in our best interests as users; content and connections should flow freely through standards based connections that allow for multiple front and back ends and mashups. Decentralized, distributed services wouldn’t be beholden to outages nor would one company have all the power and it would spur innovation to boot.

Dave Winer and Marc Canter have been saying similar things since about the Clinton administration from the standpoint of infrastructure and connections while Steve Rubel has been more recently discussing it from a publishing and consumption lifestream perspective.

All of this ignores the higher level issue of whether one should even be doing any of this, whether one should disengage more fully and focus on what is really important in their personal, professional, and creative lives — a la Tim Ferriss and Zen Habits. For me, I think I have found a good balance of checking in when I can but unplugging the rest of the time — notwithstanding the occasional marathon sessions.

My prediction: services will become increasingly open until information is exchanged between services via standards that will allow for the type of innovation, reliability, and decentralization to produce a better, more coherent experience online.

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The magic Dunbar number: Why Communist societies and operating groups should be fewer than 150 people

Tom Powell — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 03:54:01 +0000

If you have plans to start a Communist society, it would behoove you to cap your group at 150 and cut yourself off from the rest of the world, because after that point, it becomes nearly impossibly for everyone to know who everyone else is while also understanding their interrelationships.

You may not have heard about the Dunbar number, but in essence it is a “a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationship”. Developed by a fellow named Dunbar, as luck would have it, he came up with about 150 — but the number swings from 100 to 230 with 95% confidence intervals.

Regardless of the exact number, we as humans are limited by our neocortex to hold a certain number of social relationships with any significance in our head at once.

Dunbar’s surveys of village and tribe sizes also appeared to approximate this predicted value, including 150 as the estimated size of a neolithic farming village; 150 as the splitting point of Hutterite settlements; 200 as the upper bound on the number of academics in a discipline’s sub-specialization; 150 as the basic unit size of professional armies in Roman antiquity and in modern times since the 16th century; and notions of appropriate company size.

Through my semi-coherent logic, it seems to follow that a Communist group in which everyone knows everyone else and in which the contributions, points of view, and needs of everyone are understood, the group can prosper. Bureaucratic layers are not present and people are on generally equal footing, all working towards the group’s survival. This hypothetical, isolated group falls apart when it expands beyond this point.

And to the main point: would this not argue for companies or operating groups to remain under 150 or 200 people? If a company or group of people who have to work together grows beyond that point, the friction and interaction costs become too great, and people fall outside of your Monkeysphere. The amount of social “grooming” (attention and communication between group members) becomes too great. The center cannot hold. The group (whether a commune or business) has an incentive to stay together and work towards a common goal of survival — actual survival in the case of the commune; marketplace survival in the case of the business. Christopher Allen sees the number for active creative and technical groups as “somewhere between 25-80, but is best around 45-50″

We covered a case in school in which a successful manufacturing company capped it’s plants to 150 people. Once a plant got above 150 they would open a new plant, thereby keeping each group under 150. (Of course, I can’t find the case, but the general thrust of the above is correct.)

Whether the Dunbar number is correct or useful within a business context, there is something to the concept of considering the impact of a group growing too large. The number of people in your team, company, society dictate the best operating approach, as the dynamics change dramatically based on the situation.

Pay attention to the tribes within your organization; understand the monkeysphere.

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