weaverluke

Stone Age brains and the social web

2008-04-20T13:08:00.004+01:00

I just listened to a brilliant "All In The Mind" podcast on "Stone Age brains in 21st century skulls" while jogging around Highgate Woods:

Front up to your shrink, and you bring a menagerie of hunter gatherers, anteaters and reptiles from your ancestral past with you. Or so Professor Daniel Wilson and Dr Gary Galambos believe. Both clinical psychiatrists, they provocatively challenge their profession to look to the Darwinian roots of human neuroses, and the evolutionary battleground that is our stone-age brain.

The podcast confirmed my thoughts on the importance of intimate social context in our lives—specifically, social intimacy appears to limit the extent to which the dynamics between manic/dominant and depressive/submissive personalities become excessively polarised within groups.

Such polarisation of social dynamics is an adaptive behaviour that is deeply rooted in the reptilian brain: assertion of leadership by the few within a small community allows the community to function without constant fighting.

However, the exploded social contexts we live within in the modern world can distort assertion and submission into manic/psychotic and depressive behaviours respectively. Fascinatingly, we're told that all four of the major leaders in WWII (Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt and Tojo) had manic personality disorders of one kind or another.

Given all the above, how might we build social software that helps us rediscover intimacy of social context in an exploded society? Sounds like it's a fairly urgent mission.

LinkedIn's promise

2008-04-06T19:04:00.021+01:00

Pretty much all my business friends are on LinkedIn. According to Read Write Web, LinkedIn has around 20 million members and around 6.6 million monthly active users. They are the clear global market leaders in the business networking space—Centre Networks report that Xing, their closest competitor, had 5 million members in January 2008.

So just what is it that LinkedIn is doing so right? And could it be doing that thing even better?

The LinkedIn promise

The heart of what makes a service or product successful is the power of the aspirations it evokes. Once we identify the core "promise" that the service holds out to us, we can then look at how effectively the its functionalities, workflows and UI amplify, filter and channel that promise into a rewarding and effective, tangible user experience (UX).

So what is LinkedIn's promise to its users?

First up, LinkedIn's self-avowed mission: "to help you be more effective in your daily work and open doors to opportunities using the relationships you already have". Hmm, not exactly snappy, eh? We're going to have to read between the lines and read the subtle cues here...

I would sum up my actual experience of using LinkedIn feels something more like this: "LinkedIn promises to bring my business card to life." LinkedIn seems to say to me: "we will extend your carefully-constructed business card and CV across your network for you, bringing you a wealth of serendipitous professional insights and opportunities."

So what, specifically, gives me this impression?

Visual branding—"corporate" and "creative" in counterpoint

LinkedIn's visual branding is deceptively subtle. At first glance, you might think it minimal and conservative. Lots of greyspace and whitespace around clean-edged boxes and tidy little icons; tightly controlled areas of colour.

But look more closely.

Within this conservative visual framework, there is actually a wealth of variety of gradient effects, block colour shades, corner shapes, button and border styles, list layouts. I can feel that the LinkedIn designers have had fun with this UI!

To illustrate my point, here's a collage of fragments from the LinkedIn UI. (See if you can find them on the site itself—a treasure hunt!):

But so what? What does the subtleties of graphic design have to do with LinkedIn's core UX?

Well, the "corporate yet fun" visual branding perfectly expresses the "double promise" of LinkedIn that I suggested above: that you can both keep firm control of how people perceive your identity while also benefiting in serendipitous and unexpected ways by expressing that identity. In my experience, those two attributes tap into fairly universal human needs, so it's no surprise that LinkedIn is so successful.

Genteel gameplay

If LinkedIn was a game, it would be one that you couldn't easily lose at.

As you build up the various aspects your profile, a little "profile completeness" status bar creeps up towards 100%. But there are no wrong moves or puzzling challenges in the profile building game—just the gentle incentive of that status bar and the hope that your contacts will view your professional identity in a better light and opportunities will flow.

By way of illustration, I found this image by blogger Stephanie Booth (though note also the somewhat disgruntled comment exchange under the original image!):

The status bar is classic LinkedIn. It says: "take your time, stay in control, just follow the instructions - but maybe, just maybe, this could lead on to unsuspected opportunities." That's a potent double promise.

Cherry picking the social web

It didn't escape observers' attention that the latest iteration of the LinkedIn site drew on key features of Facebook for inspiration - the Newsfeed on the Home page and the Questions and Answers features being two of the most conspicuous examples.

But even when cherry picking the "bleeding edge" of the social web, LinkedIn keeps its brand promise. The content of the Newsfeed is just interesting enough to attract a curious glance from time to time (e.g. "[Your contact's name] added [someone else] as a contact"), but never strays into embarassing or awkward territory.

I will never read a message like "[Your contact name] just got the sack and is now unemployed" on LinkedIn. Engaging and potentially useful to observers as that message would be, it would LinkedIn's implied promise to help you maintain a positive professional image.

LinkedIn sucks, but it shouldn't care

When I asked my social media maven friends to tell me how well LinkedIn worked for them, their reaction was mixed.

Here are a few of their twittered gripes:

"I find it takes too many clicks to see someone's connections. Also, interface isn't consistent." - Jof Arnold

"Always struck me as kind of thing that should be useful, but just not yet. Loathe to bail in case it's useful after I've gone." - Tim Duckett

"[J]ust an address-neutral repository of people I know, and an occasional source of annoying recruiters." - Alan Patrick

"LinkedIn would be cool if it had some decent apps..." - Steve Lawson

"It seems like it should be much more useful & effective than it is." - Pete Goold

So LinkedIn clearly isn't serving the early adopter crowd optimally, and I would imagine that must be impacting negatively on the amount of "buzz PR" they are getting on blogs, twitter, podcasts and so on.

