My brother always gives the best Christmas gifts.  This year, he gave me Cory Doctorow’s new book, “Makers”, and I’m only pages in but it triggered thoughts I’ve been having with regards to Malthusian shortages vs. utopian surplus, Schumpeterian creative destruction and entrepreneurship, and the almost limitless possibilities to become rich these days.

Shortages & Surpluses

In earlier posts I’ve been thinking about how one of the keys to finding a successful business in the internet and information age is looking for where there’s a huge surplus of data and then figuring out a product or service within that.  For ebay, it was providing a marketplace for all peoples’ crap.  For Google it was monetizing all the links and attention put out on the internet by hundreds of millions of users.  Netflix and Amazon monetized the long tail for movies and books, among other things.

The big businesses of old benefit from creating scarcity, whether it be the RIAA and limiting access and remixing of art through copyright and IP strangulation, or De Beers or oil cartels or water bottlers throttling the supplies of natural resources, or insurance providers excluding access to the least profitable/most needworthy users of the services insurance pays for.

The new businesses of the dotcom era are taking advantage of the surplus of data online and in effect are allowing consumers and hobbyists to have greater access to products.

But it is in the nature of companies to grab a foothold through appealing to the public, then fighting tooth and nail to stave off competition — just look at the Model T, providing cars to the masses but perhaps leading to an industry which produces cars that look remarkably similar to the originals.

So Many Choices

Thus capitalism requires a pretty delicate balance (and it’s heavily contested how to maintain this) but capitalism is also immensely powerful.  One aspect that is wonderful about capitalism is that it boggles your mind how people find ways to sell products.  For instance, I was at REI yesterday and you can find fingerholds for your rock-climbing wall, quite a few different kinds and styles of carabiners, different styles of jogging windbreakers, fingerless gloves or ski gloves, tents collapsible into floppy thin stacks, etc.  And as I’ve looked for different services for my work and for other peoples’ businesses, there’s services for everything:  strategic consulting, HR and accounting outsourcing, entire food service sectors that cater towards the late hours of the Wall Street banking community, mobile pet grooming services being run out of trailer-vans, flexible armies of anonymous workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk ready to do mundane tasks for money, security guards and convenience store people willing to work overnights and holidays, even Street Sense homeless people standing out on the corner selling newspapers.

I’m not saying everything’s happy and perfect.  Being an international development person, I’m aware of the great injustices being done against brothers and sisters, exploitation in the name of “free” markets and globalization and worldwide races to the bottom in labor prices.  But come on, there’s some awesome stuff going on out there.

My point is that you could take any interest in the US and there’s probably a magazine dedicated to it.  There’s probably specialized, highly competitive equipment being sold for it.  There’s most likely a uniform that people of that hobby or specialization wear.  Whole lexicons.  Each interest gives off multiple waves that affect other economic sectors.  This is Michael Porter’s supply chain but for everyone.

That’s one thing that’s so amazing about capitalism when it’s working successfully.  In the US, you can make a living doing just about anything.

So Many More Opportunities Now

Another point I wanted to bring up:  what’s so cool about making a living doing anything these days is that it wasn’t always that way.  There used to be a very small number of ways you could make money.  Off the top of my head:  being of nobility, sucking up to nobility, thievery and being a ganglord, being lucky in birth and life.

Even not too long ago, you would have probably needed to be white, a member of white-collar professions like medicine or law.  And even more recent than that, you probably had to be a cog in a corporate wheel.

But turn on your TV now and there are people making names for themselves doing all sorts of insane shit.  Hell, some people we don’t even know how they became rich and famous (the Kardashians).  It’s become that diffuse and abstract.  For all their faults, the branders whom Naomi Klein refreshingly faults in No Logo like Nike and McDonalds and the Mad Men of Madison Avenue probably do deserve a lot of credit for inspiring new business niches.

But it’s all really fucking cool.  And as the Internet becomes so much more pervasive not only for Americans, but for the billions of people in the world, just imagine how much more wild things people will come up with in order to make money.

