Phil Wolff: identity

Mail is part of Google's enterprise strategy.

Sat, 03 Apr 2004 17:46:24 GMT

Jeff Jarvis says Google email (gmail) is just another portal me-too.

I don't think so, Jeff.

Email has juice. Only telephones are used more.

40% of a company's knowledge is stored in its email boxes, hidden from intranet search engines, locked away on desktops. Email is rich with:

social information (who is asked about what, who redistributes information to whom),
time signatures (sent, received, read, forwarded, printed),
threading and propagation clues (A sent it to B who replied while copying it C who forwarded it to...),
urls pointing to the web,
enclosures passed along, and
entry points, from mobile devices to robots to business software.

evectors' ZOË demonstrates the value of combing through your mail to fuel search and reveal context.

For Google, this has three strategic benefits:

Better Google scoring. There's no reason Google can't collect a billion emails by this time next year. A million users times a thousand messages. The urls will inform PageRank™, and in near real time. If you thought weblogs got you Google juice, wait for email.
Ad Revenue. Either you'll pay for ad-free viewing or you'll get Google text ads tailored to your emails. A billion page reads of additional targeted inventory to sell.
Appliance sales. With Google search, weblogs, and email, Google will give Microsoft mail service a run for its money. Watch Google roll out Blogger in a Box this year, the better to clue the Google search engine to intranet content. A year from now, watch the microcontent of email and weblogs continue to converge, especially behind the firewall.

How does Yahoo differ from Google?

Where Yahoo sells communication, Google sells context.

Where Yahoo brings integration, Google leads with relevance.

Where Yahoo! lets you type up a "buddy list", watch Google tweak your orkut social network with clues from your mailing behavior, and vice versa.

Where Yahoo uses their toolbar to access their many services/properties, Google's toolbar will observe your browser experiences. And that includes now sending and reading email, surfing, news watching, reading and writing weblogs, following and posting to usenet, and shopping. With email, orkut and your toolbar, they now can create a compound profile of your interests.

Context, relevance, experience. Tough to beat.

[a klog apart]

My YASNS riff: My orkut doesn't fit.

Sun, 01 Feb 2004 13:54:42 GMT

You may try to model me, but you can't define me. I'm larger than a tidy form.

That's why God and evolution gave us the ability to lie. And posture. And pretend. And choose our words and body language.

I am not my business card. Or my resumé. Or my orkut profile.

They are merely shorthands, placeholders, for the real thing.

And you never get the real thing.

The closest you come is by interacting with me: self as black box. Not by description.

Second best to getting the real thing: ethnographic observation of my real life behavior.

Third best: following my narrative.

Fourth best: analysis of my online behavior.

That hamstrings YASNs.

The prob, of course is that I am many people in one skin and we all change who's in charge with the ebb and flow of blood sugar, brain chemistry, and the damned cat that peed on the carpet and I'm one way in A's company, another in B's company, and some awkward way when in the company of both A & B since I'm working with B, dating A, but had horribly bad sex with B but I can't remember whose fault it was.

I am complex, not one persona but many, changing over time.

We become self aware of this in puberty.

And spend adolescence learning to navigate ourselves, to choose, to actively dream versions of ourselves into being. For the objects of our infatuation. For our authority figures. For our parents. For strangers. Hopefully for ourselves.

Then adulthood calls for settling upon an outer persona. We simplify, most of us, at least our outer affect.

But the other me's are still inside.

And each of the million other Ryzers/YASNSers are the same way.

If I'm that messy and convoluted, can you imagine the relationship complexity? personas*(personas-1).

I have a few broad suggestions for social network improvements.

Model sociology. Not just nice stuff but all the icky horrible interactions we see in the office, in school, in gangs. Rites of passage. Flirting. Insults. Combat. Cliques. Authority. Power.

Model psychology. Squeeze in Maslow's Hierarchy. Piaget or someone else who models childhood development, especially arrested development.

Let me do more. Solve real life problems virtually. Design tools for tasks I really need. Group formation. Group destruction. Group work. Better meetings. Prioritization of communication. Help people be useful to each other.

Do less. Email, texting, http, phone calls are all pretty dumb systems. They just move content, so the human content becomes paramount, richer, engaging. Find your core and strip away the rest.

Admit your limitations and open up the plumbing. We need APIs so programmers can extend the models and tools.