But then again, why should LinkedIn care too much?

As I said at the beginning of this post, pretty much all my professional friends are on LinkedIn—despite their reservations about its utility. For early adopters, the bottom line is that LinkedIn works for them as a rolodex. And for those early adopters who aren't already maxed out with gainful employment, there is an additional hope (not necessarily expectation) that being on LinkedIn could generate new opportunities.

If LinkedIn jumped to the tune of every fleeting, outré social web trend in an effort to excite us early adopters, they would be breaking their brand promise of keeping the user in control of a dependable and familiar environment. They would risk alienating their mass market of late adopters.

And Reid Hoffman is far too clever to do that.

A message runs through it

If you've ever had the dubious privilege of eating a stick of Brighton Rock, you'll know that there's some message or other written pink or green into the white sugar, and that message goes through the length of the sweet.

Great brands are like that. Everything they do communicates their brand promise.

Of course, I could only touch on small areas and aspects of LinkedIn's web (and indeed mobile) presence in this post. But it seems to me that wherever I turn on LinkedIn, I encounter the same double promise of safety and opportunity.

It's a great lesson in business focus.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to all my friends who helped me to clarify my thoughts on LinkedIn by sharing their own. While we're on the subject, why not check out their LinkedIn profiles, via my own (requires LinkedIn signin)? Maybe, just maybe, it could lead to professional opportunities for you...

[UPDATE: Special thanks to Chris Osborne for pointing out an error in my LinkedIn statistics references—now corrected]

User Experience made better

2008-03-27T12:29:00.064Z

Does your company have a presence on the social web, but no User Experience (UX) specialist? If so, I can help you. Watch this two minute Blog Friends case study slideshow to see my UX work in action in a service that grew from zero to 27k users—including 13 of the world's Top 100 bloggers—in eight months.

What I offer

I can help you make your service's user-facing experience simpler, more powerful and more intuitive. I can take some or all of these steps with your company:

Clarifying your User Experience (UX) question or challenge
UX testing and evaluation*
UI concept development or iteration
UI design implementation
Full or modular solution development (in partnership with web solutions agency Brain Bakery)

*Optionally, I can engage my network of leading UK social media influencers for your UX testing, creating great PR opportunities and insights into that key demographic's needs for you.

Your ROI

On the hyper-competitive web, every useability barrier is a costly lost opportunity. I can help you to get to the heart of your usability issues quickly and efficiently, and then help you to solve them too.

Clear objectives and engagement structure help you to project ROI
Modular approach helps you tailor projects to your exact requirements
Potential top-line benefits of even modest improvements in usability can be very significant

My track record

As CEO and UX/UI design lead for i-together Ltd., I am responsible for the Blog Friends and Buzzspotr user experiences.

Blog Friends was a social blog reading app on facebook that had 27k users, amongst them 13 of the Technorati 100.

"My favourite Facebook app is Blog Friends... It's delightfully simple but packs in a lot of features."—Shane Richmond, Telegraph.co.uk
"I have been a big fan of the service since it launched, it has brought efficiency, variety and serendipity to my feedreading to the extent that I have pretty much stopped using any other reader."—Nic Brisbourne, DFJ Esprit
"The most useful (eventually the only) Facebook App I used."—Alan Patrick, Broadsight
And Robert Scoble, the world's leading technology blogger, put us in his Facebook Application Top 10.

Take a look at this two minute slideshow to find out just what it is about Blog Friends that people loved.

Buzzspotr is a social location-sharing service, currently in closed alpha. Buzzspotr makes it easy and fun to find friendly places and faces in the city.

"Buzzspotr is reminiscent of Dodgeball (acquired by Google and mothballed) and Plazes, but, since it currently uses Twitter and Google maps, it is really a web app, not a mobile service or a PC download, which suggests it could scale faster."—Mike Butcher, Techcrunch
"A neat way to communicate with your network and see where people are gathering and who’s talking about what... a truly useful mobile app, one that I reckon has great potential."—Neville Hobson
"The team that built both [Blog Friends and Buzzspotr] is widely known in London as being amongst the best in their field... Angel or seed-fund specialists would do well to get in touch."—Mike Butcher, Techcrunch

Buzzspotr demonstrations can be arranged on request (we are in closed alpha at the moment).

Communication is key to success

Of course, I didn't make these great user experiences alone—I worked with both i-together's team of three and our community as a whole to learn about what was needed and wanted. Good communication has been key to our success.

Similarly, I will work closely with you and your team, and also with your users and target users as appropriate, to ensure that every step we take together is along the path of your strategy to serve your users actual needs.

And the more you open your UX development process to your community and the world, the more effectively I can communicate the excitement of your project to my excellent personal network of influencial social media figures. If they take an interest in what you are doing, you may find you get the kind of authentic and compelling PR that money can't buy—for free!

Tech savvy

At the same time, working closely with i-together's development team, coupled with my prior study and consultancy in the digital identity space (see this blog's archives), enable me to root my UI work in a clear understanding of diverse technologies and their constraints, including: database management, scalability factors, bandwidth and server performance issues, SEO best practices, HTML, Flash, CSS, JavaScript (and Facebook-specific versions of HTML and JavaScript), Facebook Platform, REST APIs, OpenID, Microformats and RSS.

In short, my UX and UI work is rooted deeply in an awareness of both what is compellingly useful and what is technically possible—and the broad scope of technical challenge entailed by any given design decision.