Now You Don’t Have to Be Beautiful, Be Good at Math, or Know How to Play the Piano

Finally:  what this all means is that you and I are not cursed at birth and upbringing to be a failure.  If you have an interest and are passionate about it, you can get rich and be famous while at the same time doing what you love.

As Doctorow suggests, you can even make money being an assembler or a curator, someone who puts together many different parts that he didn’t create into something new, something extremely valuable.

You don’t have to listen to your parents and study law when you know you hate law, or practice basketball because it’s the only way to get out of your shitty neighborhood, or join the military to get out of some no-name town that no one ever leaves from.  Your life isn’t over just because you hate calculus and can’t write for shit and have bad skin.

Instead of a handful of professions, there are now unlimited professions, and we all have a chance.  “I got a million ways to get it.” I leave it to Jay-Z to provide the rest:

Happy fucking new year and new decade!

Getting to the Point: Galapag.us

Right now I’m reading Bill Simmons’ epic tome, “The Book of Basketball:  The NBA According to the Sports Guy”, which is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read and which has also renewed my love and interest in basketball.  Simmons has written what is essentially a history and ethnography of professional basketball, which is a considerably easier task than it would be with other sports because pro ball has not been around that long.

At any rate, Simmons has now joined several other writers who have recently written about the volatile relationship between Moneyballization and a statistical revolution in basketball.  There was first Michael Lewis’s Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which was about Bill James, sabermetrics, and the Oakland Athletics bringing on a statistician who sought to buy under-rated, cheap baseball players who had uncanny abilities to avoid outs on offense and get outs on defense.  What this took was an alternative measurement scheme, which valued less the older statistics:  homers, hits, RBIs.  What it valued more was an ability to get an extended pitch count while at bat, to draw walks, to foul off pitches, to have high on-base and slugging percentages, and to throw a lot of strikes consistently.

http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/soxblog/archive/2009/05/06/bill-james-gets-animated.aspx

The site 82games became the source for alternative basketball stats after the statistical revolution of Moneyballization hit.  On it, you can view “clutch” rankings, the best player pairings, etc.  But these do not capture the whole picture.

Michael Lewis recently went on to basketball, to write a formative article about Shane Battier, Houston Rockets forward, which made Battier out to be a thinking man’s forward, studying tape and stats to figure out the best way to limit his opponent’s scoring game.

The FreeDarko blog guys (think Bethlehem Shoals) published a book called The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac:  Styles, Stats, and Stars in Today’s Game, which pushed further, featuring stats, yes, but stating that team ball no matter interested them.  What was fascinating was looking into the heads of the agonizing, troubled superstars of the NBA.  Think Kobe and his Colorado hotel room, or T-Mac and his back (and skeletons in his closet), or Gilbert and his crazy half-court heaves.  This book focused on the personalities and the styles of players.

from http://www.freedarkobook.com/

Bill Simmons’ book seems like a blend of both.  Simmons points out, accurately, that basketball is not a perfectly measurable sport like baseball is.  Baseball is very much individualistic, with controlled standoffs between batter and pitcher.  Basketball, for Simmons, is about The Secret, which is finding players who are willing to give up personal stats in order to play more team ball.  And this chemistry requires that you watch a game in person to see how players react to each other, to see the killer instincts or lack of them.

And yet Simmons says that you can still look at stat lines in basketball and reconstruct a game fairly well:  points scored, free throws attempted, rebounds, assists, blocks, steals.  These can tell you a lot.  Experimental stats like the +/- used now just do not work very well.

So Simmons’ book is genius because it combines statistics with stories.  Yes, Wilt Chamberlain scored over 100 points in a game, but all his teammates hated him and he didn’t set up his teammates to be better players like Bill Russell did:

And yes, certain players put up amazing years, but when it came to the playoffs, they couldn’t pass the ball away faster to a teammate because they didn’t want to be clutch.  They were afraid of failure.