I should be able to write an extension that lets you see a combined orkut profile and Google references.

Or find what the people in my virtual sub-community are buying on Amazon.

Or authenticate access to my calendar using friendship degrees.

Or sync my mobile phone behavior (who I text and who texts me) with my buddy list.

Or turn orkut into my smart phone's Caller ID system.

Or bounce new friends-of-friends against my interest profiles and nominate a few for acquaintanceship.

Or whatever. The world knows more than you do, so let them in.

If you want social software to endure, ...

A guy asked what it takes to scale your rolodex to 100,000 people. Then built Ryze to find out.

What's your question? "akasig"

PeopleAggregator alpha is A material.

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 02:31:29 GMT

The PeopleAggregator is starting to come together very nicely. Feels simple, usage nearly obvious. A pleasant experience. Pretty easy to define relationships.

And it's built on xml.

Here's my public page and the RDF underneath it.

Some thoughts on relationship vectors...

When I declare my connection to someonein PA, I pick one of these types:

know of
don't know but want to
know of in passing
know by reputation
acquaintance
friend
close friend
relative

The degrees of friendship are very nice and upbeat, but I think it conflates (a word I don't get to use very often) three dimensions into one:

time (past, present, possible future relationship),
strength (distant to close relationship), and
attraction (love, neutral, hate).

I should be able to declare that I mildly dislike Amy, my current wife. Or that I intensely hate Bob, my former boss. Or that I have a crush on Cat, this person I barely know. If the scales are quantified, you can do marvelous things with recommendations, matching, etc.

Add an "other relationship" category to accomodate the many ways we define our relationships. "Slept with", "worked with", "screwed over", "blogrolled but never met", "makes me gag", "lust after", "we're both Elks", "divorced me", and of course "know, but don't want to" (needing to divest). "Family" is also a pretty broad and shallow bucket; Genealogy XML covers more of that ground. And this doesn't even get into culture-specific notions; tribal affiliation means different things if you are a Native American, a Jew, a Boy Scout, or a Kurd. Leave room for those wonderful connections and the results will astonish. "akasig"

Integrating weblog aggregation data with enterprise data

Sat, 15 Nov 2003 17:26:37 GMT

Michael Angeles is gettin' it.

Watch people's online behavior and digital artifacts to build profiles.
Then organize the data for surfing and search, so people connect with each other.
Do that, and people organize themselves. Great things happen.

Prerequisites?

From thought to content in 1 click. Blogs do it. Wikis do it. Email and the phone do it too. Most other systems don't.
Content magnets. Rewards for every rung of Maslow's Hierarchy.
Respect. For the personal courage it takes for that first post. For privacy and other boundaries. For the collective power of invidivual choice.

via Roland Tanglao.

Dinner with Dina and Friends.

Thu, 30 Oct 2003 17:05:27 GMT

It felt like an acid trip and swings in blood sugar and the five seconds of a family reunion that are sheer delight.

Stuart Henshall, always gracious, hosted Dina Mehta at Boobo di Beppy where staple busting portions stun you with their fat content. More on the restaurant later.

We talked about Skype, blog uptake, and other things until I realized that I was at the social scientists' table. Michele Chang is an ubicomp goddess researcher. Dina is a behaviorist. danah boyd (no caps for typographical balance) is getting doctored in social network behavior. Denise Cheskin comes at behavior from a marketing view, and I'm a demoblographer (I blog demography) and labor market analyst. Clynton Taylor is a full tyme ethnographer for business (from where do I know him?). And Stuart has x-ray vision when it comes to models, business and management models I mean.

We were a worldly bunch. Dina from India. danah originally from England but sans accent? Stuart from NZ but with a courteous American drawl. I'm from New York but work has taken me to strange places like Houston and Lausanne. Liz Goodman's from the Big Apple too, an ~~actress~~ artist become ubicomp sociologist en route to Oregon. Denise went to grad school in France. It felt so cosmopolitan to be in such a faked up Italian joint.

More topics:

Dina thinks technology diffusion will be slow in India, to the point where Dean-like campaigns may take 15 years to work. I'm betting on five years, optimist that I am. I think some will do it just to get a better return on money, faster cheaper to reach the small middle class online. imho, the magic will happen when (a) we figure out how to run a Dean campaign via SMS, increasing reach and (b) when we build the social software and cultural models organizing the middle class to reach out to the offline masses, something the Democrats are attempting to do in the US. But I'm an ignorant slut when it comes to the subcontinent and am likely wrong.

