Life in a glassy fishbowl

One interesting comment appeared today on my previous post:

Anonymous said...

Well described. However there is missing area. Security. People usually not expose contacts which could be pretty close and they feel that another their contact dislike/ hate the person. Second, not all communication whatever intensive mean we are friend or colleagues. Imagine yourself complaining to any bigger company. Many times long story and no relationship will happen. Third, Unified ID. Thanks God there is no way how to enforce it (now). ID itself is great idea, however real people abuse anything they can. Now you loose at maximum limit on your credit card. However with digital identity you could loose more. In worst case you could be completely impersonated with all consequences. In digital world (now I exclude mixing of real and digital world) your reputation could be easily harmed and your chance to prove your innocence is limited

2:23 AM

Good points! However, the future world will not care about which developments we would prefer to happen. There is one general observation we can make even now: the level of transparency our our future world will change. My hypothesis is that whether we like it or not, this "transparency level" will increase significantly. It however doesn't mean our world will necessarily become a worse place for life. It may work just the opposite way: if all information is transparent we can live a more peaceful life than today - no more will anybody be a subject of gouging, no more will anybody be nervous that something secret will be found out. All information will be public. Everybody will have to live his life with a full knowledge of this fact to avoid negative surprises.

The other side of this new set-up however is that we all will have to accommodate our life to this new situation. We will have to live our life as if we stood at every moment on a public stage. It is not inappropriate to compare this situation to a new kind of religion - from the time when the God saw everything (so people had to behave gently and appropriately), we are now approaching a situation when we can be sure that whatever we do can be observed, archived and found by anybody, even by our worst enemy. (And to be frank, to a great extent we already live in this situation today - or do you really think our emails and calls are safe these days?)

Meet my mistress, darling!
Specifically to your first point: I fully agree with your comment that not all our contacts would appreciate to know all other contacts we do have or we communicate frequently with; for example, our wife will not appreciate our mails, calls and meetings with our mistress(es), your boss will not value our job application to the competing companies, etc., etc. However, as I said above, this will be not our choice to decide which information we will share with whom (I do exaggerate here, but only slightly). It will result in a new, "transparent" world and this world can basically have two consequences:

1. People will start to behave "more appropriately" (knowing the consequences of each steps they are doing), or
   
2. People will become more liberal and will accept certain situations as "normal".

I frequently think about how this new level of transparency will influence peoples' relationships. My tip is that the final result will be between these two extremes and will be different for different areas (work code of conduct will probably be more liberal than the personal code of conduct). It will be certainly very interesting to see how this develops.

Business of personal?
Your second comment falls into a more general category of how to split "business" communication from the personal one. The question is, do we need to split them at all? I agree with you that although even in business we can (and do) make friends, we all have personal experience with annoying communication with institutions which lead nowhere (only to personal frustration). But my experience tells me that in these situations we tend to limit the communication to an absolute minimum.
In addition, there are other tricks that can be used, which will help to separate the"real" relationship with the fake one. If somebody is, say, a speaker of a large corporation, he automatically gets lots of messages every day and he also replies to lots of messages, because it is the nature of his work. In this amount of communication, his personal share of communication with any particular client gets naturally pretty low. And this can be one of the clues to our problem. Weights of the friendship can be taken relatively in respect to the overall amount of communication of every person of the communication.
Interestingly enough, such an algorithm would work also well with celebrities, actors, politicians, sport stars, and all people who receive lot of attention and thus lot of communication (even with our boss). It would automatically take into account the "weight of the communication" on every side of the communication. The more asymmetrical the communication is, the less important the relationship probably is. There is certainly need to work out such ideas to a much more detail and to come up with better and better algorithms.

Let's live in a glassy fishbowl
To your third point: yes indeed, everything in our world can be and will be misused. I don't however think an instant "loss of identity" can occur; on the other hand, somebody can pretend he is you. But to make this really work he would have to do it continuously for a long time and invest quite a lot of energy into it. Frankly, most of the people have other things to do. In other words, most of the people are normal: tell their real names when we meet them on the street, do wear their own faces, not masks, and tell their real names to the phone when they call us. So I tend not to be too pessimistic here. But indeed this will be a problem. Certainly some mechanisms will appear to fight these frauds and certainly there will be even smarter frauds invented that circumvent these mechanisms. But as I said, most people behave normally and this is, frankly, why our world works, and why the future world will work, too.
Much bigger problem would thus will be how people will cope with the new transparent world where there will be an absolute minimum of personal secrets. It will depend only on us how we tackle this new situation.

So I would correct your saying slightly:

In a digital world you will have to build your reputation every moment of your life.

Wrong concept called “digital” friendship

Let us discuss the concept of “digital” (=Yes/No) friendship that governs today’s social networks. I am afraid this concept is outdated as it doesn’t reflect reality of peoples’ relationships. It should be replaced by a more natural concept of, say, “communication proximity”, which would be dynamically built on frequency of communication between any two people.