This nexus of stats with stories seems to be unique to basketball as a team game.  You don’t see these sorts of studies in baseball, or football, because those seem to be more individual-oriented.  What I find interesting is how unofficial anthropologists seem so engaged with basketball.  As if the personalities suck in social science hobbyists more in basketball than with other sports.  For instance, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article on a girl’s team led by an outsider Indian dad who always wondered why teams let the other team walk up the whole court without being challenged.  He decided that the only way his less talented girl’s team could win was if they executed a full-court press THE WHOLE GAME.  And it worked fabulously.  While violating the norms of the game.  So other coaches and parents became furious!  These are the sorts of articles you can find about basketball.

From an interview with Simmons on The Onion’s AV Club:

AVC: When you talk about everybody seeming happy on their team… You have these observations that are unquantifiable. Like, for example, the fact that Los Angeles Clippers players hate their coach, Mike Dunleavy, Sr.

BS: That’s why I don’t even really go to other games anymore, other sports. I can watch any football game in HD and probably have a better time than I would at the stadium. The tailgates are obviously more fun, but the actual game experience is more fun on TV at this point. Baseball depends on the seats, and these games are so freaking long now that, I don’t know, I’d rather watch them at home, for the most part. If I lived near Fenway, I’d want to go to games. Basketball’s the one sport that you just pick up so much more when you’re at the games, especially if you have decent seats, or if you’re close to the court. You can watch the guys interact, you can watch them watch the JumboTron during time-outs, and see how they react to the coach. All human-nature stuff. It’s the most human of all the sports. And it’s my favorite part. That’s why I love going. It’s why I freaking pay the Clippers $15,000 every year to watch their latest shitty team.

Bill Simmons

My own experience with basketball has been bittersweet.  I didn’t start playing until after college, since I played tennis (poorly) in high school and baseball as a really young kid (and did okay…).  I’ve got no handles, no moves, and no killer instinct within the paint to finish a layup.

I really could have used some coaching.  Coaching would have taught me more aggressiveness and footwork, which I think are crucial towards making an average player a good player.  What I always felt was my advantage was my defense.  But in pick-up games, defense is not rewarded.  I was willing to run down fast breaks or cut off a slashing player driving to the basket.  And I had the length to disrupt shots or poke a ball away.

I felt like I worked a lot harder than other people on the court.  That doesn’t count much in a pick-up era which is based on ballhogs dribbling at the top of the key and then driving to the basket, ignoring teammates, and drawing a foul.  It’s enormously more frustrating because this me-first, my-stats-mean-everything mentality leads to pick-up games where people argue CONSTANTLY about every call and play and stand around peacocking.

So my love for playing this game has always been inhibited by pick-up stupidity, and I wonder what would happen if I had ever played on a team with a bunch of team players.

One of the issues for Galapag.us that comes up when I talk about it with people is that they refuse to be reduced down to numbers.  The repulsion is so extreme that the discussion gets shut off just at that initial point.

Certainly it is true that people are not just amorphous bundles of stats that can predict their every behavior.  But at the same time, peoples’ habits, rituals, and ticks are remarkably observable and predictable.  We tend to create myths about ourselves which may not necessarily be borne out of stats. And that variability, that defaulting to personality or character or defect, that is what really makes us the most interesting.

So a system that is built to support one’s reputation or identity, as Galapag.us will, should be built to wed the statistical side (quantitative) with the mythical/qualitative side.

This could be the holy grail of identity and reputation memory, human story-telling and myth, and statistical analysis improving social sciences.

Can someone figure out how to make a web site that allows someone to study his own stats to see where he could improve quantitatively, yet also somehow measure the intangibles, such as his character or quirks or funny stories about him or his nickname or heroic feats he’s done that didn’t square up with his numbers?

I mean, how do you design a system that accurately keeps someone like Dick Cheney in historical perspective (as a universally loathed and feared death dealer) despite on paper having superior credentials?

How do you capture Dwyane Wade’s night-in, night-out hustle on the court, scrambling constantly and relentlessly, while evoking support and inspiration from his teammates who love playing with him?  How do you capture a will for teamwork (or lack of it), determination (my only talent), and charisma (as in those guys who can get a girl to grab the phone out of hand and put her number in it, or an MLK Jr.-like leader who can get people to transcend themselves?).