Interested? Let's talk

If you have a challenge or question you think I could help you to solve, please let me know and I will see what I can do. It's never too soon to make your users' experience better!

Email: luke@weaverluke.com
Twitter and Skype: weaverluke
Mobile: 07985 119095

Hacking the nature of existence

2008-01-15T09:03:00.000Z

Nic Brisbourne concludes a thoughtful post "On widgets, social networks and the nature of existence": "[W]e find ourselves in a situation where internet companies might not even need their own website. A kind of virtual, virtual company if you will…."

I completely agree with Nic's sentiment at a high level. This concept of a virtualised service was what lead i-together to deploy Blog Friends within Facebook in the first place. However, the tactical view from within an early-stage startup like Blog Friends turns out to look subtly different than I expected. I left a comment on Nic's post:

Your "web brand virtualisation via open social nets" point is well taken. As you say, Blog Friends within Facebook is an example of this trend.

However, we are now building a central presence for Blog Friends beyond 3rd-party sites. To start with, we plan to deploy some key new Blog Friends features exclusively at i-together.com, over the next month or so, keeping the main feedreader service within Facebook. Then we intend to comprehensively re-architect Blog Friends around a set of APIs, which will make it relatively trivial to deploy (or for others to deploy) Blog Friends on diverse platforms and devices. (Incidentally, we didn't start off with an API-based approach back in June 2007 because we knew we had to get Blog Friends out as soon as possible to catch the Facebook adoption wave—a decision we still regard as correct.)

But why do we not feel that spreading across multiple social nets alone is an optimum strategy?

Two reasons: firstly, having our own "place" on the web gives us an air of solid independence; it safeguards us against the varying fortunes of any given 3rd-party platform (witness Facebook's fall from grace amongst the In Crowd of late). Secondly, it is *so* much quicker to implement and test features when e.g. FBML and FBJS are not involved, and those features can be a lot richer and run much faster. With our tiny development resources (three of us!), and with competition breathing down our neck, we can't afford to waste even an ounce of effort.

Presence distribution is immensely valuable as a strategy, but the current state of the web and the tech that powers it, along with startup resource limitations can necessitate some toughly pragmatic tactical choices.

The social web is not a machine—it is (evolving into) us

2008-01-07T23:29:00.000Z

Chris Brogan wonders if the social web could be understood as a machine that we can learn to "program".

After adding a couple of rather emotive comments that didn't respond fairly to Chris's whole post (I've learned to open my mouth before thinking too much these days—I rarely regret it in the long run!), I managed to say what I really meant:

@Chris- My point (clumsily made, for which apologies) is that the programming metaphor only goes so far in encapsulating our activity on the social web, because we are (hopefully) not just using the social web as a “machine” to achieve a particular, pre-planned outcome that we desire (a blog in the Technorati Top 100, a new consultancy contract etc.), but rather are embedded in a complex and quite mysterious world of cybernetically-extended human relationship.

It’s only when we give up “knowing” where we are going or need to go that we open ourselves up to truth, surely? And your positivistic programming metaphor doesn’t seem to me to foster this kind of Zen Mind state.

All that said, the social web *is* at a stage right now where we do need “programming” skills just to use the damn thing, motivations not-withstanding. So from that point of view, absolutely I agree with the utility of your metaphor.

Let’s just not forget the larger goal—of facilitating the evolution of the web such that it comes to be transparent to our time and space-shifted *human* communication. : )

Powerful metaphors need judicious useage.

My hairstylist is a Blog Friends user

2008-01-05T17:28:00.000Z

Well, I must say I was pretty chuffed today when my Brazilian hairstylist, Pedro, told me that not only had he taken up my invitation to sign up for Blog Friends, but also that he really likes it and has found some great posts, including one that I had also read and that we both loved—Scoble's "What I've learned in 2007".

How cool is that? : )

Clearly, the days when all hairdressers were interested in was where you were going on your holidays are long gone. Seriously though, Pedro is one of the most thoughtful and interesting people I've met in a while, so the fact he enjoys Blog Friends makes me happy.

All of a Twitter

2008-01-03T17:32:00.000Z

I'm really enjoying using Twitter wholeheartedly for the first time. It's a bit like tracking down an elusive party—a lot of my mates are hanging out there already. I'm also getting lots of inspiration for ideas for the integration of Blog Friends with Twitter (which is actually what prompted me to get Twittering). And you can now track my latest Tweets (should you really want to!) in the weaverluke sidebar.

But where's Twitter's business model? Fred Wilson, one of their investors, clearly feels that it would be a mistake to worry about that too soon, as it could distract them from growing their userbase as fast as possible. Nic Brisbourne agrees, but also points out that web entrepreneurs should at least have a "Plan A" for monetisation in their back pocket.

I suspect Jason Calacanis is right to point to mobile advertising as an attractive monetisation option for Twitter, but I'd go even further: maybe Twitter should get themselves acquired by a mobile telco who could pay for the SMS bills and integrate Tweets with mobile ads..?

Advance Aid: a cause worth getting blogged up about

2008-01-02T12:51:00.000Z

Aha, this is much better: a really heartfelt description of why That charitable cause is worth getting excited about, from an email to me from one of its Directors, David Dickie:

It really is a good concept and one that can engender a culture of trade not aid on the continent of Africa. Our basic mission is simple: sending aid to Africa does not work; the only solution is to create real and sustainable employment there which will create lasting sustainability. The first project we have been involved is the opening of a plastics factory in Kenya which will create 300 jobs in Nairobi on day one. Believe me, this is a big deal out there and will lift lots and lots of families from the poverty trap.

