Musings & Meanderings

Madan Pandit of Textual Analytics Solutions emailed me a link to Rich Skrenta’s post on Mahalo yesterday. This afternoon I caught up on others, including more of Jason Calacanis’s, those of Dave Winer, of Dave Sifry, of Andy Beard, and even the amusing Valleywag outing of uncov.

The only post talking about any aspect of the user (and potential contributor) point of view that I took yesterday, was Rob La Gesse on the ombudsman subject. Rob contended that if an ombudsman is hired by the company, then that person has to be in the position to speak only for the community whose interests he represents, and, perhaps more importantly, has to be listened to.

To the encounter with Mahalo which I described yesterday, I arrived with the concept (after reading Jason’s blog) that the Mahalo content would be hand-built by and for the non-.001% of users. This naturally led me to expect that such building would be done, to at least some extent, by the 99.999%. The expectation was partly reinforced by the fact that, of the 20 or so searches I tried at different times, not one came up with a result. What I was searching were my own non-tech related interests and also those of other non-tech computer users I know (who all rely on Google). Knowing that I could contribute on a number of topics, I registered.

It seems that my initial concept of Mahalo, which envisaged a brilliant method of involving and identifying peak users in non-tech categories, who would naturally draw other users in each category, was inaccurate.

This 99.999% of the billion or so people with internet access seems rarely referred to as more than an undifferentiated mass by the .001%. They are, however, as different and individual as those who are in the .001%. More so perhaps, since even across the range of gamers and coders and telephony experts and social media-ites and entrepreneurs and investors, the .001% share a lot of common interests.

Other than marketers talking in broad generalizations, such as that a majority of online buyers are women (and a majority of techies aren’t), no tech entrepreneur I know of has considered mapping the majority in depth. Most start-ups target only a core group, small or large, based on a service or activity - a single need or desire to be met, and it was the idea that if Mahalo was for everyone it could result in the eventual emergence of a starting blueprint for a personalized global user mapping, that made me think it was brilliant.

Such a map will not emerge using current marketing tools. These rely at their root on common demographic elements which override personalization.

If you map users by traditional measurements such as time spent online, spending, age, gender, education, residence, etc. (which goals btw seem more in line with the Social Graph or Spock than Mahalo) you produce value for marketing professionals, including their clients, the vendors and advertisers, but the evolution of personalized information that would enable construction of better destinations and communities doesn’t emerge from this. A crowd-sourced construction based on individual interests and activities, however, could open the door to many future development ideas.

From this perspective I read Dave Winer’s comment that, “Bottom-line, he needs to figure out a way to build the company so that many others can profit from it. Otherwise I don’t think it has a prayer against Google”, and understood that this was what I had found exciting, a process where users would reap benefit by contributing, and could form further natural groups and communities through the process. This is also what disturbed me about the ombudsman image, which put users firmly outside a corporate wall.

I’d thought Mahalo might be the personal interest version of a Wikepedia type community, which would naturally evolve into an endless myriad of overlapping circles, rather than a conflicted skyscraper. The way I’m understanding the building of Mahalo now, is that first the .001% will build it, and will know what to build for the 999.99%, who will then arrive in droves to use it. You think?

The millions of non-tech users on eBay in its glory days or those on MySpace through its dramatic early growth, or the additional millions of bloggers offered a blank page more recently, brought their own views and interests to open spaces that grew as a result. Who decided or really knew in advance the scope of what they’d want to do? Who realized what further growth (beyond cashing out) could be enabled for those natural congregations of individuals?

What makes the internet different that any other medium is that it is personal and interactive, and can grow from that level in an organic manner. I don’t happen to believe that personal and interactive can’t scale, only that we have not yet learned how to enable it to. This kind of scaling, in my view, cannot be accomplished by massing larger numbers of people into a depersonalized mass, but rather via enabling a dynamic growth process within which endless groups can evolve and overlap, just as communities do naturally in large urban centers. Search/info by itself would not necessarily be the perfect or only starting point for such growth, but it could certainly be one of them.