How would Jesus Christ come out in a purely quantitative system?  In a world of monetary worship and diploma envy, would a guy who never accumulated wealth and who ended up being crucified rank well against a Barack Obama?

I envision a system underpinned with statistical analysis and automatically-fed stats coming in from peoples’ self-quantification devices.  But on top of that is a layer of human subjective input:  things like “if ‘the most interesting man in the world’ existed in the real world, this guy would be him” or “I would never want to work with this guy ever again” or “her children looked at her always with such reverence that others became envious”.  Did people like being around this person?  Was this person a stat whore who didn’t care about being a team player?  These are questions Simmons uses for his basketball analysis, and I love it.

Maybe that will be a component…along with your stats, there are questions such as “Was he a total dick?” or “Could you trust this person to take care of your cat?”  “Did he have killer instinct?  A swagger?”  “Was she so funny that people would laugh at anything she would say before she finished telling a joke?”

I want to figure out how this system will work — I really do think it’s the convergence of anthropology, economics, statistics, technology, sociology, politics, banking, everything.  And I think I’m uniquely placed to pull this off.

My boss forwarded me a Nielsen link yesterday that talked about online socializers:

But with the increasing number of resources available, it’s difficult to know what you should believe or take at face value. Socializers – those who spend 10 percent or more of their online time on social media – feel this effect more than others do. When asked, 26 percent feel that there is too much information available on the Internet, compared to 18 percent of people who predominantly use portals and just 5 percent of people who primarily use search engines.

But why does too much information lead one to use social media as a navigation tool? The short answer: Socializers trust what their friends have to say and social media acts as an information filtration tool. This is key because Socializers gravitate towards and believe what is shared with friends and family. If your friend creates or links to the content, then you are more likely to believe it and like it. And this thought plays out in the data.

Increasingly, I’ve been having to filter down what I look at because the net is just catching too much stuff.  My blogroll is pretty massive and it takes some time to get through — I’ve had to remove some of the more spammy blogs like DCist, Engadget, etc.

The Nielsen article differentiates between searchers and socializers (searchers tending to be less active socially online, using search engines to find content).  But what if we could combine searching with social trust?

Various obstacles have blocked an identity layer online, but none moreso than peoples’ demands for privacy.  Privacy is used haphazardly as a way to ensure trust.  That is, we protect ourselves in public by restricting who has access to us to only family and friends.  But this is not “trust” per se — it’s obfuscation.  But internet trends such as collaborative wikis, Netflix ratings, and tagging show that open trust systems can provide much more information than small, closed networks.  They open themselves up to abuse but with just a few people and a few tools to manage that abuse, the systems can be massive gains for public knowledge.

[By the way, as a related aside, for my Yahoo!/ISD fellowship research, I wrote a paper talking about the meaning of "privacy" and what is currently happening online with regards to how the US and the advancing BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) are dealing with openness and closedness.]

What we are heading towards is some brutal endgame with respect to personal data:  Facebook has been developing a pretty complex privacy infrastructure but it is being lambasted both from security people for exposing too much data and from internet geeks who want portable identities and data that they can use across social networks.

Certainly underlying all this is fear of government monitoring.  The Patriot Act under Bush (and probably under Obama too) has disgustingly blurred the lines between lazy domestic surveillance and strict burden of proof for court orders.  Until the government can reassert that it must require a lot of evidence and court approval (perhaps involving a watchdog representative too) to start spying on someone (not just American citizens), the prospect of freeing up personal data online must be tempered.

But imagine if we could sort out all these issues and build up a proper trusted network online for reputation and identities, ensured by a public trust and not by a for-profit company or by the government?  What if we could ensure transparency not only for individuals but also upon governments and companies?  What I feel is missing in the debate about “big federal government” is that companies have become as powerful or in some cases more powerful than governments.  Unions and large public organizations as well.  Transparency and accountability are not popular ideas across the board.

