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?

I’ve been thinking about the actual mechanics underneath a system of limitless personal data inputs.  What relevance do different data fields in your life have with each other?  Take, for instance, the number of hours you’ve spent playing a guitar, and then comparing that against the number of women you’ve dated.  What is the common factor?  Would there ever be any correlation between the two?  Perhaps women like a man who can play a guitar, so therefore you might want to play a guitar in order to get more chicks.  Or perhaps there’s something about the culture of playing a guitar (i.e. being in small groups of friends) that facilitates emotional relationships.

These are interesting (but perhaps statistically untestable) hypotheses that I am more than happy to let Galapag.users play with, experiment upon, and debate with each other about.  While I am interested in providing the tools to let Galapag.users interpret their own data however they want, I also know there must be a ubiquitous economic formula or standardized measure within each of the formulae that Galapag.users will create.

It will include some function of attention and time.  That is, peoples’ attention given towards a certain activity, or towards tracking that activity online (a statistical bias in itself, perhaps), is paramount towards determining what value someone places upon an activity or a subject, but it is not the ONLY measure.  Time perhaps is a more neutral unit of measure.  Despite our very different lives, varying deeply not only from person to person but also from tribe to tribe and country to country , we are all dealt with a hard-coded limit of 24 hours in the day.

A large part of that day is spent sleeping (we cannot track quality of sleep yet, but I’d love to have the ability to), but unlimited permutations of how other activities are mixed into the rest of the day reflect our individual uniqueness and personal interests.  As an example, the average hours of sleep per night in the US seems to be about 6-7 hours, while it is recommended that they get 7-8.  Some people may sleep on average more, around 9-10, while others who have a lot of work to do may get as little as 5-6.  Coders certainly may go on long stints without any sleep at all if they’re in the middle of the coding zone on something they’re engaged in.

But you can extract some fairly accurate time-value pictures of people based on how they compose the activities in their days relative to how long that activity takes.  So therefore if you spend 5 hours a day in the gym and working out, probably because you are an athlete, it goes to say that you exceed the average and value that aspect of your life quite a bit.  It’s also likely that you spend a lot of time also on your eating habits and diet.  But not necessarily.  It could be a symptom of some self-image problem.  Or maybe it’s a short-term program, not indicative of your life-long patterns.  It might be that you spend much of your day doing the wrong thing for you (addiction, bad job, family problems), so in that case your numbers will not represent themselves the same way they would for someone else who doesn’t have those issues.  It might be that the summation of activities you do in a day exceeds 24 hours, because you’re capable of multi-tasking.

Thus this gets complex quickly.  But expecting the amount of time you take versus the average, per day, on certain activities is a rough way to gauge the value you place on those things.  Time, not just over a day, but over years and paying specific attention to how different key events (marriage, divorce, children being born, graduations) affect your patterns would become even more fascinating.

Attention and time belong in a function together.  You might be fully engaged into a hobby, relative to others, but it might be that that doesn’t really eat up a lot of your time.  This would be akin to Malcolm Gladwell’s positing that his 10,000 hours need to be active, fully-focused practice and not just 10,000 hours of hanging out at the tennis court chatting while playing a little bit.

These two data points (attention being harder to quantify) will provide the grounding for the rest of the data within Galapag.us formulae.

I think ultimately that these time-value formulae are akin to productivity calculations, which seem interesting when compared across nations.  Western Europe seems to take a lot of vacation time, while Americans take little at all.  Relatively speaking (compared to, perhaps, GDP/capita), who is more productive?  While we can look at our own personal productivities relative to each other, what will it look like when we compare across nations using the Galapag.us dataset?  Can we tug out interesting observations about the value of time and attention?  Can we employ such data towards strategies for increasing human capital and youth development in developing nations?

Do you have any ideas about how to proceed with these measures of value?

Seems like everywhere I look, enforcing transparency is the theme and is being touted as the possible solution to today’s problems.

Massive financial crisis?  See Daniel Roth’s Wired article for a plan for radical transparency in the financial markets.  See Toby Segaran and Jesper Andersen of freerisk.org talk about transparent asset rating schemes and database schema.  Or read Umair Haque’s call for Finance 2.0.

Political corruption?  See Transparency International or use Global Integrity’s corruption assessments.  Or see what tools the Sunlight Foundation is working on.

Our detachment from food production systems?  Read Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma in which he proposes slaughterhouses transparent to the world instead of the immensely secretive systems in place now.

I love it.  It seems like ages since David Brin wrote his book, “The Transparent Society:  Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?”, which I consider to be one of the most under-rated books out there but which deserves to be cited as often as, say, Hernando de Soto’s “The Mystery of Capital:  Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else”.

Brin proposes a world of total transparency, where we give up much of our “privacy” (to exclude within our homes) in public, in exchange for the ability to watch the watchmen, police, government, other organizations, and each other.

Sunlight, it is often quoted, is the best disinfectant.  I agree.  The hand-wringing over Facebook’s privacy controls is necessary, but in the sense that we need to have control over our own data and reputations, but not necessary in that we are moving towards a world of publicly visible reputations.

Secrecy — that is, darkness, and being able to hide what you do to different people — allows for corruption, duplicity, and deceit.  It breaks down trust.  It leads to massive Ponzi schemes if combined with favorable regulatory environments (one of the genius outcomes of a radical free-market ideology to allow organizations to bilk people out of all their money).  It leads to realpolitik and cutthroat realism.  It discourages education (the less you know, the more I can exploit you) and human rights (you may know, but you can’t do anything about it).

Transparency has basically become what I’ve become infatuated with, along with reputation and identity.  The research model behind my work for the Yahoo!/ISD fellowship looks at privacy and openness and finds what could happen through the intersection of both:  transparency.  My model is below:

I get really excited about this stuff.  This is the way we have to go in so many areas — towards transparency and accountability — if we hope to achieve sustainable progress.  And this goes for us, in our own lives, in our own countries, before we even hope to press other “evil” or “secretive” or “authoritarian” countries to open up to the rest of the world and be more democratic.

So if you have any more examples of transparency projects in other sectors (like in education or in voting machines, et al), or projects I could get involved with in that area, please let me know.

As you know, I’m hoping to build a massive, transparent reputation system where people will be able to affect other peoples’ reputations, which they must defend and can respond to, creating feedback mechanisms…all out in the open.  People I’ve bounced this idea off of for Galapag.us usually respond with disgust that they don’t want to have their privacy violated.  But consider the alternatives.  When you can use a reputation to build capital and prove yourself, and not just be afraid of people knowing things about you, wouldn’t those benefits outweigh the drawbacks?  What about all those people you know who get over, and get away with screwing other people over?  What about them?  How do we hold ourselves accountable?

How can I convince you that Galapag.us will be huge?

Today in our international negotiation class, one of the readings we looked at was Robert Axelrod’s highly influential article, “The Evolution of Cooperation”.

In it, he describes a computer simulation he ran based on the game theory game “prisoner’s dilemma”.  Basically, the game assumes two prisoners, speaking to the police separately.  If both stay mum on the crime they both committed, they get the lightest punishment.  But if both tattle on the other, they both get a fairly bad punishment.  If one tells on the other but the other doesn’t do the same, then the traitor gets a lighter punishment and the other gets a really horrible punishment.  So it would seem to be “safest” to confess on the other party, just to be sure.

Instead of analyzing one iteration of the game, he extended it to run multiple iterations, building on past results, to generate the best outcome for both parties.

What Axelrod concluded was that the best strategy for a party in this game is to reciprocate the other’s move, after opening with a cooperation move.  That is, the first thing you should do is cooperate.  But if the other party defects, then you should reciprocate by defecting too and reciprocate every move henceforth.  But your overall strategy should be to want to cooperate and forget past defections.

Basically, as our professor put it, this strategy is “be nice, retaliatory, and forgiving”.

There are flaws in this game, as my brilliant classmates pointed out:  parties are rarely equal in international negotiations (the US vs. Panama), the first defector ultimately has a slight advantage, and sometimes payoffs for cooperating/defecting are different for each party.

But I am interested in the overall message:  reciprocity.

If I am going to try to build a comprehensive reputation system, then it cannot just be a quantitative measure of your life-long statistics.  It must also incorporate social and qualitative measures, such as what other people think about you.  In other words, your reputation as we tend to think of it now.  It is an amalgamation of all the acts that other people know (and suspect) you’ve done.

If you are going to evaluate someone else’s honesty and trustworthiness, you want to know whether they’ve ever pulled a fast one on someone else.  Even then, would you still conduct commerce with them?

Galapag.us will allow people to post bad things about other people, something that’s fairly neutered online right now (for obvious reasons).  But what mechanism needs to exist in order to counter this is the ability to reciprocate both by the person aggrieved and by the system itself.

