Category: network

Track: The Future Tense of ‘To Search’

Published June 23, 2008 by cgerrish

Trying to understand what track might become if it emerges again. Every time I start to deepen the question, a new train of thought is unleashed. Track is not a well known gesture on the Network, but its potential value is unlimited.

A glint in a riverbed, images of the goldrush, Das Rheingold and Deadwood rush through my mind’s eye. Certain basic commodities are so rare and valuable that men are moved to desperate action to acquire them. Track is more like water or search, it’s rare now, but will eventually be as common as clicking on a link. It will be a primary mode for hunter-gatherers on the Network trying to find something in this particular moment. And in this moment, the glint remains obscured from vision.

Walking down the street with an economist. I spot a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk. “Hey look,” I say, ” a twenty dollar bill.” My friend the economist snorts, “don’t be ridiculous, if it really was a twenty dollar bill someone would have picked it up by now.”

Karoli Kuns says “I’ll drop a link in Twitter” as part of a live conversation across the Network. I’m listening on time delay via RSS/Sync/iPhone. It’s just a casual gesture, no one questions what she means. Think about the ripple effect of really simple publishing, and the simple findability of the item.

A commercial rolls across the television screen in the background, a bank commercial:

Real-time info matters.
Chase what matters.

Certain elements of the periodic table only appear under very special circumstances, they’re called transuranic elements. They don’t appear naturally, to the extent they exist they’ve been artificially produced in nuclear reactors or particle accelerators. Track only exists in a rarified air, a particular set of environmental conditions had to occur. The basic requirement is the real-time web, where there’s enough volume of traffic to allow track to return valuable results. Twitter is relatively small, but it has established itself as a primary gesture market with enough data structure to allow for some interesting queries to return satisfying results.

Given the general instability of Twitter, one assumes the staff there is concentrating on the basic publish and subscribe capabilities. As they discuss the new architecture, they’ve made mention of messaging rather than a traditional CMS. That suggests that track could be meaningfully supported, but they don’t seem to have an expansive understanding of what they’ve enabled.

The gesture space around track is completely new. While it’s difficult to explain what Twitter is, a solid definition of track is even more elusive. The initial use case is the extension of a directed social graph through keywords to create a listener in the live web’s primary gesture market. This creates opportunities for interactions in real time.

While chat might be the obvious first interaction, there are others that will emerge:

A clarification
Extension of a concept
A negotiation
Relaying a message to a different social graph
An agreement on a transaction

Complex structures can be built from simple gestures. A primary market for gestures combined with track could be the primary mechanism to enable VRM. When connecting customers and vendors in real time, it will be easier to filter a single stream of gestures rather than the whole web. Now some might argue for a special stream just for VRM transactions, but I disagree. When thinking of categories, I tend to agree with that guy who said something like — categories are important, but “everything is miscellaneous.”

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Descartes, Skepticism & the UnNetworked Personal Computer

Published June 15, 2008 by cgerrish

Rene Descartes published his Discourse on the Method in 1637. In order to create a solid foundation for the natural sciences, Descartes employed a radical skepticism. He stripped away every piece of the world around him until he was left with his doubt, his thought and a single existence. This was expressed as: “Dubito, cogito ergo sum, I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am. The thinking, doubting ego was all that was left as a certainty, a monologue echoing through the darkness. When I visualize that moment I think of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, or of much of his later work, Imagination Dead, Imagine, for example.

It wasn’t until I listened to a Philosophy Bites podcast with Barry Smith on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein that I understood the willful solipsism of Descartes’ approach. Wittgenstein’s critique is simple and beautiful, the tools of doubt and thought are social. Language is social, there is no such thing as a private language. If there can be no private language, Descartes simply became a hermit. He believed he cut every tie, but the knife was borrowed from society. Billie Whitelaw demonstrates, in Beckett’s Not I, even as we are alone in the darkness; we frantically reach out to the world.

The first commercial personal computer wasn’t part of a network. There’s a sense in which it was an instantiation of Descartes’ Discourse on the Method. The software product and hardware peripheral ecosystem that developed around it reflected this disconnected state. And while from a technical point of view it was unconnected, from the human side it was always already connected to the Network. The conception that the computer was ever alone, disconnected in the darkness; computing, crunching numbers, writing to a hard disk in its own private Idaho was false at its point of origin. In the beginning, there was sneakernet.

The beginning of this train of thought began not with Descartes, but with Microsoft. The first era of Microsoft was created to supply products to the unNetworked computer. If you examine the products that provide the dominant share of revenue, Windows and Office, they don’t require the Network for purchase or use. Microsoft’s thought is deeply rooted in the image of the solitary computer. Wittgenstein once defined philosophy as the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. Microsoft is in the middle of a titanic struggle with the bewitchment of its intelligence. If there is to be a Ray Ozzie era of Microsoft, it will signal the shift from the solipsistic computer to the Network, the creation of roots and rhizomes spreading into the Network, and the establishment of revenue streams that are fundamentally of the Network. Microsoft’s current set of competitors are already living off the Network, the brain trust at Microsoft has had a large margin for error, but the door is closing.

There’s a wonderful story that Barry Smith tells about a conversation between Elizabeth Anscombe and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Anscombe says to Wittgenstein that she can understand why people thought that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Wittgenstein thinks for a moment, and says “and why is that?” Anscombe continues, “Well it looks that way.” Wittgenstein smiles and says, “And how would it look if the Earth revolved around the Sun?”

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The Searlsian Decade: Visualizing VRM

Published June 8, 2008 by cgerrish

Doc Searls is trying to find the fulcrum and the lever that will shift the basic network patterns, economics and power relations of advertising, marketing and B2C transactions. It’s your typical boil the ocean project. He calls it Project VRM.

VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is the reciprocal of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. It provides customers with tools for engaging with vendors in ways that work for both parties.

As the Network matures and we begin to understand the gestural possibilities at every device and virtual device endpoint of the Network, the tools that Doc seeks begin to materialize.

These proposals offer no quick and easy solution to the problems of peace. But they are essential tools. “Give me a fulcrum,” Archimedes is reported to have said, “and a place to stand—and I will move the world.” The tools I have suggested can be our fulcrum—it is here we take our stand—let us move the world down the road to peace.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963)
President of the United States (1961-1963)
Campaign speech proposing the United States Peace Corps
San Francisco, California, USA
November 2, 1960
(As reported by The New York Times, November 3, 1960, page 32)

I’m remodeling my kitchen, so I’m in the market for a number of products: a sink, a faucet, lighting, appliances, drawer pulls, etc. I’d recently looked at a few of these items on Amazon, so the next time I stopped by, I was shown some similar items based on my previous browsing and click path data. I wondered aloud on Twitter whether or not Amazon could read my blog to add data to their propensity model. Michael Markman responded that they probably had enough data on me as it is. From my perspective, the difference is between a conscious gesture signaling interest and a harvested gesture that feeds a mechanized targeted messaging propensity model.

But the truth is, I’m not really interested in using my blog as a method to signal to vendors. But this thread reveals another piece of the puzzle, the value of a blog, and current authoring tools, is that they make it easy to create RSS feeds. What I’d like to do is construct an RSS feed of the kind of things I’m interested in for my kitchen remodel. Vendors could read that feed and respond with feeds of their own that I could wrap into a consolidated feed where I could rank, tag, filter, sort, and search the RSS items. The user contract with the vendor is: don’t offer me feeds that aren’t relevant to my interest/gesture feed or you will be labeled a spammer.

I’ve been thinking about the synchronization capabilities of Live Mesh, the idea of notebooks and pens, and what Evernote might be good for over the last few months. While I’ve seen some potential in Evernote, it didn’t really click with me as a user until yesterday. I was surfing around the Network looking at various sinks, flooring materials and faucets and needed a way to store my consideration set. The use case for Evernote finally emerged, I was able to select portions of web pages and copy them into a notebook on Evernote through a browser plugin. I can also use my my iPhone to take photographs in the wild and email them to a notebook. And because there’s an iPhone web client, I have access to my notebook where ever I am. Similar to plans for Live Mesh, there are already desktop Evernote clients for Mac, PC, Linux and some Phones. The desktop client extends my ability to manipulate, annotate, tag and search my notebook. The local notebook syncs to the copy in the cloud — and that copy can be made public as an RSS feed.

I have a number of notebooks on Evernote, I can choose to keep them private or make them public. One reason to make a notebook or a portion of a notebook public would be to create half of the VRM relationship envisioned by Doc Searls. The question is, is there a vendor somewhere on the network who would know how to respond to my RSS feed? And does Evernote, or will Live Mesh, give me the tools to work with the feeds vendors offer me?

Michel Foucault in his essay Theatrum philosophicum put forth the notion that one day we may identify the 20th century as Deleuzian. In particular Deleuze’s idea of the rhizome has taken root. There’s a sense in which we are entering the Searlsian decade of the Network. Hugh McCloud noticed and noted it while talking to Steve Gillmor on the telephone. As we begin to understand more and more about the Network we always already occupy, revolutionary gestures like Project VRM will move into the strong currents of the zeitgeist.

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@SteveGillmor : Plan B, and Playing ‘Dealer’ in Real Time

Published June 3, 2008 by cgerrish

There are moments when a crucible unleashes both light and heat. In Michael Hiltzik’s book Dealers of Lightning there’s a description of a weekly meeting run by Bob Taylor at Xerox Parc’s Computer Science Lab in the 1970s. The meeting was just known as “Dealer.” The name was derived from the book about blackjack called “Beat the Dealer,” by an MIT Math professor named Edmund O. Thorpe.

In casino blackjack the dealer plays against everyone at the table. In Taylor’s variant a single researcher would propose an idea or project, then stand alone to defend it from dissection by his peers. …The pitiless judgements dispensed at Dealer derived from the ethos of the engineer, who is taught that an answer can be right or wrong, “one” or “zero,” but not anything in between. It was felt that if you were wrong you were done no favor in being told you were right, or half right, or had made a decent try.

The output of Xerox Parc and Bob Taylor’s meetings was nothing short of personal computing as we know it today. Every element of the graphic user interface, networking, social behavior over electronic communication media, the laptop, the Macintosh, object oriented programing, ethernet — found its origin in that fertile period.

I thought of ‘Dealer’ while listening to the Gillmor Gang talk to FriendFeed co-founders Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit. The Gang was trying to teach Bret and Paul the old lesson that the street has its own uses for things. Feeding friends is one thing, but understanding that you have an opportunity to tap into a strong current of the zeitgeist is another.

You can listen to Dealer Live here:

Gillmor Gang 20080530

To understand the show’s theme of Plan B, you sorta needed to be listening all along. The writing is a sound check of the ongoing jam session, the riffs are well established and the players all have distinctive sounds. It’s a textual interlude in the orchestral maneuvers of the fierce urgency of now. If you have an “A,” it’s the “B” that creates the positive bid-to-cover ratio. The basic idea is that markets create the demand for common technical standards. And there’s an irresistible movement of the Network toward the real time flow of interactions. Real time interactions on the Network have had a limited scope. The “track” function in Twitter has opened a window to a powerful set of new interactions. “Track” works because Twitter is a primary market for gestures, but if @Ev, @Biz and @Jack don’t understand the lightning they’ve unleashed, those of us who’ve had a taste will need to consider Plan B.

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