The stream

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Google unveiled recently Yet Another Try at social networking in the form of Google Buzz. It is a social network borrowing heavily from Friendfeed, a website build by ex-googlers. If you are not familiar with Friendfeed here is a post that goes through some of its features.

One interesting thing about all this proliferation of social networks and feed aggregators is seeing their evolution over time. Over the past couple of years some of their features became somewhat standard. You could say that this is just because some websites keep stealing ideas from others but it also says which features seam to be useful and which implementations are intuitive to theirs users.

One idea that is central and common to all of these social websites is the concept of the stream. A list of updates from your contacts in the network typically ordered by time that you can interact with either by commenting or more simply by stating that you find that interesting. These actions are in turn propagated to your own contacts and so on.

It is impressive to see how this simple idea became so widespread in so little time. Facebook estimates that it has over 400 million active users. If Facebook was a country it would the 3rd most populous after China and India. We had plenty of ways to interact with friends and colleagues online before these social networks arrived (Email and instant messaging among others) so why did they become so popular ? The first few iterations of the stream reminded me a lot of those mass emails and chain emails from a few years back. It is also somewhat similar to how people were using their status in instant messaging tools to broadcast news about themselves. These two examples show that when given the tools people enjoy telling their contacts what their up to.
Status in instant messaging have no history and broadcasting jokes by email is very impolite as most people use email for work. So broadcasting to your social network in an non-intrusive way fills a need that previous tools could not solve well before.

Its clear that the stream is here to stay but where is it heading to ?

The stream localized
GPS enabled phones let us track our position and share it with the world. I am personally not comfortable with this but plenty of people are using tools like Foursquare and now Google Buzz to share their coordinates. In Foursquare users can play games where they "check-in" to places to unlock tips and badges. For business owners this could be used to give rewards for loyalty to their costumers.
It is easy to imagine how interesting it would be to get tips on what to eat when "checking in" to a restaurant or finding out that your friend is just around the corner in a cafe you like. Still, you don't have to be too paranoid to start thinking about the implications of telling the world where you are. "Please Rob Me" is the name of a website that, as the name implies, was created exactly to raise awareness to these privacy concerns.

Most likely these tools will iterate through changes in their privacy settings. For example, Google Latitude lets you share your location only to a select group of people or applications as well as letting you set the level of detail shared (ex. exact position versus area/city).  Given the many business opportunities around location based advertisement companies will certainly try to make location sharing a standard property of the stream. The advertisement system in the movie Minority Report comes to mind.

Social Searching
After releasing Google Buzz the company also announced that they had acquired the company Aardvark. If you use sites like twitter or many of the other social networks you probably tried to broadcast a question. If you are not sure who exactly knows the answer  there is no harm and casting a wide (and non-intrusive) net to try to find an answer. The term "lazy web" describes this sort of question broadcasting. In twitter there are even simple services organized around these "lazyweb" questions (see Lazytweet as exanple).

Aardvark tries to take this concept a bit further by targeting your questions to people that are more likely to known the answer instead of simply broadcasting to all your network. When you sign up to the service you tell it what subjects you might be able to answer and how often you mind getting some questions. In return you can ask Aardvark any question you want and it will try to route it to an "expert". This sort of social searches are a useful complement to current search engines. Your not supposed to ask questions that are easy to find with Google and it will take longer to get a reply but you can ask more subjective questions and hopefully get very knowledgeable answers.

I have tried asking questions in different social networks and a few times in Aardvark. Predictably the quantity and quality of the replies depends mostly on how specific the question is. Very broad and subjective questions get many useful replies while questions on very specialized topics will probably go unanswered.
The success of such an approach depends on many different factors but it looks like an interesting direction for search.


What do you think ?
In what other ways will we be using the stream ?

Review - You are not a gadget

I just finished reading "You are not a gadget" by Jaron Lanier. The book is very much in the same tone as an article he recently wrote the Edge called "DIGITAL MAOISM:
The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism". Very few other books made me want to say "No!" out loud so many times while reading it. I enjoy reading opinions that run contrary to my own because I think it is important to challenge our ideas. This is why I like reading Rough Type. This book, however, was extremely confusing too me. It reads mostly as a collection of essays and often deviates from the path. I still think it was an interesting book to read because of the importance of the topic.

If you read the essay linked above you will get the general feeling conveyed in the book. As Lanier writes in the end of the first chapter:
"So, in this book, I have spun a long tale of belief in the opposites of computationalism, the noosphere, the Singularity, web 2.0, the long tail, and all the rest. I hope the volume of my contrarianism will foster an alternative mental environment, where the exciting opportunity to start creating a new digital humanism can begin".

I think these sentences summarize well what he set out to do in this book. To counter the rising open culture / web 2.0 movement and create some "alternative mental environment" for the future of the web culture. Some things he talks about I fully subscribe. If you believe that the singularity is near and that we are about to merge with the machines in the next couple of years you are about as bonkers as the rapture people. The wisdom of the crowds can do a great job at annotating images but it will not cure cancer. Also, the rise of the open culture (free content, mash-ups, etc) is hurting content producers and we can't just say that they are the dinosaurs and let them figure it out while we pirate their goods. Journalism is fundamental to democracy and we need to figure a way to make it work.

