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"What an Alternative Might Look Like: An ideal alternative would probably not be a single replacement social network, but the creation of an interoperable social networking protocol. That way multiple vendors would compete based on quality of service and would keep each other honest, while still allowing users of different services to message and subscribe to each other much like customers of different phone carriers can call each other. "
Entries from May 2010
28 May 2010
27 May 2010
Take back the graph! Facebook, The Cloud, and a return to the basics of social networking
"Take back the graph!" was @mattmiz's reply to my rant that The Cloud was shite, Facebook was poison, and that the future will be peer-to-peer social networking.*
Head in the clouds
How did I come about to that, since not long ago, I was Mr Cloud, harping about a time when all would be in the Cloud, with a dashboard (or a "door") to all our lifestreams, connecting to everyone, sharing, loving, communicating?
At least, that was the original vision of Ovi I first pitched at the end of 2005 (to the wrong crowd, though). I thought that the killer service would be Cloud-based and full of lifestreams. The last flourishes on these thoughts in the past years revolved around visualization and filtering of all these streams.
But I believe this no more.
Here is where I rain on everyone's parade
Facebook is the best example of how Cloud living can go wrong. Folks who are first discovering social networking are getting so mired in Facebook without understanding how Facebook is so twisted with respect to the users.**
And nothing is really in the Cloud. Is anything ever really in the Cloud? No, everything has always been on someone's servers. Their servers. Your data, their servers. [Despite this, there have been efforts to take back the graph, great standards work to democratize social networking - see here a suggested alternative.]
So, I say, The Cloud is a fantasy.
The past is future
Back in my father's day, data resided on someone else's machine. When I started with computers, it was the dawn of PCs, where the data resided on my machine. Then we hooked up all those PCs to communicate until some of those PCs got huge and ended up shouldering the work, serving up data stored out there somewhere.
And now The Cloud dream is to return to a time where the "terminal" is an appendix on the network, and that the network would store everything and do all the work. Terminals are to be just windows onto the Cloud, Just as our terminals were getting interesting and wide-spread - smartphones, tablets, amazing laptops.
How did we let that happen again? Bad move.
Peer to peer social networking
I claim that we need to move data and communication back to the edge of the network, residing in your machines, sitting in your hands, your laps, your tables.
I used to say that the ultimate social networking device was the mobile phone - your buddy list in your address book, billions and billions of text messages exchanged, a direct 1-1 link through a phone call.
Can that model be extended? Can we create a world where there is no Cloud, just a bunch of network bots pushing packets, be they IP or SMS or whatever communication packet we need to route? What will a peer-to-peer email-blogging-website-social network be like?
Do you want to have full control over your data, your social graph, your communications, just like you do now with your mobile phone?
So do I.
How will we do it?
*I've not really written these thoughts down before, since I've sort of stopped worrying (or at least tried to), or hoped to do something myself. They are peppered in the bookmarks and comments I have made in the past years, though. And since I have a high idea to execution ratio, here's the thought for anyone to build upon.
**I deleted my first Facebook account in 2008. I only got another one last year because of work. But, yeah, it'll be gone as soon as I can ditch it.
25 May 2010
22 May 2010
21 May 2010
20 May 2010
15 May 2010
Culture as Augmented Reality?
I was listening to Wade Davis' Long Now talk about the wisdom of ancient cultures. Like all Long Now talks, it got me thinking. One thing that Wade said that stuck out was that other cultures are not failed attempts at being us, but other interpretations of what it means to be human.
He did mention one thing that rubbed me a bit the wrong way. When mentioning Amazonian indians who have a hallucinogen that is made from two parts from two plants, he cited the usual disbelief from our culture of how this came about. He did mention that the indians reply that the plants speak to them. But I feel he failed to say that these indians are as scientific and explorative and systematic about their world as we are and that what was figured out generations ago is now part of how they interact with nature - the plants indeed do speak to them.
He also mentioned Songlines, the songs indigenous Australians sing when traversing the outback. The songlines are an interesting mix of information and culture used to navigate the world.
That got me thinking: Are songlines a form of augmented reality? Indeed, thinking about how the plants "talk" to Amazonian indians, might culture, our encoding of information and norms and etiquette and stories, just be an augmentation over the world, and augmented reality?
By the way, the rest of the talk was mind-blowingly awesome. Listen to it.
Image from StormyDog
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