Monthly Archives: January 2004

Social Networking Cartoons

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handshake.gif

Ok I’m biased. I got a good conversation and a free meal out of somebody I hooked up with via Linked In so I’m a believer. I’ve been bribed and my opinion is now obviously suspect.

That said, I think that a lot of people who are railing against these sites are missing the point. I find that ironic since so many of them are actually experts on the pattern I see unfolding here.

The pattern: systems come along that are a cartoon of what an expert knows, in this case an expert at social networking, and they on the one hand drive the experts crazy and on the other hand they empower hordes of amateurs to start playing – like a children’s game – in the field.

We saw this with desk top publishing which enabled an army of church newsletters that were all so hugly that professional graphic designers wept. I remember going to one MacWorld many years ago and describing it as an alien blood bath.

We saw this with drum machines that enabled no end of bogus things. That MacWorld was painful on different sensory channel.

I would argue that the presentation software did this too. There I think the network effect caused a lot of extinction of presentation skills; since these days people demand a power-point and it’s a lousy framework for many variations on good story telling. In the case of powerpoint the standard it set killed.

Some fields, when attacked by these amateur empowering cartoons, have a literature of “ for dummies” books standing by that assures that when the amateurs get curious and go down to the library they can read up on: graphic design, drumming, story telling. I’m a little concerned that the social network field may not have this stuff written down, increasing the chance that the amateurs will have to rediscover it all from scratch.

In the happy versions of this pattern the field is invogorated by the influx of fresh blood. The experts end up happy because suddenly a huge audience appears that cares about what they care about. The ivory tower may not be quite so high anymore; but the hill it stands on becomes a mountain.

So much of the design problems people work on in semantic net design, product design, protcol design sessions is about how finely drawn a cartoon they are going to standardize on. One fear is that the cartoon will be so stark it will cut people and they will bleed. One fear is that if the standard takes, it has powerful network effects (or worse if it’s bundled with something else that does) all more sophisticated models will become second class citizens. Or worse the diversity of models will go extinct.

The current generation of this social networking stuff sure is a cartoon! It’s quite clear that what’s going on in over at friendster is game playing than sophisticated social networking.

species-area relationship

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speciesVsArea.png

I didn’t know this. The number of species in an ecology is strongly corrolated to the size of it’s zone. If N is the number of species and A is the area then log(N) = c + a*log(A). This paper (and source of the illustration) is a good short overview.

What that curve shows is that if you increase the area an ecological zone by a factor of 10 then the number of species in that area will increase by 186% (i.e. 10^0.27 where 0.27 is the slope of that line).

In turn this allows you to estimate how many species your going to drive into extinction when you decide to take land out of some zone and switch in another; say by filling in wet lands and replacing them with suburban housing.

I wonder where that number, 0.27, comes from?

Moving Things Along.

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As an engineer I learned that you move a mass by applying force. I learned from “Don’t shoot a dog” that you move a smart animal by providing reenforcement for good behaviors; that attempting to force a smart animal will only cause resistance at first and then they will leave. I learned from the liturature on motivation that rewards work to get behaviors in the near-term, but that they tend to extinquish the desired behavior in the long-term.

My summary of that: you push inanimate objects and you pull animate objects.

I’ve never quite figured out what the right approach is to a institution. A mixture of both I suspect. For example when you call customer service at Apple you dealing with smart folks; and those you need to pull forward – meanwhile your dealing with a large massive beauracrachy. For that you seem to need to push: argue, be firm, hold the line, make a noise, etc.

I suspect that more your inside the institution the more it becomes fruitless to push and the more it becomes wise to pull: convince, encourage, construct, be creative, hold your tongue, etc.

Plate Techtonics

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Another framework:

  • Geology – Platetechnonics, Erosion, etc.
  • Nature – Evolution, etc.
  • Culture – Languages, etc.
  • Goverments
  • Markets
  • Firms
  • Fads

Somethings change faster than others. Which makes for interesting interface design problems.

The old bay bridge floats on 60 foot pillings in a slurry of mud; which means it would probably collapse in an earthquake. The new version will have 300 foot pilings that reach bedrock. How do people reach the consensus to do a project like this? How deep can a firm’s pillings go?

Go it Alone

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One of the textbook examples of a network effect is the ATM network. The more ATMs in your network the more value your customers will perceive in opening a bank account with your bank. All else being equal customers will pick a bank with a larger network of free ATMs. For very small banks, those with only a hand full of offices, this became a serious competitive problem about a decade ago. To solve the problem these banks formed branded ATM networks. In my region, for example, a large number of very small banks formed a network known as SUM. The SUM network allows me to bank with a small bank but get the advantage of a large free ATM network.

So yesterday I stopped to get money and the ATM machine announced that the bank I was in had withdrawn from the SUM network. My first reaction to the bank

Property Assessment Trick

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Here’s a cute device.

In my town they have just published the latest tax assessments. This, of course, causes people to start complaining about the accuracy of these assessments.

So today I read of a delightful gimick used by the Dutch in the 18th century. They would charge a small tax on ship cargos to pay for the lighthouses. This was based on the purchase price of the cargo. Which, of course, created an incentive to lie. The trick was that the goverment had the option of purchasing the cargo based on it’s declared value.

Presumably many disputes over valuation and taxes could use a limited amount of a similar mechinism to limit the cheating. It works both ways: you could create a control feedback loop where the town assessor can be ‘put to the test’ by volunteers that; if they believe the understand the market better than he does offer to sell their homes to prove it.

There are two things, at least, that make this somewhat unworkable. First the house market is very thin; so that the instantanous prices that things are clearing at isn’t a good estimate of the median price of the entire set of houses. I don’t see a reasonably way to eliminate that problem. Second the town assessor has much more knowledge of the market than the median home owner – knowledge imbalances like that make for poor market solutions. To some extent assuring that the home owners have to volunteer would limit that problem.

The shipping example presumably works reasonably well because the cargo’s owner is reasonably well informed about the value of his goods. That means that the tax collector and the owner have similar valuation skills.

There is the germ of an idea hidden in there somewhere.