What I dislike about the book is the overly negative tone. How many people really believe that "wisdom of the crowds" can solve the worlds problems ? How many people have even heard of the term ? I would risk saying that Lanier spends too much time around silicon valley geeks. Sure, there is an open culture on the web but I pay more for content today that I ever did before (The Economist, Nature Reviews Genetics, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon on  Demand, Pandora One, etc). The web 2.0 mash-up craze peaked when the Times nominated "You" as the person of the year (twitter is not content ;). Also, I like youtube clips like anyone else, some of them can be just amazing (ex. Kutiman's mash-ups) but I still want to pay to see Avatar again in glorious 3D IMAX.

One idea that he mentions often is that of the technological lock-in. As media formats might get locked in with use by the majority Lanier argues that concepts and ideas can be equally locked-in. An example he gives is the concept of files on the computers. That we are no longer free to experiment with the way information is stored in a computer system because this has been locked in.

What I guess Laniear was trying to say with this warning about technological lock-ins is that we run the risk of getting trapped in a set of ideas of the web that decrease the value of humanity and the content we produce and give too much value to the cloud of computers that underly the net. Even if I was to agree that current web culture tends to devalue content and humanity I don't think these lock-ins can be that powerful. We see net culture changing everyday before us and we have so far gained much more than we lost.

In summary, I would say that the problems he talks about are important but the book is overly pessimist about our current web culture.

Books: long tails and crowds

I read two interesting books recently that relate to how the internet is changing businesses and society in general.


“The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson ends up suffering from its own success. I was so exposed to the long tail meme before reading the book that there were very few novel ideas left to read. The book describes the business opportunities that come from having a near-unlimited shelf space. While physical stores are forced to focus on the big hits, long tail businesses sell those big hits but also all the other niche products that only a few people will be interested in. There is a big challenge in trying to guide the users to those niche products that they will be interested. Anderson provides examples of recommendation and reputation engines from several companies (ie. Amazon, iTunes, eBay) that by now most of are familiar with. Even for those well exposed to log normal distributions and long tail businesses the book is still worth getting as a resource and for the very interesting historical perspective on the origins of long tail businesses.

“Here Comes Everybody” is an excellent book by Clay Shirky that describes the huge decrease in cost of group formation that we are currently living. Through a series of stories Shirky demonstrates how the internet facilitates group formation and how collective actions that before were impossible are now become the norm. His stories touch on ideas as simple as the photo collections in Flickr to the coordination of regime opposition in Byelorussia. I appreciate the somewhat neutral stance on the phenomena. The book covers cases where online groups almost change to a mob like mentality and others were groups of consumers were able to stand up to corporations to guarantee their rights. The outcome of easy group formation for the future of society is not easy to predict and this is well conveyed in the book.

The subjects and stories from these books are interesting for scientists also because they can influence the way we work. Science is a long tail of knowledge with many niche areas that only a few people in the world care about. The recommendation and reputation engines described could help us navigate the body of knowledge to find those bits that interest us the most. Also, easy group formation might one day shift the way we work so that the innovation and research is not determined by physical location but instead focused on the research problems.

Freebase parallax

Freebase parallax is a new browsing interface for Freebase. It allows the user to drill in and connect sets of objects to other sets of objects within Freebase and draw maps and graphs with the information. This really shows the power of having well structured data available online. Here is a video describing how it works with great examples of data mining:

@World

(caution, fiction ahead)


I wake up in the middle of the night startled by some noise. Pulse racing I try to focus my attention outwards. Something breaking, glass shattering? Is someone out there ? I reach out with my senses but an awkward feeling nags at me, bubbling up to my consciousness. I try hard to focus, it is coming from outside the room , someone is inside my house. I close my eyes but vertigo takes over and weightlessness empowers me. I am in the living room cleaning the floor, picking up a broken glass. The nagging feeling finally assaults me fully. I am moving but I am not in control. Panic rises quickly as I watch helpless the simple and quiet actions of someone else. I stop picking up glass and I feel curious, only it is not exactly me, the feeling is there besides me.
- Hi, who are you ?
The voice catches me by surprise and my fear goes beyond rational control. All I can think of is to escape. to go away from here. For a second time I find myself floating as if searching for a way out. When I open my eyes again I am by the beach and I breath a sigh of relief. The constant sound of the waves calms me down for a few seconds until my eyes start drifting to the side. No, stay there I am in control! I look into the eyes of a total stranger that smiles back at me in recognition. Two voices ask me if I am enjoying the view and I can only scream back in confusion.

