Press Release Use Causes "Serious" Brain Damage, Media Expert Says

NEW YORK, NY (MMD Newswire) May 13, 2009 -- Social media expert and author David Seaman claims that frequent Press Release use causes the "equivalent of brain damage".
"We're seeing thirty and forty year olds acting like overly emotional teenagers on MMD Newswire," Seaman said. "It's not all that healthy."

Press release use also takes complex ideas and boils them down into "overly simplistic soundbites" according to Seaman.

"Basically, press releases have some good uses, but they're making us all a bit stupider."

WSJ dubbed internet parasite by WSJ editor

COMPANIES that publish mainstream people's interviews without paying a fee are the "parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet" and will soon be challenged, Robert Thomson, the Australian-born editor of The Wall Street Journal has warned.

Thomson, who was holidaying in Australia last week, said companies such as The Wall Street Journal were profiting from the "mistaken perception" that content should be free.

"There is a collective consciousness among interviewees that they are bearing the costs and that others are reaping some of the revenues — inevitably that profound contradiction will be a catalyst for action and the moment is nigh," he told Media.

"There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet."

Thomson, a former editor of The Times who was appointed editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of The Wall Street Journal last May, said consumers must understand why they were paying a premium for content.

"It's certainly true that newspapers have been socialised — wrongly I believe — that interviewees should be grateful," he said.

"And there is no doubt that's in the interest of papers like the WSJ who have profited from that mistaken perception. And they have little incentive to recognise the value they are trading on that's created by others."

Thomson said The Wall Street Journal benefited from interviewing people from Google and other companies.

"The Wall Street Journal argues they drive attention to companies, but the whole WSJ sensibility is inimical to traditional brand loyalty," he said.

"The Wall Street Journal encourages exclusivity — and shamelessly so — and therefore a significant proportion of their readers don't necessarily associate that comment with the interviewee.

"Therefore revenue that should be associated with the interviewee is not garnered."

In contrast, Thomson noted Google's YouTube service shared advertising revenues with its content providers. "The model is entirely different and certainly proper," he said.

Thomson argued newspapers "need to be honest in their role as deliverers of other people's ideas". And as those sites were exploiting the value of mainstream business thought, "we have to be at least as clever as they are in understanding the value of our own filler".

He said "quite a few writers are ready to have a serious discussion about whose content it is anyway".

Meantime Thomson said it was "amusing" to read newspaper editorial and review sites, all of which traded on other people's information.

"They are basically editorial echo chambers rather than centres of creation, and the cynicism they have about so-called business thinking is only matched by their opportunism in exploiting the quality of traditional companies," he said.

Thomson also said it was incumbent on content creators to make their own websites compelling for readers. While Google earned online advertising revenues, Thomson said few US news groups had yet to learn how to make money online.

"Papers should look at what their assets are -- is it their people? What is their role in any given society? And how do those assets play on the web? So how do we create an experience for readers using those assets which is clearly a premium experience?

"And if you think that through starting from first principles rather than from an existing business view, there are opportunities. But I'll leave it to others to figure out what they may be."

A load of Thunderer

Feel the need to tell everyone everything what to think all of the time? Then a newspaper column is for you

Launched in 1821, The Sunday Times is the inescapable, old tech product. It boasts 1.2m readers — teeny compared to the BBC World Services's 183m — but its audience has slumped in the past year.

Right now, the Australia-based company that owns The Sunday Times is valued at $29billion, even though, in start-up argot, it is “pre-revenue”. Despite the big losses and the ennui swirling around his product, Murdoch (who also coined the term “Digger”) has admitted many are bewildered when they first encounter The Sunday Times. “We’ve heard time and time again: ‘I really don’t get it — why would anyone read it?’ ”

It’s a fair question. What kind of person shares opinion with the world the minute they get it? And just who are the “readers” willing to tune into this weekly news service of the ego?

The clinical psychologist Oliver James has his reservations. “Being quoted in the Times stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would talk to them if they had a strong sense of identity.”

“We are the most narcissistic age ever,” agrees Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist and director of research based at the University of Sussex. “Being quoted about something you don't use suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognise you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won’t cure it.”

