Memex 1.1

From BBC NEWS…

A US study of text messages suggests the theory that we are all linked by six steps to anyone else may be right - though seven seems more accurate.

Microsoft researchers studied the addresses of 30bn text messages sent during a single month in 2006.

Any two people on average are linked by seven or fewer acquaintances, they say…

Wonder if this is the first study to be done on a global rather than a society-wide basis? Also, it rather undermines the conjecture — which I first saw, I think, in the Economist — that electronic connectivity was reducing the Milgram coefficient.

This morning’s Observer column…

Sometimes, ignorance is bliss. We saw two examples of this last week. The first came when a new search engine - Cuil (www.cuil.com) - was unveiled. The launch was an old-style PR operation. Some influential bloggers and mainstream reporters had been briefed in advance, and whispers were circulating in cyberspace that this would be Something Big. Cuil would be the ‘Google Killer’ everyone had been waiting for.

Evidence for this hypothesis was freely cited. The venture was the brainchild of ‘former Google employees’: nudge, nudge. At least one of them had been at Stanford, the university that nurtured the founders of both Yahoo and Google: wink, wink. It had indexed no fewer than 121 billion web pages, compared with Google’s measly 40 billion: Wow! Cuil had already received $33m in venture funding! Cue trumpets.

So many people were taken in by this that when cuil.com finally opened for business the site was swamped…

From the Sydney Morning Herald…

THERE has been speculation recently about what is being called an internal Facebook valuation - a value the company has assigned to its own common stock that is drastically lower than the $15 billion valuation set so publicly last year by Microsoft’s investment.

According to the transcript of a June 13 case-management conference in the lawsuit settled last week between Facebook and ConnectU - one of the few documents in the case not under seal - that figure is $3.75 billion, or one-quarter of the Microsoft valuation.

ConnectU had claimed that Mark Zuckerberg, a former employee and Facebook’s founder, got his idea from ConnectU.

The relevant passage from the document, under the section titled Defendant ConnectU’s Position, said: “The term sheet and settlement agreement is also unenforceable because it was procured by Facebook’s fraud. Indeed, based on a formal valuation resolution approved by Facebook’s board of directors but concealed from ConnectU, the stock portion of the purported agreement is worth only one-quarter of its apparent value based on Facebook’s public press releases.”

The piece goes on to point out that Microsoft bought preferred stock — i.e. ones with special voting rights, so the ConnectU figure is probably too low. But it’s still not $15 billion.

This interesting graph (compiled from Technorati data) comes from a BusinessWeek piece. I came to it via this meditation on the phenomenon, which says,

Perhaps we’ve realized that blogging every day isn’t as fun as it sounds. A happened-upon red swirl of autumn leaves before a backdrop of unusually artful East Vancouver graffiti may very well be a blog-worthy topic. Life’s minor muses are perhaps what inspire the pleasure blogger to pick up a keyboard in the first place, but it actually takes work to develop new material on a regular basis. No, writing never becomes easy no matter how long you do it.

Some difficult truths have been brought to light by the personal blogging blitz of the last few years. One such revelation is that most of us aren’t as interesting as we think. Waking up every day and jotting down some deep thoughts about breakfast is a difficult way to sustain any kind of readership. A creative writing teacher once told me that everyone has lived one novel-worthy story. One being the operative word, I think.

It’s as if we’ve gone through a few generations of blogging natural selection. The ones left are the big alpha bloggers, well suited to the harsh — and fickle — web environment. Said alphas have learned how to make money from their wordslinging, transforming what was once a very grassroots medium into something much more commercial. The pleasure bloggers just didn’t have the genes, nor the capitalistic instincts, to survive.

The writer goes on to speculate that the energy which originally powered the growth of blogging may simply be dissipating into other media — microblogging (like Twitter, Jaiku), social networking (FaceBook updates), etc. He also reveals that Google has acquired Jaiku, which is something I had missed. Hmmm…

Intriguing account by Luis Suarez of IBM…

EARLIER this year, I became tired of my usual morning ritual of spending hours catching up on e-mail. So I did something drastic to take back control of my productivity.

