IGNITER

I think it’s time to “pull a VISA” and free the Fail Whale.

Back in the early days of credit cards, the banks were facing competitive and processing challenges. A number of them came together create this thing called VISA – an idea to develop and provide common standards and processing infrastructure for their competing cards. Well I think it’s time to do it again for this thing called public micro-messaging. Here’s why.

With 3000% year over year growth, it’s no question that Twitter is here to stay. It’s also increasingly clear that what’s behind the phenomenon is something bigger… as Om Malik observed back on April 14th, 2009:

“Twitter is just the beginning of this real-time internet
- the simplest manifestation of this long term trend -
that spells the end of communications and start of an interaction society.”

What’s going on here is the emergence of a new medium based on the public micro-message (PMM) – the most accessible, interactive public medium in our history.

Sounds pretty nifty, doesn’t it? Well, here’s the catch. Every message posted is a public object that may be called upon at any time. Combined with the rapid increase in number of users, the number of posts per user, and the number of services publishing PMMs, PMM services and application developers face a massive data processing challenge. Already, Twitter struggles to provide a stable application infrastructure and user experience despite prominent venture capital backing and technical investment.

This is just the beginning. Dave Winer puts forward a good case of why there will be many more Twitters – and Dave’s a smart guy, so what happens when we have 10 more services and 100 times the activity? Not only does the data processing challenge grow but we run headfirst into issues of disconnected silos of public micro-messages and limited interoperability. Finally, the total reach of the medium is directly affected by global SMS interoperability which is currently a costly and cumbersome country by country issue.

Unaddressed, these issues will undoubtedly limit the value that can be realized from this medium. And that helps no one. So now what?

It’s time to pull a VISA.

Responding to these challenges requires a universal system, standards, and SMS gateway for public micro-messages – in other words a network-grade infrastructure. The core of this system could operate as a layer below Twitter acting as a scalable, interoperable PMM processing infrastructure connecting PMM services and facilitating real-time access to an aggregated PMM data-set. It could operate as an infrastructure to PMM services upon which they can build robust and scalable services and enable an ecosystem of applications. In my view it would have to: enable a vibrant ecosystem of PMM services and applications, provide unrestricted access to the aggregated PMM data-set, ensure authors have access to and control over their prior messages, be scalable to the global population, and be optimized for public benefit.

This might sound ambitions but I believe it entirely possible. Whether through leveraging some existing technologies like XMPP, Hadoop, and Laconi.ca or attracting some of the worlds top developers from the telecom or financial exchange markets to create a new infrastructure – it is a shared, soluble problem that unlocks enormous opportunity.

So what’s next?

I’ve been making some forays into making this happen and think it’s something that can be tackled by scoping and exploring the 3 components of the solution (system, standards, SMS gateway) and getting the key players in a room together to create the thing they all need to make the most of the medium. Players like Twitter, Laconi.ca, Google, World Wide Web Foundation, and the mobile industry and others have a very real interest in seeing this happen. How could it not be worth giving it a try?

And just think, if we do this, Twitter could finally retire their faithful Fail Whale. I for one would like to set it free. What about you?

Popularized by Twitter, the public micro-messaging medium is leading to a major evolution of the web and society.

Twitter is just the beginning of this real-time internet – the simplest manifestation of this long term trend – that spells the end of communications and start of an interaction society. ~ Om Malik, What Twitter and Broadband Mean to Me.

The public micro-message medium represents the potential for a 4 billion person global message board, where anyone can share their interests, ideas, and actions real-time, and where every message can be seen, referenced, and responded to by anyone directly, person to person. This is nothing short of monumental.

What’s more is that people love it. It’s easy to do, nothing more than typing a short message, and can be done from anywhere via computer or mobile phone. This makes it real.

The result is streams of succinct, interest-driven messages that create relevant, real-time context around every account, topic, and object they reference… which effectively means anything and everything. With that comes an increasing expectation that the web will orient itself around each person, topic, or object based on it’s history and real-time context. Already for me, I  follow fewer blogs, spend less time in any single site, and instead find more of what’s interesting to me coming to me through real-time messages from the people and topical threads I follow. This reorientation is what is changing the web.