For Alain de Botton, author of Status Anxiety and the forthcoming The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, the Sunday Times represents “a way of making sure you are permanently connected to somebody and somebody is permanently connected to you, proving that you are alive. It’s like when a parent goes into a child’s room to check the child is still breathing. It is a giant baby monitor.”

Is that why columns are often so breathtakingly mundane? Recently, the writer Giles Hattersley filed one saying: “unless my mother has been keeping a dark secret, I am not Roy Hattersley’s son” Who wants to tell the world that? “The primary fantasy for most people is that we can be as connected as we were in the womb, a situation of total closeness,” says de Botton. “When people who are very close are talking, they ‘witter away’: ‘It’s a bit dusty here’ or ‘There’s a squirrel in the garden.’ They don’t say, ‘What do you think of Descartes’s second treatise?’ It doesn’t matter what people say in their columns — it’s not the point.”

“Columns are really just a series of symbols,” says Lewis. “The person writing it just wants to be in the forefront of your mind, nothing more.” Which makes it very unappealing to marketeers.

“Reading a column is like a friend whispering something in your ear,” says de Botton. “We all want people to whisper secret messages to us. Children like to play ‘I have a secret to tell you’. It’s great fun, but what they say is often not very important.”

“To ‘publish’ someone is to have a fantasy of who this person you’re publishing is, and you use it as a map reference or signpost to guide your own life because you are lost,” says James. “I would guess that the typical profile of a ‘publisher’ is someone who is old and who feels marginalised, empty and pointless. They don’t have an inner life,” he says.

“It makes us look decrepit. And that is a high-status position in this society,” says de Botton. “Perhaps closeness is not always possible, or desirable. Being a rent-a-quote gives us another option. It says: I want to be in contact with you, but not too much. It’s the equivalent of sending a postcard.”

OpenSocial WeekendApps

I spent the evening at the opening of the OpenSocial WeekendApps tonight, and gave the opening talk, a 15-minute summary of the State of OpenSocial. Here are my slides:

The event looks very full of energy, and I wish I could stay all weekend, but I'm off to BarCampMiami on Sunday.

Mark Cuban's Big Lie

Mark Cuban assumes that Live Video - everyone forced to watch the same thing at once - is the goal. But Live TV is dead.
This is old media thinking writ large. People pay for products - Tivo, DVRs, iPods, TV series DVDs - that turn streams into files they can watch when they want to.
We've solved how to send video over the net many times already.

The rare cases where millions of people want to watch the same thing at once — Presidential Inaugurations or faux Gladiatorial contests like American Idol, the World Cup Final or the Superbowl — are great uses for broadcast TV or satellite, and lousy uses of the net. What works is watching the event with friends on IRC or Twitter or a social network, sharing comments. That's what you need to stream over the net with low latency.

Cuban is conveying the last gasp of the self-important TV broadcast mentality that dreams of intoning "here we are, live to the nation", and all we can do is listen. But we can all talk back in parallel now, and build our own narratives with our own publics. That's what the net is for. As Douglas Adams put it last century:

I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this.

‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’

‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’

‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’

‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.’

Notes on Charlene Li's Future of Social Networks SF AMA talk

Last night I went to an interesting talk by Charlene Li at the SF American Marketing Association -here are my twittered notes. See also, Charlene's slides.

