Communications

Skype - MySpace integration falls short

In a recent article over at Skype Journal, I lamented the fact that Skype had not built it's subscriber base as rapidly as I'd hoped or as rapidly as QQ in China or even (perhaps) Windows Live Messenger.  Shortly after I wrote those words a friend pointed out the MySpace-Skype announcement from last October.  It sounded like just what I'd been adovocating, i.e., Skype cuts deals so they interoperate with as many communities as possible thus growing the range of people I can connect with.

I immediately went to my (otherwise little used) MySpace account to check it out.  Unfortunately, the integration between MySpace IM and Skype only applies to voice!  You can't chat between the two services.  What good is that?

One of the significant features that Skype introduced was the idea of combining presence, text chat and voice conversation in a single user interface.  That value is lost when the MySpace - Skype integration is restricted to voice calling only.

Asian innovation in mobile social networking

I'm continually amazed at the East-West cultural gap (that's between Asia and the US/EU, not between Boston and Silicon Valley).  It goes both ways, but as an American Internet and mobile enthusiast with Asian connections, I'm usually struck by US ignorance of Asian Internet and mobile services.

Today, China has the worlds largest mobile population and the worlds largest Internet population.  Korea is a leader in high speed broadband, as is Japan.  Japan is also the #2 economy in the world and arguably the world's leading mobile society.  Surely it's worth the time to understand what's happening in their markets!

For a change, over the weekend, I stumbled on an excellent presentation, What Asia can tell us about mobile social networks, from O'Reilly's conference, Graphing Social Patterns East, held in June in Washington DC.  The presenter was Benjamin Joffe who resides in Beijing where, among other things, he's the founder of Mobile Monday Beijing.

Some of his numbers may be a year old, but the impact is clear.  Asian services like QQ (740M registered users), CyWorld (used by 90% of young Koreans) and Mixi (10M mobile users in Japan) typically started before Facebook, have many more features, and are profitable!
Here's Benjamin's features list:

Check out the entire presentation.  Well worth the effort!

Similar motivations for mobile and Internet usage in rural Zambia

Over the years I've uncovered a number of serious studies of the social and economic impact of mobile phone adoption in emerging markets.  In fact, my list of links (embedded in various blog posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) has become a reference for several people, for example here. I've been somewhat less organized regarding the social and economic impact of Internet access, but I've resolved to track such references as well. 

Here's something I stumbled on this weekend -- a study by Paula van Hoorik and Fred Mweetwa of TNO Information and Communication Technology in the Netherlands, entitled "Use of internet in rural areas of Zambia."

What struck me in this study was the parallels between the social and economic benefits they found and those conventionally associated with the adoption of mobile phones.

Based on our study, the most important social benefits are:
• Internet enables people to keep their network and enlarge it by communicating with friends, family and others
• Internet enlarges the world of people in rural areas by giving access to information
• Internet brings knowledge and supports education

The most important economic benefits are:
• Reduction of commute time
• Saving money in a lot of different ways, such as only traveling to pick up something when you know it is actually there instead of having to return multiple times
• Bringing new opportunities and using them, such as learning new farming methods or opening an internet café to make a living.

Most studies of mobile phone adoption in emerging markets, especially amongst the poor, show that social reasons - communicating with friends and family - come first, economic advantages come second.  And among both social and economic advantages, the ability to eliminate journeys, i.e. save time by not having to walk to the next village to ask a question, is extremely important.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.  At root, they are both communications technologies and our use of such technologies is driven by basic human needs that are remarkably similar, for everyone, everywhere. 

The Moral Instinct, cyberjustice and Internet law

There's an excellent article in today's NY Times Magazine, The Moral Instinct, in which Steven Pinker summarizes recent neuroscience research on the human moral sense.  This bears directly on how we think about justice and morality in cyberspace.

He covers the enormous progress (at least since I was in college) in our understanding of where the human moral sense comes from, including what is universal, what is cultural and how we can be easily mislead by "an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish."