Yes, you can post something negative about me.  But the system will see this as a negative attack that should cost you something, and both my friends and myself will have methods to attack you back.  All done in public.  So it’s a transparent system that holds people accountable to their actions.  It allows for reciprocity.

Says Axelrod:

“Once the word gets out that reciprocity works – among nations or among individuals – it becomes the thing to do. If you expect others to reciprocate your defections as well as your cooperations, you will be wise to avoid starting any trouble. Moreover, you will be wise to respond appropriately after someone else defects, showing that you will not be exploited. Thus you too would be wise to use a strategy based upon reciprocity. So would everyone else. In this manner the appreciation of the value of reciprocity becomes self-reinforcing. Once it gets going, it gets stronger and stronger.  This is the essence of the ratchet effect: Once cooperation based upon reciprocity gets established in a population, it cannot be overcome even by a cluster of individuals who try to exploit the others. The establishment of stable cooperation can take a long time if it is based upon blind forces of evolution, or it can happen rather quickly if its operation can be appreciated by intelligent players.”

It will be interesting to see how different personalities approach this functionality.  Will some people defect more often on others?  Will some really come to value being trustworthy?  Will people become hypersensitive about any sort of negative attack like on eBay’s buyer/seller ratings?  How can Galapag.us facilitate an equitable system.

These won’t be easy questions to answer, but my overall goal is to create a reputation management system that rewards cooperation and social capital while at the same time valuing negative feedback, both in the sense of finding it necessary and important, and in the sense that if you say something bad about someone, it should cost you something to take that course of action.

A last point I want to make is about the value Galapag.us holds:  its permanence.  It establishes a long-term view and accountability upon all users.

Axelrod says, “For cooperation to prove stable, the future must have a sufficiently large shadow. This means that the importance of the next encounter between the same two individuals must be great enough to make defection an unprofitable strategy.”

Clay Shirky, who’s been thinking about reputation a lot lately, talks about the “shadow of the future” as well, based on Axelrod’s reciprocity.  You get a sense that the Ayn Randish selfishness and every man for himself attitude is only a short-term game.  Some might call this social Darwinism or survival of the fittest, or Malthusian or gladiatorial (as Wikipedia says in its article on Axelrod’s “The Evolution of Cooperation”).

But the shadow of the future, the mankind and individual memory we have of the past, allows us to play out into the long-term.  And this is where altruism and “mutual aid” come in.  It might serve our purposes better to work together than to play for ourselves (i.e. the prisoner’s dilemma).  We may need to be competitive to advance, but if we destroy each other in a zero-sum game, then we will all die.  The ecosystem we are all a part of thrives when we’re all there, participating.

So Galapag.us was not born of a cutthroat mentality where every person must compete with everyone else.  Galapag.us is that ecosystem, made up of many levels and units and layers of biomass and data, and the more datamass there is, the more information we can learn from it in order to grow more individually.  It is a network of trust and accountability that creates teeming supplies of social capital so that we can conduct better business and social networking and self-awareness.

Mike Neuenschwander wrote a post on how it’s good that social science is coming into the internet security (which feeds off of reputation) discussion, which had been dominated by computer science in the past.  What he says is,

“However, I’d like to add that Axelrod’s work is only a starting point—a portal into the discipline of what I now refer to as “social trust online.” Some of my “Laws of Relation” hark back to Axelrod. But Axelrod’s work on reciprocity isn’t sufficient for developing new pathways to trust on the Internet. In fact, filling in all the other applicable research on trust is the entire purpose of my contributions to this site.”

So with that in humble mind, there’s a lot more to research in order to make Galapag.us the massive all-encompassing trust network for every human and thing on the Earth that I envision it to eventually be.

Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, has been getting a lot of press this week.  He was interviewed on Charlie Rose and also had a column published in the Washington Post. (please check them out to understand the context below)

The start-up/entrepreneur community linked the heck out of Hoffman (like at TechCrunch), so his name kept getting more and more traction.

Although Hoffman is right about making the US hospitable to immigrants (immigrants are shown to very positively impact economic growth), I do not agree with much else of what Hoffman does or says.  Why?

LinkedIn

Listening to Hoffman peddle LinkedIn on Charlie Rose was kind of sad.  Really?  A popular founder posted a question on a forum on LinkedIn and a bunch of people responded?  Wow, you can post recommendations of people on LinkedIn?  That’s amazing!  Only on LinkedIn can you use forums and post things about people!

This probably works pretty well if you’re popular and have a lot of fans willing not only to read you but also to contribute.  But how does this help individuals with little prominence get a job or promote themselves?

Can anyone not affiliated with LinkedIn honestly say it’s helped them professionally at all?  The more people join LinkedIn, the more their job listings become like Monster or other clearing houses for jobs.  i.e. they’re totally useless.  Naturally a lot of bloodsucking headhunting/recruiting companies leech onto LinkedIn and bulk post listings, diluting the value even more.  Now there’s a 6-figure salary professional networking site, TheLadders, which I’m sure looks upon LinkedIn with disdain but is also pretty much useless to most people.

Hoffman dismisses Facebook as a place mostly for photo-sharing.

Uh, what?  That’s a pretty big red flag that he either was making a small off-the-cuff comment, or he has no clue what he’s talking about when it comes to social networking.  Facebook is massive; it’s vibrant, explains who people are, and allows people to be creative.  LinkedIn is stuffy.

It’s unfortunate, too, because LinkedIn could totally become a standardized resume service so that you don’t need to hand someone a resume, they just go to LinkedIn and find you.  Then your resume never goes out of date.  You know, like how the web is supposed to work…

The Future of Social Networking

LinkedIn is an added layer of redundant social graphs on top of something really useful like Facebook.  I’d be more likely to meet people I want to work with and communicate with through Facebook than on the staid LinkedIn.

Hoffman talks about people in the future needed two social networking sites.  One professional, one personal.  I completely disagree.  I think one thing to come out of this Great Disruption and crashing down of old business models is that personal and professional lives will be combined.

It’s unsustainable to live a dual life of your professional self and your personal self.  One should reinforce the other.  People create value when they’re employed in a way that allows them to self-actualize and be creative.  They are useless as drones.  People aren’t comfortable with this yet (privacy concerns) but it’s the only way a future information/service/networking economy is going to work.

Hoffman’s world of two separated social networks is ridiculous.  Most of us play with the people we work with, or at least socialize to some degree.  Our networks overlap quite a bit even though we try to control the degree of convergence to “protect” our reputations.

Identity layer protocols in production right now like OpenID and OAuth and Facebook Connect and Yahoo! Open Strategy and OpenSocial are going to jailbreak our social graph data.  We will be able to use multiple sites simultaneously.  Likely there will be an aggregator through which we use those other sites (Facebook hopes it will be the aggregator), but each site will cater towards specific hobbies and interests (that is, specialization of Facebook into social networking, Yahoo! into social media, Twitter into micro-messaging).  Our daily internet use will look more like a meshy ecosystem of different sites and brands.  Companies will have to fiercely build their brands so that their data doesn’t get absorbed into a ghoulash you see when you open your browser.

Stimulus Plan

So then Hoffman argues passionately in his WaPo column that the stimulus plan should earmark money for giving micro-loans to small businesses.

There’s a canard that the Republicans love to use that the lifeblood of the economy is in small businesses and start-ups.  Now, as someone who wants to start my own company, you’d think that I’d be all in favor of this talk.  But it’s not really true.

Yes, there are far more small businesses than big businesses.  Duh.  You can start and close a business fairly easy in this country (see the World Bank’s Doing Business report).  Obviously the aggregation of human capital into firms is going to consolidate into larger and larger companies, which will be fewer than small businesses.

But those large firms are also usually fairly successful (to have gotten that far), require massive administrative/financing/etc. support and logistics and clustering and supply chains and their own mini ecosystems.  That is why they generate far more actual productive jobs than a small business with a handful of people could.

Small companies far more often than not fail to make money.  They churn quite a bit.  Hoffman of course would like to boast about Google and Amazon and Microsoft (he cites Microsoft in his article) as examples of how small businesses drive the economy.  But these companies are outliers that actually had different, revolutionary ways of doing business.  They don’t represent the majority of small businesses.

In short, most small businesses are trash and will never make it.  They will barely employ anyone.

So Hoffman recommends giving loans to small businesses.  Is this a government function?  To fund businesses?  No.  What Hoffman seems to be advocating is a lot of mini-bailouts for small businesses that can’t monetize or succeed in an open market.  He seems to want to subsidize failing businesses.  How are these people going to pay back their loans if their businesses fail?  Will they blot out their credit records early with a bankruptcy?  Does this funding come along with better bankruptcy/business exit regulation that’s more conducive to entrepreneurial endeavors?