There is also a secondary aspect of Mahalo which I responded to, and this was the potential of real valuation of reputation and development of trust. These two valuable words have been turned into buzz words everywhere we turn in this web 2.0 world. When I first came to Lijit (which I think is supposed to evoke ‘legit’) last year, the word trust stood out front and center. So in I went, wandering around, and discovered that everyone there was anonymous and that there were no forums or other venues for getting to know people. When I inquired about this, I was told that the idea was that I should bring friends I trust to join me there, but I could not understand why I would do so. Squidoo originally struck me much the same way. Every lens I found of interest was written by an ‘expert’ …using a pseudonym. This reputation and trust aspect of compiled information on any topic is worth further thought in regard to Mahalo, or any other site with big growth plans. Even if you have real experts using their real names, unless they are truly famous across many fields of interest, or at least extensively credentialed, their authority will not be easy to establish with strangers.

So I finally got around to checking out Mahalo.

At first glance Mahalo seems a hybrid of a crowd sourced resource such as Wikepedia, Larry Sanger’s Citizendium which will be authored by experts, and a community compiled compendium of links to, hopefully, aggregate and replace all those great resource pages that individuals used to build and maintain, and my first response was “cool”. What I saw was an ad free human recommendation search engine. Who couldn’t get into that?

The initial impression was strong enough that I registered, as Vera, and then stopped.

There’s a basic premise here of crowdsourcing for the crowd’s own benefit but combined with quality control that is certainly appealing.

There are dozens of sites that I could submit (for which there are not yet categories), dozens of subjects that I could make a page or ten for, but I’m not a student or part time enthusiast looking to make $10 or $15 per submission, and keeping track of what I sent in while it was waiting on approval sounds a bit too much like work for which I don’t have time.

I could certainly review submissions on a range of subjects that I care about and have studied most of my life, but I don’t want/need a full time job, and the Mahalo Greenhouse (for growing things) is apparently structured with full time guides reviewing submissions.

Taking another step back, there are many non-tech individuals whose Favorites would make a better search result in the areas in which they are passionately interested, better than any existing search engine or recommendation site could produce. Some of these people wouldn’t share that list for love or money because it represents a competitive advantage in their livelihood. Others whose lists are hobby rather than professional income related, still, if I look at Mahalo through their eyes, might not find incentive to participate. For one thing, they aren’t part of the .001%.

Jason says that Mahalo is being built for them/us, the other 99.999% of the billion or so people online worldwide. If that’s the case, then I’m hoping to see guides and contributors from all the places and communities where they/we are, or at least distributed mostly across North America and the UK, since Mahalo is, for the time being, in English.

One of the things stopping me from contributing is the impression I’m getting that Mahalo intends to become a destination/community but I can’t find it. Let’s say that one of the topics that I could build something on was 20th century art and design (or at least a number of the thousands of pages that such a broad category should eventually contain). Based on the intimated goal of community(ies), I’d be expecting or perhaps hoping to ‘meet’ and possibly ‘confer’ with other members contributing on the same, or related topics. Would we, these loosely associated community members, discover one another accidentally via and then outside of Mahalo? Would our contributions be subject to the approval of ‘one of us’ or only of a paid employee of Mahalo who is or isn’t as knowledgeable in our areas?

Then there is Jason’s invitation to Jeff Jarvis to join Mahalo as an ombudsman. Bringing in an individual of stature who has a background in journalism as well as diplomacy skills to interact with the contributing community sounds like a good idea. The term ombudsman is a respectful one, generally referring to an appointed, or company hired, official whose duty it is to protect the voice and interests of the constituents, but it also implies that the constituents are the masses outside the gates who need a spokesman and are unable to elect or appoint their own.

Mahalo is, I’m assuming, a privately owned corporation in which we the contributors will play roles varying from contract employees to unpaid contributors to users. This picture does not vary too greatly from many other web constructions, and the idea of a crowd sourced human compiled search engine with quality control, as I stated earlier, is an appealing one.

The pieces of information that I’m missing here, the reason I stopped after registering, are in the questions of where the communities are, how they are to define themselves and function, and what their intended role is in the future if Mahalo turns out to be a big success? For those of us in the 99.999% who have painstakingly built various favorites and link lists in many categories over the years for our own use, what draws us to and keeps us returning to Mahalo, and what are the incentives for contributing?

I understand that Mahalo is new, at a Beta stage. My questions are not intended as criticism, or as an expectation of definitions that are not fully formed and expected to evolve. If Mahalo grows to be a big success, these questions might even matter less to me. Am I seeing a projection of community where there is really only controlled and directed crowd-sourcing?

In today’s post on Edgeio’s paid content widget, Jeff Jarvis includes a little demo, which says,

“There’s nothing of value behind this wall. There often isn’t.” Right.