Business cards. Mine with Google keywords. danah's in black so nobody can write on it. Clynton's with a form on the back for notes: event, date, was wearing, talked about, follow up with call/email/visit.

Dollars are the universal currency, you can use them in Costa Rica and almost anywhere interchangeably with local coin and paper.

Fun stories of interviews with gay men about their computers, including the minimalist who hides it behind the clothes in his closet, the pious who adorn their technology with icons of angels and saints.

How men worth anything will follow their women from state to state as they pursue their careers.

Being neither fish (academe) nor fowl (one of the kidz) at one of danah's dance parties. If you haven't met her, danah lives both in her body and her mind, and her parties reflect that. Oh to be younger again, but I was never that cool.

How kids who've grown up with the Internet only use email to communicate with parents or other adults. They use IM (meaning AIM) among themselves and will jump to MSN for private conversations. What happens when non-email kids grow up?

danah who monitors her self-monitoring started us on how many bloggers write with purpose instead of just uttering. Sed quis custodiet ipsos Custodes? Aware of consequences now and maybe in the future. My thinking: The reemergence of Google and the Wayback machine as our Permanent Record casts a chilling effect on personal disclosure. Will I share that cute story about the cat's claws coming too close to the vibrator and clit if it might affect a future relationship, job or political office? Or will I censor myself? LiveJournal shows the way: controlled layers of disclosure let you write to the world, your friends, a friend, or just to yourself.

The restaurant was all about experience marketing. Sculptures of popes, photos of Frank, bottles of chianti, meals served family style. Appealing, satisfying. And contrived by marketing folks at the chain's corporate headquarters. Their business relies on the illusion of the place, on customers suspending disbelief enough to enjoy the space, service, and food. They are careful to hide everything that might break that illusion. Kitchen stuff, admin staff, computers, break rooms. And they are not alone. Hotels depend on you accepting the illusion that no one ever slept in that room, in that bed before. Theme parks don't let you see characters slip out of costume or see staff lectured on crowd control. This conflicts with the marketing blog meme of letting the world see what goes on inside your enterprise, see how the sausage is made. Are the benefits of having a large choir of voices singing to the Internet, bonding to customers with sincerity, are the benefits worth your customers' lost innocence?

The GoGame, that builds new teams independent of prior rank or status by forcing people to notice their urban environment in great detail (phone powered scavenger hunt). Teletwister, a game of twister where a community votes on the players' moves.

That of course the lessons of emergent democracy and the Dean campaign (putting the tail of the power curve to work) can work inside organizations, but not at my company.

How the power to read more people (newsreaders are TiVos of the blogosphere) means everyone is becoming more like Oprah. Oprah's shields manage her 20 million "personal connections" rising from her broadcast media (tv, books, magazines). Setting expectations so people don't feel I'm rude when they get a form letter, a challenge, or a request for references.

Blondie's big gulp martinis. And then it gets fuzzy.

Monster enters the community business. Look out Ryze.

Tue, 21 Oct 2003 00:53:49 GMT

Monster is getting into schmoozespace. Ryze, LinkedIn, et al are in for some competition. A gang of Monster execs tried Ryze in July: CIO Brian Farrey, VP Dan Miller, SVP Danielle McCabe, VP Douglas Hardy, software engineer John Hayward, VP Michele Pearl, Director Sean Luitjens, and Creative Director Sue Duro. Michael Schutzler too, SVP responsible for Monster Networking. Schutzler stopped by LinkedIn too.

Why does Monster care? Two problems:

Monster spams employers.

Monster makes it easy for job seekers to apply for a job. So they do. To lots of jobs. Multiply the number of job seekers times the number of jobs to which they apply, divide by the few jobs offered. Monster spews a supersonic torrent.

Employers are treating Monster-generated job applications like spam. The bigger ones spend heavily on applicant tracking systems that filter, blacklist, and screen, typically less effective than your average bayesian filter.

Monster needs to show employers the handful of needles in the career pool haystack. But how?

Monster needs to improve on the 4% Relationship with Workers.

The average job search lasts around two months. The average person gets a new job every 3.5 to 4 years, about once per presidential election. So you need Monster 2 of 48 months, between 4 and 5% of your career. What about the other 95%?