Hoffman says, “The stimulus finances important development of infrastructure, renewable energy and scientific research, which is great for jobs in the short term but doesn’t guarantee the vibrant economic ecosystem required for sustainability.”

What?  How does research and infrastructure only lead to short-term jobs?  Doesn’t he have it backwards?  Research and infrastructure create long-term ecosystems and new sectors for jobs, while micro-loans create short-term jobs?  I’m confused.

To dispute this, let’s take a look at how some companies came about, through small business loans:

FedEx (from “FedEx History”):

“In 1965, Yale University undergraduate Frederick W. Smith wrote a term paper about the passenger route systems used by most airfreight shippers, which he viewed as economically inadequate. Smith wrote of the need for shippers to have a system designed specifically for airfreight that could accommodate time-sensitive shipments such as medicines, computer parts and electronics.

“In August of 1971 following a stint in the military, Smith bought controlling interest in Arkansas Aviation Sales, located in Little Rock, Ark. While operating his new firm, Smith identified the tremendous difficulty in getting packages and other airfreight delivered within one to two days. This dilemma motivated him to do the necessary research for resolving the inefficient distribution system. Thus, the idea for Federal Express was born: a company that revolutionized global business practices and now defines speed and reliability.”

Burger King:

From “Food Metrics”:

“When you think of McDonald’s in San Bernardino and later Des Plaines, Wendy’s in Columbus, Burger King in Miami, and KFC in Corbin, Ky., the one element that combines all these concepts is food. Colonel Harlan Sanders sells the first KFC fran­chise in 1952. Burger King opens its first restaurant in 1954 in Miami. Ray Kroc sees the success that the McDonald brothers are having in their restaurant in California and immediately starts to sell the brothers on the idea of opening other restaurants, first to sell his Multimixers and then to run them himself. He opens his first McDonald’s in Des Plaines, Ill., in 1955. Along the way, Pizza Hut starts up in Wichita in 1958. The common thread? Food—the American equalizer.

“With the development of the interstate highway system through the 1960s and into the 1970s, we’re on the road, and we find a growing number of meals are being eaten away from home. By using franchise and license systems of development, food vendors are able to develop chains of (continued from page 35) restaurants, thus leveraging purchasing power for all of them and using those franchise and license agreements to leverage standards of operation across franchise net works. McDonald’s is a strong proponent of mandatory standards and leads the way for other chains to develop quickly. McDonald’s targets television advertising to children and drives sales by reaching out to the youngest members of the family. All this occurs at a time when mobility and suburb growth are exponentially expanding.”

I think if you read a lot of histories of successful companies, you will not really read a whole lot on how they got financed.  I mean, some have interesting stories like Charles Ferguson’s company, Vermeer, that he eventually sold to Microsoft.  But mostly these companies were about people, and about ideas.

Hoffman mentions MTV and CNN as start-ups…really?  Too bad he didn’t mention Google and Yahoo!, both started out of a very generous Stanford computer science school that put up with the massive resources they ended up using.

Similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s point in Outliers that people do not just happen to be successful, new firms are very often products of large agglomerations of human capital.  Fast food, as Eric Schlosser discusses in Fast Food Nation, came about after WW2 and the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 under Eisenhower, that created a market for food on the go — it is no mystery why all of our greatest fast food chains were created at about the same time in the 50’s-60’s.  FedEx was the product of university research and experience in the military through Fred Smith.  Heck, even Reid Hoffman is a Stanford-born and Berkeley-raised Stanford and Oxford grad, all pillars of human capital agglomeration, a key driver of innovation and growth as Richard Florida describes in his latest book, Who’s Your City?.

Human Capital

Hoffman belittles Obama’s investments into human capital.  Funding university research, private research, improved education systems and schools, technological and logistical infrastructure, these are all keys towards building human capital so that it can continue to innovate.  Green energy research is going to at the same time lower the cost of energy inputs into development and production and consumption, while providing new jobs and new sectors for continued economic growth.  It will also wean us away from having to work long hours to create value, as we transition to a lifestyle where we value living as much or more than working for someone else.

Hoffman’s cute but pithy quote that everyone will be an entrepreneur is quite frankly offensive.  Not everyone has an entrepreneurial spirit.  Certainly most entrepreneurs are not social entrepreneurs, people who seek not just to own a business or make lots of money, but to also (and primarily) to help a lot of people.  Entrepreneurial literature carefully discusses how entrepreneurs are NOT like other people, most of whom just want to earn a comfortable salary and raise a good family.  Far different to take responsibility for your life (as we all should do) than to work on a completely untested, unproven idea (as true social entrepreneurs do).

The money for financing new ideas will always be there.  Forcing investors and financiers to fund bad businesses is just like the Big 3 bailout on a smaller scale.

What we should be doing is investing in people, building their intellectual and creative capacity, while giving them the health and social security to take risks.  Start-ups are most constrained not by lack of funding (except for large capital expenditure ideas like nano or bio research), but by not having the time and living money necessary to dedicate to an idea without having a regular job.

We should invest in training and mentoring people to build their human capital that way, too.  We should encourage people with opportunities to do what they really enjoy to do, to find a way to apply their talents and skills towards something that might be valuable or profitable.  We should invest more into organizations like the National Science Foundation and DARPA and joint partnerships between universities and businesses and government.  We should invest in universities all the way down to K-12, but focus mainly on high school, where most American children fall behind internationally.  We should invest in common areas for knowledge (public centers, co-working, etc.) and internet infrastructure.  We should free companies from having to fund health care for their employees, by universalizing health care.  Why do Republicans support businesses having to pay for health care instead of concentrating on their core businesses and making money?  We should guarantee college for students but also have public schools compete against private schools, as Stanford’s president John Hennessy just told Charlie Rose in a recent interview.

A recent study released by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, entitled “The Atlantic Century:  Benchmarking EU and US Innovation and Competitiveness” (PDF file warning), ranked the US #6 overall out of 40 states/groups of states, and dead last (!) out of all 40 in improvement in innovation and competitiveness in the last decade.  The indicators?  Human capital, innovation capacity, entrepreneurship, information technology infrastructure, economic policy, and economic performance.  Vencap and small business creation, two things Hoffman values, are only small parts of the whole picture.  And even in this downturn, privately funding and ease of starting a business is still something the US does really, really well.  So why is he so focused on that stuff when there are deeper structural problems in our government funding and education systems?  Is it because he’s a financier?  Hmm.

Can we just get rid of this idea of “economic incentives” as the only way to spur growth?  Incentives mean distortions at some level, and what Hoffman wants would be tantamount to nationalizing start-ups and innovation.  The government should invest with human capital, not with money.

Money doesn’t lead to ideas…ideas lead to money…please don’t buy into this crap.  At some point, ol’-money-bags-America will run out of ideas and will have nothing worthwhile to fund.  Then it will cease to have money.  That will happen if we don’t invest in human capital.

I think Obama’s stimulus and budget proposals see the value in this and have provided a lot of money to raise human capital.  I have no idea if the amount of money proposed is enough, but the initiative is there.  I want the US to be competitive and innovative, and therefore I must sharply disagree with what Reid Hoffman had to say.  I hope you feel the same way.

This is going to be a rather meandering post, covering Malcolm Gladwell’s new book “Outliers”, a little human capital theory, international development strategies, and the computer game Civilization IV.

Malcolm Gladwell

I just finished reading “Outliers”.  I found it to be superb; its adoption of cultural legacy as one of the missing inputs for discussion of how people become successful is brilliant.

You can watch Charlie Rose talk to Gladwell about the book on the Charlie Rose site.

Gladwell argues that people are not destined for success, or born with all the talent they need, or have advantage as a pure function of just income.  It is the culture in which those people grow up in that is key.

For example, he starts off by saying that professional hockey players seem to be overwhelmingly born in the first few months of the year.  The reason?  Age cut-offs for youth leagues give these kids an advantage because they’re older and stronger than the kids born later in the year.  As a result, these kids get picked to advance, and receive more training and practice than the other kids.  The other kids are doomed from the beginning.

But even then, not necessarily.  What else could happen is that certain kids find odd circumstances.  Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, for example, logged computer time on local school systems that by chance had terminals, a rarity for the day.  As a result, he had the practice and skill to code at an early age, well before almost everyone else in the world, within the context of the birth of modern computing.

Gladwell also proposes that Asian cultures, based in rice-growing, have a distinct cultural advantage in persistence to attack a problem that wheat-growing Russian or American cultures do not have.  Rice requires a lot of precision, love, and nurturing to grow.  Corn and wheat are fairly easy to grow and don’t take much work (however, read this article in last month’s Wired about the top corn-grower in America).  In school tests, Asian children spend far longer trying to solve math problems than white children.  Gladwell says that this is not because Asians are just “better at math” but because they have been raised and taught not to give up so easily, to diligently solve problems.  He also states this might be rooted in the Chinese numbering system, which is more logical than the English one in the ways it is expressed.

