A Tale of Two Social Networks

I wrote earlier about re-publishing content across different social networks. I've recently concluded that really, there are two different social networks. There's Facebook, and then there's the sum of everything else.

The idea was initial seeded by classmate of mine, who insisted that the audiences are different and must be treated differently. She uses twitter to make protected updates with a handpicked circle of real life friends, much like a private, asynchronous, logged chat room (rather than as the public, asynchronous, logged chat room that it is). Her case is the extreme - her audiences are different because she's made them different.

In my case, the audiences are different because of content. This blog talks mostly about technology and marketing, something most of my real life friends and family aren't all that interested in. They want to see pictures of me out in D.C., not product comparisons on social bookmarking. Likewise, readers here are more interested in those technical discussions, but less interested in my personal musings while exploring the National Mall. They're different groups, and should be treated differently.

So I've disconnected Twitter from Facebook. I'm going to continue to use and update them both, but separately. FriendFeed and Twitter will host streams on technology and marketing, and Facebook will host a stream of more personal interactions. It's like maintaining separate professional and personal email accounts, or not subjecting your friends to work-related technical discussions.

Which we've all been doing for years.

A New Front Page and A More Complete Picture

The analytics software I run on this site has led me to conclude I have three kinds of readers:

1. Those who know me personally, and are interested in what I have to say.
2. Those who I haven't met, but have been referred to me and want to know more.
3. Those who are just interested in a specific post, which they've found through a search engine.
   

I've been frustrated for some time by the blog format of this site, because I felt it didn't do enough for the first two kinds of readers (the third kind don't seem to need any help). By coming here or subscribing here, the first two reader types are just seeing one part of my information stream; the rest of the data is on services they may not be using and hence is lost to them. When I'm thinking about a particular trend or technology, I'm sharing links on it, commenting on others who are talking about it, and tweeting short ideas. Those who read just my related blog post are getting only a fraction of the information I'm trying to share.

So I've changed the front page (http://amiablecoder.com) into a FriendFeed powered stream of information. I'm still going to post entries to my blog, but they'll show up in the stream mixed in with links, comments I make on other sites, and conversations I'm having outside elsewhere. In short, it should be a much more complete picture, with more content and more frequent updates. I've updated the subscription options to allow you to subscribe the whole feed, but I've left the existing blog RSS feed alone. I'm not going to force anyone to change who doesn't want to.

There's still a long way to go before I'm satisfied. Right now I'm most distracted by the fact that only the blog is searchable, and that the only ordering mechanism available is chronological (which I mentioned before isn't ideal). I will keep working on those issues and some of the other ideas I have, but for today I'm quite pleased. I think this is a step in the right direction.

Convergence

For certain technological applications, I adopt earlier than most. I'm willing to work very hard setting up bleeding-edge apps that will allow me to save time, organize information better, or have greater availability to my data. I think that once the setup becomes easier, these will be common or expected services:

• Full over-the-air synchronization of email, contacts and calendaring between my laptop, web services, and my mobile device. For example, if I update a phone number in my local address book, the change is reflected in my webmail contacts and on my mobile device in minutes. (To do it now: Windows Live + MyPhone if you have Windows on everything or Google Apps + MobileMe + Google Sync for Macs)
  
• Full synchronization of all my files between my desktop and my cloud. If my laptop were to die this minute, I wouldn't lose any data, and would only need a web browser to access my files and continue working. (To do it now: Live Mesh, MobileMe or DropBox)
  
• Social and News Network aggregation which allows for organization, reviewing and participation in information sharing across all networks (To do it now: FriendFeed + Google Reader and/or Digg)
  
• IM aggregation into a single client which allows me to be logged into all instant messaging services at once and manage all IM's in a single app. (To do it now: Meebo, Trillian, or Adium)
• Streaming for all TV shows and Movies (no cable bill!) (To do it now: iTunes and/or Netflix)
• Internet Calling (no landline!) (To do it now: Skype)

I know I haven't included all the options, but I hope this post is still useful to readers. If nothing else, it should be entertaining to look back on a few years from now.

An Open Letter To New Twitter Followers

Dear New_Twitter_Follower,

Thank you very much for following my updates on twitter! I'm flattered and inspired by your interest in what I have to say.