We are really ready to spread the word now and need to use the cheapest and most efficient media for doing this. If there is a way in which you could help us get the word out there, that would be great.

Check out www.advanceaid.org for some more info.

I wish Advance Aid all the best for 2008—it sounds like they are indeed doing very valuable work. I can't help but feel, though, that they could do very well to blog (etc.) about it from the rooftops themselves and leverage social web tools to spread the word. I would certainly favourite them in Blog Friends if they joined, as I'd love to track and share with friends how they get on. : )

Greetings of the (silly) Season

2007-12-29T08:23:00.000Z

Received in an email from Fernando Barrio:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the Northern hemisphere’s winter solstice holiday, practised within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or the choice to not practice secular or religious traditions at all…and a
fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contribution to society have helped made our country great (not to imply that our country is necessarily greater than any other), and without regard to the race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform or sexual orientation of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration of the original greeting. It implies no promise from the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others, and it is void where prohibited by law and it is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher.

This wish is expected to perform as expected within the usual application of good tiding for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish a sole discretion of the wisher.

LOL.

Christmas blessings to one and all

2007-12-24T17:27:00.000Z

Charla and I just walked home from some last minute Christmas shopping in Marylebone. Of course, we passed some homeless people along the way. I keep thinking of how sad it is that so many people will spend Christmas without loved ones beside them. My Christmas blessings to everyone who feels sad and alone tomorrow. And to those who do have something to celebrate, have a jolly good Christmas and make the most of it!

Leading "Buzz Marketer" shows how NOT to do it

2007-12-21T18:13:00.000Z

The other day, I received a request from a well-known "buzz marketer" (who shall remain nameless) to plug an organisation (which shall also remain nameless) on Blog Friends and/or on my personal blog. However, I politely declined. The organisation sounds like it's doing great and philanthropic things, but I'm not personally involved or engaged with it. And as all good bloggers know, blogging (and Blog Friends) is, at heart, about being transparent about one's personal passions.

The difficulty that this reknowned consultant seems to be experiencing is that of making clear distinction between (a) being paid for expressing his opinions in the context of an explicit, contracted mandate and (b) informal chats over coffee that touch on his subject of expertise, but where the value exchange actually goes both ways. He knows that he "knows it all", so his voice is surely the only one worth listening to. (Naturally, he will carefully explain to his anyone who will listen that marketing is a conversation. ; )

To get to the point, I believe the above phenomenon may explain this excerpt from Mr Buzz Marketer's part of my exchange with him:

Readers, please excuse his profanity, but poisonous boils are best lanced. This is the season of goodwill, and I bless this poor fellow and everyone else suffering with negativity.

UPDATE: I would like to point out that I am not referring in this post to my good friend James Cherkoff of Collaborate Marketing and Modern Marketing blog. By contrast to my correspondent quoted above, James doesn't just talk about respectful and authentic relationships but also engages in them online and offline.

A long overdue apology

2007-12-21T09:39:00.000Z

Back in the spring, I made much of my plan to co-author a grand series of posts on Startups and Identity, and indeed published the first few posts with my stalwart collaborator Nic Brisbourne. However, the sheer intensity of focus and effort required by my startup company i-together has fatally distracted me from this blog in general and the post series in particular. I kept hoping I'd find the time and brain space to get back to the series, but things are just getting busier (and more exciting!) at i-together.

So—I admit defeat.

My sincere apologies to Nic, my other prospective co-authors and you, my readers if you were looking forward to the rest of the Startups and Identity series.

Hopefully the New Year will bring me some new weaverluke-blogging mojo, but I think it's time to lay to rest that post series.

A Big Day for Blog Friends

2007-11-19T12:20:00.000Z

I feel like a bit like a trapeze artist at the moment, arcing through the air between swings. (Admittedly I feel like a trapeze artist very definitely in a metaphorical sense only, as I put my back out yesterday and am hobbling around the flat!)

We took the current Blog Friends service down a few minutes ago, and are now working furiously to get Blog Friends v1 Beta ready for prime time—hopefully sometime later today.

So whether you are an existing or would-be user of Blog Friends, please bear with us: we very much hope the wait will be more than worthwhile.

And the view up here is amaaaaaaaaaazing! ; )

[Cross-posted from The Blog Friends Blog]

Blog Friends v1 Beta launches tomorrow!

2007-11-18T13:09:00.001Z

I can't quite believe it but it's true—Blog Friends v1 Public Beta launches tomorrow, after months of preparation and weeks of testing and bug fixing (it's hard to convey to those who haven't experienced it just how fiendishly difficult it is to get a complex web service working properly in Internet Explorer ; ).

I'll be blogging about Blog Friends v1 Beta at The Blog Friends Blog tomorrow, but in the meantime you can find some more annotated screenshots of the app in action on our flickr group.

Looking forward to welcoming y'all to the new Blog Friends tomorrow. (If you don't yet have Blog Friends added to your facebook account, just follow this link.) Oh, and the current Blog Friends service will be out of action for much of tomorrow while Benjie updates the servers—not a trivial task now we have over 18,000 users!

Identity, embodied

2007-10-28T18:10:00.000Z

It's hard to believe that I was posting up to three times daily on this blog just a few months ago. Since dedicating myself to creating, launching and growing Blog Friends with Jof and Benjie in June this year, my to-do list has been continuously overflowing with design, administrative and business tasks, leaving little room in my schedule let alone my head for "identity" blogging.

