Utah Open Source Planet

I just put up Episode 26 of Stack Overflow on IT Conversations. I've really enjoyed listening to Joel and Jeff over the last few months. And the Stack Overflow site is simply the best place to get answers to programming questions. From the show description:

Joel and Jeff answer five listener questions, mostly about social software design. Warning: this podcast features cowbell. Really.

From IT Conversations | StackOverflow | Episode 26 (Free Podcast)
Referenced Wed Oct 15 2008 18:31:15 GMT-0600 (MDT)

Tags: itconversations programming social+networks

Twitter's performance problems over the past few months have made people skittish about basing businesses, even ideas, on it. The problem isn't just performance problems, however. When one company controls what many come to consider a key piece of infrastructure (who'd have thought they'd read that about Twitter 18 months ago), it creates a brittle situation. What if they can't perform or go out of business?

Enter Identi.ca, a Twitter-like site that's based on open source software called laconi.ca. The key problem with something like Identi.ca is that if it's just another centralized solution, nothing's changed.

Laconi.ca has the ability to federate different servers so that if I have an account on Identi.ca and you have an account on whojusttweeted.com, I can follow you and you can follow me. Until today, I've understood that in theory, but not in practice.

Jay Ridgeway has put together a short instruction page on how to federate two accounts on different Laconi.ca servers. There are seven, count'em, seven steps. That's a little more involved that most people will put up with, but, as Jay says, it's a start.

It really isn't any more involved than subscribing to an RSS feed and over the years we've discovered ways to make that less painful. Still, I'd argue that part of the lag in uptake of RSS by most people is this complicated subscription process.

I think subscriptions are a great answer to complicated syndication problems--whether it be RSS, tweets, or whatever, but we've failed to make that pattern so precise that systems take the pain out of subscriptions for users.

I think I'll set up a Laconi.ca server and play with this a little. There's something here, I think.

Tags: federation social+networks twitter

I got a message from Facebook today saying that someone had friended me. I realized I didn't care. Not that I didn't care about the person who'd friended me--I didn't care about Facebook. It's been weeks since I was there and my life is pretty much the same.

I think the reason is Twitter. Twitter is much more social, much more interesting, and the plethora of clients (including any mobile phone with SMS) means that I don't have to remember to go check the site to see what's happening. Twitterific displays a solid stream of the 140 character thoughts of my friends.

Because of Twitter, today I know:

• There were tornados in Denver and Laramie
• Twitter posted an article about their architecture on their blog
• There's a blogger dinner tonight in Salt Lake City
• @tylerwhitaker and @bradbaldwin aren't going to carpool to the blogger dinner

I like that.

Twitter has scaling problems even though their user base is reportedly quite small. As Nik Cubrilovic points out, Twitter isn't like Wordpress or Digg. Twitter is a group forming network (GFN). When a Metcalfeian network adds another user, the number of potential connections goes from N² to (N+1)². When a GFN adds one more user, the number of potential connections goes from 2^N to 2^(N+1). In case it's been a while since you'd done that math--it's a big difference.

To make this more real, consider TechCrunch's twitter account. When TechCrunch, with almost 18000 followers, sends a message, that results in 18000 messages--one to each follower. This is like the phone system with infinite, always-on conference call capability. Sure, you can do things internally to collapse some messages, but you're still dealing with exponential growth.

Cubrilovic points out that this feature creates some serious engineering problems getting Twitter to scale. AL3X at Twitter argues that they're not blind to the problems and they're working on them. There are dozens of people blogging about what kind of architectural solutions might lead to better uptime at Twitter. AL3X's final plea: if you're so smart, come work for us. Good answer.

Tags: facebook social+networks twitter

Reading Scoble's Audience of Twittering Assholes on the Sarah Lacy botch of the Zuckerman interview adds a data point--and an interesting one--to something I talked about a few weeks ago in a post entitled Organizing Ourselves. The point of that post was that tools that allow crowds to connect shift the balance and power and that can be a good thing.

The Lacy thing shows the other side--empowered crowds can turn into mobs (I'm using that word loosely here). The technology in use at SXSW allowed the audience to self-organize and take control of the situation. Previously, you might have mentioned to your neighbor that you were bored or you thought a question was stupid. With Twitter, IRC, and other tools a large group of audience members were capable of knowing that others felt the same way they did. They became, in Scoble's words, a audience of assholes.