Please know that I've read your twitter profile and your last 20 (or 40) twitter updates. If I felt your tweets had a high signal to noise ratio, were relevant to my interests, and your publish rate would not drown out other people in my information stream, I've followed you back. If you have a FriendFeed account, I'm subscribed to you there too; otherwise I've created you as an imaginary friend. (I prefer to do everything through FriendFeed.)

If I have not followed you back on twitter, please don't take my decision personally. I am just trying to keep my own information stream well diversified and down to a manageable flow rate. As such, I just can't follow as many people as I might like to.

I may, in fact, be subscribed to you in other ways. I've also looked up your name on various search engines, followed the link in your twitter profile (if you have one), and tried to find blogs or other publications made by you. I've read them, and if I felt they were informative I've subscribed to them.

Thank you again for following me on twitter, and I hope you find my updates useful!

Sincerely,

Ian Stewart

MBA'ed

I knew it was going to be a good day when my windsor knot came out straight the first time.

The commencement was very nice. It seemed deeply befitting that Professor Pinkowitz, whose open-house mock lecture back in 2007 inspired me to attend Georgetown, hooded me at the ceremony.

Both my parents and my wife's parents drove down to attend, and I'll remember their enthusiasm long after I've forgotten the details of the event. We left the reception a little early and spent a thoughtful afternoon at the National Gallery of Art. A few cab rides later, we enjoyed a great dinner and some fantastic gelato in Georgetown. And then through some surprising good luck in both timing and cash-on-hand, the #31 bus took us all away from campus for the last time.

Lots of symmetry today.

Negative Externality Billing, Inc.

I would like to see a cost benefit analysis on leaf-blowers. In other words, the numbers that satisfy this equation:

([Job Time, Leaf Blower] - [Job Time, Broom]) * Hourly Wage >? ([Cost, Leaf Blower] - [Cost, Broom])

I'm assuming that works out - otherwise economically rational landscaping companies wouldn't use them. Now, what if the costs were fully loaded, and accounted for more than just the initial and operating expenses? Could you somehow include the cost of the noise on the surrounding neighborhood (perhaps as lost productivity), and require payment to those bearing it? Could you do that for all noise generation above some agreed-upon level?

It's an idea that made me smile after I was woken up this morning. Noise is part of the cost of living in a society, and unfortunately quiet can end up a tragedy of the commons. But it doesn't need a vigilante - just an accounting firm with legal precedent and low operating overhead.

Consumers' Marginal Cost of Media

I made a table:

Movie Theatre Tickets ($10 / 2 hours)	$5.00 / hr
Buying a DVD ($20 / 2 hours / 2 viewings)	$5.00 / hr
Buying a Book ($20 / 10 hours)	$2.00 / hr
iTunes Movie Rental ($4 / 2 hours)	$2.00 / hr
Cable TV ($60 per month / 45 hours)	$1.33 / hr
Mobile Data Plan ($60 per month / 60 hours)	$1.00 / hr
Great Game ($60 / 100 hours)	$0.60 / hr
Netflix Streaming ($10 per month / 30 hours)	$0.33 / hr
Anything on the Internet, Hulu ($30 / 100 hours)	$0.30 / hr
PeasantVision (antenna TV, minus the antenna)	$0.00 / hr

There are a lot of assumptions in there, and some simplifications. However, adding in additional detail to one item inevitably requires adding in other details to other items, and things seem to end up in about the same order.

It comes as no surprise to me that I only use the items near the bottom of the list. After all, as an engineer I like to optimize everything, and I've been a cash flow-negative student for two years!

Babel. We Should Not Have Built That.

Yesterday I was showing my wife the changes to this blog. I told her I really liked the ShareThis icon because the combination of image and text explains exactly what is going to happen when I click on the link.

"I don't get it - it looks like a less-than-sign", she said.

*blink*

Then I realized that she doesn't look at tree diagrams very often (if ever). Her perceptions, like everyone else's, are shaped by her experiences. Her life has been different than mine, so what she saw was very different than what I saw.