To me it’s clear that we are entering into the biggest transformation of the use and form of the web since it’s creation. This is not an incremental improvement but rather a fundamental evolution that requires a whole new set of applications, services and ways of interacting.

Cool.  So now what? For me, there are 2 things.  First, for the real-time web to reach its full potential we need a neutral, platform-independent application infrastructure and public dataset. Second, this will be the fastest evolution we’ve ever encountered and with that comes an unprecedented opportunity to seed a whole new wave game-changing ventures.

A neutral, platform-independent application infrastructure and public dataset.
Anyone who has built something on the Twitter API knows of the challenges and limitations. Processing real-time public micro-messaging data is a big challenge and one that is only going to get harder as more people and more services publish public micro-messages. This challenge could seriously stunt the growth of the real-time web and lead to a fractured future. What it calls for instead is a neutral, platform-independent foundation that hosts and provides the real-time dataset and a robust and reliable application infrastructure to build upon. Such an approach is also more compatible with the essence of the real-time web which is fundamentally a public resource created by people for public consumption. This is what we are working on through SVC.

Seeding a whole new wave of game-changing ventures.
It’s just beginning. Betaworks investments for example shape an early ecosystem of some of the most relevant ventures in this area and Collecta and maybe Ginx are two ventures that I think are getting right to the core of the real-time web. It’s also never been easier to launch a web service and with new application infrastructures it will only get easier. The key challenge, aside from the infrastructure issue, is being first to market  with applications that work with how the real-time web really works. I expect development, capital, and management talent are going to flock to the opportunity. Giving those resources a jump-start with proven prototypes of services that layer community and collaboration into the real-time web is a huge opportunity. This is what we’re working on through Shouldless Inc.

There’s never been a better time to start something and never been a better opportunity to change the game. Exciting times to say the least. Game on!

I’ve been unsubscribing from email subscriptions like crazy lately and have just been prompted to review my online profiles in prep for the launch of http://thread.IO.

I used to want product/org updates to come to me… ones that I had requested. That seems to be changing though. I’m shifting to reliance on curation and synchronicity like never before. That means relying on Twitter, Friendfeed, Tumblr and direct notices from real people who know me to find out what’s going on. It marks my trust that what needs to, will find me. This is big. And I think it’s a reflection of how the social web is fundamentally changing us. I don’t want new destinations I want humanly pre-filtered inputs.

In terms of profiles, I’m also finding myself less drawn to define myself by the companies/projects I’m affiliated. I seem to be trying to express who I am and am more comfortable letting the companies/projects just surface in the content. My sense is that this also relates to the gig economy where we are increasingly people who do stuff rather than people being a part of stuff that happens.

Which leads me to my final ramble… how I use this blog is changing. I will be doing more unfinished thoughts and posts as they happen. I have also been more actively on my tumblog which is more about sharing what I encounter throughout my day (my curated content).  And finally if you want a firehose of my content you can check out my FriendFeed which grabs all the contributions I make in this social web. As I play with these things, and can find the time or help, I’ll be updating this blog to bring it together in a cleaner way.

Feels like this is a transition to a new way of being. Something that’s been coming, but has just become more practical. The transition will be messy but it’s a great time for ideas and experimentation too.

Whether you love it, hate it or otherwise, there is something unique enabled through Twitter. I think there is something interesting and potentially powerful happening and seem to have ranted well enough to get the interest of Dr. Frances Westley, co-author of Getting to Maybe – How the World is Changed, a member of Social Innovation Generation, and the Chair of Social Innovation at University of Waterloo. Frances asked me to articulate my hunches from which we’ll see what might be the most interesting research questions that someone from her team could dig in to.

Though this post, I’m hoping to refine my hunches and maybe provoke some more conversation in the comments.  The more we can feed into researchers like Frances the better.  It’s all part of helping us and others make better use of Twitter, spread the innovation, and realize the benefits.

