Why I FAILED

I Agree

I could do without the language, but I agree with this post about where Social Media is heading. It’ll be cool when it’s a reality.

The Other Shoe…

The same week MySpace announced dataportability for profile information, Facebook has said they have similar plans.

“It’s a big move for the site. Until this point, Facebook has had a reputation for keeping its cards close to its chest–even banning the account of popular blogger Robert Scoble when he used a script to export his Facebook contact list to Plaxo. But Facebook has a representative in the Data Portability Workgroup, and executives have said that Facebook has wanted to bring its information outside the site eventually.

“These are just a few steps Facebook is taking to make the vision of
data portability a reality for users worldwide,” Morin wrote in his
blog post. “We believe the next evolution of data portability is about
much more than data. It’s about giving users the ability to take their
identity and friends with them around the Web, while being able to
trust that their information is always up to date and always protected
by their privacy settings.”

CNET has the scoop.

I’m fascinated and excited to see where this goes and quite frankly, have ideas that I’d love to explore as a business. The unanswered question is how sites that rely on eyeballs will remain profitable when interconnectedness results in decreased traffic. There are ways, but like everything web 2.0/social networking, we’re a long way off from the category killing, business models that will inevitably develop in the years - and decades - to come.

As a user though, I’m excited about what’s beginning to happen online.

WOOHOO, Closer Every Day

MySpace has announced an alliance or sort with a collection of websites that will allow the cross-posting of your data, Your online identity. Your…YOU! At least in internet online life terms.

I’ll let you know how it works when it’s up.

Yahoo Open Strategy

Yahoo has made some powerful commitments to the future at the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco. According to ars technica, “Ari Balogh unveiled “Yahoo Open Strategy,” the company’s umbrella term
for a couple of social networking initiatives in mind. At the heart of
the move, however, is an effort to unite the myriad of profiles users
have to create and manage across Yahoo’s various properties.”

But that’s not all, in addition to linking all their own properties - e-mail, Messenger, Flickr, Yahoo 360 and more - their involvement in Open Social means they’ll reach out to interact with other sites too. And the fact that they have 500 million users compared to Myspace’s 110 million and Facebook’s 60 million means that they might be the reason a lot of silos will come down.

CNET has coverage too.

Digsby Launches

Lifehacker has announced the launch of Digsby which appears to be a step closer to my dream of an online hub. I haven’t downloaded it yet, but I will soon.

It could be cool…

Kevin Kelly and 1,000 True Fans

Kevin Kelly summarizes what I and a number of people have been trying to say for a long time. I could grab highlights from it and elaborate, but it’s as near to perfection as it can be.

Read it and get your 1,000 True Fans.

Organizing Me Online, Part I

I’ve made one step forward, but I have so far to go.

Earlier this week I made the decision to use this blog for more than just music. I feel freer and more light hearted since the decision - exactly as I hoped to be. However, I still have so far to go towards my ultimate vision partly because of time and partly because of the current state of tech and business.

Time:

People don’t live lives the way our computers think we do. There’s a vast difference between the papers and pens on my desk and the start/programs/office/word/my_life on my desktop. Online isn’t much better and socially it’s even worse.

Social life in the real world - networking - is a friend/acquaintance/stranger network that revolves around me (or you). It does not revolve around a place. In other words, I don’t go to Chili’s to find my friends, I find my friends and we go to Chili’s. The context is me and them, not Chili’s. In fact, tomorrow, we’ll go to Arby’s.

But online, my life is segregated by place. Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, blog(s), e-mail, etc. Though it’s true that several friends are present in all of those, many of them are only in a few. The tough part comes when I want to talk to a sub-group of friends about a topic - say, social networking.

On the off chance that all my “friends” are interested, I’m currently forced to communicate something 5, 6 or more times, in different formats and forms. Not only is this time consuming, I know the failure rate is high because of the fact that the recipients are bombarded by stuff in their networks all day long. How will they know to read my thoughts on a topic they’re interested in when my last five thoughts have been on unrelated topics?

Tech and Business:

Which brings me to tech and business. Technology is simply not where it needs to be yet and it’s because of business. MySpace wants me to live in their network (Chili’s). Why? Because their advertisers are counting my eyeballs and those of my friends. Same with Facebook, LinkedIn, etc… There’s nothing inherently wrong with this of course, I’m just wanting the next phase to happen now (can you say impatient?).

What I (we) need is interconnected hubs with ourselves at the center as opposed to websites (Chili’s).

Vision:

In an interconnected world, we will most likely be connected through tags, but in a different structure than today. We currently use tags to describe content. These tags categorize the content by subject, usually several at a time. For instance, the post will be tagged life, social networking, personal development, about me. This works great in a world organized by sites and blogs.

But what if tags were the paths that interconnected our personal hubs? What if each tag represented levels of connectivity between us? Think concentric circles around a hub.
Imagine this post tagged like this: [stevegrossman - thoughts - about me - life - personal development - social networking - stevegrossman]. Now imagine your RSS feed reader set to look for [stevegrossman - social networking - personal development]. You would automatically receive any thing coming down my path that ended with [personal development - social networking - stevegrossman]. Likewise, a person’s feed reader looking for [thoughts - about me - life - personal development - social networking - stevegrossman] AND [thoughts - about me - music - success - personal development - stevegrossman] would receive my posts on both those subjects.

On my side, I would manage my content and contacts by looking out from my hub - me. My contacts would be tagged too. A close friend would be tagged: [friend, their name, e-mail (or message), thoughts] and any e-mail groupings I need like “church”. An “acquaintance” would be [tagged, name, thoughts].

Any e-mails or thoughts would go to the first person. The second person would only receive my thoughts, not e-mails. If I tagged a post e-mail, church, it would go to the first person and anyone else in that grouping. Automatically. More specifically, when I wrote a note tagged with [friend, their name, e-mail] - it would only go to one person.

This may sound like a set-up nightmare, but not really. Most of us already do this in our heads, and we have to “tag” every thing we write and usually across multiple sites and technologies. First we have to consider who will be interested in our message or who we want to contact. Where they are online - e-mail or social site. Which of their multiple e-mails will work. Where most of the people are who we want to contact and what are their addresses (what’s the MySpace nickname for Cathy?). Add to that the fact that we’re only guessing as to who is really interested in what we have to say, and TODAY is the nightmare.

The hub based network I envision connects everyone exactly where each person wants to connect. Remember, I only described my address book and content tagging. On the recipient end, they would control the input with similar tags. They can chose to accept everything I send by configuring their feeds deep into my hub, or only receive certain topics near the edge of my hub.

Either way, I sit down at my computer and sign into “Steve’s Hub”. I write a post with tags and hit send.

Across town or across the world a person sits down at their computer and signs on to “Cathy’s Hub”. They see my post because they wanted too.

Who would pay and what I’m thinking about doing while waiting for “Steve’s Hub” will have to wait for Part II