But I look forward to a day when I can do what should be mundane tasks.  I went to a get-together with mainly girls once, and they were playing with jdate, the dating service for Jews.  They were searching only for guys who had Master’s degrees or above.  And they got the results and were disappointed with men who appeared to me to be absolute all-stars:  doctors, good-looking, wealthy, fun guys.  But the girls were practically yawning.

What if I could search across Amazon for only people who’ve read over 200 books?  What if I could look for opinions on Afghanistan only from bloggers who have served a tour there in the Marines?  What if I could find Digg articles from people who have had at least one child and who own a camera I’m looking at?  What if I could filter out my Twitter follow list so I only view tweets from those with at least 100 users and who post at least 3 times a day and who have had over 20 of their tweets voted upwards?

What of serendipity?  Well, the random public lifestream will still be there.  But I want to be able to filter across networks and across siloed databases.

And sure, not everyone will want to share all this information with the world.  They should have the right not to.  But what about those of us who want to opt-in and start using all this data to make our lives better and to be able to use our reputation and others in order to make better decisions?

As we connect more real-time nodes onto the internet, we’re able to do more and more impressive things.  I can hardly wait until the entire world is blanketed in real-time nodes sending data to the internet to be mashed up.

Clive Thompson’s always thought-provoking notes in Wired Magazine this month covered the real-time web, quoting Edo Segal:

Edo Segal, a pioneer in real-time search, thinks the field is going to explode as updates become more automatic, with our devices autoreporting where we are, how we’re feeling, and what we’re doing and seeing. Old-school search will never vanish, but real-time news will create a society where we have an omnipresent sense of the moment. “Google organized our memory,” Segal says. “Real-time search organizes our consciousness.”

One of my favorite Twitter tools so far has been Trendsmap.  It shows the trending topics in different regions of the world.  As of Sunday evening (11PM eastern), you can see what the world (or what little of it is represented on Twitter and Trendsmap so far) cares about.  Click the images for larger versions.

Damn, all we’re using Twitter for is to share our feelings about football?

AMERICA.

I barely ever read fiction.  My general take on that has been that there’s so much interesting out in the world, past and present, that I’m always trying to catch up and learn more just to keep my pulse on things.  While the internet (and heavy computing) has made the present much more accessible and tangible to us, it has also unlocked the past and given us better predictive tools of the future.  But the past and future still remain a blend of fiction and non-fiction, since what is history is often both myth and fact, and what is future is often speculative even if it’s predicted with extrapolated trends.

One comparison I think about is Plato versus Aristotle in the School of Athens painting by Raphael.  Plato points up, to the heavens, while Aristotle points outward, towards the world.

There have been some touchstones in my life that have led me to believe that what my career will end up being.  My suspicion is that I want to make a name for myself studying personalities, biographies, reputation, and identity (both formation and maintenance).

Last year, when I attended the Achievement Summit in Hawai’i, I got to listen to A. Scott Berg speak about his life as a biographer.  He’s written a biography about Charles Lindbergh and is working currently on one for Woodrow Wilson.   I remember being taken by his speech moreso than some others, and I think this quote sums it up well as to why:

“I did tell myself early on: I think it would be interesting, perhaps, to spend a career writing a half-dozen biographies of twentieth-century American cultural figures—each one, as I often use as my metaphor, a different wedge of the great apple pie.”

As a dotcom kid I grew up with extensive biographies swirling around out of Silicon Valley about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (cults of personality if there ever were any), Jeff Bezos, and later Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams and Richard Branson, et al.

The intelligence services worldwide of course keep elaborate leadership databases that try to figure people out based on their backgrounds in order to predict true intentions, biases, and future political/military/economic decisions.