Two people in the same room, face to face, have an excellent chance of misunderstanding each other. Add to that all things that make communicating over the internet hard - the 90% of non-verbal messaging that isn't transmitted, our propensity to imagine all the sensory cues we're not getting, and our sinister bias towards the slightest misinterpretations. No error correcting system in the world could handle that kind of signal to noise ratio.

I think that's part of why I like marketing. Communicating really is a fascinatingly complex, organic problem. It's not only unsolved, it's unsolvable. And that makes it really interesting.

ShareThis

I've moved to ShareThis, for the following reasons:

1. I've always liked the branding and icon better. I think "Share This" has a much more intuitive appeal than "Add This", and I think the icon is an excellent representation of what's happening. (You may have even noticed that when I had the AddThis button, I called it "Share This".)
2. It lets me customize what services show up, which I really like. (Update: it turns out both services let you do this. See the comments for details.) I believe I've put the most useful and relevant networks for this audience on the first page - please let me know if something is missing!
3. I'm impressed with their marketing team.
4. This weekend I ran several speed tests, and it looks to me like they've resolved all the problems I talked about before. I think it could be as fast / faster than AddThis if I could get the code on a button level, rather than on a page level, but the timing difference is negligible now (and the configuration so much easier).

Dropping Out of Warp

Tonight I submitted my last MBA assignment. Nothing left to do, nothing left to turn in. After sprinting for so long, it's going to take me a little while to adjust to this change of pace.

Because right now, I'm *bored*.

Monday Night Starcraft

These Starcraft II games, with their sportscaster-like commentary (which really does seem to work), are quite fun to watch:

Game 1: Protoss vs. Terran
Game 2: Zerg vs. Terran

Succeed Silently, Fail Loudly

I bought a Blackberry Curve 8310 about a year and a half ago, when I was preparing for a trip out west. I wanted email, web access and GPS turn-by-turn driving navigation in a single device. At the time, the Curve seemed like the best option.

When everything works, it's great. But the way it's handling those times when it fails is unforgivable.

1. Sometimes while using the GPS navigation, I've made a turn off the routed course (mostly on purpose). However, on several occasions the device continued to project my directions along the previous route because it had lost the GPS signal a while ago without notifying me.
2. While on the road, I received an important email and replied to it right away. However, the other party never received my response, despite the fact that my Curve reported success. I was able to check the server logs, and confirm that the Blackberry had failed silently, and never actually sent my email.
3. I recently wanted to add an email account to the phone, so I correctly entered my new email address, password, etc, into the device. It reported "configuration successful!". It's been two days and I have not received a single email on the device yet (despite dozens to the account). It's clearly not working, but it's not reporting the problem.

What frustrates me the most is that in all these cases it's failing silently. Which is exact opposite of what technology should do. It's absolutely to acceptable to succeed silently, but technology should always fail loudly. When something doesn't work, it should 1.) Tell me something happened, and 2.) Tell me what I should do.

The consumer experience result? I don't trust the phone anymore. I've been using a third party email application that clearly verifies emails sent and received, and printing out driving directions again.

And looking for a new phone.

Nothing to See Here

(Sorry, no post today - just trying to get through finals week!)

This Isn't a Blog

It really isn't. I rarely post about things that happened to me personally, and most of my posts are not time sensitive.

Which makes chronological ordering the worst_possible sorting mechanism.

The only real alternative I have right now is labeling, and I haven't been using it. I really don't want to go back and relabel my 300+ posts - a computer should be able to do that for me. A word cloud is a step in the right direction, but falls short in several key dimensions. What I really want is all my social media contributions organized first by topic, and secondly by relevance. And to help frequent readers, perhaps those topics with the most recent contributions could "bubble up" to the top of the list.

I'm going to have to think about this, and do some research on what's out there. If the right solution doesn't exist, I'm tempted to just create it.

We Like Walled Gardens

I've been thinking about the social nature of the web. This summary skips a few steps, but I think it hits the major theme:

1. The first widely adopted version of the internet was walled garden community of people, features and content.
2. Then search engines helped us find whatever we wanted, and we left to discover all the silos of user-created media.
3. Which was OK for a while, but mostly we didn't know all those other people and we built new gardens to live in.
4. But there was some good stuff out there, so we shared it.
5. And figured out ways to view it without leaving our garden.

After all, even if we do have computers, we're still just mammals.