Tim Oren's Due Diligence

Rant: 'Social graph' considered harmful

(Minor backstory: Blog-buddy Marc 'Armed Liberal' Danziger posted at Winds of Change on the 'social graph' and Google kerfuffle and then asked for comment behind the scenes. Which I provided in a rushed e-mail, and then let the topic simmer through the weekend, distilling several fractions of bogosity from the raw material on offer. Which I now offer, from most trivial to consequential.)

'Social graph' is an unneeded and misleading coinage. Dave Winer lays this out well, in his inimitable style. A graph as referenced is an abstract math and computer science concept, a class of representations for - among other things - networks. Real people schmoozing at parties - real or virtual - are networking, not 'graphing' (that's something you try to beat out of Excel). For the sophisticates, there are well established fields like social network analysis and the virtual business category social network service which the incumbent term invokes. For either, 'social graph' is needless use of obscure terminology, perhaps in service of trumping up a category with no good reason to exist.

The Google story is highly suspect. So what actually happened here? A deliberate workaround on NDAs signed by attendees at a Google technology briefing, with vague mentions of various internal services and external partners that might or not be implicated in an attempt at more 'openness' in the SNS space, and some stringing together of names of folks who might or might not be involved in the project(s). If that's something you'll base a business judgement on, I suggest a job at CBS, not an SNS startup.

Google's immediate impact in SNS is limited. I recommend Danny Sullivan's well-stated comment to the above story. It's not like Orkut and iGoogle have been burning up the world of late. If Google gets too free and loose with their data, most folks won't even have to opt-out, because they've never opted-in. Google's incentive is to come up with something that will attract new community members, not keep them away.

...unless Google's making an evil-stupid move. The Googlers tend to be chaotic but clueful, so I doubt this, but it could happen. The evil-stupid thing would be to reverse engineer social networks out of people's GMail content and use them for marketing purposes. I'm talking address books and message headers, even content. This is known to be possible. It's also so far away from the originally intended use of that information that it's almost certain to create instant and explosive blow back.

Open social network representation is (partly) counterproductive. That includes both SixApart and associated efforts in that direction. If you're concerned about privacy - and SixApart is at least using that rhetoric - then why the heck do you want to make it easier for representations of social networks to be mobilized and shared? Wouldn't you like the shadow of the past to die along with a SNS that might be abusing your confidence? Oh, that's right, we're all (users and SNS providers) going to sign up for OpenID before that happens...

But it doesn't matter, because it's DOA anyway. For the non-technical: Horse, barn. Cat, bag. For the others: FOAF, client-side certs, digital wallets. What do these have in common, other than being dead meat? They all are/were bets that J. Random User wants and will use more secure and capable privacy and portability mechanisms if they are put into their hands. J. User continues to sign up for GMail, Facebook, etc. without any of these mechanisms and complexities. SixApart has one platform, LiveJournal, that is in the SNS space by a stretch and is a fading star. I love you guys (see the URL for this blog), but this is an overreach. Wake me up when someone with a user base and growth curve buys in. (Oh, yeah - SNS' are hit driven businesses, have you noticed?)

There is no singular social network (or graph). SixApart says the right words: "Everyone has many social graphs, and they shouldn't always be connected">. danah boyd nailed this one some time ago (PDF warning). Social networks aren't fragmented only because of technology issues, but deliberately so, as a means of controlling one's own social presentation, hiding and controlling information, even constructing identity. Before working on collapsing all those social affordances into one data structure, you might consider whether that's something the individual will appreciate. And even think about whether then attempting to market based on that unified view is going to be appreciated, or resented.

And you'll never get it out of people anyway.. But let's suppose that in this new transparent society we won't care if our significant others, our minister or rabbi, and some banker all see the same social network. Still won't work. Listen to the Old Fart for a moment here. Back in the day - before there was a real Web - academics sat around talking about the rhetoric of hypertext and how we'd all encode our links. Then we built the real thing - and it didn't happen. Take a look around you - how many typed links or even consistently tagged pages do you see? Real people don't do that.

Now you'll likely admit that marking up Web links is not an emotional topic or something discussed at parties for most of us (unless you're working at Google). Interpersonal relationships are both - see 'gossip'. What the heck makes anyone think we'll get all the nuance of social networks externalized - truthfully and completely and consistently, mind you - if people won't do it for something simple and unloaded like the Web? Doesn't even pass the grin test. So, we're right back into having to reverse-engineer semantics from minimal and partial representations (a la PageRank) but in an incredibly loaded setting. Plenty of step-on-your-crank potential for both incumbent and wannabe SNS'. With the properly perverse attitude, it should be entertaining to watch. Pass the popcorn?

Makin' Bacn

The coinage of the last month is definitely bacn, a midpoint between the e-mails you want, and the spam you'd like to end up at /dev/null before you see it. As put by its inventors:

Bacn is a new problem now plaguing our email inboxes. Putting it simply, Bacn is email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.

(You should visit the site if only for its embedded YouTube of the original spam sketch; the Pythons at their most manic and therefore best. But I digress...)

I think this one will stick to the wall. It's cute and captures a reality of today's virtual life. However, it's definitely not a new problem, though it's probably afflicting a wider population. Flash back a big six years to when Gartner was talking about 'occupational spam' - everything from excessively copied internal mails to self-promoting newsletters from vendors - essentially the unavoidable ur-twitters of enterprise life.