I wake up in the middle of the night startled by some noise. I immediately flex my hands in front of my eyes to make sure it was nothing but a nightmare trying hard to calm down. What a dream. I get up and check on the noise coming from the living room realizing that it was just the storm outside. Feeling better I fire up my laptop and grab a glass of water from the kitchen. I open twitter and type away:
- I had the strangest dream !(cursor blinking) Our senses were all connected(enter)
I get up to open the window drinking another sip of water. After a couple of steps I feel a jabbing headache forcing me to stop and bright spots of light blur my vision. I close my eyes in pain and the voices of some unseen crowd thunder in my ears:
- I had the same dream - the all say in unison
The sound of glass shattering on the floor in the last thing I remember before collapsing.

I wake up in the middle of the night startled by some noise (...)

(Twistori was the main motivation for this post)

Previous fiction:
The Fortune Cookie Genome

Why does FriendFeed work ?

I have been using FriendFeed for a while and I have to say that it works surprisingly well. It is hard to define what FriendFeed is so the only real way of understanding it is to try it for a while.

One common way to define FF would be as a life-stream aggregator. Each user defines a set of feeds (blog, Flickr, Twitter, bookmarks, comments, etc) providing all other users with a single view of all the online activities of that user. Anyone can select how much to share (even nothing at all) and subscribe to a number of other users. Each item (photo, blog post, bookmark) can serve then as spark for discussions. The users can mark items as interesting or comment on them and this propagates to all other people that subscribe to you. In addition we can select sources to hide if for some reason there is a particular part of a user's activities you don't enjoy. All of this creates a very personalized view of whoever you elect to interact with online.

I still find it striking that there are so many long threads of discussions around items that we share in FriendFeed, sometimes more than in the original site. A couple of examples:
Google code as a science repository (discussion in FF, blog post)
Into the Wonderful (discussion in FF, slideshare site)
Bursty work (discussion in FF, blog post)

Why does it work so well ? One possible reason could be that a group of early adopter scientists happened to get together around this website creating the required critical mass to start the discussions. Still, most of those commenting were already participating on blogs so that might not be it. There might be something about the interface, maybe it is the ease of adding comments and that these comments can be edited that increases the participation. Ongoing discussions get bumped higher in the view so every new comment brings the item back to your attention. In this way you know who saw the item and who is thinking about it. A bit like talking about a movie you saw or a book you read with a bunch of friends.

Anyone interested in the science aspects of it should check out the Life Scientists room with currently around 85 subscribers. Here is an introduction to some of these people, in particular on what they work on. Connecting to other scientists in this way lets you see what are the articles they find interesting and discuss current scientific news. Even maybe start a couple of side-projects for the fun of it.

What I don't like about BPR3

For those that have not heard about it before BPR3 stands for Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting. From their website:

"Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting strives to identify serious academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research by offering an icon and an aggregation site where others can look to find the best academic blogging on the Net."

It is all great except that it already exists and for a long time before BPR3. You can go to the papers section in Postgenomic and select papers by the date they were published, were blogged about, how many bloggers mentioned the paper or limit this search to a particular journal. I have even used this early this year to suggest that the number of citations increases with the number of blog posts mentioning the paper.

In this case I think that unless they really aim to develop something that is better that what Postgenomic already offers, the added competition will only fragment an already poor market. The value of a tracking site like Postgenomic, Techmeme or what BPR3 is proposing to create increases with user base in a non-linear way. This is what people usually refer to as network effects in social web applications. Increasing number of users make the sites more useful, reinforcing the importance of the social application. I suspect Postgenomic is not closed in any way to discussions. The code is even available here for re-use. So, why can't BPR3 and Postgenomic work this out and have a single tracking database and presentation. Let's say that BPR3 could be a mirror for the Postgenomics papers section (why re-invent the wheel).


I am not in favor of any particular site (sorry Euan :), what I think would be useful would be:
1 ) common standards for everyone (publishers, bloggers, etc) to carry information on published literature (number of times paper was read, ratings, comments, blog posts, e-notebook data, etc) attached to single identifier (DOI sounds fine)
2) one independent tracking site with enough users to gain hub status such that everyone gains from high exposure to the science crowd.

Building an e-Science platform with Miscrosoft tools

(via Frank Gibson's Peanutbutter) Hugo Hiden, the technical director of the North-East Regional e-Science Centre (NEReSC) started a new blog where he will explore how to build an e-Science platform based on Microsoft technology. The initial post explains a little bit why he is doing this:
"The reason for this blog is, primarily, to document my experiences with writing a prototype e-Science research platform using Microsoft tools instead of the more traditional approach of fighting with Open Source. This way is easier, supposedly."
and also, what he aims to build:
"The task I have set myself is to recreate, at a basic level, the software being developed by the CARMEN project (http://www.carmen.org.uk). "

Let's see how it goes. Maybe they'll take suggestions later on :).

Slideshare adds voice

(via TechCrunch) Slideshare, a site to share presentations online has added voice synchronization. We can now provide a link to an mp3 file and Slideshare provides with some tools to sync the audio to the slides, such that each slide is linked to part of the audio track. More information and examples can be found in this FAQ page.

In related news, Bioscreencast has now a group in Facebook.