Excellent piece from Andrew Keen on profiting from social media like twitter and facebook. Keen talks about the John Wiley’s formula for online success:

Influence + Reputation = Trust

We’d do well to understand this simple equation because trust equals dollars…

It would seem, whether we know it or not, all of us social media users are in a struggle to improve our trust proposition on the net. Whether we are goofy, cool or clever, we will continue to reinforce our personal brand with each status update.

My take is that these social media sites will become more controlled, online resumes like linkedin.com and less confessional, no holds barred exposes of our lives. Note the example of Petite Anglaise aka Catherine Sanderson who recently shut down her personal blog on life in Paris for reasons of confessional blogging being “fraught with danger” for her and her family.

This just in. I love youtube. But is the youtube business model really sustainable? I’ve heard conflicting reports but my understanding is that the bandwidth costs alone of youtube exceed $1 million/day. That doesn’t include the cost of servers and the petabytes of storage required for all those videos.

I’m probably not alone in saying that few people click through the ads in youtube or facebook. Twitter doesn’t have any ads to click on. But youtube and twitter are really great things. Perhaps in the future they will need to be funded like public television? Just a thought…

Even the heavyweight pundits of all things Web 2.n are weighing in on the debate. Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, Tipping Point etc.) thinks that the free model in practice is unsustainable whereas Chris Anderson (The Long Tail, Free: The Future of Radical Price) thinks that content will remain free. While Anderson’s book is on my reading list at first glance I’d have to side with Gladwell on this one. I remember talk 10 years ago in the dot com boom that business models that had actual revenues and profits were obsolete. I don’t buy that. I’m not even convinced about the validity of Anderson’s concept of “Long Tail Ecomomics.” Most people the world over frequent only the same handful of sites each day (see Alexa.com)  Heck because of the Internet, it would appear that people are choosing from a pool of fewer and fewer names for their babies.

And free or not free, youngsters aren’t even using facebook as much as they used to as facebook’s drop in growth rates in the high school and college cohorts shows:

Move way over web 2.0, it would appear the “real-time web” is here. From twitter to facebook updates, the instant connectivity in the “stream” is the new service-bus between man and machine. Applications like twitter may evolve beyond 140 character sound bites and news updates to become your programming interface to the world. Maybe. 

Have you noticed the machine-like syntax has crept into tweets – with its requisite @ and # commands? I’d submit that tweets will be unreadable into the future. (Some already are.) And you now need a users guide to operate twitter - albeit a clever powerpoint from Tim O’Reilly. 

Why not tweet appliances as well as friends:

@bbq start @dvr lost @frank #beer

(Of course you would have to follow all your appliances…)

Why stop there. Perhaps you could tweet money by introducing new twitter operators…

@maria %$25

Book and pay for airplane tickets

@AC &YVR &CDG (21/05/09) (30/05/09) !Vegetarian %$2000

Not only will the stream take care of all your ecommerce, it will let your friends know your travel plans and dietary habits. Who needs to say “I’m going to Paris” when they can just reverse engineer your booking command?

The stream may turn out to be the command line king’s dream. Maybe.

Of course Twitter has become a social phenomenon. It is successful because it focuses on only one thing, 140 character “tweats” to followers and the world. Heck even Barack Obama and Stephen Colbert are followers of little old me – brimac, apparently. Imagine that. Too bad I never use it. 

While tweats from US presidents or Johnny Depp are far more interesting than from your humble correspondent, there is something captivating about the technology. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m seeing social networks like facebook more of a broadcast technology than intitmate social experience. Twitter on the other hand, is more conversational and two-way.

The winner of techcrunch50 2008 was a technology called Yammer. Yammer is basically twitter behind the corporate or institutional firewall.  Only those users with a valid @tru.ca email, for example, can participate. It is also twitter with a business model: the idea would be that yammer quickly becomes your communications tool so other features are available to support the community at a cost of a couple dollars a month per user.

I’ve already  registered tru.ca and added a few colleagues. The idea is that this could be an effective internal communications tool to let people know what is happening, updates from the president, and a forum to address the issue of the day. Having all 1,700 or so employees on here would be cool.

I have no idea if this will take off – but in an time where ideas (and Ideas Management) are keys to success, it can’t be a bad thing. Further, IT and HR departments should be proactive with these technologies, as they will probably be used more and more as the virtual water cooler, like it or not.

The Network Effect, or Metcalfe’s Law, states that the value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the number of its users. Here’ Bob Metcalfe’s original slide illustrating that fact:

Whether or not it is correct, Metcalfe’s Law illustrates the value of the Network Effect, that the more people, devices and IP-aware vacuum cleaners there are on the “network”, the better. Heck, that’s been the assumption we’ve always used to justify the expansion of communications networks for ages.

You’d think Metcalfe’s Law would also apply to social networks, ie the more “friends” you have on your social network the more rich and complete your life is. Apparently that’s not the case. According the Dunbar Number, the maximum number of stable relationships us humans can have is 150. Any more and things would go quite wobbly. From the Economist:

Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming”. In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation. You need to remember who is allied with, hostile to, or lusts after whom, and act accordingly. Several years ago, therefore, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop. Extrapolating from the brain sizes and social networks of apes, Dr Dunbar suggested that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 148. Rounded to 150, this has become famous as “the Dunbar number”.

Facebook reports that the average number of “friends” subscribers have is 120, corresponding closely to the Dunbar number. However, they also note that the size of the real social network is actually quite smaller, with men responding with any frequency to only seven of those friends online, and women responding to only 10. Having 500 friends doesn’t seem to increase things much either.