That said, the real problem has not been a lack of time—it's been a profound shift of point of view on my part. For three years, I was on the outside looking in on the world of web-enabled business. Sitting on a cloud at 15,000 feet and surveying the landscape stretching out below me became a comfortable habit, and the resulting insights and musings ended up on weaverluke blog.

Not that I wasn't working diligently throughout those three years to realise my "i-together" vision of a world where each individual could explore and express their unique identity in rich community contexts. Far from it: I dedicated much of my spare time and my life savings (and then some), to create with various programmers three prototype applications of that vision, and wrote any number of supporting business plan drafts. Then Facebook's Platform came along, and I realised that there was a great market opportunity for a very specific aspect of the i-together vision—the social blog post sharing and discovery service that is now Blog Friends.

Soon afterwards Jof, Benjie and I launched Blog Friends into the world, rapidly gaining real users with real opinions and preferences. There were suddenly a million things to do by yesterday just to keep the service running, let alone planning and building new service features, iterating the business plan, networking with potential employees, partners and investors, and lastly—but actually most importantly—communicating one-to-one with our wonderful and loyal users.

June, July, August, September, October... The months have sped by and weaverluke blog has languished. It feels rather ironic that I've co-created a service for bloggers and blog readers, yet seem to have lost my own blogging mojo so catastrophically! We also now have a blog for Blog Friends itself that will need tending.

So how could what weaverluke blog has been transition into something that supports and is fed by what my life has become? In other words, what's the common thread (a weaver always needs a thread) that runs through my passions for identity and for Blog Friends?

Considering that question for a moment, I realise that as we adjust the designs for Blog Friends v1 by a pixel here, a shade of blue there, and as we plough through the nitty gritty numbers of the i-together business plan, it is all too easy for me to forget what so excited me about i-together and Blog Friends in the first place.

We are all preciously unique, but we have so much in common too. We thrive when we acknowledge and celebrate both our individuality and our commonalities.

I wanted to create a service that taps into these insights to help people discover and share stuff that really interests them, easily and intuitively. And I really feel that with the forthcoming "v1" release of Blog Friends, we are getting a whole lot closer to that goal.

V1 introduces a full-page feed reader, rich feedback options to tune your topic and author preferences and a whole lot more. Jof, Benjie and I have been grafting away for a couple of months on v1, and we're just days away from launching it into private beta testing now (do let me know, along with your facebook id please, if you'd like an invitation!).

Anyhow, this rambling and anecdotal post has wandered off topic, just like my mind has wandered from the purity and abstraction of "identity" these last months into the challenge of actually making something with and for real people! Because at the end of the day, it's all about relationship, right, this identity stuff? About sharing your passion and dreams with others, and witnessing them in theirs.

Hopefully, I can start to do some more of that on this blog and at the Blog Friends Blog from now on.

Blog Friends latest

2007-08-29T06:41:00.000+01:00

We must really start a Blog Friends blog so I can go back to just writing about identity at weaverluke! In the meantime, it seemed about time to write an update on Blog Friends' progress.

Firstly, I'm delighted to report that we closed some more seed investment yesterday, which gives us plenty of runway to launch the upcoming "v.1" release (of which more shortly).

We have 5,422 registered users as I write, and had 22,000 unique people in total use Blog Friends in the last month. Growth is gradually accelerating and currently averages around 150 registrations per day.

In the last few weeks, Benjie has been focusing on optimising the code and server setup in order to cope with our growing user base, along with various bug fixes, feature tweaks, and now support for multiple blogs (a much-requested feature).

So what next?

From user's feedback, and our own observations, we believe that we are doing a great job of serving bloggers and their friends (the reviews have been very kind*), but a lousy job of serving people who may only have heard of these curious things called "blogs", but have no idea how or where to find good ones to read.

For this reason, our forthcoming v.1 release (in a few weeks' time) will focus on redressing this deficit: our aim is that a new user, however little they may be networked on facebook, let alone with bloggers, should get a great experience from the get go!

We also hope to make Blog Friends much more useful and fun for all our users with a set of ratings and recommendation features that will help you, your friends and the whole network find more and more personally-interesting posts.

Finally, they do say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery... ; )

As ever, your feedback and thoughts are treasured—feel free to comment here or drop by our facebook group*.

*Link requires facebook login.

Identity Society—happenings and musings

2007-08-09T09:20:00.000+01:00

I found the Mobile Monday "Mobile Digital Identity" event at SUN pretty interesting. Alex Craxton (his report here) did a great job of organising and MD-ing the evening, and the panel session seemed to go well.

As ever, though, the topic of identity quickly escaped the confines of "mobile" and we ended up talking about facebook and its privacy implications! The discussion reminded me a lot of the "Dark Side of Social Media" Chinwag event the other month, with both panel and audience divided between the privacy worriers and the information-must-be-free advocates.

I guess I attempt to span both camps with my "i-together" philosophy, which goes something like this:

It's natural that human beings assert and protect the boundaries of their individual identity in "win-lose" situations (my money, not yours!—"i"); on the other hand, people allow those boundaries to become increasingly permeable to others as they discover mutual interests and common purpose (saving the planet etc.—"together").

The individual and collective aspects of identity look set to weave ever more intricately through one another in our evolving culture, creating all sorts of social patterns at many scales ("i-together"). And networked technologies like facebook and new mobile capabilities are only accelerating the pace of the identity loom's machinations.

A weaver's view, you might say.

Incidentally, Charla and I spent a lovely day with my friend John Madelin and his delightful family yesterday, and John and I took the opportunity to make some good progress on the Identity Society wiki. Do check it out and edit away!