The other crux of Gladwell’s book is that failure is not assured for those not born to privilege.

As an example, Gladwell cites a study that tracks the progress on a standardized test given both at the end of the school year and right after the summer break.  While rich and poor students seem to learn at the same rate during the school year, regardless of socio-economic status, low-income students learn absolutely nothing over the summer while high-income students continue to learn at a healthy clip.

The reason?  Rich kids’ parents keep their minds engaged and challenge them to question authority and to ask a lot of questions.  They might have books around for the kids to read, or send the kids to summer camps.  Poor kids’ parents are more accepting of the environment and defer to authority as if it were not their responsibility as much to push their children.  The children just languish during the entire summer.

Gladwell talks about the life of one guy whose IQ scores rival Robert Oppenheimer’s.  The difference was the first genius came from an environment where he never received breaks, even when he made it to university; the university would not allow him to continue studies and never encouraged his obviously brilliant mind by fostering it.  Oppenheimer on the other hand received the benefits of privilege and was always given opportunities to thrive.

I found another part of Gladwell’s book highly fascinating:  his look at Harvard students.  He concludes that after a certain point, IQ stops mattering.  Someone with an IQ of 120 is not going to be more successful or creative than someone with a 180 IQ.  All that matters is that one becomes smart enough.  Gladwell writes about affirmative-action students at Michigan who had lower entrance scores but who ended up doing just as well as the other students later in life; they were given the opportunity that comes from the degree, along with working with a different class of people, and they turned out as good as everyone else.

Human Capital

I have always been more interested in studying the biographies of people than, say, reading fiction or even reading about historical events.  Gladwell has encapsulated what I’ve found so interesting:  what breaks did these people get to get where they are today, and where would I be if I did or didn’t get similar breaks?

I know in my own life that there have been times when I’ve been given extraordinary opportunities that I didn’t feel like I deserved.  I’ve also had times where I’ve reached out for a mentor, for someone to push me further, and have been let down and disappointed by apathy.  While entrepreneur advocates would have you believe that it takes just sheer will and determination to make it, I think this is only partly true.  It certainly matters who you know, what opportunities you come across, and how lucky you get.  This “luck” is what Gladwell refers back to often, as that intangible that allows certain people to develop a competitive advantage on others through sheer circumstance.

I don’t have a lot of time to play computer games but I do remember contributing to a bulletin board on Prodigy back in the early 90’s that was dedicated to the computer game Civilization.

I was barely in my teens and was talking with programmers and people older than me about this game.  It’s stayed with me up to this day.

So when I was reading about Civilization IV, the latest installment, last semester, I found that they’ve actually created quite a clever approximation of what Gladwell is talking about.  You can call it Michael Porter’s “cluster” or a supportive community (like SanFran for start-ups) or whatever.

In CivIV, you are the ruler of a civilization and you can build cities.  These cities can dedicate their labor in different directions such as food production, mining, or knowledge work.  That knowledge work, if there is enough of it, can birth a “great scientist”, such as Albert Einstein, whose presence gives the city even more knowledge capital — he can build a great scientific work in a city that propels it to the top of the world in science.  The same can all be said about working on entertainment and culture:  Shakespeare could be born in a city and settle there, making it a global cultural powerhouse.

Culture can be an imperial weapon in CivIV as well.  A city’s cultural influence boundaries can be expanded as its culture capital increases.  A foreign civilization’s city that falls within your city’s cultural boundaries may decide it wants to switch over to your civilization.  In this way, capture is bloodless and organic to that new city.  CivIV also allows you to found religions and send out missionaries.  You can build a civilization that is fundamentally founded upon Buddhism, and foreign cities won’t switch to your side solely on that basis, but if they are proximate to your Buddhist cities, they may switch to Buddhism and therefore be more sympathetic to your interests.

A final point:  if you accumulate enough capital, you can trigger a renaissance, which increases the civilizational cultural, scientific, and economic growth per turn for a while.  Gladwell’s stories of personalities and the opportunities they received are like mini-renaissances:  if that person accumulates enough opportunities to keep pushing forward with his interest, then all the sudden he might have the chance to make a key breakthrough!

I think the gaming engine for this is simply brilliant.  Instead of simply a battle to build up military units and economic power in the original games, now the game is a battle of cultural contexts and amassing human capital.

Sometimes it feels as though our policy implementations for education, politics, and international affairs, is all based on a hare-brained view of the world, without the cultural context at all.  Despite the recently deceased Sam Huntington’s seminal work, “The Clash of Civilizations:  Remaking of World Order”, we have just begun to come to terms with a unilateral, western-biased, free-market attack on Iraq, Afghanistan, the banking system, health care sans businesses, low-cost housing, HIV/AIDS strategy in Africa, and so on.

International Development

Malcolm Gladwell uses the well-known cultural context study by Geert Hofstede, which Gaurav, Pav, and I used extensively in our research over on the Yahoo! fellowship blog.  Gladwell does not point out that the study only interviews or surveys IBM employees and not any broad-based country survey.  But still the classifications of context from “uncertainty avoidance” to “power distance index” shaped a lot of debate into how different cultures should perceive and cooperate with each other.

In the international development field, which I’ve been studying for my Master’s, it seems to me that despite some good work to add anthropological perspective to the field, aid and development practitioners still come from a highly top-down oriented perspective.  Only a few rebels like Bill Easterly ask why we spend all this money on projects that have no transparency, accountability for results, and arguable pay-offs.

People like Easterly argue that development must be organic to the culture.  Bottom-up action makes progress sustainable.  In other words, the people have to do it — there can’t be a deus ex machina, which foreign aid agencies and the World Bank/IMF have tried in the last few decades.

Even the most savvy and regionally-trained practitioners are still saddled with a budget and policy daddy that forces them to act in a certain way (the western way) on the ground.  There has been some improvement, particularly from England’s DfID and Scandinavia in terms of how to effectively help developing nations, but it’s a long way from ideal.

Amartya Sen’s book “Development as Freedom” is massively influential right now; it claims that self-actualization and freedom to pursue one’s own path is the perspective to view international development from.  Sen’s point of view is coming to be the newest, hottest point of view, and in my opinion this is a good thing.  Individual capability (Gladwell’s skill-building) or human capital is always impeded by top-down efforts because the top-down approach is directly in conflict with human rights and actualization.  I am reading similar sentiments in my comparative democratization class, its literature showing just how important organic democracy-building and human/institutional/social capital are towards sustainable democracy.

This has been quite a long post, and I apologize, but I do see something truly remarkable converging out of all these different, recent projects.  While it sounds pithy, we may be truly returning the human (and by extention, environmental and natural) element to modern civilization.

I’m currently applying to Stanford’s Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship.  Here were the short answers I gave to their questions section.  The limit was 500 words.

Why would you like to participate in the Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship?

For the last two years, I have been thinking about my web start-up idea, taking it through class assignments from crude business plan and online prototype to elevator pitches.  I must formalize my business background, meet inter-disciplinarians, and form a team.  As junior Yahoo!/Institute for the Study of Diplomacy fellow, I studied international values and their effects on social networking site design and individual privacy.  As a Georgetown international development concentrator, I took classes in small-medium enterprise and social entrepreneurship, seeking to create a social business to help the disadvantaged.

What specific goals do you hope to achieve?

I have breadth from past studies (international affairs, social media, anthropology, capital markets), but desire a business background to be a tough-nosed founder, and to find the right founding team of smart, diverse, entrepreneurial-minded people.  I will refine my pitch and will develop monetization metrics along with contingencies for my start-up’s first few years.  Specifically I am looking forward to the modules in negotiation, management communication, and non-verbal communication to shore up my people skills.

What are your entrepreneurial ambitions? If you are currently pursuing an entrepreneurial venture, please be as specific as you can.

My organization will be split into a personal data control advocacy foundation and a social business for persistent identity system for the web.  I believe  all humans (6 billion customers) as well as “the internet of things” can have verified identity online through which they build credit history, reputation, and personal brand for their various transactions and networking.

Imagine viewing my reputation online through a number score in different areas of my life (business, education, personal), and using it to judge whether you should admit me or not.  Imagine if that score contained all my public life datapoints, and you could contribute your knowledge of me to it, a Wikipedia for my reputation.  Global reputation management systems will be the next big killer app once identity-layer standards such as OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial become popularized, which will be within the next two years.

How will the Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship help you achieve your career goals?

I attended last year’s Academy of Achievement summit in Hawai’i and met one hundred other grad students from all fields (mainly science and health), who all had different, creative views of the world.  Multi-disciplinarian environments are key towards the viability of my company since it will bridge fields to approximate individual identity.  To operationalize my international development studies, I seek to use my start-up as a social business to improve the welfare of those who had no way to protect their reputations or to build social credit.