Monster has to advertise to you for four years so you return. That's expensive.

And your profile becomes stale the week after you post it. So employers won't pay to mine Monster's "resume" bank.

Can Monster bribe you to keep your profile current? To share your professional network? To write about your work life?

If so,

Your continuously fresh profile will be at least 20 times more useful to employers.
The record of your electronic relationships with others in the community helps employers find clusters of like-minded people, the better to recruit.
And you'll already be in the house the next time you launch your career campaign. Monster won't need to advertise to you again.

Monster's head start, challenges, and opportunities:

Monster's lead:

Traffic. 40 million job seekers have visited Monster sites. If even some of those email addresses still work, they might be able to draw a million people to try the community. Compare that to
Motivation. Job seekers have an economic interest in making it work.
Conditioning. They are trained to fill out forms.

Monster has real challenges.

Resumequity. Their current policies are hostile to user privacy. They claim ownership of all data you write when on their site, or any data they infer from your behavior. This runs counter to a strong cultural and political trend moving power and control of information to individuals.
Pay to Play. They want to charge for membership. It's not clear that anyone has made a go of that in schmoozespace.
Tone. Executive and contractor experiments failed in the past, not least because of the tone of the places Monster created. Time and staff have passed. Can they create a place that is safe, fun, social, purposeful, casual?
Friar's Fallacy. Groucho Marx wrote in a letter to the Hollywood Friar's, "Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." I don't feel any particular connection to other people in the phone book. Monster needs to foster feelings of affiliation and membership beyond a credit card transaction.
Big Walls. Monster doesn't open its databases to the world's programmers. Amazon and Google have, and thousands of experiments helped these giants discover new ways to create value.
All Work. Many other communities created for business find that people want to explore and band together about non-work things. Can Monster aggressively follow and support their users?

Opportunities:

Nodespace Neighborhoods. BostonWorks' Jason Butler describes "nodespaces" as those data intersections that connect people with each other. Monster can create just-in-time community around specific job postings, employers, occupations, and interests. And there is no reason some of those spaces can't be branded.

Fellowship. Cynthia Typaldos addresses professional and personal workplace isolation with her professional guilds. If Monster can match and beat that, it's scale will have a chance to work.

Built in Word of Mouth. More jobs are filled by referral. By helping you form tribes, Monster multiplies the effectiveness of your job search. And increases the chance that you'll refer a Monster employer to a Monster networker.

Cross-Property Inolvement. Monster operates relocation, training, testing, and other businesses. An active and lively social network can be used to improve customer acquisition, retention, and satisfaction in many of their properties.

Hosted Blogspaces. There's no reason Monster can't host weblogs for every user, both on the job seeker and employer side. Most people won't try blogging, many will try and leave, but millions will try and stick. Monster could become one of the top blog hosts, along with Google, AOL, and Yahoo!

Humanization of Candidates. Job seekers are people. But you wouldn't know it from datafied personas job boards pass to employer databases. Social networks offer employers a chance to understand more of people than their "resumes".

Will Monster execute well and fast enough for employers to defer to Monster's network instead of rolling their own?

It all comes down to social capital. The more you help your customers harness it, the stronger your competitive advantage.

# # #

From the Monster PR site:

Monster Redefines Career Management By Harnessing Professional Networking; Network Available to 40 Million Job Seeker Members. excerpts, bulleting and empahsis mine:

Monster ... today announced plans to launch Monster Networking, a professional networking service.

Monster Networking is an online community where professionals across all industries and levels can exchange information about jobs, offer expertise and help others achieve their goals.

Monster will serve as the host in this community,

fostering introductions between members and

encouraging them to:

share career advice,

cultivate long-term professional relationships, and

support each other's goals.

Proprietary matching technology will allow Monster to

proactively initiate introductions between participating members as well as

promote relevant career opportunities based on criteria in a member's professional profile.

Member profiles will include skills, occupation, employment history, schools attended, titles, interests, and geographic location.

"In addition to leveraging the Internet as a powerful recruiting tool, consumers continue to rely on their network of friends, colleagues and peers when seeking professional guidance or advice about how to best achieve career goals. Today, we embark on a new Monster - one that serves all professionals who are looking to manage their careers, not just those seeking work."

Monster Networking is a subscription-based service that is expected to be available in Q1 of 2004.

"akasig"