says @charleneli: Theme is "social networks will be like air" - her better phrasing of my "Social Cloud" idea
says @charleneli: in future we'll say "wasn't it quaint that we had to go someplace to be with our friends"
says @charleneli: "I want Amazon to have a 'friend's reviews button on there - or anywhere else they could be"
says @charleneli: we'll have a feed of the presedential debates with our friends tweets on - like I did in 2004: http://bit.ly/IRCdebate
says @charleneli: universal login with OpenID lets you tie your IDs together, and sites can import friends from your networks
says @charleneli: I had to friend my co-author Josh 35 different times on different sites - Portable Contacts should save us from this pain
says @charleneli: Profiles where they are useful - eg LinkedIn profiles showing up in Lotus Notes via email
says @charleneli: your friends activities in context with GetGlue.com's plugin - Iron Man wikipedia page and IMDB page shows friends reviews
says @charleneli: 2 sets of standards exist Facebook's own protocols and the OpenStack backed by Google, MySpace, Plaxo, Yahoo and more
says @charleneli: advertising has evolved - content targetting for demographics; Search marketing for intent; behavioural targetting
says @charleneli: how many of you have gone to a social network site and remember seeing an Ad? or clicked on one?
says @charleneli: Who wants to be a fan of FiberOne on Facebook?
says @charleneli: people want to tell each other about things they care about - need new ads for this
says @charleneli: examples of new Ad types - branded virtual gifts, shown to you as your friends gave or received them
says @charleneli: SocialVibe has profile sponsorships that donate to your favourite charity eg colgate ad to leukemia
says @charleneli: the Tipping Point argued that there are influencers that can make a product go viral [I disagree see http://bit.ly/watts ]
says @charleneli: social graphs and interests, culture of sharing and online and email behaviour can create context for ads
says @charleneli: vendors who identify influencers include 33across, lotame, media6 degrees, unbound technologies
says @charleneli: network neighbourhood modelling in interesting - homophily is a good predictor for clusters - you are like your friends
says @charleneli: Google tracks who I email most - very useful to me: "In Google I Trust" http://bit.ly/BtvV
says @charleneli: Media6 identifies you by profiles you view on SNSs - shows ads to your friends based on your purchases
says @charleneli: Media6 gets 3-7x increase in response rates on banner ads through this homophilic targetting - no PII involved
says @charleneli: Influencer strategies are a misnomer, btu clustering works
says @charleneli: People will demand greater contol over when, where, how profiles + friends are used. Detailed permissions - a UX nightmare
says @charleneli: remember when people didn't trust callerID? Now if you turn it off, people won't take your call
says @charleneli: setting up lists of who can see your pictures is a pain - have to categorize people - reclassifying is hard
says @charleneli: there's a need to better articulate and detect sub-groups of friends so this is less of a chore
I pointed out the power of asymmetric friending eg http://bit.ly/publics and @charleneli and audience agreed that it reduces awkwardness
says @charleneli: people will pay real money for virtual gifts
[ChrisSaad @kevinmarks asymmetic is good, the term friending is not great. I prefer follow or subscribe ]
@ChrisSaad agreed "following" is a better term for this
Audience: when will people profit from us using their profiles? @charleneli says we all have our own CPMs
[clynetic @kevinmarks What is CPM?]
@clynetic CPM is marketingspeak for 'cost per thousand' - I suppose CPA ( cost per action) is better
says @charleneli: don't give up your social capital for short term gain me: don't be the Amway guy at the party
says @charleneli: behavioural targetting is often faulty, as behaviours change
says @charleneli: social media advertising experiments are waiting for turnaround
says @charleneli: GYM (Hotmail for M) will test social media integration with webmail
says @charleneli: Facebook Connect and Open Stack gaining traction with media co's
says @charleneli: Social shopping experiments start - we want our friends recommendations
says @charleneli: identify where social network data and content shoudl be integrated in your sites
says @charleneli: leverage existing identity and social graphs where your audience is
says @charleneli: get your privacy and permission policies aligned with an open strategy
says @charleneli: find your trust agents - in google I trust? do you trust facebook?
says @charleneli: the media buyers are still trying to buy demographics or content, not better targetting

Hold your breath while Googling to save the planet

The Times and Telegraph have picked on some rather dubious stats on Google energy use:

a typical search generates about 7g of CO₂ Boiling a kettle generates about 15g

but

Wissner-Gross has also calculated the CO₂ emissions caused by individual use of the internet. His research indicates that viewing a simple web page generates about 0.02g of CO₂ per second. This rises tenfold to about 0.2g of CO₂ a second when viewing a website with complex images, animations or videos.

So client-side, a search costs 0.02g/s - to get to 7g you look at it for 350s, or nearly 6 minutes. But hang on:

A separate estimate from John Buckley, managing director of carbonfootprint.com, a British environmental consultancy, puts the CO₂ emissions of a Google search at between 1g and 10g, depending on whether you have to start your PC or not. Simply running a PC generates between 40g and 80g per hour, he says. of CO₂ Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, estimates the carbon emissions of a Google search at 7g to 10g (assuming 15 minutes’ computer use).