What leadership skills, entrepreneurial experience and perspectives will you contribute to the Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship?

I served five years US Army enlisted, eventually a sergeant, both in field operations and in headquarters, so I have on-the-ground leadership experience through training new troops and deploying to Iraq, as well as larger strategic experience working with senior officers.  I studied international development as well as telecommunications policy while at Georgetown in Washington, DC, so I can bring in knowledge of how state policies may affect start-up climate.  I researched online privacy in different cultural contexts through my Yahoo!/ISD fellowship, obtained because I was recognized by my program as web-savvy, having coded and maintained databases, using Twitter, multiple blogs, Facebook, and other social networking tools to further my online presence.

I find people highly compelling.

I love biographies.  I love looking at actual facebooks with pages and pages of photos of people with short descriptions of what they do and who they are.  Wired has super glossy, close-up photos of personalities and Esquire does “What I’ve Learned” features overlayed on one staged photo of that person.

I think it’s interesting to find new people and see what their histories are, where they came from, what decisions they made to get them to a certain point.  Some sort of mix of their own view of their development, and outsiders’ views of them.

Few things drive me more nuts than people online who hide their biographical data.  Are they ashamed or embarrassed by what they’ve done?  How can you read someone without context?  There are a lot of bloggers who don’t include a simple About page so you can know who they are and what they do.

Facebook came out of the Harvard facebooks, but it works substantially different now.  There’s no facebook-like page with lots of portraits on them.  Some of that grand appreciation of humans disappears — Facebook seems less about people and more about interfacing with a web platform or with a dissociated computer.

One other limitation I find is that photos often provide little insight into the personalities behind a profile.  Most of this is due to the fact that people get to select which photo to use.  But it would be nice if everyone could have a Wired or Esquire -like portrait that really shows them in full light. (e.g. this Halle Berry cover is hot)

And it would also be nice to see a brief 5-10 second video of that person moving or saying something, to add more context.  Something brief, something well-integrated.

A little while back, I created a Wuntsah template.  It’s intended to be a photo of yourself over regular intervals of time — in my case, once a (or wuntsah) month.  I think it’s a great thing to do over time but it needs to be codified into a successful project and then made easily portable.  Read more about where it came from and how it looks. You can even install it!

I am tinkering with an idea to take my Canon PowerShot (on loan from my mother) and take short videos of my classmates and then put them up somewhere (maybe Flickr).   I just want to experiment with it, and have something to remember them by after we graduate.  Some cool stuff might come out of it.

Maybe Galapag.us will have something like it.  I’ve already decided to try to hire a freelance artist with a stunning, unique style, to draw portraits for paying subscribers.

Over on the Yahoo!/ISD fellowship research blog, I wrote a post about James Grimmelman’s thorough and fascinating research paper on Facebook’s privacy norms.  I thought it’d strongly apply to the research here, since I’m trying to formulate a system that allows people to protect their own identities and data in an open format.

In it, Grimmelman talks about all the different aspects of how we use Facebook’s privacy controls (or rather, how we don’t use them at all) and how Facebook is absorbing an awful lot of data.  How are we to protect ourselves and our data using Facebook’s system?  How can we get people to pursue their own privacy more actively?

Go give my post and Grimmelman’s paper a read.

I recently finished reading “A Crowd of One”, by John Henry Clippinger, who is a senior fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society.  Dr. Clippinger studies open identity and digital institutions, and his book is about the history of identity and where this is leading us in the future.

I’m going to make this book mandatory reading for all Galapag.us employees.  It’s excellent, and basically anticipates an open online reputation system, using the new identity layer applications that are in their early stages right now.

Negative Identity

The most interesting part of “A Crowd of One” to me was his talk of a “negative identity”.  Basically he defines a negative identity as organisms defining their individual identity by excluding outside groups.  This is somewhat different than how organisms usually perceive identity formation, through actively choosing clothing or coloring or whatever, to make themselves different than others.

The whole line of explanation is a bit longer.

Clippinger starts by talking about the Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, who wrote of Darwin:

“Darwin’s alienation of the outside from the inside was an absolutely essential step in the development of modern biology.  Without it, we would still be wallowing in the mire of an obscurantist holism that merges the organic and the inorganic into an unanalyzable whole.  But the conditions that are necessary for progress at one stage in history become bars to further progress at another.  The time has come when further progress to or understanding of nature requires that we reconsider the relationship between the outside and the inside, between organism and environment…. But the claim that the environment of an organism is causally independent of the organism, and that changes in the environment are autonomous and independent of the changes in the species itself, is clearly wrong.  It is bad biology, and every ecologist and evolutionary biologist knows that it is bad biology.  The metaphor of adaptation, while once an important heuristic for building evolutionary theory, is now an impediment to a real understanding of the evolutionary process and needs to be replaced by another.  Although all metaphors are dangerous, the actual process of evolution seems best captured by the process of construction.” (page 152 in Clippinger’s book, from Lewontin’s “The Triple Helix”)

Clippinger says that “every organism must have a rudimentary way of recognizing what is friend, foe, or food, and act on these differences.”  A good example is the human immune system.  It doesn’t know what actually does belong in your system, so doctors and scientists have come up with ways to trick the human body into accepting foreign organs and blood from donors, as long as they pass basic identity tests.

But when the body identifies something as “foreign”, it attacks it relentlessly.  Diabetes and multiple sclerosis are a result of autoimmune defenses destroying the body.  The great influenza attack early in the 20th century succeeded in killing the healthiest, not the weakest, of our population because the healthiest peoples’ bodies would promote such a response from their body to kill the pathogen that the body would die of exhaustion and drowning in fluids.

Clippinger goes on to say that perhaps social identity works the same way as biological identity.  Groups that are ethnically similar and/or geographically close try to find elaborate ways to distinguish themselves from each other.  Crips wear blue, Bloods wear red.  Arabs and Jews, Tutsis and Hutus, Turks and Armenians.  By all appearances (or maybe not), they should get along, but instead they fight even more violently than anyone else to find ways to look different.

Identity Tests

Clippinger talks throughout his book of two identity tests in society:  merit-based and status-based. So certain people succeed because of their birth and upbringing bestowing upon them a certain lineage, family history, and reputation.  Other people succeed because they have the best skills for the job.

Galapag.us I think is easier to explain in the latter sense:  you enter in data about where you went to school, what you ate for your meals today, more of the quantitative stuff.  This is somewhat verifiable and less tenuous; the tools for it are being built and are collectively called microstatistics or even microblogging or microsharing.

But I think the more interesting aspect of Galapag.us will be the status-based side.  What will your friends say about you in public and then anonymously?  Will people build strong and weak ties on Galapag.us to vouch for a person or to give them a recommendation?  Will people enter in and verify other peoples’ data, like a CDDB for people?

These systems can be gamed individually, through identity theft.  Clippinger talks about a guy who managed to convince a lot of people that he was worthy of managing their money.  He had all the appearances of being trust-worthy (good family, well-esteemed friends), but he did not have the requisite skills, and was later exposed.  Hackers can steal your identity, your quantitative details, and run off with a lot of goods before you can call up your credit card company and they analyze your “status” to see if you normally make those purchases.

So if you combine the two different tests for a feedback system that accepts conversations and debates between an individual, the groups he’s in, and outsiders, I think you’d get an extremely awesome identity system.  That’s my hope anyway.

So Clippinger’s idea that part of future identity systems will be allowing for people by expressing their identity by claiming who they’re not, instead of just who they are, is brilliant.  And related to that, is this person not my friend, but actually someone I hate?

Don’t Regulate Behavior, Just Protect Its Versatility

His final insight is that by identifying ourselves by who we’re not rather than specifically who we are, it leaves our identities somewhat amorphous, flexible, and free to create and adapt.  That is, if you’re only given a few rules on what to do and what not to do, then everything else is therefore permissable.

This is quite compatible with trends towards forward-thinking approaches to governmental regulation.  We want there to be basic protections of our freedoms, but not lengthy lists of what’s allowed and what’s not allowed.  We want there to be copyright, but according to Lawrence Lessig in “Remix”, we want to be able to opt in to copyright protection (i.e. every work is shareable upon creation unless copyright is specifically claimed), rather than how it is right now where everything is opt out (therefore anyone can claim a copyright after the fact, which is restrictive to creativity and innovation).

Anyway, fascinating stuff.  I think Galapag.us will be huge.  And Clippinger’s “A Crowd of One” makes me even more confident in that.

Webster’s New World selected “overshare” as its word of the year.

I guess people are getting nervous about sharing so much data online this year.  Just like they were in 1996, and 2000, and 2003…

I think the real story, however, is that 2008 was the year when everything has flipped:  now undersharing is the new problem!