Further on in the post, Jeff talks about what I call the ‘make it worth the consumer’s while’ internet marketing concept. I’ve been pondering this for some time now, thinking it a potentially good idea, and considering how it could be linked to user ownership of data, but am getting to a point where, no matter how I develop the model, it eventually breaks down and ends up rather lame.

In a comment on the same post, Seth says, in response to current online advertising, “I have an almost reflexive need to hit the back button… unless, of course, it’s my “choice” “. This hits the nail right on the head.

Choice is what could grow like wildfire …a model in which selection and action is initiated by the consumer. I doubt, though, that many marketers/vendors would consider such a model. That means it probably won’t exist unless consumers build it. If we did, I think that a whole lot of vendors would make a whole lot more over the internet. Of course they wouldn’t get to vie for their market position in the same way they do now. What’s more, they’d also have to really respond to their customers.

If greatest impact and adoption are used to define the big picture at each edition level, then what I see as the basis of 2.0 development are blogging and rss. Neither one by itself was 2.0. Even before the emergence and growth of large blogging platforms there were personal weblogs and anyone motivated to could afford to find a friend of a friend to help them set up their own site, although most who did quickly discovered that the complexities of seo and other ways of connecting were beyond them.

Blogging platforms, especially the ground breaking MySpace (on the heels of Friendster), have become the basis of all the current social networks and communities. Rss is basically the automation and customization of mailing lists, brilliant in itself, but not complex in terms of behavioral change. In fact, every successful component of 2.0 so far is simply enhanced enabling of what people have always done and wanted to do before most of them knew computers existed: talk about themselves and/or their ideas, converse, choose topics and conversational partners, show off, sell stuff, work with others, etc.

Some additional enabling using 2.0 tools and ideas can be and is realized by individuals, small businesses, and sole proprietors, as well as enterprise users, but in many cases the growth of change is slowing as it hits barriers beyond which it cannot yet travel. I don’t believe those barriers are technological, though, but rather a product of our conception or lack thereof. The rather foggy collective idea of where we are and what to do next, it seems to me, is often floundering. The best analogy I can come up with for what I’m seeing is a mass of bumper cars, of many sizes in terms of capacity, constantly impacting against the inherent barriers of their separate structures. Frequent users occupy space in multiple cars and get increasingly frustrated with having to jump back and forth.

Some of the old definitions of 2.0 included building common passageways and links between many or even all of these bumper cars. I’ve seen the path to this building proposition expressed from a variety of perspectives, including compatibility between systems, languages, and/or architectures, common programming and coding standards, and user profile integration through a variety of methods such as open Id and customized search. I believe that some combination of all these perspectives, however limited, is one of the reasons Google is in the position of prominence that it is.

An emerging common access and connectivity solution idea is referred to as the cloud, where by having data and systems residing in a commonly accessible domain we will somehow dissolve those bumper cars altogether. In some ways, the cloud concept does make sense. It could be a bit like creating a giant virtual bumper car emporium where the properties of all the cars are broken down into a huge a la carte buffet. (yes, I’m forever mixing metaphors …treat them as little bridges, please)

I’ve now progressed to where most people pondering web 3.0 are, and am moving into the direction of my own dream or wish list. Remember what I said about Google? That I believe the key to their success is in combining perspectives? On that basis, I could name my vision of what the future could be ‘Beyond Google’.

The next paragraph is for those who subscribe to the notion that anything worth saying or doing can be expressed in one or two sentences, which is sort of true, except that most people don’t have a clue what those sentences mean until they’ve seen the elephant from the other side of time. Simple tools that we take for granted, such as a telephone, would not exist if one or more breakthrough theories had not been developed and proven scientifically, but no one actually pictured things such as telephones at the time that the theories were first proposed.

Beyond Google is the convergence of different viewpoints. Convergence is achieved through collaboration. Successful collaboration combines multiple viewpoints of multiple parties.

In January, before my extended absence, I wrote a post titled There Are 3 Sides To Every Relationship. It was based on an extremely simplistic description of the multi-faceted and multi-dimensional way that I see things. The over simplification still makes me wince at its clumsiness, but the surprise was that quite a number of people personally responded to me, mostly in understanding. Essentially, what I was saying is that in every interaction there is your side and my side, and then there is the whole picture, and that this view of all dimensions and perspectives at once is also the best tool for conflict resolution. The same view can be applied to the requirements of successful collaboration as I see them.