Illusions are a favorite tool of perception scientists for exposing the workings of the five senses, and of philosophers for shaking people out of the naïve belief that our minds give us a transparent window onto the world (since if our eyes can be fooled by an illusion, why should we trust them at other times?). Today, a new field is using illusions to unmask a sixth sense, the moral sense. Moral intuitions are being drawn out of people in the lab, on Web sites and in brain scanners, and are being explained with tools from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

While the article doesn't mention the Internet, a better understanding of our moral sense can only help temper our approach to law and culture in the new social relationships facilitated by the Internet.  Depending upon the cultural setting, subjects as diverse as ethnic humor, pornography and religious discussion can be completely acceptable or morally outrageous and yet, except for some language effect, the Internet cuts across cultural boundaries.  Then there are Internet-related tragedies like the death of Megan Meier which provoke discussion and calls for sweeping laws to regulate cyber-behavior.

Undoubtedly, our laws and culture will evolve in response to the Internet age, but hopefully we do this with care, taking advantage of what we can learn from history and from the new science of the moral sense.

Here are a few short quotes from Pinker that struck me:

There are many other issues for which we are too quick to hit the moralization button and look for villains rather than bug fixes.

Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”

If you are at all interested in morality, neuroscience or evolutionary biology, I highly recommend the Pinker article.

Who will unify my communications?

2 email accts/ 7 email aliases/ 4 IM accts/ SMS/ this blog/ Bloglines (238 feeds)/ BlogRovR (480 feeds)/ LinkedIn/ Facebook/ Myspace/ Twitter/ 23 other "social" networks/ 3 PSTN accts/ 2 mobile accts/ Skype/ FWD/ ... 

...accessed via 3 different PCs and 2 different mobile handsets, at least on most days.

These are not just information flows — most have associated directories of friends, business associates and other acquaintances.

One year ago I wrote:

...  I already run four instant messaging clients on my laptop.  A single client would be nice, but it's not that important.  Once we finally learn how availability should work from an existing player like Skype or from an entirely new overlay network (as Skype was a few years ago), then we can worry about consolidation.

Now I'm not so sure. 

Who will aggregate this flood for me, in some convenient and semantically meaningful way?

Where is the tool that lets me organize my diverse connections?

There's an opportunity here for a new class of solutions...

Community goes mobile, when? how?

Some notes from the first after lunch session at Connect 2007 in Madrid yesterday, entitled Community Goes Mobile.  Dave Penny (VP Biz Dev at NMS) moderated, with panelists:

• David Springall, CTO, Yospace
• Stuart O'Brien, Editor, Mobile Entertainment Magazine , Intent Media
• Gerrit-Jan Konijnenberg, CEO, Comsys
• Peter Karney, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, NEC

The first key point is communities don't align with operators.  The lead example in every market is SMS.  Until there was universal connectivity, SMS never took off.  David is particularly vocal that social networks have to span multiple operators to succeed.  This is interesting as Yospace currently runs SeeMeTV for 3 in the UK and Look At Me for O2 in the UK and a similar service for 10 other operators in various countries.

Big discussion of charging models.  If Facebook is free on the Internet, why pay for mobile access.  Conclusion, you'll never get someone to pay per transaction, but you might get someone to pay an Internet access fee, especially a fixed known flat rate fee (like x per day for all day and y max for all month Internet access).

Another interesting point is that mobile operators are doing deals with Internet brands (like Vodafone UK with MySpace) because the Internet brand has more recognition than the mobile brand.

Of course there are no operator representatives on this panel to hold up their end...  :-)

Availability -- more than presence and a nice implementation to boot

I’ve never liked the term presence or the way the function is implemented in instant messaging systems.  I want to indicate my availability — something that, at any given moment, may be different for my wife, my co-workers or my friends in the blogsphere.  And, if I check my PC for messages at 6am, just before walking the dog, that doesn’t mean I’m planning to respond to those messages or accept calls or chats at that moment — my dog is desparate and she’s letting me know it!