When I was in the Army and when I went to Australia, I wrote some very vivid descriptions of the people I met — I enjoyed studying their ticks and appreciating them for their unique qualities.  Perhaps one of the only writers I’ve seen who admires subtle things about personalities is F. Scott Fitzgerald — if you read his books, he writes about people as if their tendencies are timeless and universally understood by all people.  For instance, from “Tender is the Night”:

“The mother’s face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins; her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way.  However, one’s eyes moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold bath in the evening.”

and

“She did not like these people, especially in her immediate comparison of them with those who had interested her at the other end of the beach.  Her mother’s modest but compact social gift got them out of unwelcome situations swiftly and firmly.  But Rosemary had been a celebrity for only six months, and sometimes the French manners of her early adolescence and the democratic manners of America, these latter superimposed, made a certain confusion and let her in for just such things.”

I guess what I’m going for is that biographies have been tools of only the well-educated, to describe the elite (those worth talking about).

What I hope Galapag.us will be is a way to allow anyone to form biographies about themselves and others.  The way I see the world, not only should one treat another as an equal human being, but he should also see every other person as having a unique, interesting story.  After all, no one goes through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and growing old without having interesting stories about how they dealt with certain crises, new experiencies, their first loves, bad break-ups, etc.  Each person is a story.

I would like to get those stories out.  For everyone on Earth.

And maybe become, in that way, the biggest biographer ever. =)

A couple points interest me lately about the social graph.

One:  while it’s old hat now to talk about, I continue to admire the fact that now we are able to keep past friends, acquaintances, and people we’ve met as touchstones by adding them to Facebook.  Life’s relationships hardly seem as ephemeral — I lost touch with a lot of my childhood friends as I left Texas and they stayed within.  But now with Facebook reaching its tendrils into even the older demographics and smaller countries, people I used to spend time with are now becoming visible to me again.  And I will never lose touch with them again as long as we all retain trust in the Facebook system.

How will that affect the way we age, the way we communicate, the way we organize?  Now that we can keep in touch with people from cradle to grave, how will that affect our ability to deal with all of our friends dying or getting sick as they get older?  How will that affect fund-raising when we now can pull favors from our entire life’s social graphs?  If we’re called out for bad behavior, can we use such an extensive social graph to repair our reputations and defend us as good people?

Second point:  what do we do with the people we actively keep out of our Facebook social graphs?  Facebook has finally added the ability to group people so that certain groups can’t see everything about you (i.e. work people can’t see your photos, if you choose to configure it that way).

John Clippinger calls this a negative identity, based on how the immune system works, only exposing itself as much as needed and allowing in anything once it passes basic verification (blood type, usually).

Certainly, many people do not friend their parents.  This is unfortunate but also a coping mechanism.   It might be fixed by Facebook’s new settings.  But there’s that desire to keep one’s parents out of one’s personal life, for individual identity formation.

But what I’m really getting at is what if you meet someone casually, or know someone a long time, and choose to NOT friend them?  That is becoming, now that Facebook is so ubiquitous, quite noticeable to everyone who knows both parties.  Why didn’t he friend me?  It must be because he really has a problem with me.  Now I get messages saying that they don’t want to friend me because they’re trying to limit exposure — they’ll connect with me on LinkedIn, though.  Considering the effort it takes to divide one’s spheres of life like that, it must be a pretty significant psychological issue for people.

Black markets exist because the formal economy does not either recognize the market for those goods as being legal, or because the formal economy is not doing a good enough job providing access to those goods.

How does the negative identity affect a black market for social capital?  Is there a market for those people who are not included in our social graphs?  Does it go beyond social shunning and become a problem in formation of trust and reputation?  If Galapag.us is trying to offer a complete picture of a person in order to formalize a standard for identity and reputation, how does it address the gaps such as distancing oneself from parents and work colleagues, disavowing knowledge of mistresses and affairs, hiding crimes, etc.?

This underground economy of social capital must be expressed in some way to be valuable for accurate reputation calculations.  But how?

I was reading this blog post about what makes Twitter so interesting:

The key to Twitter is that it is phatic – full of social gestures that are like apes grooming each other. Both Google and Twitter have little boxes for you to type into, but on Google you’re looking for information, and expecting a machine response, whereas on Twitter you’re declaring an emotion and expecting a human response.