In 2008, microstatistics and microblogging and lifestreaming and portable data became ubiquitous among the web community.  Sure, many of your friends are not yet on Facebook.  But of those who are, do you get annoyed that they don’t have MORE of themselves there?  Does it make you wonder why someone doesn’t have a Twitter account yet?  Why aren’t they using RSS and sharing feeds?

This point is early still, but this is how it starts.  The web ecosystem should burst with life in the next few years as smaller and smaller details are uploaded, but with more frequency, so that the web begins to visibly breathe as we use it.

I found myself annoyed while doing my Christmas shopping.  Since I don’t want to ask family and friends what things they’re interested in (since I should know, for one, and also because that would give away the surprise of a gift), I look on their Facebook accounts for hints.  But I find that most people still either don’t take entering in their personal data seriously (joke/humor/false data) or they don’t put enough.  I know for sure that this doesn’t mean they’re boring people, since I know them.

But I get pissed that they haven’t added more!  Aren’t we past this already?  Get with it!  You’re undersharing!

Zuckerberg was right about his law for the half-life of privacy data.  But people will fight and fight and fight…  “Why use e-mail?  No one ever writes to me.”  “I read books and newspapers, the web is just more stuff to have to keep up with.”

You’d think by now people would learn to stay ahead of the curve a bit and just embrace the new stuff.  Heck, it might even give them a leg up on their competition.

People don’t think that way, by and large.

You think it’s ironic that Webster’s is thinking about oversharing?  Don’t you imagine that the Wikipedia userbase complains about undersharing holding back the breadth of knowledge that Wikipedia could potentially hold?

Yeah.  Think about that one for a second.

Itemizing the World

So we can assume with the advent of IPv6, RFID chips, and smaller, leaner, smarter appliances and devices, that the internet of things is coming.  Your fridge will talk to the grocery store with your list of favorites (“please always keep the milk, eggs, and cereal stocked”).  WalMart will not just track pallets of inventory using RFID, but all their items will have chips.  When you buy something, you’ll put an RFID or GPS locator on it with your return information, like tags on your animals.

That much has been talked about for while and is the holy grail for bringing the living, breathing, sensing world of the virtual and the real together.

Applications for a Synthesized Digital-Analog Future

But what are the implications for future applications?  We will need new tools to track and visualize all these new “individuals” in a coherent way.

Will there be something interesting about finding out if one object is in proximity to another?  For instance, will a toolkit come with centralized tool tracking so your wrenches don’t get lost and separated?  If we package something up and make a shipping label for it online, can we link it with someone generous or with a shipping service that’s nearby and can take the package for you to a location?  Will we have something like Trinity phoning Tank for the location to the nearest hardline exit from The Matrix?  Certainly some of the most popular applications for the iPhone 3G involve geolocations for your position relative to locations you’d like to go to.

When you’re looking for that sweater you packed away for the summer months in boxes in the basement, will you go to your Google search box on your cell phone first instead of rummaging around for an hour?  Will you type in “grey sweater”, bringing up a search result and proximity tracker so you can zero in on where it is downstairs?

Will we be able to make our devices “public” so we can see visualizations of density and concentration of, say, the use of iPods playing Coldplay in Manhattan right now versus three months ago?  Will we be able to make our devices “read/writeable” so other people can use the web to manipulate our devices?

Overcoming Contradictions

I just finished a two-person project to research innovation processes, and one of the processes we came across was called TRIZ (Teoriya Resheniya Izobretatelskikh Zadatch, meaning “the theory of solving inventor’s problems” or “the theory of inventor’s problem solving”, according to Wikipedia), a process developed by a Soviet engineer Genrich Altschuller.

“Altshuller believed that inventive problems stem from contradictions (one of the basic TRIZ concepts) between two or more elements, such as, “If we want more acceleration, we need a larger engine; but that will increase the cost of the car,” that is, more of something desirable also brings more of something less desirable, or less of something else also desirable.

“These are called Technical Contradictions by Altshuller. He also defined so-called physical or inherent contradictions: More of one thing and less of another may be needed. For instance, a higher temperature may be needed to melt a compound more rapidly, but a lower temperature may be needed to achieve a homogeneous mixture.

“An inventive situation might involve several such contradictions. The inventor typically trades one contradictory parameter for another; no special inventiveness is needed for that. Rather, the inventor would develop some creative approach for resolving the contradiction, such as inventing an engine that produces more acceleration without increasing the cost of the engine.”

TRIZ sought to identify contradictions that served as barriers to solving a problem, and then figuring out a way to solve the contradictions themselves.

The Barrier Between the Virtual and the Real

What we will have to deal with is unprecedented in human history except within fantasy, science fiction, and imagination.  We will have to learn that the internet of things will solve the contradiction that exists between the virtual world and the real world.

We have always assumed there to be a barrier between what we imagine and what we do online, and what actually happens in the real world.

We will have to map all of our software tools developed on PCs and on the web into applications that can manipulate the real world.  It will not be easy for us to conceptualize but those who succeed will make a lot of money doing it.

In some ways it amounts to what was known in the past as magic or just sleight of hand.  We have to imagine that what we create through software will work on new hardware:  the world and objects within it.

Yahoo!, Facebook, and Amazon are working on the next revenue streams and business models. Only a small percentage of people and investors actually understand this.

Yahoo! is understood to be a site that uses its webmail, search engine, news, and gossip photos to attract eyeballs for banners and advertisements.

Facebook is understood to be a social networking site without a business model. It needs to monetize, and all it seems to do is be a time sink that lets you chat with friends and non-friends who won’t stop stalking you.

Amazon is understood to sell books and music and maybe some other things over the web. Particularly savvy people might know that Amazon is moving a lot of its products to Kindle for distribution, so that you can download a book immediately for a much cheaper price onto Amazon’s e-ink reader.

But these descriptions only scratch the surface of what these companies are doing.

The Next Wave

Let’s look at Yahoo! first. Jerry Yang just announced he would step down, which quite a lot of people wanted. Why? How does this serve the company? Yang co-founded the company with David Filo. Another guy came in and ruined the company by trying to make it a media company.

As a result, Yahoo! fell behind while Google and Amazon and other web companies took off. But Yahoo! still has some of the most popular properties online.

When Yang returned, Yahoo! cut down its operations, fired some people, and began transitioning to a more open data platform, called the Yahoo! Open Strategy. Yahoo! is a member of the OpenSocial Foundation and supports OAuth, OpenSocial, and REST for enabling the transferring of information between web sites. In a way this is part of what some have called Web 3.0, or read-write-execute. (Web 1.0 was read, Web 2.0 was read-write)

Therefore, what investors think Yahoo! is doing is something that died with the dotcom bubble. What it’s actually working on is at the forefront of the coolest stuff on the web right now. The problem? It’s not recognizable, it’s not monetizable yet, and it’s not standardized and adopted enough to allow for generativity amongst new start-ups and other sites. It also has entirely too many employees; does it really need 14,300?? But this stuff is absolutely integral to the next iteration of the internet, so Yahoo! will be right in the thick of it.

Facebook

Facebook is pervasive enough now that even people most disconnected from the internet are now creating profiles. But people think all it’s doing is being another Friendster or Orkut. Just social networking.

What’s going on under the hood? Something radical for the current internet. Facebook is working on Connect, which is similar to Y!OS but is far more closed in at this point.

It’s also working on Beacon, which enables users to show what they’ve purchased to their friends, serving as trusted buying recommendations. Essentially this is allowing each individual to be able to extend the power of his reputation and brand so he can influence advertising. Check out this presentation I did on Facebook Beacon for my class this semester.

Facebook is actively working on building a social graph that it thinks it can extend to its Applications, allowing anyone to build an app and use Facebook’s resources.

Eventually, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, must certainly believe these will not only monetize Facebook, but become standard advertising and distribution streams in the future internet.

In fact it is evident in interviews with him (including this fine one in the latest GQ, the link of which was sent to me by Kevin Donovan…thanks!) that he knows this is the future of the internet.

Says the GQ article’s author, Alex French:

Facebook is gradually rolling out Connect, the product previewed in Zuckerberg’s July f8 keynote speech. (It currently works with CNN, MoveOn.org, and CBS, among others.) But the technology is clearly an attempt at seizing control of digital identity in the way that caused Sean Parker to see dollar signs when he first met Zuckerberg. Connect will essentially work like this: You log in once, to Facebook, and then everywhere you travel on the Web, that log-in travels with you. Such a system has potential advantages for users. Web sites will use your Facebook data to create new features—e.g., if you visit Citysearch, you’ll be able to click a tab and see which restaurants your friends have recommended. “You’ll have a seamless sign-on process and seamless access to your data everywhere you go,” says Parker. “And you’ll control who has access to your data. I don’t think Microsoft would’ve been trusted to perform that role, but Facebook has earned that trust.”