I stopped using e-mail most of the time. I quickly realized that the more messages you answer, the more messages you generate in return. It becomes a vicious cycle. By trying hard to stop the cycle, I cut the number of e-mails that I receive by 80 percent in a single week.

It’s not that I stopped communicating; I just communicated in different and more productive ways. Instead of responding individually to messages that arrived in my in-box, I started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others. I also started to use the telephone much more than I did before, which has the added advantage of being a more personal form of interaction…

This strikes a chord. I’ve found that the email system at my day job has become positively dysfunctional (I’m cc’d on everything, it seems), so I’ve had to resort to giving selected colleagues a different address, which ensures that anything from them comes straight through to my phone. But of course this has the disadvantage that I may miss ‘important’ messages from other people in the organisation — who then get shirty because I don’t appear to be paying due attention to them!

I’ve taken to using Skype a lot — mainly for IM and occasional phone conferencing. I’ve also found Twitter useful — and its unreliability correspondingly infuriating. So I often fall back on SMS. My experience with wikis has been mixed — most of my colleagues seem reluctant to use them.

The bottom line, though, is that organisational email has to be brought back under control. Someone once told me that one of the big supermarket chains — it may be ASDA — has a policy in its open-plan HQ that when anyone’s on email they have to wear a red baseball cap. It’s wacky, but might just work.

The mess that is organisational email is actually a symptom of the failure of ICT systems to provide software services that workers really need. Why, for example, do you find that office workers have email inboxes with thousands of messages in them? Answer: because it gives them an electronic filing system that they can use. So instead of being an indicator of how hopeless people are at managing ICT, overflowing inboxes are actually a measure of how ingenious humans are when faced with useless technology.

Interesting post by Naoimi Gleit in the Facebook Blog.

Ever see a story about a friend who tagged “themself” in a photo? “Themself” isn’t even a real word. We’ve used that in place of “himself or herself”. We made that grammatical choice in order to respect people who haven’t, until now, selected their sex on their profile.

However, we’ve gotten feedback from translators and users in other countries that translations wind up being too confusing when people have not specified a sex on their profiles. People who haven’t selected what sex they are frequently get defaulted to the wrong sex entirely in Mini-Feed stories.

For this reason, we’ve decided to request that all Facebook users fill out this information on their profile. If you haven’t yet selected a sex, you will probably see a prompt to choose whether you want to be referred to as “him” or “her” in the coming weeks. When you make a selection, that will appear in Mini-Feed and News Feed stories about you, but it won’t be searchable or displayed in your Basic Information.

She goes on to say that they’ve “received pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting.”

Eh???

Go to twitabit and post your tweets there. Their server will stack them in a queue and make sure they get delivered.

Just thought you’d like to know.

Thanks to Dave Winer (who has a small stake in Twitabit).

Very interesting study from the Pew ‘Internet and American Life’ project which, among many other things, suggests that,

A significant number of voters are also using the internet to gain access to campaign events and primary documents. Some 39% of online Americans have used the internet to access “unfiltered” campaign materials, which includes video of candidate debates, speeches and announcements, as well as position papers and speech transcripts…

(Hint: Steve Jobs’s Keynote on the iPhone 3G?)

Thoughtful Guardian piece by Charles Arthur.

What Twitter needs is to expand its capacity while making money from those who are using it. True, it has just received $15m (£7.5m) of venture capital funding, valuing it at $80m. But it needs to deter some people from using it - while benefiting from those who continue to.

There are two obvious ways forward. Charge the users, or charge those who want to get at the users. The first option is fine - if it wants to lose 90% of its user base (the rough tradeoff any service sees if it begins charging, however little). The second option might look puzzling, but it has worked before, in the MP3 market.

Once, there were zillions of MP3-playing software programs. Then Fraunhofer, which owns the patents, decided to charge for their use. At a stroke, the number of MP3 encoder/decoders shrank - leaving only those companies able to pay for them.

Twitter could do the same: charge for access to its API, or throttle requests over a certain limit from non-paying sources. True, its architecture challenges would remain - but with money coming in, it would have the incentive to get it right. And in the end, what do you want: a Twitter that’s free, or a Twitter that works?

My answer: one that works.