Now there’s a new kid on the block, EnThinnai, that’s launched the beta of an information sharing site featuring privacy and control.  They also include a concept of availability that looks very much as I desire.

In addition, they’ve done a peer-to-peer implementation with a choice of query (you only ask when you’re interested in knowing my availability) or subscribe (you want to be notified when I transition to a specific state).  This makes a lot more sense to me than a central server farm monitoring everything I do and continuously broadcasting it to people who only contact me once or twice a year.

Aswath Rao has more info at the EnThinnai blog.

 

VONCamp Unconference in Boston

About 12 hours ago I had a long IM chat with Carl Ford about the Innovator's track at the VON conference.  The Innovator's track is already very interesting, but Carl is going one better and running an unconference based on the ideas of FooCamp and Barcamp.  Carl's is the VONCamp Unconference. 

FooCamp is an invitation only event.  BarCamp is open to anyone.  VONCamp is open to anyone who is attending VON.  Otherwise, the formats are similar.

The first order of the day is to determine the order of the day.  Tom Howe will lead this, but it's a free form way for the attendees to develop the agenda.  As Carl puts it:

The Innovators Forum is a series of sessions that show case companies in our more traditional format.  However dialogue in these sessions is encouraged.  The VONCamp Unconference is harder to describe,  because it gives people a chance to self identify as a speaker.  At the present time there are 12 speaking slots. If you've got something you want to discuss that's outside the formal program, VONCamp Unconference is the place to do it. We also have a SpeedDating session.   

Here are the rules:

1. There are no rules. 
2. Everyone is equal. Everyone is a rockstar.
3. Give back to the conference by participating actively. "Active participation" might mean giving a presentation, helping with a presentation, blogging or podcasting the event, or whatever other creative ways.  While everyone is encouraged to lead a session, there are only twelve slots available.
4. All sessions must obey the Law of 2 Feet - if you're not getting what you want out of the session, you can and should walk out and do something else. Hopefully you will walk the show floor!

Alec Saunders and Tom Howe have already signed up.  If you'll be at Fall VON in Boston, you can sign up on the wiki here.

This should be very interesting!  Thank you Carl. Hope to see you there.

The Human Need to Communicate — real, but independent of Maslow

In my last post, I mentioned an interesting email correspondence with Paula Muller of Net-Scale Technologies.  At one point in that dialog, I associated mobile telephony with the third and fourth levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.  It's a thought I've mentioned in talks (as far back as 1997) and writings, but never investigated critically.  Paula’s response caused me to revisit the subject and realize I’ve been tying legitimate observations about mobile telephony to a discredited theory of psychology.

Here's what I wrote:

Speaking of human priorities, you may have run into Maslow's hierarchy of needs??  I didn't take psychology in college so I only ran into it years later...  Maslow claimed people don't worry about higher needs until they have lower level needs under control.  At the most basic, you need safety and sustenence, then you can think about community or belonging, and then you can think about your identity and self esteem.  Only when all those are under control, can you rise to "self actualization."  I don't know about self actualization, but I understand community and identity.  I equate community and belonging with mobile phone adoption!  :-)  Then once you can call your family and friends, you need to establish your identity (achive self esteem) which you do by acquiring ringtones and ringback tones.  :-)

In reply, Paula points out the appeals of mobile telephony are much broader than just community and identity (Maslow’s belonging and esteem):

With respect to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's quite interesting. I didn't know directly about him, but it's expected that this hierarchy exists.  Interesting from the articles that I found, mobile phones give the perception to their users of affecting more fundamental needs than the 3rd level (family and affection).  People have the perception that they feel safer - second level (safety needs) and even it affects the first level (with improving their work options to get food and transportation to get to work). I think this is a fascinating aspect that I wasn't aware of, but it makes sense.