Both on a personal and societal level, we naturally classify ourselves and each other constantly. She’s a loner; he’s a party animal. They are a mom and pop business; we are a large corporate entity. We further constantly observe properties and assign values to them. This guy’s cool; that guy’s lame. These people are knowledgeable; those are ignorant. This gal’s nurturing; that one’s selfish. This is how we function, and no amount of political correctness or sensitivity is going to change this basic functionality. It is how we learn, through identification, observation, evaluation, judgment. On the level in which we need to share this world and co-exist in peace, only mutual respect and civility are required. On the level where we can collaborate, and thereby progress and evolve, the entirety of our views and motivations must be apprehended and integrated.

This applies as naturally to a small isolated group or community, to personal relationships or regular business engagement, as it does to large societies, and to all of humanity. There will always be conflicts, just as there will always be natural laws that apply to them, whether we’ve discovered and understood those laws yet or not.

Over the past 25 years, I have many times been asked for my opinion on their projects by entrepreneurs, which I am happy to offer. Certainly there are some who are essentially seeking only validation of their own ideas. Nevertheless, I’m usually game to offer a simplistic overview analysis, together with a few pointed questions, partly because entrepreneurial energy, ideas, and problem-solving are my personal fuel. The responses I am most used to getting are “I never thought of that” and “I’d have never looked at it that way”. This is not to say that my way of looking at things is superior to anyone else’s. My point is that very few of us look at any situation from more than a narrow sampling of perspectives.

So my dream, or wish, and my focus of energies as well, is toward greater and even full integration of perspectives in all we do. If, indeed, we can manage to understand natural laws and principles from an integration of perspectives viewpoint, perhaps the very idea of bumper cars will come to seem downright primitive instead of just a bit silly.

Last week there was a surge of conversation about the term user.
Here are some links.

In First we trashed “consumers”, now we’ve effed up “users”, Antonio said,
“…every little company looking to make a similar run has a board full of investors asking the same question every month: “how many users have you got?” …The bummer about it is not the use of the term— but rather how much the constant focus on growing the pool of users quickly distorts any connection that the word user actually has to a real breathing person, even in startups that claim to be “user-centric.”

The conversation swelled to a point of calling for bloggers to post a promise to blackball the term users, with a few bloggers and commenters noting that they were proud of being users and didn’t mind the term. There were also few challenges posted to come up with a better, substitute term.

There was a lot of really passionate feeling at the heart of this conversation from developers who protest the reduction of human beings to a term or a blip of data, yet there was little conversation about who the users are, only about what to call them.

Does changing the terminology really effect much real change? I don’t mind being a user, or a customer, or a consumer in the narrow context of a transaction. I am also, as Antonio put it, a living breathing person. I may be just a blip in your traffic. By the same token, being a user is a blip in the total package of who I, and others like me, are. You can bow down and call me Your Royal Highness and it will not make any substantial difference in why you’re talking to me and what you want from me.

A few years ago, before the rise of blogging, the number of non-tech people interacting online was much smaller, but we were still here. In the communities and groups I’ve participated in, there was typically a very small minority of tech-savvy people who were there for other interests that we all shared in common. They’d help out if someone had a computer problem and that was it.

In some online communities, the administrators consult the contituents on things such as which new fun features they’d like or on minor issues to do with site/community policy. If there are help boards, members can gripe or ask a question, but their isn’t much constructive conversation, to the point that the silence is deafening. Users should start a group weblog about ‘user experience’, except that it might quickly devolve into satire.

The other day I posted that there is no tech speak for non techies and that they simply don’t care ‘how’ things work. That does not mean that they don’t care if it works or if it is of any use to them. I understand very well that there are big viewpoint and language barriers. What I don’t understand is, if the goals are to enable lots of traffic or build and expand online communities, why developers wouldn’t want to really communicate, and even commune, with the intended citizens.

If you’re a tech type or developer reading this, when was the last time you talked about life online with non-techs and how much time do you spend at it? If you’re a non-techie, when was the last time a tech person expressed any real person-to-person interest in your online experiences? I’m not referring to marketing tools such as surveys or other voting mechanisms, but to real conversation.

Anyone?

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added August 5/07:
Tests for Customer Focused Companies posted on August 3/07 by John Hagel.