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.

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?

The Power of LinkedIn

I’ve just joined the fast growing Central European team of Capgemini. In my new role of Managing Consultant it will be my pleasure to develop offerings of this global IT services and business consultancy around the lines of Service Oriented Architecture.

In another place of this blog I am discussing the business model of social networks. Indeed, the model is flawed, as today’s applications motivate participants to grow their “trusted” networks indefinitely (last time today I’ve got an invitation saying “it is always beneficial to increase the size and scope of ones network…”). So, this conclusion is very true.

But of course, even if the business model is not right, it does not imply anything about practical usability of these applications. Actually, I can serve as a good example myself. After being a member of the LinkedIn network for just two months, I was approached by headhunters working for Cap. They found my profile at LinkedIn around the same time when another big IT company found me on this network, too. Then both these companies approached me directly and gave me the luxury of deciding between two good opportunities.

The lesson learned? Applications like social networks really work. Even before visionary projects like UPI happen (sorry, this is my child :-)), social networks are already turning the internet into a more structured place. By improving search in more and more special areas, the internet is gradually becoming a medium where you can find what you need.

So there is one symbolism for me. Since now, I have a new job. But in the same time, I have been shown that the world has changed.

Welcome to a networked world! It will be my pleasure to continue meeting you there.

Funny Profiles on Zoominfo

These days a lot of people try hard to work on improving search on the internet. Today’s wealth of internet content is so vast that any method that would help people to differentiate quality content from the ballast (that is overall flooding the net) would be extremely beneficial. Well, we already have one such a method – it is called PageRank. This method is based on the “universal popularity” of a particular site expressed by links that are pointing to it. In other words, PageRank grubs out the semantic information on popularity from the only available syntactic tool: web links. The PageRank algorithm is well proven and fine-tuned to the best possible extent. It is very hard to find any further improvement of it.

Context digging

OK, so where can we move from this point? There are just two ways forward:

• to add some additional syntax piece to the internet (that would help make the content better searchable), or
• try to work better with the existing unstructured content.

Zoominfo can serve as a typical application of the second approach. It tries to dig out the semantics information from the context of keywords and automatically builds user profiles from publicly available news resources. To do this, it attempts to uniquely identify a particular person by searching its name in the context of other keywords that are automatically identified as being relevant to this person. This is a very non-trivial thing to do, indeed!

The Reality Check

Let me share some examples with you. If we search Zoominfo for the most popular Czech singer Karel Gott, we find eight (!) different profiles. The good news is that all are sort of related to the singer; however, the bad news is that no one is really correct and seven of the eight actually don’t mention that this person is a singer! Where is the problem? In the attempt to differentiate possible namesakes the system actually splits information about one person to many different profiles. Of course, the balance is difficult to reach. On one hand, it is wise to suppose that if there is a lot of information about a particular person, part of it should be contributed to namesakes. On the other hand, it doesn’t hold always, particularly if the person is really popular.

From professor to journalist or landlord

However, this problem is even more general and is not limited to top celebrities only. For example prof. Vorisek, who is the Head of Department of Information Technologies at the Prague Economic University, has 4 different profiles. Only the profile No. 2 is sort of correct, but it is vastly incomplete, just quoting his name and school. We don’t even know his function and have no idea about his other activities. In addition, some of the profiles are pretty funny. My favorite one is the one that actually identifies Jiri as a sort of landlord of Zofin Palace. In reality, Zofin Palace is just the venue of a regular annual conference Jiri’s department is organizing.

The conclusion

I don’t think that people at Zoominfo don’t try hard. They certainly do. The problem is a more serious one: the task to process context of keywords exceeds capabilities of today’s technologies, even if we limit this task to search in a particular context only (e.g., search of names and positions, as Zoominfo does). The idea itself is not bad, but it is a too ambitious one. Generally speaking, the complexity of this task is close to the problem of an automatic text comprehension and translation. Zoominfo’s case just illustrates that we are not at this stage yet.