He's using it for 15 minutes per search? That gives 0.01g/s, or half the other chap's estimate.

Google's data centre's are carbon neutral, so it is only the client end you do have to worry about. However, breathing generates about 6g of Carbon every 10 minutes. Or about as much as they estimate computers do.

So I suggest you hold your breath while you search Google, to offset your carbon use. As searches return in well under a second, whatever these newspapers say, this shouldn't be any hardship. Or search from your Android or iPhone instead.

Update: Urs Hölzle gives some actual figures for searches energy use

MacWorld wishlist

John Gruber says "all Mac-related web sites must publish pre-Macworld Expo predictions regarding what Apple may announce at the show."

What I have is not so much predictions as an "I hope they've been thinking along the same lines I have" wishlist.

• An HD or better laptop. 17" if you must, but I'd like a 15" or smaller. The iPod Nano has 204 pixels per inch and a beautiful display. A 1920x1200 screen at that density would be 7" diagonal, or at iPhone's 163 ppi it would be 8.8" - there's plenty of room. You could get the 30" display's 2560x1600 into a 13" screen at iPhone ppi.
• Come to that, a 7" diagonal HD iPhone/ iPod Touch would be lovely too. Not just for video, but for reading the web and facing-page PDF's on. Give it Bluetooth keyboard support.
• Obviously, a new Mac Mini. I have a big shiny Sony HD TV and I want a little Mac to drive it (are you getting the HD theme here yet?)
• Separate out the phone crap. I don't like phones, and holding screens to my ear is daft anyway. Make the earpiece separate naturally. Come to that, negotiate me a data plan without a calling plan with your carrier buddies. Amazon did it for Kindle. And for goodness sake ship iChat for the handhelds. Put a camera on the top of the screen like the Macs all have.
• Drop DRM already. For videos too. And HDCP. 
• Extend your lovely bluetooth keyboard to have a trackpad too. Make it work with iPhones and the new 7" HD iPod too.
• one more thing -  Phil Schiller, stop charging for QuickTime Pro. Admit the mistake you made ten years ago and make video editing natural again.

My twittered notes on the Leweb Social panel

Platform Love: Getting Along - Panel

Panelists:


• David Glazer - Director of Engineering, Google
  
• Jeff Hansen - General Manager, Services Strategy/Live Mesh, Microsoft Corporation
  
• Dave Morin -Senior Platform Manager, Facebook

  
• David Recordon - Open Platforms Tech Lead , SixApart
  
• Max Engel, Head of Data Availability Initiative, MySpace

Moderator: Marc Canter - CEO, Broadband Mechanics

Watching the 3 Davids, Max, Marc and Jeff talk social at LeWeb
says Marc Canter 'open is the new black' - and asks about the Open Stack
says @daveman692 google, yahoo, microsoft all building on the open stack - won't FaceBook become the underdog when openness wins?
Canter suggets OpenID will be the brand that ties the Open stack together
max of MySpace "what we're doing with these standards is moving the web forward - when the web hits a roadblock it routes round it"
max of MySpace:"90% of our users think of themselves as URLs so OpenID is a natural fit for us"
Dave Glazer: the goal is to let users do anything they want to, with others, anywhere on the web. OpenID lets you log in anywhere
Dave Glazer: openSocial solves a different bit of the puzzle - JS APIs to run the same app in different social contexts REST APIs web to web
says @daveman692 the web is designed to be distributed, and the Open Stack fits this model
Jeff of Microsoft: live mesh is built on symmetric sync - supports Open Stack, OpenID shipping, OAuth looks good, support PortableContacts
Jeff of Microsfot: we're evaluating the OpenSocial gadget container
Marc canter "we're putting all our balls into ev williams vice"
Jeff: we offer lots of languages. Marc: lots of ways to put our balls in your vice
Max: we support OpenID, Oauth, OpenSocial but you can too
Marc: anything good for the Open Web is good for Google
Marc Canter wants a URL for each Gmail? DG: each one does have that, but only you can see it
Dave Glazer: there are 3 classes of information: Public, Private and Complicated - users should never be surprised by who can see what
says @davemorin facebook wants people to have a social context wherever they go
says @davemorin FaceBook had to create a Dynamic Privacy model for FB Connect @daveman692 calls shenanigans - LJ had those in 1999
asks @daveman692 of @davemorin why are you giving microsoft access to all our email addresses wihtout asking permission?
Max of MySpace - we've shown that security and openness work together by using OAuth, and can revoke them from in MySpace
Dave Glazer: need to separate the technical levers from the social customs. technology can't stop people putting your bizcard on the web
says @techcrunch "call bullshit on facebook" - broke integration with google. FB don't want an open stack, they may be forced into it
says @tommorris how can MS be on the panel after the debacle of Office OOXML which wasn't open or XML?
says @dave500hats could we get contacts with certain features eg tennis fans?
Dave Glazer: there's an open spec process to define new attributes in the spec - if you want to add one go and propose it