I think it would be kind of cool on Galapag.us if, since Galapag.us will be more data collection and analysis than networking and interaction, it could tell people what it THINKS you’re doing.  So you might not even be updating your status like you would on Facebook or Twitter, but Galapag.us, when your profile page is viewed, might tell the viewer that “Ben Turner seems to be analyzing the relative importance of hours worked against productivity and happiness,” sort of like how Track Your Happiness does based on the results of your survey answers.

It is interesting to me to think of something like Twitter (which as a developer is FAR more fun to work with than Facebook is) as ambient awareness, or lifestreaming, or, as the blog post intimates, social grooming.  The same way we take facial expressions, body language, intonation, etc. as cues in real life, Twitter sort of lets us do (but not fully) through its platform.

What if we could really bring this out in more meaningful ways than just letting you foul up a web page with dumb wallpapers and icons like myspace did?

[Final note:  I thought the phrase 'tragedy of the comments' was funny, referring to how useless comments on posts usually are, unless curated/rated.]

I would like to see a well-designed infographic that tries to chart out about how long it takes for certain endeavors to become productive, on average.

The initial datapoint, I think, would be the time it takes for a person from a developed nation to reach the point where he/she is creating something genuinely new for society.  My guess would be that it falls somewhere between 30 and 40 years of age.  Calculating the time it takes to finish school, get some experience working, fail a couple times, and perhaps get more schooling (as more and more people are being forced to do now), that would put someone at least around 30 years of age before he is untethered from educational requirements or the trappings of youthful indulgence or overwhelming financial stress.

At that point, he could be expected to formulate his life’s career then, or to at least begin down that path.  Despite the hand-wringing over athletes who are minors, child prodigies, and college dropout entrepreneurs, it seems to me that overall, the really successful people are well into their 30’s that I’m most interested in.  They’ve served their time and are taking more risks.

Other datapoints I’d like to see would be similar to Gladwell’s 10,000 hours:  # of years for education policies to work, # of months for militaries to respond appropriately to new environments, # of generations to forget a culture’s devastating legacy (like 9/11), # of years before basic science investment turns into scientific renaissance, etc.

One of Geni.com’s (a socially collaborative family tree) most compelling features is that you can add relatives to your family tree without their having to do it themselves.  This was a feature that probably came from necessity:  you’re not going to “friend” your great-great-great grandfather who’s been dead for a while.

But the upshot of this is that a few power users (since social networking always follows power laws) are empowered to build out most of the network.  People who aren’t as active in the network can verify their own details and maybe fill in a few other details that they may know.  This is more of a Wikipedia model, where a small number of people do most of the work, but anyone has the opportunity to add or just use what others have done.

I just started using Nike+ and the Gmail import function is broken.  So even though I have like 800 contacts, I can’t check against them to see if anyone else is using Nike+ that I know.  The result is that I only have 1 friend on it right now, another guy I chat with regularly about exercising.  How am I supposed to be more engaged?  How are we supposed to build a community?

So Galapag.us will let people add anyone else’s profile to the system.  I already planned to beta test the site within my Georgetown network, but I can already envision myself adding basic profiles for all my closest friends and then inviting them to claim it for their own.

People will also, I imagine, add profile pages for celebrities.  Celebrities will be somewhat forced to defend themselves by claiming their profile and either parking it or (preferably) building it out.

Another side effect might be that human rights groups could document small communities in war-torn/oppressed countries.  That is, they could keep censuses on small towns and update their info so the world can see if a lot of people are disappearing because of political violence or dying of disease/malnutrition.

While the costs of storage, bandwidth, and processing time are dropping like a rock, the human population in the world is going to be leveling out, and thus there is a finite number of people.  As population stabilizes, individuals will each become more valuable and more will be invested in each person.  In developed nations, families have fewer children because they are not as likely to lose the children to disease or war or anything else — the time and resources spent having more children is then put into giving them better educations and improved health, among other factors.