The upshot of all this is twofold. Thankfully, the amount of FB “friends” you have is not really related to your Dunbar-150 and that social networks are really more of broadcasting than networking medium. The network effects of your “friends” beyond  a handful is very limited. Frankly, I find this a relief.

We interrupt the usual, pollyanna technology updates to draw your attention to an article called The End of Solitude by William Deresiewicz in this month’s Chronicle of Higher Education. Deresiewicz postulates that people in their teens and 20’s

…have no desire for solitude, have never heard of it, can’t imagine why it would be worth having. In fact, their use of technology — or to be fair, our use of technology — seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude, a continuous attempt, as we sit alone at our computers, to maintain the imaginative presence of others. As long ago as 1952, Trilling wrote about “the modern fear of being cut off from the social group even for a moment.” Now we have equipped ourselves with the means to prevent that fear from ever being realized. Which does not mean that we have put it to rest. Quite the contrary.

Remember my student, who couldn’t even write a paper by herself. The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less are we able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets.

There is an analogy, it seems to me, with the previous generation’s experience of boredom. The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest citations of either word, at least in the contemporary sense, date from the 19th century. Suburbanization, by eliminating the stimulation as well as the sociability of urban or traditional village life, exacerbated the tendency to both. But the great age of boredom, I believe, came in with television, precisely because television was designed to palliate that feeling. Boredom is not a necessary consequence of having nothing to do, it is only the negative experience of that state. Television, by obviating the need to learn how to make use of one’s lack of occupation, precludes one from ever discovering how to enjoy it. In fact, it renders that condition fearsome, its prospect intolerable. You are terrified of being bored — so you turn on the television.

I speak from experience. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, the age of television. I was trained to be bored; boredom was cultivated within me like a precious crop. (It has been said that consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.) It took me years to discover — and my nervous system will never fully adjust to this idea; I still have to fight against boredom, am permanently damaged in this respect — that having nothing to do doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The alternative to boredom is what Whitman called idleness: a passive receptivity to the world.

So it is with the current generation’s experience of being alone. That is precisely the recognition implicit in the idea of solitude, which is to loneliness what idleness is to boredom. Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred text messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. Some degree of boredom and loneliness is to be expected, especially among young people, given the way our human environment has been attenuated. But technology amplifies those tendencies. You could call your schoolmates when I was a teenager, but you couldn’t call them 100 times a day. You could get together with your friends when I was in college, but you couldn’t always get together with them when you wanted to, for the simple reason that you couldn’t always find them. If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.

But not all hope is lost for today I learned that  drinking coffee,  being tall and left-handed has an upside!

Digital kids take time out for some analog sushi building

And the newspaper reporter, musician, record store employee, and television producer, etc…

According to the Web 2.0 iconoclast Andrew Keen in his book the Cult of the Amateur the flood of user-driven content on wikis, blogs and social networking sites is “destroying our economy, culture and our values.” Oh oh, that can’t be good.

Keen has lots of illuminating examples in his book, which is a polemic against the “upload society” we have created that is eroding the livelihood of professional writers, musicians and producers, etc. While some of the book seemed a tad alarmist for me, I really liked the passion of the work.

I found the concept of how no one makes any money in the Web 2.0 world (except Google) very interesting. Take blogging, pour example. According to the book, Guy Kawasaki, whose blog is on the top 50 for the whole Internet, earned a paltry $3,350 for 2006, not exactly a wage matching his fame.

Keen also discusses the misfortunes of the rock-acoustic band “The Scene Aesthetic”, who, despite massive MySpace and Youtube popularity, couldn’t translate that success to real world things like cash. Page 111 talks about their national tour where they could barely cover costs:

“On good days, if the band manages  to sell enough T-Shirts and tickets, they can even buy dinner. On bad nights, Bowley and de Torres ended up sleeping on basement floors of fans homes.”

Not quite the image of rock-stardom for a band that had nine million plays on MySpace…

Call me old fashioned and a crazy, cock-eyed optimist but I’ll continue to buy music, books and magazines – thanks very much. I’ve found that in this Web 2.0 world I’m starved for good information from experts and works from talented artists. In fact, I’m spending more money in the iTunes store than I ever would have spent at the local music shoppe. While there are some blogs that I really, really enjoy I also need actual news from actual journalists from the CBC, The New York Times or the Economist, etc.

I found the most frightening bits in the book dealt with  how your information is mined by search engine companies. According to Larry Page, Google co-founder, the future is the “ultimate search engine that understands everything that you asked it and give you back the exact right thing instantly.” To do that Google becomes pretty well omnipotent and the concept of personal privacy a thing of the past.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook:

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.”

Yikes. And Google will remember it all.

Have a nice day.

My favourite social network has to be linkedin.com. Besides from being a really good addressbook for business contacts, there is something comforting about  keeping in touch with people you spent time with in the corporate trenches over the years.

Sadly, I don’t have that much luck with facebook. I’m sure younger people dig it but I can’t stand the cliqueness and opportunities for social drama guaranteed by design.  (Me being voted worst dinner companion of my  fb “friends” doesn’t help either. )

That said, I must say I like the micro-blogging aspects of fb – this feature was borrowed directly from twitter.com I think. I like the more esoteric messages:

Pete is thinking about what cereal to have for breakfast.

Sally is on fire. No literally. Call 911!

Linkedin actually has a practical use for me in my life. I’m finding some of the groups very helpful to my job. With 30 million business users, who knows, it could be the place to be for networking and career opportunities.

Now can I please add you as a linkedin friend? We can do lunch…