Cycling to new layers of freedom

Dave Winer used the public beta of Google Friend Connect to reflect on tech industry cycles:

A new generation of young techies comes along, takes a look at the current stack, finds it too daunting (rightly so) and decides to start over from scratch. They find that they can make things happen that the previous generation couldn't cause they were so mired in the complexity of the systems they had built. The new systems become popular with "power users" -- people who yearn to overcome the limits of the previous generation. It's exhilirating! [...]
The trick in each cycle is to fight complexity, so the growth can keep going. But you can't keep it out, engineers like complexity, not just because it provides them job security, also because they really just like it. But once the stack gets too arcane, the next generation throws their hands up and says "We're not going to deal with that mess."

Now, I may be a few years behind Dave, but I think he is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or the stack out with the cycle here. Back when I started out, to get my computer to generate sound, I had to make my own D to A converter to attach to the parallel port, and for non-character graphics, my hardware hacker friends swapped the character generator ROM for RAM, and I had to code in assembler to swap the display data in time.

Now my son thinks nothing of mixing 10 polyphonic Midi tracks in an afternoon or editing hi-def video (and yes, it's on an OS I helped to make capable of that).

Dave's revolutionary impulsiveness has a germ of truth, but what really happens is that successful technologies become invisible infrastructure for the next things that build on them.

I no longer need to write assembler, heck I no longer need to write C code. Dave's very URL - scripting.com - shows how we have built up layers of utility to work upon.

HTTP, HTML, JSON, Atom and Javascript are infrastructure now. Our deepest role as developers is to build the invisible infrastructure for the next generation to take for granted, so they imagine new abstractions atop that. Dave did it with feeds.

What we're doing with the Open Stack — OpenID, OAuth, PortableContacts and OpenSocial— is part of this evolutionary cycle too. We're combining building blocks into a simplified whole that makes sense to people who want their websites to become social.

It comes down to what you can take for granted as the baseline to build the next exciting cycle on.

OpenSocial’s birthday today

OpenSocial Reach chart
Originally uploaded by Kevin Marks

Just over a year ago, we launched OpenSocial to the web, with a few example applications and a lot of potential. Now, a year on, over 600 million social network users can use OpenSocial applications in their preferred social network sites.
Then, applications had to be embedded in sites as gadgets, which makes the social context clear for users, but means developers have to write some Javascript, and can only run code when the user is looking at the site.
With OpenSocial 0.8 rolling out, the REST APIs mean that developers can integrate with social sites using server-side code directly, potentially delegating user registration, profiles and friend relationships to an already-trusted social site, and feeding activity updates back into them.
To do this, we are building an Open Stack, based on OpenID, XRDS-Simple, OAuth, PortableContacts and OpenSocial. By composing open standards in this way, we can make each one more valuable. The advantages of OpenID over email login in itself are not that obvious to users, but if the OpenID can be used to bring in your profile and contacts data - with your permission via OAuth - suddenly the added value is clear to users and developers alike. This connection was one of the exciting discussions at the Internet Identity Workshop this week - here's a video of myself, Steve Gillmor, David Recordon and Cliff Gerrish talking about it.

Missing the point of OpenID

I'm puzzled by Dare's post on OpenID, as he is wilfully misunderstanding its advantages at each stage, and I know he's smarter than that. He gets it right that OpenID is a way to confirm that a user owns a URL, without the rigmarole required to do so for an email address. 