The long-term solution would be to incorporate a standard to the internet that would unambiguously identify people along all ways of their communication. Even if I read an article of certain author, this should be calculated as his one-way communication with me. If I post comment under that article and the author reads it, it will be already a two-way communication. After collecting all these data, everybody would have a personal map available to him that would automatically map people in his neighborhood – from his closest friends to some remote potential contacts; in addition there should be possibility to map people not just by frequency of communication, but also by common professions, interests, hobbies. In other words, even results from this mapping exercise would be highly personalized and would offer variety of outputs. This model would correspond much closer with reality than today’s digital Yes/No schemes.

Ideally, contact management systems should be developed that would automatically watch all means of my communication: email systems, IM systems, (VoIP) phone applications, and that would also integrate with my calendar, as personal meetings are also a way of communication. To allow these applications being established, a clear method to uniquely identify people in their different ways of communication should exist. Yes, we are again returning to the concept of “Unique Personal Identificator” described earlier in this blog. Unfortunately, nobody has the authority to define such a thing, even if it is very useful. Several interesting attempts exist (e.g., FOAF), but the way to go is probably through creating a de-facto standard.

And now we are coming to our question. How can, to your opinion, such a standard develop? Which is the most likely scenario that would force people to use certain identification method in all their communication?

I have some ideas and I am ready to share them with you, but would love to hear your opinions first.

My third book: Effective business on Web 2.0

My new book arrived on the market these days. For those of you who can read in Czech language it brings some practical tips of how to use internet applications dubbed “Web 2.0” in everyday business. We are not in a fully automated world yet, but we are getting closer and closer to this vision literally every day. Enjoy!

Opportunity to be filled: personal notes in contacts

The history taught us one lesson very clearly: the best chance for adoption have those products that solve particular customer problem. So let us have a look at one particular customer problem now; problem which is well known, but yet unsolved today. It is a problem of managing personal notes in our contacts.

Most contact organizers, both in paper and electronic form, allow users to add personal comments to any contact in the database. This in fact splits the information in organizers in two groups:

1. Contact information with up-to-date phone number, email address and job title – this part would be preferably updated by the contact himself;
2. Strictly personal judgments and notes that are unambiguously linked to the contact information, but still remains the sole property of the user who wrote it. This part cannot be updated automatically and may be shared if and only if it is explicitly required.

To my knowledge, solution that would separate these two categories and would allow synchronizing the public part while still keeping the private part untouched doesn’t exist on the market. “Personal tags” in Xing are not satisfactory for this purpose indeed. In a long-term, "Unique Personal Identificator" defined earlier in this blog, would solve this problem – it would unambiguously link all information about particular person both on the web, and in personal notes of whichever form. But before these general solution emerge, there is a gap on the market. Any interest to fill it?

Three quick tips for Gmail team

This will be a short one. I have the following recommendations for the Gmail team:

1. When searching in Gmail, display not only emails that contain searched words, but also contacts containing these words. Alternatively, add “search contacts” next to “search mail” button.
2. After opening an email, make the email addresses “live” – allow opening particular contacts by right-clicking to any email address, which is displayed in the header or in the body of email, including addresses in “From”, “cc:” or “To” fields (should work similarly like the "Linkedin companion" plugin for Firefox)
3. Allow opening mail messages in new windows, for example by right-clicking to emails in inbox

I am sure these changes would be quite helpful and still very easy to implement.

The Implications of the Cracked Zune (and iPod)

It was clear that the protective DRM software of MS Zune player will be broken one day. Few people however predicted that it will happen so soon. Just one week (!) passed after the official launch of Zune and somebody already found out How To Use The Zune as a Hard Drive. In fact, using media player as a hard drive is a functionality that is normal to most of the competing players, however, for the MS-Zune users, this was excellent news. Going from there, other things became suddenly possible, including the very useful tip How To Bypass The Zune's WiFi Sharing DRM.

Both these methods force users to a cumbersome procedure (the second one is even more cumbersome than the first one), but, and this is strange, even then they are more attractive than the implicit, built-in way. But it is only logical, because users of the built-in solution are offered:

1. to transfer files to their device only via a software that controls what can be transferred and what not
2. to artificially limit abilities of their wi-fi-enabled gadget to very limited sharing of music and video

Good news for Zune?

It is a paradox, but both these news can be in fact considered good news for Zune. By removing artificial limitations of its functionality, the device becomes more appealing to its users and can be more successful on the market. (The problem however is, that Microsoft wanted to own a platform where users are locked-in. Opening the device to competitors will not make the trick.)

Wider Implications

Zune is not alone with this kind of problems. New software promises to unlock iPod, iTunes, the most popular player and music download service on the music market. In such a case, a broader question should be answered:

Does it ever make sense to create protecting mechanisms in today’s time, when such mechanisms can be broken in matter of days?