You can see why I have such a fascination with Zuckerberg and Facebook — this is what I’m looking for in Galapag.us.

Once again, like Yahoo!, Facebook is far ahead of where its users and stock-market gurus think it is.

Amazon

I think what Amazon is doing right now is the closest to being monetized. In early October, I wrote about Amazon as an investment. Since then, the stock has gone from around $80 to a closing price today just under $36. So it’s almost buyable under ideal conditions, I think.

But what Amazon is doing is not just selling books, music, and everything else. Well, it IS doing that. It’s selling everything else. Amazon is selling books at a cheaper rate that go on its Kindle reading device. It’s selling MP3s. It’s offering excellent reviews of products from its users.

But not only that, Amazon is using all of its data centers and processing speed and bandwidth to re-sell at a pay-as-you-go rate to all the individuals and small business and large businesses that want to put up their businesses online too. In other words, Amazon is enabling a business climate and operating space for entrepreneurship and innovation.

Read the slideshow I put together on cloud computing; Amazon is right in the thick of it. In fact, Amazon offers services for hosting data, crunching data, and now, content delivery networks in its recently-released CloudFront.

The cloud is the future of computing, Jeff Bezos being an early adopter of it and among the top competitors in that space. Who knows what he’ll do next? Can he cloudsource his logistics networks for business services in the same way that UPS has (UPS having moved into helping businesses with streamlining their shipping processes and pleasing their customers)?

But this is completely unnoticed. In a #daytraders channel I frequent, people were bashing AMZN. I asked them if they knew the Kindle. For one, they all said the Kindle would fail because people prefer books. That’s a myth that will die soon. Offer a device that gives you superior features to a book, with a fairly similar feel and dimension, and people will switch. Especially when they can edit and change the text as they do on a computer, and when they can interact with the content more.

Then I asked these daytraders if they knew about cloud computing and Amazon’s Web Services (AWS). Again, no. So all this stuff Amazon is doing, and supposedly very knowledgeable potential investors have no clue about it!!

Bad Marketing?

So is what’s going on here just a case of bad marketing? I’m not sure. I’m pretty sure businesses have caught on pretty quickly to the fact that you can have the cloud do all your computing for you so you don’t have to waste a lot of capital expenditures on server equipment. They’ve been a bit slower in figuring out how to leverage Facebook’s applications and fan pages for their social branding. And Yahoo!’s stuff? Forget about it. Very few people know what they’re doing.

A new infrastructure for generativity is currently being built. It will take some time for people to adjust, for there to develop a market, for coders and entrepreneurs to begin to exploit it. But it will be fabulously fun and useful to see what products come out of it all.

I’m excited, but it’s early in the game. However, I’m always looking for early-mover investment opportunities, and these web companies show that down the line, there will be a lot of them. It is particularly tempting if, instead of just being a consumer, someone such as myself is looking to be a bootstrapping entrepreneur in that space. I’m licking my chops.

This might be confusing at first but this is the nature of online data flow now, where YouTube and blogs and tweets and RSS and googling converge with reality. A lot of people on Twitter were re-tweeting a tweet from Mashable about a “wanted” post for a command line for the web.

The article got me thinking. Will we be returning to the command line again, where we started from? Back in the DOS days, the command line was how you navigated. Some people got pretty ninja at it and preferred it to the graphical user interfaces (GUIs). But GUIs took off, of course, and now we’re using AJAX and PhotoSynth and Google Maps and SecondLife and all that cool stuff.

Speed

Eric Schmidt gave a great talk yesterday in DC for the New America Foundation in which he discussed, as part of Obama’s economic transition team, how we need to invest in infrastructure, build a smart electrical grid, increase federal research and development, and pursue a lot of other Googlish agenda items. (I elected not to go because I figured it’d be best to stay home and watch the webstream…so meta)

What struck me about his Q&A period at the end was that some privacy advocate asked him to address privacy issues that Google overlooks, such as using HTTPS or other things to increase security.

Schmidt’s response was that Google DOES care about privacy, but that it basically cares about SPEED and LATENCY more. Considering how fast and reactive Google is, you can see how it can be compelling as a design priority and how Google sees it as a key factor in competing with desktop clients from Google’s competitors, like Microsoft.

Command Line for the Web

So let’s move on to the command line for the web. The Mashable article talks about a start-up that lets you type in “check twitter” and it will pull up the latest tweets. Same for other services. That perhaps isn’t very remarkable and says more about how fast and low-latency the web has become for wired Americans. I’m not sure I want to use an external scraper to use Twitter. Nor am I sure that this is much different than Google’s very similar but far more powerful command line search page that has been lauded for its simplicity.

The article also shows a video demo for someone who wired up his room’s lights to Twitter and then to his cell phone so that he could SMS to Twitter and then have it turn off his lights.

So the cell phone could be turned into a remote for life.

UNIX Commands as Start-Ups

There was a thread I remember reading about that posited that all the really useful start-ups lately have basically been based on UNIX commands. Google Docs is like pico, Gmail is like pine, Twitter is like finger, etc. Not being a UNIX/Linux person myself, I can’t think off the top of my head whether there are any commands that haven’t been exploited yet. But it’s an interesting way of thinking about the command line inspiring creativity and innovation.

MUDs

The reason I first got on the internet was because the ImagiNation Network (see this long TV ad that explains the service pretty well) got bought out by AT&T and was promptly reduced to expensive junk (sense a trend?), causing a massive exodus.

A friend of mine who I used to hang out with (an IT specialist who worked at Coca-Cola in Atlanta but who died several years later) told me about how her company had access to the internet and how I might be able to get online through my dad’s UT Dallas account. The first thing I started doing on the internet back in ‘95 or so was playing a Multi-User Domain/Dungeon, a text-based, command-line-driven multiplayer game. You moved around by typing “north” or “east” and “inventory” to look at your inventory and “gossip Hi!” to tell the entire MUD hello.

Commands eventually got shortened to “n” for “north” and “e” for “east” and “inv” for “inventory”.

MUDs began to die out in favor of games like Starcraft and Quake, never to recover. Now of course there are role-playing games online like World of Warcraft and Diablo 3 and everything on Xbox Live such that a return to the days of mudding or MOOs or MUSHes seems impossible.

But I have long been interested in reviving the MUD in a web start-up, as a sticky, added component to my social networking site. For Galapag.us, I figured with a large database of personal information, you could turn those stats into a gaming character who can play a role-playing game within Galapag.us, for more points, more rankings, unlocking elements of the rest of the site.

Where I see social networking sites going eventually is back to gaming. Sculpting very realistic characters based on our own characteristics.

The Internet of Things

The future of the internet is rapidly advancing towards an internet of things. Soon all our appliances and even non-electronic devices will be talking to each other on the internet, often without our knowledge.

Now imagine a command line that is completely free, untethered, generative, and open in the spirit of Jonathan Zittrain’s “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it”. There will need to be fairly open APIs from different services and maybe an industry standard API for appliances like light switch circuitry, TVs, fridges, etc. There will need to be an identity layer for reputations and trust, but that’s being worked on right now by projects such as OpenID, OpenSocial, and Shibboleth.

I can just imagine being able to control the electricity and solar panel set-up and energy generation in my house and electric car using my cell phone. I can imagine creating UNIX-like aliases for batched commands and scripting entire configuration changes for which lights go on, when my fridge checks for food updates, when my car uses the grid to power up its batteries most ideally versus high-volume consumption in my area.

I don’t think SMS will be a sustainable solution for this but maybe a fall-back, since SMSs have high latency and even disappear entirely with some frequency, even still.

Magic

It used to be considered magic when we could control our world from a distance, but the day where this will be considered normal is coming soon. It’s not really entirely clear or imaginable the sorts of innovation and generativity that this ability will unlock for us. But certainly soon the world will have an operating system, and we will start out using it through a command line of basic I/O and scripting…and then a highly-graphical OS…and then a continuous cycle once again.

I got a pass for the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami. I’ll probably be cutting class for it, and won’t know anyone who’ll be there personally, but it’ll be my first web conference. Gotta start somewhere, right?

My Google Reader feeds have gravitated towards smaller, less frequently updated blogs now (I’m up to 202 subscriptions still, but I’ve gotten rid of some of the noisiest that post dozens of entries a day). Some of the best blog entries lately come from those like Umair Haque, a strategy advisor who writes at the otherwise dull Harvard Business Blog.

One of his latest entries discusses the post-hypercapitalism world, which is dying a violent death after the credit collapse (even Greenspan gave a mea culpa today) and dramatic paradigm shift of the internet’s Moore’s Law effects on concentrated capital (i.e. big business). He lists three transformations:

1. A change in global patterns of savings, investment, and consumption.
2. Strategists must rediscover the lost art of authentic value creation.
3. Strategists must rediscover entirely new sources of advantage as old ones fade and decay.