My Hunches on Twitter Magic

1. The following features are the key enablers:

• Default public on account setup (tweets will be public)
• 140 character limitation
• Tagging (@ and #)
• Permission-less follow (you don’t need permission to ‘follow’ someone)
• SMS compatibility (tweet from your mobile phone)
• ‘Open’ API (anyone can build on top of Twitter)

2. This seems to nuture/result in:

• Unmatched discovery because of the public nature, short snippets, and tagability (@, #, url – and now $, ^, !) that generate high link density. No matter your interests you can find people and threads on twitter that will also lead you to new interests and places.
• Uncontrollable as there is no structure beyond voluntary tagging. Can’t even be sure a person that is following you will see your tweet. This is why ‘marketing’ fails spectacularly in Twitter.
• Humbling and leveling. Anyone can follow anyone and ‘reply’ to them by tagging their handle. Billionaires and others who are most inaccessible may respond to an unknown person on twitter. And just because you are a billionaire, it doesn’t guarantee that people will be interested in what you have to say. On twitter a big part of you is your last 20 tweets.
• Authenticity and rapid trust building. The 140 character limitation seems to promote a brevity and frequency that leads to a higher degree of authenticity. My experience has been that my experience of meeting people in real-life is highly correlated to my experience of them on Twitter. I think it must take too much energy to be something other than who you are on Twitter if you use it with any frequency.
• Collectively iterative. Again because of the brevity and uncontrollability things tend to iterate quickly among multiple people if they gain any momentum. Things only gain momentum when there is collective iteration.
• Speedy and Spontaneous. From the collective iteration and default to public, if something takes hold it can spread uncontrollably aournd the world. It is unknown where it will go and can die as quickly as it started.
• Loving and constructive. There are only so many ways to complain and criticize through 140 characters. What’s more, noone has to respond, and you can’t be sure anyone is even reading. What gets rewarded is intersting information, links, and action. Those are the things that people will invest their own 140 characters in.

3. This isn’t utopia, it just encourages our better parts:

• Human nature will always show through
• But, because of the key enablers it’s more likely to be the better parts of our nature.

I’d love to hear your comments, or get links to any other posts, reserachers that are exploring this topic. And if you are compelled enough to post, please link back here too. The more we can feed into the research engines that are interested in this the more it will help us all.

UPDATE: Btw… there was an interesting Twitter thread on this a week or so ago.

This really began back at the StartupEmpire conference on November 14th, 2008 in the midst of Howard Lindzon’s StockTwits presentation.  Today, VenTwits (^VenTwits) is live as a the first property in a series of initiatives to help things happen and create the world we want.

Developed by Shouldless Inc. (^shldlss), VenTwits is a site for people building things they care about. We believe there is something special about communications that happen in public, 140 characters at a time. It seems to encourage a unique breadth and practicality of engagement such as the #hohoto party in Toronto. #hohoto emerged through Twitter (see SlideShare preso) and within 18 days of the first mention was sold-out to over 600 people, raised $25,000 in cash and 2 tonnes of food for Toronto’s Daily Bread Foodbank. All this without any one leader or cash investment – rather it leveraged parallel leadership from over a dozen people and the contributions of countless more. What if we could leverage what happened there?

Well, VenTwits is the beginning of seeing where this can go. Already in the first day, we’ve had people visiting from around the world to see what’s going on, some of whom quickly adopted the new tags and jumped right in. We are already working on another property that will come at this from a different angle as well. Once launched, we want to see how people use them to help things happen and with a few months under our belts we’re planning on open-sourcing our core code and firing up the Social Venture Commons (^svc).

The Social Venture Commons is being established as a non-profit organization dedicated to coordinating the development and application of this concept for the purposes of social change and public benefit.  If what we believe about this mode of peer-produced organization is true, then we have a lot to give. If we’re wrong, we’ll have learned a lot from trying.

In the past two months, I’ve met some extraordinary people – all through Twitter of course – that have come together to make this happen. As we’re building we’re experimenting with how to peer-produce an organization, how we create and measure value, and how we deliver public benefit.

We’re inspired by the potential of people coming together and contributing to the creation of things they care about. We believe that we are building uniquely helpful ways that help that happen. And we believe, that together, we can use it to create the world we want.

Please jump in and give it a try. And if you have any feedback or want to get in touch – please do.