Mobile Digital Identity event at SUN

2007-08-04T08:47:00.000+01:00

So I am donning my Identity Society hat on Monday evening and chairing the panel session at the Mobile Monday event on Mobile Digital Identity, held at SUN Microsystems' London HQ.

My friends Dave Birch, Ajit Jaokar and Alan Patrick are amongst the panelists. As I don't pretend to know a great deal about mobile technology, I hope to learn a lot!

Blog Friends has been Scobleized!

2007-08-01T13:57:00.000+01:00

Blog Friends is no. 7 on Robert Scoble's list of his favourite facebook apps. An honour indeed. : )

Blog Friends' tendrils spreading

2007-07-30T17:05:00.000+01:00

I thought I'd give my readers a quick Blog Friends progress report. : )

As of today, around 1,400 bloggers have signed up to Blog Friends (the official facebook number of over 1,500 is slightly out, according to our logs). Amongst them are many well known bloggers such as Robert Scoble, J.D.Lasica and Ethan Zuckerman. We are growing at about 100 users per day, and churn (people deleting the application) is at a low 8.9%.

Technology, social media and marketing are popular subjects amongst our users' blogs, as might be expected. However, what has been really amazing is tracking in our user logs the incredible diversity of subject and geolocation: we have blogs on ethical palaentology, knitting in New York, Music from the 80s, blogs from India, Africa and China, and many, many more topics. Truly, bloggers are a rampantly eclectic lot!

Benjie, our developer, is on his hols for the next week or so, but we have a load of new features that we are itching to roll out on his return!

Watch this space—or rather, watch your Blog Friends profile box on facebook. ; )

Bloggers' likes—and dislikes!

2007-07-20T08:40:00.000+01:00

Three days into the Blog Friends public beta, and a picture of the most common interests and dislikes of bloggers (as told us by our users) is beginning to emerge. Interesting for me, as a musician, to see music at the top of the likes list. Some of the dislikes are quite funny: I have highlighted my favourites for your chortling convenience.

Top dislikes

1. sports (6)
2. fashion (5)
3. gossip (4)
4. iphone (4)
5. politics (4)
6. dogs (3)
7. gadgets (3)
8. sport (3)
9. celebrity (3)
10. children (2)
11. pop (2)
12. football (2)
13. music (2)
14. kids (2)
15. microsoft (2)
16. sex (2)
17. cats (2)
18. games (2)
19. personal (2)
20. food (2)
21. tennis (1)
22. benjie (1) [our erstwhile developer]
23. us (1)
24. pretentiousness (1)
25. life hacks (1)
26. drugs (1)
27. fish (1)
28. advertising (1)
29. romance (1)
30. creationism (1)
31. parasites (1)
32. scarf (1) [?!]
33. criminal law (1)
34. business (1)
35. hype (1)
36. hot topic (1)
37. jof (1) [our wonderful project manager—hum, tit for tat?]
38. sms (1)
39. poetry (1)
40. fried worms (1)
41. monte cristo (1)
42. internet (1)
43. sap (1)
44. parliament (1)
45. bad (1)
46. nothing (1)
47. mac (1)
48. rants (1)
49. bioconservativism (1)
50. junky stuff (1)
51. h0|2r13u|_ (|-|4&i`c7Â£rs (1)
52. mpaa (1)
53. patent trolls (1)
54. arrogant. (1)
55. loads (1)
56. us politics (1)
57. hip-hop (1)
58. pineapple (1)
59. apache (1)
60. digital marketing (1)
61. silliness (1)
62. negative people (1)
63. h0|2r13u|_ (|-|4&i`c7Ã‚Â£rs (1)
64. jem (1)
65. united states (1)
66. pinheads (1)
67. judgmental people (1) [these last two presumably by different users!]
68. investment. (1)
69. mats (1)
70. drinking (1)
71. general stupidity (1)
72. dogmatism (1)
73. fish&chips (1)
74. windows (1)
75. heights (1)
76. celebrities (1)
77. high maintenance people (1)
78. routers (1)
79. facebook (1) [a bit worrying for us, that one]
80. code (1)
81. dog shit (1)
82. brussels (1)
83. web 2.0 (1)
84. personal finance (1)
85. fascism (1)
86. bugs (1)
87. blogging (1)
88. apple (1)
89. lifestyle issues (1)
90. religious fundamentalism and ignorance of any kind (1)
91. colleges (1)
92. other things (1)
93. avocado (1)
94. journal (1)
95. when people do not respond or thank each other for (1)
96. aging (1)
97. web (1)
98. wifi (1)
99. annoying people (1)
100. environmentalism (1)

Identity & startups: the web (2)

2007-07-17T17:37:00.000+01:00

Luke Razzell and Nic Brisbourne

The story so far

This post is the second in a series that explores the strategic relevance of identity for startups (a full introduction to the series, and a link index of the posts, is here).

In our previous post, we identified a key challenge for any startup: to help users to personalise their experience according to their unique identity. We then looked at how while networked services are great at helping us to transcend the limitations of physical space and even time, they are not yet very good at helping us to integrate the diverse aspects of our networked presence (identity)—let alone doing so without jeopardising our privacy. And so long as these challenges of presence integration and privacy remain for networked services, we asserted that startups will struggle to deliver excellently personalised user experiences.

Exploring what a networked service ecosystem that did enable true personalisation—a notional "Identity Web"—might look like, we came up with four key requirements:

1) The Identity Web must allow us to integrate the various aspects of our presence (rather than forcing us to re-make our presence anew for each service we use).

2) The Identity Web must allow us to segment others' view of our presence (although relaxing attitudes towards privacy may erode this requirement for some or many contexts and demographics).