This is a very clear message that shouldn’t be overlooked. It is (yet) very hard and even contra productive to automatically work with unstructured information, even in very special scenarios. On the other hand the syntax approach (PageRank) works well; the problem however is that its mechanism is already “milked to death”.

The solution?

To get better search results, we will have to add some additional syntax to the web. We should do it smartly – we cannot expect too much work from users, but in the same time we should make this web extension a clear advantage for everybody who joins.

There are many applications already that tackle the internet search problem this way – social networks can serve as a good example; thanks to their growing popularity they are in fact turning a significant part of the internet to a structured form! Another interesting example is the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project.

We will however try to formulate a more general approach based on Unique Personal Identificator (UPI). It is actually a nice paradox that Zoominfo (and not only it) would greatly benefit from such a system. On the other hand, if the internet had UPI, applications like Zoominfo would not be necessary at all...

Why Are Social Networks Dying?

Dear Blogosphere:
Skip directly to the paragraph labeled “socioware”, if you want to start directly with my recent thinking about social networks. But as this is my first blog here, let me start with a few words about myself. First, to my motivation: There is one problem with today’s internet. We can find quite easily products, texts, even maps there, but it is very difficult to find people with similar interests and similar way of thinking. To do that, we have to do some extra work – like the one I am starting now. In the best case, a fruitful discussion starts and the right people emerge from the discussion.
By the way, I understand that you (the readers/discussion partners I seek to find) will read these lines when and only when I am persistent enough with my publishing efforts and cover enough interesting topics in a way that is close to your own thinking; only then you may return also to the beginning of the blog one day and read these lines. And this is a very interesting thing about the blogosphere itself: right now I am actually “broadcasting against the wall” and writing something for my potential future readers. But it depends only on my effort whether I succeed to remove the wall between me and you one day. There is no shortcut today. But there might be one in the future – and we are already coming to socioware visions :-). But allow me two more paragraphs before we get there...
Second, about myself. At the time of writing, I am an 42 year old mathematician, recently earned Ph.D. in Computer Science, who lives and works his entire life in Prague, Czech Republic. I am new to English blogosphere, but not new to publishing at all. I wrote two books, one called e-Business for managers, one sci-fi novel “Stab in the back on the information superhighway”, one TV serial “Man and computer” (produced and broadcasted by Czech TV in 1992). All my publications cover my hobby and lifetime passion: trends in the IT and the consequence of IT developments to various areas of human life and business. These days I write a regular column for the Czech most popular weekly economics magazine Ekonom and for 15 years I am regularly publishing for Czech edition of Chip, the most popular computer magazine here. There is however one BUT: All my publications (with a few exceptions) are in Czech language.
So I am “Mr. Nobody” in the English speaking blogosphere and starting nearly from scratch here (well, I delivered some English presentations and gave some interviews when I was Senior Manager of “Big 4” consultancy Deloitte; and I also put some articles on calresco.org). But most of my work you will find is in Czech.
These days I am teaching e-business and IT Management courses on University of Northern Virginia in Prague (one interesting implication of September 11th – it is more difficult for students to get their US student visa now; this lead some US private schools to open campuses in other parts of the world); sometimes I teach in Beijing for the same school. In addition, I’ve just found a producer for my new educational TV serial on future technologies “Stepping Forward”. The entire serial is based on a story that is placed in the future. This serial will be in English, too. There are lots of strange things heroes of the serial (in their “innovative professions”) have to go through. And I would love to discuss at least some of them with you, too, in some of my next posts.
Enough about me for now. I hope I’ve just covered what is my life-time interest and hobby: visions of IT applications and visions of the internet applications; in the same time, we are not finished yet, as this will be the subject of this entire blog – as long as time, energy and passion allows me to continue (well, I hope for at least one additional post-:))...