So Galapag.us will be right in the sweet spot for providing a way to document more and more of the stabilizing population…and then allowing them to create value for themselves through public reputation.  Doesn’t that sound beautiful?

Having finished grad school, I’m now waiting for my job to begin.  In the meantime, I’ve been vacationing and have been able to hunker down and code a bit for Galapag.us.  I’ve been working on some rudimentary versions of Facebook’s event updaters and news feed, as well as working on the internal mechanics of building formulas and sharing them with others.  So far it’s been going pretty well, given that I’m not much of a coder.

And as I tinker with the overall structure more, I’ve been coming up with lots of lofty ideas for how I want Galapag.us to ultimately look like.

For example, I would love to extend the Galapagos Islands theme and have different islands for the Galapag.users to play on, in some capacity.  There would be a welcoming island where people have to gather enough social capital and contribute back enough such that they can level up and use the full site.  There would be an island for the role-playing game that I intend to build using each person’s unique profile data.  I haven’t thought about how the islands will work exactly, but I want to layer tribes onto that as well.  One problem/benefit is that people have multiple tribes now, not isolated by geography alone.  Can you tie multiple facets of identity to a geographic location in any meaningful way besides having something as hollow as Facebook groups?

This whole way of thinking about islands allows me to build a sort of cultural map of the islands and layer on different aspects of human and social capital.  I’d love to build atmospherics into the islands such that islands have different weather patterns affected by how many people are using a particular part of the site (congestion, increased heat, dynamism) or how prominent the information on that island has become.  I’m not sure how rainy tropical seasons or perfect beach days could be converted from overall site statistics, but it’s a concept I want to explore in order to make the site a breathing entity.

A couple other ideas I had were to view the site as an ecosystem, and employ the Galapag.users to try to maintain the balance of all the different factors on the island, through incentives.  Was there a typhoon in Indonesia?  Perhaps the charity part of the site would offer more incentives when there are calls for Galapag.user action.  Are the long-time users unhappy with new features?  More attention would go there.  There would be hotspots and coldspots on the islands to direct peoples’ attention.  Obviously there would be multiple constituents and lots of issues, but my approach is to use a collaborative method in which users can help maintain the balance.  I’d like to build in Liz Coleman’s liberal arts education program, focusing students on actionable problems and not just fields of interest.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is how to gather more data without people having to manually enter it.  A lot of the problem could be mitigated by taking on companies and organizations to enter in aggregate data.  Why should you have to enter what groceries or fast food meals you bought when those companies can do it quickly and easily not just for you but for everyone? (given a good registration system)  What if the government was sharing information about you to the database for its health services, social security, etc.?  Already I am working on allowing people to enter in info about you so they can help you complete your profile (with you having the final say in approving/declining that info, of course).

There are big issues, such as privacy concerns and getting organizations to share data.  These solutions are sort of pie-in-the-sky but perhaps in the future, our deathgrips on any shred of info we possess will become looser.  Perhaps we’ll be willing to share our info in order to benefit from the data that companies already enjoy about us.  Perhaps it will allow us to engage with companies and organizations better, if we can use universal logins and social data across sites.

Yahoo! has some wonderful documentation on building social capital and incentives into social networks.  I’ve thought about how to properly align incentives for users (in the way of points and achievement bonuses) with Galapag.us’s goals.  One thing I hate about most social networking projects is that they award people who spend 24 hours a day playing or people who just collect other friends or objects without any meaning behind them.  So the goal is not necessarily to reward those who have more time to play, but who can build more meaningful and important connections — true social capital.

I would like to reward notable figures on Galapag.us, like Nobel Prize winners…while at the same time building new metrics and fame for genuine networkers and builders of social capital.  Different people find different ways to be successful and any social networking site/human data platform should represent that.

So I’m thinking big here, which can be frustrating because the whole mentality for start-ups now is to do something really simple.  Everyone pushes you to refine an idea down to an essence — but that goes against the complex, generalist, all-encompassing nature of Galapag.us.  Everyone’s in search of the next Twitter, a simple platform for messaging asymmetrically.  But who’s going to bring all this data together?