3) The Identity Web must support diverse, mutually-independent services if it is to offer true choice and privacy-enablement (benefits that cannot be provided by a mere handful of megabrands).

4) The user themselves must be the only unifying node in their presence network within the Identity Web (no-one else should be able to put together all the pieces of information about that user).

Finally, we identified a potential benefit of the Identity Web for individuals and services that mediate their online experience:
The individual should be able to monetise (directly, or indirectly through discounted/free services) the value of their identity by selling access to their identity information.

Where there's a successful startup, there's a great service and a successful business model: so just what might the business and service models that drive the evolution of an Identity Web look like?

Piecing the Identity Web jigsaw

We want to acknowledge at this point that thousands of businesses are of course already delivering incredible and diverse innovations in service personalisation. Hats off to them! However, such innovations—while often highly valuable in their own right—are mostly confined to tactical, rather than strategic aspects of the identity problem space: a bilateral personal information sharing arrangement with a third-party service here; a useful topic-specific, personalised recommendation feature there; a special offer for sharing your opinions with marketers over there.

The big identity picture remains fragmented, like a partially pieced-together jigsaw.
Meanwhile, the big identity "walled gardens"—Google, Yahoo!, Facebook et al—continue their inexorable rise. One of the keys to success of these mega-networks is the way they tie each user into their suite of services (and partner services, in the case of Facebook) by integrating the presence of that user across those services (with a single login). These jigsaws are much better pieced together—but at the cost of users not being able to choose their own pieces, or indeed shield the big identity picture they create within the service from the view of the service itself.

Unless startups can find ways to create a commercially-viable, distributed identity ecosystem—an Identity Web—to compete with and complement the big network's identity lock-in power plays, there seems to be real potential for innovation around identity to become stifled, thereby eroding both choice and privacy for the end user.

There is everything to play for!

Yet without a good map of the identity jungle with which to plan their route, startups are having to hack their way through its dense undergrowth.

So let's make a start towards plotting such a map by taking a look at the business and technological drivers, blockers and unknowns for two service types that seem likely to underpin the Identity Web (and can already be seen embodied in embryo in diverse web services): identity aggregation and identity federation.

In the remainder of this post, we will explore the identity aggregation service type.

Identity aggregation—"lifestream" services

Identity aggregation or "lifestream" services help people to gather personal and personalised information from multiple sources. These services enable their users to integrate various pieces of their online presence into a more coherent whole—with a number of potential benefits detailed below.

So what are the business and technology drivers, blockers and unknowns for startups with regards to the identity aggregation service model?

Business drivers

+ Identity aggregation services allow users to re-aggregate the value of all their diverse fragments of presence, either for their own insight (e.g. Garlik, which helps individuals track what information about them is "out there") and/or for showcasing them to their community/audience in order to enhance their personal brand (e.g. Wink, which publishes aggregated information about individuals' presence across multiple services).

+ Identity aggregation services also could enable users to personalise services via standardised preferences modules. This is the capability that Facebook is building with regards to third-party service integration into users' Facebook profiles (via Facebook Platform).

+ Identity aggregation services can leverage the value to marketers of their users' attention, selling attention information with users' permission, and possibly directly sharing that value with their users (in real or virtual currency).

+ Identity aggregation services have the potential to turn the advertising model on its head by enabling users to opt in to personalised offers, which they would be incentivised to do either by improved personalisation over push adverts, and/or by being paid.

+ Startups may be able to be more transparent about revenue sharing arrangements with users than incumbents (c.f. Google's opacity around AdSense royalties), thereby gaining user trust. Furthermore, startups can avoid the conflicts of interest around revenue sharing transparency that established companies with legacy business relationships can suffer from.

+ Startups within a distributed Identity Web may be in a better position to monetise users' presence information across a broad range of partner services than incumbents, who's identity lock-in approach effectively limits them to monetising their own properties (because they cannot track users' presence information beyond those properties).

+ In the medium term, it seems likely that major advertisers will continue to target fairly broad demographics with their branding messages, so a critical volume of users will still be necessary for advertising platforms (witness the success of Google Ads, targeted across the entire web). Therefore, media properties, with their limited subscriber numbers, are likely to struggle to leverage their users' presence data (e.g. clickstreams) effectively on their own. ISPs may well be in a stronger position to leverage presence data, partnering with ad networks to offer personalised ad services to e.g. media properties. Facilitating this process would seem to represent an interesting opportunity for startups—an opportunity toturn the current ad model (and maybe the whole internet model!) on its head. In this scenario, instead of sites selling space on their pages, the control goes back to the owner of the data “pipes”.

Business blockers

- The GYM club (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) and social network (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo) incumbents are busy building and/or acquiring their own identity aggregation capabilities—and it is not in their interests to share control of their users' presence information!

- Social networks and start page services (Netvibes etc.) can enable their users to integrate 3rd party services into their profiles (via widgets, Facebook Platform etc.), thereby potentially neutralising the competitive threat of a distributed identity ecosystem (on the other hand, this opportunity for exposure on the large networks does give startups a platform upon which to grow their user base).

- The large networks have the potential to enable users to segment their presence (in the context of a single account and login) into various personae, each with their own page. In fact, Netvibes is already doing this, effectively, with its Tabs, which can each be publicly shared independently of one another.

- Large networks, with ownership of or advantageous relationships with ad networks, are in a stronger position than small startups to monetise value of user's identity information to marketers.

- Micropayments to and discounts for users for divulging their personal information to marketers seem unlikely to take off in a big way as a business model in its own right: established services such as Pigsback and Greasy Palm have only seen relatively modest growth. It seems more likely that successful business models in this area will integrate cash incentives for personal information disclosure into a more rounded value proposition that includes personalised services and information provision that are useful in themselves.