However, the then uses his unmemorable Facebook URL http://www.facebook.com/p/Dare_Obasanjo/500050028 as an example, rather than any of the memorable ones he actually uses and people refer to, such as http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/ or http://carnage4life.spaces.live.com/ or http://twitter.com/Carnage4Life

DeWitt Clinton did an excellent job of clearing up some of Dare's other innaccuracies, but he then rhetorically exaggerated thus:

URLs make fantastic identifiers — for the 0.1% of the web population that understands that they “are” a URL. Fortunately, the other 99.9% of the world (our parents, for example) already understand that they have an email address.

This is missing the huge population of the online world (our children, for example) who consider email a messy noisy way to talk to old people, or to sign up to services when forced to, but are happy using their MySpace or Bebo or Hi5 or LiveJournal or Blogger or Twitter URLs to refer to themselves.
As I said in URLs are People Too:

The underlying thing that is wrong with an email address is that it's affordance is backwards - it enables people who have it to send things to you, but there's no reliable way to know that a message is from you. Conversely, URLs have the opposite default affordance- people can go look at them and see what you have said about yourself, and computers can go and visit them and discover other ways to interact with what you have published, or ask you permission for more.

Where I see OpenID providing a key advantage is in it's coupling with URL-based endpoints that provide more information and save the user time. The OpenID to PortableContacts connection as demonstrated by janrain can add your friends (with permission) from an OpenID login directly via OAuth.
This makes the OpenID login instantly more useful than an email one, and by connecting to an OpenSocial endpoint too, you can couple activities you take on the wider web with the site you trust to be a custodian of your profile and friends data, so your friends can discover what you are doing elsewhere, and come and join you.

I'm looking forward to talking through these issues at Internet Identity World next week in Mountain View.

Blogging's not dead, it's becoming like air

One thing I learned at Technorati is that one sure-fire way to get linked to by bloggers is to write an article about blogging. Sure enough, The Economist and Nick Carr have, with their 'death of the blogosphere' articles, garnered a fair bit of linkage.

Their curious obsession with the Technorati Top 100 is missing what is really happening. As JP points out, the old blogging crew are still around, they're just blogging less that those paid to do so a dozen times a day. Not because they are less interested or engaged, but because there are now many new ways to do what we used blogs for back then.

In 2001, if we wanted to share brief thoughts, we used a blog; to link to others’ posts, we used a blog. If we wanted a group discussion, we made a group blog.

With Technorati, and trackback and pingback, we built tools to follow cross-blog conversations, and learned that we are each others’ media. As I wrote in 2004:

The great thing about weblogs is when you discover someone. Someone who makes sense to you, or someone who surprises you with a viewpoint you hadn't thought of. Once you have found them you can subscribe to their feeds and see how they can keep inspiring or surprising you.
You can even start a blog, link to them, and join the conversation

A year later I reiterated:

By tracking people linking to me or mentioning my name, Technorati helps me in this distributed asynchronous conversation (thats how I found Mike and Dave's comments, after all). However, as I've said before, "I can read your thoughts, as long as you write them down first". In order to be in the conversation, you need to be writing and linking. Perforce, this means that those who write and link more, and are written about and linked to more, are those who most see the utility of it.

What has happened since is that the practices of blogging have become reified into mainstream usage. Through social networks and Twitter and Reader shared items and Flickr and HuffDuffer and all the other nicely-focused gesture spreading tools we have, the practice of blogging, of mediating the world for each other, has become part of the fabric of the net.
This may be the first blogpost I've written since August, but the many digital publics I'm part of have been flowing media and friendly gestures to and from me all the time.

Social Disease, or making magic?

Suw is musing thoughtfully on the overtones of describing something as ‘social’:

Monica thanked me for the explanation, saying that she was glad I had elaborated as she had thought, and I hope she forgives me for paraphrasing, that 'social software was something awful, like social workers'. That really made me think, and I haven't quite got to the end of where that throwaway comment has led me.