Dying Socioware

Contemporary social networks, like LinkedIn, OpenBC, or Orkut have a flawed business model. They all try to earn money on selling the so called “premium membership”, that means access to those parts of their membership database that is not “linked to” us yet. This concept is in direct contradiction with the original motivation of these applications, which was to establish close networks of trusted friends.
All these applications build a concept of “friendship” that is far too simplistic and does not correspond to any kind of real-life relationship of our real world. “Friendship” in these networks is established when two contacts agree via email to “connect”. By this agreement, they make their own contacts mutually visible; if I connect to somebody, I can see his contacts, and I can search in contacts of his contacts. If I search elsewhere, I just get a result like “partner at Deloitte; if you want to know his name, buy our premium membership”.
What are the consequences of such a business model? To make the application work for me, I am motivated to be as opened to accepting and offering connections as possible. As a result, an average number of connections in these networks constantly grows. “Hubs” and “superhub” users appear that connect thousands or even tens of thousands of people. LinkedIn recently decided not to publish the actual number of connections of particular user any more, but this is of course not the real solution of this problem; it is just its manifestation.
The longer term consequence is pretty clear and sad in the same time: everyone will be a connection (a “friend”) of everyone one day. While this is happening, the value of friendship that was originally meant as the essential information of social networks, degrades and will eventually be lost. We can even say that socioware is dying these days, thanks to its flawed business model.

The Way Out?

So, if the business model is wrong, there should be a way to fix it. It would actually not be that difficult. First of all, let us have a look at what are the main characteristics of today’s concept of “friendship” in social networks.
“Friendship” is:

• digital (yes/no – a person is friend or is not)


• static (once agreed, we are friends; OK, in theory, we can break, but it would be too painful in current implementation :-))

In addition, friends are our key to make the search functions of the network accessible to us.
I am pretty sure that the key to survival of today’s social networks is to frankly answer the following two questions:

1. How to re-define friendship (of course, in a “non-digital” and dynamic way)


2. What should be its purpose (and this implies another question: what should be the business model of social networks?)

Nobody is perfect in his reasoning, so in fact I’ve decided to consult this problem with some really good professionals in the Czech internet community. There is a server called Lupa.cz which is focused on the technology and internet, but, what is more important, which is also home of a very strong community of internet professionals. Actually everyone who means something in the Czech IT business reads articles and participates in discussions on this server.

eWorkshop

Six years ago, in Spring 2000, I tried to launch an experimental format on this server. I called it “eWorkshop” and based it on a simple idea. In the first day of an eWorkshop, an article about an interesting topic is placed to this server. This article formulates a problem (like the one above) and ends with some open questions. People are encouraged to participate in a discussion, which is moderated by the author; in the evening, this discussion is summarized in a new article. These steps are then repeated three or four times, and eventually, at the end of the week, the communityitself comes up with an interesting proposal.
I must say I was not sure whether this will ever work when I was running the first eWorkshop back in 2000. But eventually I was really surprised how fruitful the discussion was and how much appreciation I’ve got from the community. It is true – the more you give, the more you get. So no doubt this discussion lead to really innovative ideas and views I would be myself unable to come up with. In some areas (suggestions how to improve web search) we even came up with a solution that was eventually implemented (independently on us) by a commercial Israeli firm. I’ve run eWorkshop on this server six times since then, but last time in 2003.

The Outcome

This February I revived this format and asked the community about its ideas how to salvage social networks. And I must say, the community doesn’t age :-). Even today it came up with very good answers and suggestions that would really solve some big issues of existing socioware. But the biggest surprise to me came later on in the discussion. From a concept of static network of nodes, which serve as the universal basis of today’s socioware, we moved to a much more general an interesting approach. We proposed a concept based on of UPI (Unique Personal Identificator) that would solve better and more generally the original purpose of socioware: finding people that are similar to us in their way of thinking, work and behaviour. This concept could be implemented as a natural extension of existing search engines and would convert web search from being based on universal evaluation of web content quality (PageRank) to a personalized method.
Being able to do that, we would be able find ideal candidates for our real friends. Such a nice change if we compare it with static applications called “network of friends”, or socioware. Well, the internet is dynamic. And this will be our next topic if you stay tuned.