Those making investments get hammered with this stuff. Once your name gets out there as someone with money, that information seems to spread like a slime mold to those with less-and-less differentiated notions of your actual interests. From blurbs for conferences and pitches that might have a few percent chance of interest, on to ventures in fields of no interest, to PIPEs and dubious buyouts, then film financing, real estate punting and off into deep gray shades indistinguishable from a 419 scam. And once you're dealt with a vendor, either as investor or board member, you're on their list forever and your contacts there will also carry the information like a virus as they cycle to other firms. Some amount of this tripe (they've got me doing it too) might someday be of interest if you're backgrounding something or someone or looking for quick pointers, but who's got the time to sort it out? No one I know, so it sits there cluttering things up. So, yes, VCs know bacn.

Although bacn arrives over the same transport as spam and wanted e-mail, that fact may detract from noticing that managing it is a problem different from either. You want it out of your way, like spam, but available on demand when and if you should ever want to give some of your attention in that direction. That makes it more of a database and search problem, and should probably have an interface and mechanism that are blended with, but not the same, as one's regular e-mail browser.

We Hsure Don't Need This Again

So now notorious Democratic fund-raiser and accused fraudster Norman Hsu is in California again, extradited back after making it as far as Colorado in a 21st century railroad bail jumping bid. Why should a mostly technology and investing blog care about this? Hsu will arraigned and tried in the same San Mateo County court complex in Redwood City in which the three-ring-circus trail of Scott Peterson was held a couple of years ago. That's our downtown, three miles from home, where we shop and run errands. The media circus is back in town. Oh, joy....

So that's where 'cut-and-paste' came from!

A Newsweek piece on the Boomers and computers from Steven Levy - one of the few technology writers with a sense of the deep history of the field - provides a perfect example of what I've called reality creep:

"...I (born 1951) told these twentysomethings that there was a time when people wrote on machines called typewriters, beginning at the beginning and plowing through until the end, at which point they would mark up the manuscript with pen or pencil for the next run through the typewriter. If there was a need to recast a couple of sentences or even an entire paragraph, you would type on a new sheet of paper, cut the new text from the page with scissors and use Elmer's glue to paste it over the original not-so-hot lines. "Oh!" said one of the Googlers, of 1980s vintage. "So that's where 'cut-and-paste' came from!""

Those of us with a techie background has long borrowed computing concepts into real life: I'm multitasking, you're thrashing, my buffer is overflowing, I need to ping her... and so on. We're now well down the road to where using a concept from the virtual to describe the real is a commonplace in the general population. The Googlers of Levy's quotes are natives in that land.

Vacationing in Earthsea

Nearly 20 years ago, I was a 'guest artist' at a summer arts program at Humboldt State University on California's North Coast. The first and last time I've held the title, which amounted to coder-at-large for one of the first experiments in what was then called hypermedia fiction. One of the other artists, more in the traditional definition, was writer Vonda McIntyre. In an evening bull session she mentioned that fellow fantasy author Ursula LeGuin loved the North Coast area around Trinidad and had used it as the model for the seascape of her Earthsea series of books.

So, by that definition, we've spent the last week vacationing in a little bit of Earthsea. The wild blackberries are ripe, the salmon are running up on the Klamath, and a little front blew out the fog for the last two days. Life is good! Now on to Mendo for a few days before returning home.

Another 'Almost PC' Bites The Dust

...as Palm kills the Foleo three months after its introduction. Bringing out a product that is too similar in price, functionality and even form factor to the contemporary vision of the PC - without being one - has been the kiss of death for over two decades. It started with 'near clones' from the likes of DEC and AT&T, but it was IBM itself that provided the paradigm case with the PCjr.

From then to now, there's been a regular tide of similar errors by product managers wanting to attack an emergent market and trying to reach their design and BOM targets by cutting away functionality from the perceived 'standard' platform. A recurrent folly of wannabe multimedia PCs, TV PCs, network computers, e-mail terminals and what have you, and all dead. Palm is just the latest example of forgetting the tech past, and repeating it. In spite of the dwindling strategic importance of the so-called 'desktop', its image with customers is still so strong that it acts as a sort of tech marketing black hole, ripping apart competing visions that venture within its event horizon . (I expect the '$100 laptop' will ultimately end up in the black hole as well.)

Palm's cutting the Foleo is a sign the new investors and management team are showing some discipline. RHIT this isn't the only project to have been canned to free up resources and respond to the iPhone. Let's hope there's still some design magic left there. If Palm goes dark, and then produces nothing but an iPhone clone to restore the fading Treo brand, they're dead as well.

Henry Coe (Lick) Fire Visuals

The big brush fire burning in Henry Coe State Park, east of Morgan Hill, can be seen via a webcam up at the Mount Hamilton observatory. Movies of the previous 24-hours are here. And I've saved away the movie of 9/4, the big blowup, as a download.

Coe is a very steep and remote wilderness park. Many parts of it have a very heavy fuel load built up over the decades, and that plus hot winds from the interior are going to make things hard for Calfire. This area has 'needed to burn' for quite a while, so as long as the conflagration can be kept away from inhabited areas, the size of the fire shouldn't be too big a concern. Assuming it doesn't get so hot as to sterilize the soil, there should be spectacular post-fire wildflower displays next spring.