Is 'social' the problem with social software? Certainly in the UK, 'social' has some rather negative connotations: Social workers are often despised and derided as interfering, and often incompetent, busybodies. Social housing is where you put people at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap. Social sciences are the humanities trying to sound important by putting on sciency airs. Social climbers are people who know how to suck their way up the ladder. Social engineering is getting your way deviously, by using people's weaknesses against them. Social security is money you give people who can't be bother work for themselves. Socialism is an inherently flawed system that is prone to corruption. Social disease is venereal.

This reminds me of early in the Social Sofware story:

The SSA meeting was fairly chaotic - perhaps reflecting the diverse meanings of 'Social'. Clay Shirky did not show up (or if he did, did not speak up); Dave Winer later poured scorn on the efforts, implying it was all about social climbing.

Friedrich Hayek famously said that the word 'social' empties the noun it is applied to of their meaning. Hayek goes on:

...it has in fact become the most harmful instance of what, after Shakespeare's 'I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs' ( As You Like It , II, 5), some Americans call a 'weasel word'. As a weasel is alleged to be able to empty an egg without leaving a visible sign, so can these words deprive of content any term to which they are prefixed while seemingly leaving them untouched. A weasel word is used to draw the teeth from a concept one is obliged to employ, but from which one wishes to eliminate all implications that challenge one's ideological premises.

Perhaps the problem is that the social realm is the realm of trust, so saying things are social is asserting "trust me". As Adam Gopnik writes on magic in the New Yorker:

But the Too Perfect theory has larger meanings, too. It reminds us that, whatever the context, the empathetic interchange between minds is satisfying only when it is “dynamic,” unfinished, unresolved. Friendships, flirtations, even love affairs depend, like magic tricks, on a constant exchange of incomplete but tantalizing information. We are always reducing the claim or raising the proof. The magician teaches us that romance lies in an unstable contest of minds that leaves us knowing it’s a trick but not which one it is, and being impressed by the other person’s ability to let the trickery go on.[...]

I saw, too, that David Blaine is absolutely sincere in his belief that the way forward for a young magician lies not in mastering the tricks but in mastering the mind of the modern age, with its relentless appetite for speed and for the sensational-dressed-as-the-real. And I thought I sensed in Swiss the urge to say what all of us would like to say—that traditions are not just encumbrances, that a novel is not news, that an essay is a different thing from an Internet rant, that techniques are the probity and ethic of magic, the real work. The crafts that we have mastered are, in part, the tricks that we have learned, and though we know how much knowledge the tricks enfold, still, tricks is what they are.

Open Source and Social Cloud Computing

Tim O'Reilly has written an excellent review post on Open Source and Cloud Computing which says, among other things:

The interoperable internet should be the platform, not any one vendor's private preserve.

So here's my first piece of advice: if you care about open source for the cloud, build on services that are designed to be federated rather than centralized. Architecture trumps licensing any time.

But peer-to-peer architectures aren't as important as open standards and protocols. If services are required to interoperate, competition is preserved. Despite all Microsoft and Netscape's efforts to "own" the web during the browser wars, they failed because Apache held the line on open standards. This is why the Open Web Foundation, announced last week at OScon, is putting an important stake in the ground. It's not just open source software for the web that we need, but open standards that will ensure that dominant players still have to play nice.

The "internet operating system" that I'm hoping to see evolve over the next few years will require developers to move away from thinking of their applications as endpoints, and more as re-usable components. For example, why does every application have to try to recreate its own social network? Shouldn't social networking be a system service?

This isn't just a "moral" appeal, but strategic advice.[...]

A key test of whether an API is open is whether it is used to enable services that are not hosted by the API provider, and are distributed across the web.

I think this API openness test is not strong enough. As I wrote in An API is a bespoke suit, a standard is a t-shirt, for me the key test is that implementations can interoperate without knowing of each others' existence, let alone having to have a business relationship. That's when you have an open spec.

The other thing I resist in the idea of an internet operating system is that that the net is composable, not monolithic. You can swap in and implementations of different pieces, and combine different specs that solve one piece of the problem without having to be connected to everything else.

The original point of the cloud was a solved piece of the problem that means you don't have to worry about the internal implementation.

Thus, the answer to "shouldn't social networking be a system service?" is yes, it should be a Social Cloud. That's exactly what we are working on in OpenSocial.