Business unknowns

? No-one really knows how the issue of privacy will play out across diverse online demographics. Will people come to accept it is unviable to stop others viewing "their" information? Or will they demand ways of protecting it? Or will both the above be true, but in differing contexts? The answers to these questions may play a large role in determining the true potential of the information aggregation market.

? Could a few high-profile abuses of users' trust (such as the debacle over AOL's inadvertant exposure of its users' search history data last year) set back the identity aggregation service market significantly?

Technology drivers

+ The maturation of mobile web technologies will open up the "location" dimension of personal identity for innovation in identity aggregation services (although, given the lock-in on handset-generated location information that mobile network providers enjoy, startup business models in this area are unclear).

+ Widget platforms (Netvibes, Spring Widgets etc.) and distribution ecosystem (Netvibes, Snipperoo, Facebook etc.) are beginning to provide a springboard for startup identity aggregation services.

+ OpenID looks set to enable a distributed jigsaw approach to user authentication management across the web if adoption by services and then (more importantly) users reaches a critical mass.

+ Microformats are beginning to enable a degree of automated rich-content discovery and exchange across services.

+ APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language) promises to enable the automated exchange between services of various kinds of personal attention data (information about what someone pays attention to—in other words, their implicit identity information).

+ The Atom publishing protocol has become established as a standard "wrapper" for rich content exchange;

+ Windows Cardspace looks set to provide desktop-based secure assertion management in forthcoming versions of Windows Vista, providing a degree of protection against identity phishing (a topic whose in-depth coverage is beyond the scope of this post—look out for a future post in this post series on the subject of identity assurance!).

Technology blockers

- People don't think or communicate according to "data standards"! We humans understand the meaning of information in a hugely complex and semantically and socially contextualised way—not according to a patchwork of standard, fragmented data types.

In this light, the standards-dependency of both Microformat and API-based data exchange (not to mention SOAP Web Services, the RDF-based Semantic Web and a host of other standards-dependent data exchange technolgies and data models, many of which have quietly fallen by the wayside over the years) appears to be a severely limiting factor for their potential applicability for the distributed exchange of rich and complex personal and personalised information.

It seems likely that we will have to evolve semantic, distributed data exchange technologies that reflect our innate, human ways of understanding and communicating information if we are to evolve an effective Identity Web. Yet progress in this area is at a very early stage—the data integration problem remains a massive and largely intractable one.

Technology unknowns

Ease of use questions over OpenID:

? How easy is it for anyone with a less-than-unique name or pseudonym to find a memorable, simple and appropriate personal URL? This issue alone may prove to be something of a stumbling block for OpenID in the mass market of non-geeks.

? Even if they can find an appropriate URL, it is currently far from easy for a non-geek to navigate the domain registration and hosting process. Will ISPs begin to be much more proactive in assisting their users to do this kind of thing in a pain-free way?

? Will the open-source aspects of Cardspace get implemented on the other major operating systems (Mac OS X and Linux), thereby creating a consistent cross-platform user experience for handling identity assertions?

A final question

? And finally, perhaps the most important question of all, and one that is relevant to both technological and business aspects of the problem space: will identity aggregation services in general become easy and useful enough to garner mass adoption, and if so, when? Clearly, execution is key here—many innovations at the user experience level will be necessary to get us to the point of having truly compelling and accessible identity aggregation services.

Conclusion

There are massive opportunities, sobering challenges and unknown factors, at both business and technological levels for startups who venture into the world of personal identity aggregation. After all, there has been a widespread recognition of the potential value of the market for personal identity aggregation services in the tech business world for some time now—and many, many more companies than we have space to mention above are striving to seize a share of that market.

But we are not yet finished with our survey of the problem space: identity aggregation only represents one side of a coin whose flip side turns out to be identity federation. In our next post, we will look at the opportunities, threats and unknowns for this service model—a model that represents the natural complement to that of identity aggregation.

Blog Friends public beta is now live!

2007-07-17T13:12:00.000+01:00

I'm really pleased to be able to announce that Blog Friends public beta is now open to all! (Well ok, all bloggers with facebook accounts then, if you must nit pick.)

My sincere thanks to all my friends who participated in the private alpha test. In particular, special mention must be made of Alex Newson, who not only gave great feedback on the alpha service, but also provided us with some invaluable pro bono legal advice, and Andy Roberts, who has been tireless in seeking out bugs and feature improvement opportunities.

Also, thanks again to the guys at Brain Bakery, who have done an amazing job at bringing to life the service specifications I delivered to them just 16 days ago.

Finally, my thanks to Savvas Voudouris of Peelme Visual Communications, who has brought an elegance and sophistication to our graphic identity that is second to none. : )

Blog Friends private alpha launched today!

2007-07-13T19:03:00.000+01:00

The Blog Friends facebook application private alpha launched today—hooray!

There has been some great feedback from Blog Friends alpha testers so far, which is hugely gratifying. My heartfelt thanks to all my Blog Friends who are currently giving us the benefit of their experience and insight. Also to the tireless Benjie of BrainBakery Ltd, who has coded like a demon over these last twelve days. We are aiming for public beta early next week—at which point I can spill the beans on exactly what it is we are building.

It strikes me that I've been working, with various friends, on myriad iterations of business plans and a number of prototypes for i-together for three and a half years, yet it has only taken three and a half weeks to take Blog Friends (i-together's first service offering) from a twinkle in my eye to launch.

Go figure!