Long-term solution

As regards music, from a longer-term point of view no technology can avoid its copying. Instead of fighting against the inevitable, another approach should be chosen. We should invent such a business model of the music industry, which will be in compliance with the fact that music can – and will – be copied. Selling individual copies of music and trying to protect them through cumbersome (and sometimes even buggy) DRM systems is not the way forward. Instead, the music industry should learn from the software world. Similarly to the shift of software towards the “Software as a service” model, the future of selling music will be ensured by selling tracks to providers of interactive services. While music for personal usage will be for free, authors will get paid in the case of any commercial usage of their work.

Music will become the essence of new interactive services. These services will be so attractive that majority of users will prefer to consume music through these services than to download the free “pure” music. Thanks to this, future users will “pay” for most of the music they will listen to (the word “pay” is in quotations because typically even these services will be for free for the end user, as they will be sponsored by targeted advertisements). By the way, even today the majority of users listens to music through paid services (TV and radio channels). So this service-oriented model of music sales will be very natural as it will be built on existing behavior of users. It will also not require any new pattern of consumer behavior to be learned by users.

Why these services will be attractive?

Let us name just few examples of possible services of the future:

• an interactive radio where virtual clubs of fans of certain genre or a particular music group are formed and served
• educational service teaching its participants the basics of music
• “smart” libraries allowing search for music “similar to” other music, or browsing through music that “people similar to me” like
• automatic recommendations systems of various kinds
• radio that “understands” my mood (thanks to seamless collaboration with other web apps, including my calendar) and automatically offers me what I want to listen to (of course, feedback is implemented, so e.g. a particular track can be skipped and system learns from this)

Why services?

Services have two nice properties:

1. They cannot be copied.
2. They are more attractive for customers than just the music alone. This will assure that future users will “pay” for most of the music they will listen to.

It is not a coincidence that the solution for the music industry copies developments of the software world. Software as a service made already its entry in Wikipedia. Why the “Music as a service” entry is still missing there?

The breaking news that didn’t make it to the headlines – End of the PC era

Last day of October, one small article appeared on the cNet News: Office Live almost out of the gate. I am afraid that mainstream media didn’t quite realize its real significance and implications.

A Forced Move

Anticipating Google's moves in the area of web based applications (Google Apps for Your Domain, but also and mainly Google Docs & Spreadsheets), Microsoft, the world's biggest software maker, has responded by introducing Microsoft Office Live -Web-based software for “small business and consumers”. By this move, Microsoft is starting to fight against its own core cash-cow products. And this is really unique in its history.

Cannibalizing its own cash-cow

At first, Office Live is cannibalizing its Exchange Server right now. At second, the longer-term consequences of this step will make the entire MS Office, which is the most important cash generating product for Microsoft, obsolete. Although Microsoft is trying to underplay its move and underlines that Microsoft Office Live is not intended as replacement of MS Office, but as an additional tool for “small business and consumers”, the reality will soon show up.

The Purpose of Documents

Let us forget marketing for now and be blindly honest in describing why documents exist: every document is created to be processed (read, edited, reviewed, approved...) by other people. That’s it. There is no one simple document which was created just with the purpose to be stored somewhere on the PC.

But only now the second part of our observation comes: there is currently no better platform to accomplish this purpose than the web. Web based applications are inherently better suited for information exchange than any PC-based, or PC-centric solution. Web based applications are not better for formatting documents or printing them, but they don’t need to be. They don’t need to compete with desktop apps in the same arena. Instead, they can use their real competitive advantage and realize the real purpose, why documents were created. They can help people to increase their productivity and effectiveness by allowing them an easier and more straightforward communication.

The Funny World of Today

It will not take long and today’s world and our present-day document practices will sound very funny. Imagine that we need to tell somebody important information today. At first, we write it on our computer, then we print it, then we insert it into an envelope and send it by mail, fax, or messenger, then the recipient reads it and takes notes to his own computer. Is this really the best way how computers should be utilized?

The Funny World of Email and Millions of Copies

OK, you say, “go on, we have the email today!” But that is just slightly better. Document must be saved to local disc first, then send as an attachment to the recipient, then saved by the recipient to his local disk, then the recipient makes his comments and remarks and saves the modified document on his computer (if he is smart, he chooses a different name), then he sends the revised file to a third person to his revision or approval, the third person sends it back to all of us... Well, at the end of the day we end up having tens of copies of different versions of the same file across several dozens computers of our firm, including several slightly differing copies on our own PC. Yes, I am aware of the “Version” function of today’s word processors. But for good reasons (we all are aware of) it is not a good practice to delete the original file when we receive a newer version...

End of the PC era

The conclusion is simple and straightforward. The PC paradigm is not a suitable platform for collaboration of people. At the onset of the mainstream mass internet, the document storage and processing paradigm should be revised from the ground up.

Don’t be confused by the fact that Office Live is marketed only to small and medium companies. The truth is that even big corporations do need to work with documents effectively.