I think it's important that we ask ourselves how we're using tools. I'm not speaking about some kind of regulation. I'm talking about awareness. Venues like conferences be aware of adjust to this new reality. For one thing, if the audience is going to be twittering and chatting about the speaker in real time, the organizer or session chair better be keyed into their mood. I think it's too much to ask most speakers to be doing that while they're speaking.

Ultimately, this will likely change conferences. Open space style conferences are, I think, better suited to this new power sharing arrangement than traditional conferences because they've turned so much of the conference over to the audience already.

Bonus: Dave Winer has an interview with Scoble on the "trainwreck" at SXSW. Michael Arrington calls the reaction to Lacy's interview a witch burning.

Tags: sxsw social+networks politics

I was listening to Jon Udell's interview with Valdis Krebs on IT Conversations and Valdis tell the story of seeing hotels guests self-organize to deal with hotel management about the awful Wi-Fi service. He says:

Hotels are used to dealing with disconnected customers -- hotel guests who do not know each other. They can tell these guests anything. Since most guests do not talk to each other, nothing is verified, no action is coordinated. In terms of social network analysis: the hotel staff spans structural holes between the guests -- occupying the power position in the network.

When INSNA arrived, the hotel guests were no longer disconnected -- many people in INSNA know each other and after initial greetings started to talk. The conversation soon went to the lack of connectivity in the hotel -- no one could get a connection out of the hotel to the internet. Not only did everyone discover they were having the same bad experience, but they discovered they were receiving the same lie from the hotel staff -- "everything is fine, no one else is complaining". Being lied to made "being disconnected" all the more infuriating.

From Network Weaving: Connected Customers
Referenced Sat Mar 01 2008 13:36:21 GMT-0700 (MST)

Valdis goes on to make the point that power dissipates when people in a hub-and-spoke network start to talk to each other.

I think this kind of insight has huge ramifications for government. Doc recently wrote about US 2.0. How will this happen? I think it happens when the disconnected nodes that have formerly been only hearing what the middle (government, big media, corporations) has to say start talking to each other. Britt, with OrgWare (disclaimer: I'm an advisor) and other ideas he has is starting down this road with real commitment (i.e. dollars).

I've said, and still believe, that eGovernment--focused on how we run things in between election cycles--is at least as important as eDemocracy--focused on how we run the election cycles. eGovernment has been seen primarily as the responsibility of government. "Give us an online vehicle registration system!!!" we say and government complies. "Yeah!!! eGovernment!!!" and everyone's happy.

But as Valdis points out, we can effect much greater change when we start to talk about how we want the government run. Power dissipates when we're all connected. The power becomes us--government "by the people." Social networks are the real future of eGovernment and eDemocracy. For the first time, we may have the ability to really make that a reality. I think it's inevitable.

Tags: social+networks itconversations politics egovernment

I posted a piece at Between the Lines on the fine line between advertising and recommendations. The basic idea:

Facebook has missed out on a tremendous opportunity to use recommendation permissioning to annotate their social graph with trust information--that's an order of magnitude more valuable than the graph itself.

Tags: facebook recommendations social+networks advertising

Eric Nolin is being very explicit about sponsor talks at Defrag. No harm there--in fact, I like it. The sponsor talk is clearly labeled as such and right before lunch. Today, it's Shane Pearson, from BEA. I interviewed him for Technometria (as part of our coverage of Defrag) a few weeks ago.

Shane said a couple of things that piqued my interest. One was referring to a McKinsey study on interactions on the workplace. He put of a graph about the evolution of managed assets showing that capital was the earliest and easiest asset to manage. Information was second and interactions are the latest asset that businesses want to manage. The money quote from the study:

Almost 85% of people have jobs that are largely or wholly about interacting with other people (rather than transforming raw materials, running machinery, etc.).

IT has always had a function that included managing people interactions, but we've largely relegated it to the bottom-line "saving money" side of things: zero-day start, make sure the phones work, run the email system efficiently, etc. We've not been about top-line, "making money" activities.

Shane asked "what if wanted to know what articles and blogs my co-workers were reading?" He the put up a slide that showed what Facebook might look like if it provided enterprise-friendly functionality.

This got my attention. Maybe it's been obvious to others, but I've informally done similar things with co-workers--shared what we're reading--but this could make it more automatic. I'd welcome the opportunity to see more of what my co-workers think is interesting in any given day. Ironically, universities are particularly bad at this.

Tags: defrag conferences social+networks