Technoratio

Technorati is one of the more amazing ways to participate in the "Web" at a number of levels.

• "Push browsing" - leveraging surfing time to inform the community about use-patterns
  
• "Social publishing" - leveraging "list discussion" and comments to generate meaningful and computable content
  

Here's my contributions - God Speed!

OpenSocial, Inbox 2.0, and online networks

Recent buzz about Google's OpenSocial and Yahoo's Inbox 2.0 is pretty fascinating stuff. The convergence of email and social networks hits upon a number of sociological issues. My thoughts were spurred by a thoughful article on TechCrunch.

Stepping back from the Internet to consider modern history a bit, take the post-modern transition from nation-state consciousness back to new or renewed kinds of "tribal" associations. For example: the Balkans, ex-USSR, Blue states vs. Red states, Apple vs. PC.

Most people in traditional nations had a relatively stable sense of social identity, with relatively low social barriers between strangers. Enter the new tribalism - now the differences between a stranger and a friend are quite striking; issues of trust and authority change dramatically, especially in a social context, but tesselate throughout the political economy.

The older institutions of nationhood like (democratic) government, broadcast media. and corporations feel the impact and are scrambling (strategically or tactically) to respond with varying results. Recent particular examples are how Europe has shifted to ethnonational conservativism, and South America to class socialism... both domestic reactions to globalization of one form (immigration) or another (privateering).

Getting back to E-mail (Yahoo, Google) vs. Social Networks (MySpace, Facebook), a similar old/new analogy seems to apply. E-mail can be sent by anyone to anyone as long as you know the address - remember the old days how it was such a rush to get e-mail from a stranger. Richness of experience was defined by the level of novelly accelerated (and free), and narrow, contact. Along came spam - now, even filters, then folders, and finally tags, still barely helps stem the unwieldly tide.

Social networks define the internet experience (through who you know) as "Connection", not "Contact". In fact, the semantics work - you connect without needing to make contact. Richess of experience is level of connectivity - with transmission accomplished through a sort of inverted broadcast.

So.. E-mail Nation feels a need to redefine itself to match the impedance of the evolving network. Leveraging the huge asset that is email makes some sense. It always used to intrigue me - since Yahoo knows who I email, and how [in]formally with what frequency... they must be trying to monetize that intimate model of my.. um.. social network. Is it just good old-fashioned privacy policies and culture that prevented acting on it meaningfully until now?

At this point, since everyone is explicitly providing sites with personal connectivity and tagged at that, the culture seems quite different from 10 years ago. I think Google bootstrapped old-school search+email with the strategy all along to go deep tribal with tags/adwords and something like opensocial in mind.

I think Yahoo seems to struggle competing because of its old-school inertia. Of course, now social sites have their own spam problems and privacy issues. Technology continues in its race condition with culture, and so the landscape is likely to change too much to predict a "winner". Check out this comment.

First post in Beantown

First post after a move to a new job and city right after setting up this blog... Boston is an interesting city. Having been here for a while it still feels undiscovered. Large metro area surrounding a small city. People are, let's say, straightforward... mixed with a lot of imports what with all the top-flight schools, hospitals and corporations.

What brought me here was the fact that it is the 2nd best biotech hub in the U.S. (and therefore the globe).

Giving thanks...

My First post

Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. Every process has an initiation protocol; I just invoked mine.

Peace World! I've been putting this off for some time - not a very good or punctual conformist.
Hopefully, I'll have some combination of tech, biz, history, and other ideas to share, very soon.

Have a pleasant weekend, wherever you are.