That got me thinking.  As Paula comments, mobile phone usage cuts across several layers of Maslow’s hierarchy.  And as studies like this, this and this, show, a significant number of extremely poor people list telephony as the last thing they would give up.  Does Maslow’s hierarchy even make sense?

Unfortunately, while there is a lot of theorizing there is little evidence*.  As G. A. Valdosta, puts it:

An interesting phenomenon related to Maslow's work is that in spite of a lack of evidence to support his hierarchy, it enjoys wide acceptance (Wahba & Bridgewell, 1976; Soper, Milford & Rosenthal, 1995).

That may be acceptable in college psych courses, but as an engineer, I'll drop the Maslow analogies from here on out.

-----------------------

*  Wahba, A., & Bridgewell, L. (1976). Maslow reconsidered: A review of research on the     need hierarchy theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 15, 212-240.

 

Community goes mobile

Dave Penny, VP at NMS, is moderating the first session after lunch entitled "Community Goes Mobile" with panelists:
Prakash Iyer, Founder and CEO, envIO networks -- a market centric approach to recommendations and content discovery.  They are still in stealth mode, but already he's said more than shows up on their website.
Nicolas Arauz, Co-founder and Managing Director, Xipto LLC -- some notes earlier today...
Dan Melinger, CEO, Socialight -- location aware social recommendations particularly useful when you want friends comments on where you are right now.
Jouni Welander, Head of New Solutions US, Nokia Siemens Networks -- most people know NSN...

Some comments I found interesting:

Jouni showed a Nokia Siemens forecast that by 2016 there would be 5 billion people connected.  I can't imagine it will take that long...  Of course they are talking about real people, not just subscriptions, but still... Why so long?

Jouni also mentioned a study that says 12 million people used mobile devices to access social networking sites in June 2007.  Half of these were US users accessing either MySpace or Facebook.

Prakash differentiates mobile community by location but also by the different characteristics of the mobile environment.  On the other hand, neither Prakash nor Dan see the need for different services on the Internet and on mobile -- they will just be different interfaces to the same community.  Nicolas focuses on how personal the mobile device is, e.g. spam on a mobile is much more intrusive.

A lot of discussion about location and privacy issues.  All of the panelist seem to assume that location is something that may become available from the service providers.  So far, no one has mentioned Navizon which I wrote about last week.  The real issue is trust and the need to push control of location information to the user.  Edge solutions sound best to me, but everyone seems to assume they'll have to work with operators to get location info.

A long discussion of swarming, i.e. too many people including completely unrelated people showing up for a suburban party, political protests, or related, cyber bullying.  Also discussion of privacy in virtual worlds and in your on-line social persona.  The panelists are worried about privacy, but everyone on the panel is over 30.  My impression (even though I'm over 50) is that today's youth are much more comfortable with living their lives publicly.  Or to put it another way, it used to be if you lived in a small town, everyone knew everything that went on.  Today, it's not just in a small town.

Making money -- social networks must appear to be free as they are on the Internet.  Money comes from driving traffic (on a flat rate plan), perhaps by offering some premium service to a subset of users and, eventually, by advertising and advertising-like activities, for example, content discovery and content recommendations.

In response to a question, Nicolas made the point that your closest contacts on your mobile may churn quite rapidly but can be represented by who you've communicated with in the past 24 hours and/or past week.  To me that suggests that a mobile social network client should capture all your phone calls and SMSs and ask you if they are people to add to your social network (and if so, where and how they are to be added).  And, sure enough, three minutes later Nicolas added the idea that your biggest mobile social network is the people you call and SMS in any given day.

General agreement that mobile social networking won't really take off until it is available across operators.  Exclusive deals won't promote widespread adoption.

Dan suggests that handset standardization should come through browsers, although this will take time to roll out.

****  Minor corrections 12 Oct 2007  *****