Haque’s big thing is that companies need to rewire their DNA so that they can move quickly and nimbly in a business world that doesn’t reward the traditional ideas anymore.

In this post, he talks about Starbucks and how their hypercapitalist attempts to pawn off music, mugs, and doohickeys along with their coffee eventually didn’t provide long-term sustainable growth.

The key, he says, is to plan for the long-term, so that instead of selling cheap shit and diluting the brand, you’re providing services like barista training and community development.

Howard Schultz, Starbucks’ original CEO, just got the position back and promptly shut a lot of the extra shit down. Jerry Yang, much maligned right now for coming back to Yahoo! and turning down a buyout offer from Microsoft, is doing the same: lay off the excess, scale back operations, and get back to core business (in Yahoo!’s case, building open platform tools).

So it’s good to see that some companies are breathlessly trying to adapt. Others won’t even try and will fade away. I think it’s fair to say that, at least for a while, consumer culture is on the decline and business models won’t be so fearlessly predicated on the notion that you can just jam shit down customers’ throats.

What will the future look like? Well, it might be most instructive to look at the internet for the early signs.

What is coming is the network of things, or the One as Kevin Kelly calls it. Soon every device and even inorganic thing will probably have some webness that lets it contribute to the online brain, which is what all the linked computers in grids and clouds are becoming. Your kitchen appliances, small RFID chips, GPS sensors, even nano devices. This is all on top of an increasingly developed world where there are still billions of people who have never been online.

At the same time, as Jeff Bezos presciently explains in a TED Talk about the Internet gold rush back from 2003, the internet is less like the gold rush after the dotcom bubble and more like the advent of electricity.

At first, electricity was not intended to power a lot of devices. It was just intended to provide energy to light bulbs. Later, light bulb sockets were used to power some crude devices, since wall sockets did not yet exist. Even a dangerous washing/wringing system used a light socket. Bezos claimed that back in 2003, we were at that point in terms of where the internet was relative to where electricity was. His insight is that we have a lot more innovation to discover than we have already.

Internet access has yet to be commoditized, but it will be soon. It will become easier to connect to and interface with, and devices and appliances we could not have dreamed of will come out. With plummeting storage, processing, and access costs, companies will be able to drop their capital expenditures and rent out time and bandwidth from other companies. Individual users will be able to create and innovate on their own as they have through writing on blogs and on web sites. There’s a lot of growth to come for those who are willing to adapt.

The credit crisis is helping to bring this upon us. Limits in capital, labor movement, and the weakening of tyrannical oligopolistic holds on a lot of industries and sectors will push innovation harder. Entrepreneurs will find new ways of doing business that will be highly rewarded. It’s been a while since we’ve seen a tremendously successful company come out of the 2001 wreckage: probably Facebook is the main example there, and it’s still trying to figure out how to best monetize.

Geoff Huston wrote an excellent post back in 2006 about the advent of IPv6, a new protocol coming soon to address the shortage of IP addresses under the IPv4 system (addresses like 192.168.1.1 are on IPv4). Depending on who you talk to, the shortage will begin to take effect in 2011 or so. The IPv6 standards have been in development through consortium for over a decade now, and once implemented, there will be billions upon billions of possible addresses, which should take care of any problems we have in the foreseeable future. Said Huston:

“So what’s left? I suspect that the truly revolutionary message in IPv6 is a message about the extracting efficiencies in the business model of communications. We appear to be looking at a transition from value to volume with IPv6. IPv6’s true leverage is about the ability to encompass world of tens of billions of chattering devices. The service industry that provides the networking services to these tens of billions of devices will not be a bloated inefficient relic of a bygone era of monopoly service enterprises. Indeed its likely that there will be nothing in common with the enterprises that operate in this industry today. IPv6 appears to be carrying an implication of a quite dramatic shift in the service enterprise to an industry based on a commodity utility. We are looking at an industry that will operate at a level of single digit operating margins and investment returns similarly phrased. If we want IP to operate from anonymous sockets in the wall, or seamlessly over wireless, then we will be looking at service delivery systems that provide simple lowest common denominator networking service. The search for valued-added services and value-added networks have no logical role in such a commodity utility world. This all sounds quite conventional, and the path to commoditization of many artefacts and services is a well trodden one in many industries and service sectors. So why is this such a revolutionary message for the communications industry? I suppose that the observation here is that this is one industry which is continuing to live the myth that there is a pot of gold out there in value-added networking-land, and that the windfall profits made in successive waves of innovation in the telephone industry over the decades will continue to repeat itself, and there is a pervasive air of denial over a message that says that the value is going to be destroyed by volume. In this industry the words “commodity” and “utility” remain taboo!”

This is all tremendously exciting for geeks like me! The future is awash with innovation, with opportunities for new companies and projects, and with optimism and increasing potential for individuals to bring ideas to market.

Social networking is even hotter than it was before, and it’s barely scratched the surface.

Social networking sites (SNSs) are beginning to permeate into the non-digital crowd and into the office.

At the same time, developers are simultaneously working on all sorts of open API standards that will get rid of a lot of the problems we currently have with balkanized social networks: OAuth allows you to authorize a site to take data from a site you already have data on. OpenID lets you use one of your trusted logins to login somewhere else. OpenSocial is standardizing the containers and database fields for your personal data so different sites’ databases can easily port your data. What this means for you is that you’ll be able to move from one SNS to another without re-entering all your data over and over.

Listen to Kevin Marks’ lecture on data portability and the future of enterprise apps, from the Future of Web Apps conference in London recently.

We’ve been victims of lock-in since SNSs began; we start using one SNS and after nurturing our profiles there, we are reluctant to move, especially if we weren’t too hot on using the web to begin with. Being able to migrate easily means that SNSs will become easier to build and become more competitive. Seen in this light, I wonder if Marc Andreessen realized this when he decided to build a site that lets you create portals for your microSNSs. Even if Ning kind of blows.

SNSs are going to have to compete and offer more value. It’s quite clear Zuckerberg at Facebook realizes that there’s going to be a battle, and he’s doing well to arm his company for it.

I think one of the next battlegrounds will be in providing a platform that focuses on trust: personal data control will be a priority for users as they become more aware of how their data is used online. Not only that, but people, who then have control of their data, will want to analyze it — if they can use it to break down their own lives and define their own quantitative metrics, then SNSs will begin to be more tangibly useful by making our everyday lives more fulfilling.

Marketing

I went to an event at Google DC and afterwards started talking to some of the other visitors about behavioral marketing. It’s not really my area but basically one guy was saying that all these Web 2.0 sites need to offer ads in exchange for cheap or free service (which disregards other forms of monetization that one could build into a site…), and I was saying that I thought ads were pretty much bullshit.

Tom Davenport wrote at the Harvard Business Publishing blog:

“But it seems to me that many of the activities, business models, and assumptions behind social media are a bit fluffy, and that fluffiness is going to be difficult to maintain in the post-bubble environment we now find ourselves in.”

He’s right but not in the way that he explains it: a new economic model is coming. Clearly social networking and a lot of web 2.0 sites have economic benefit and increase productivity. This is not measured by most metrics, and certain not in ones that track monetary economic growth. But it’s transforming the context in which we live. When these companies that grind out cash from lazy customers start having to A) be wiser about their advertisement placement in a slumping-demand economy and/or B) throw in the towel when it becomes too costly to use outdated advertising strategies, the rest of us win. Movie, music, and software distribution models have already been shown to be horrendously behind. Advertising comes along with that.

Hell, even the federal government is going to adopt social media and the internet faster.

I found some agreement with a couple other people during our conversation at Google DC that the most effective form of marketing was what Facebook is trying to do with Beacon: if my friends all buy something and it is broadcasted to me, that has a far stronger influence upon me to buy it too. There are caveats, of course; not all my friends are wise on gadgets and may recommend garbage. But it’s far better than Amazon’s approximations of “what other people bought” or Google’s context-based ads, or behavioral marketing.

“Friends”

By the way, I just wanted to voice my angst towards a one-size-fits-all social graph that currently exists: you can only “friend” someone. You can’t classify him as anything other than a friend. Is it fair to say that this is because SNSs realized they don’t want to deal with the potentially massive problems of people being offended that others didn’t classify them as “best friend” or “buddy” or DID classify them as “enemy” or “acquaintance”? “Friend” is a nice, unoffensive term that’s safe and generic enough for people to use. Unless it’s McCain referring to “my friends”. Then it sounds pretty fucking creepy.

There. That should be a suitably jarring ending to an otherwise pie-in-the-sky post, right?

Galapag.us will be packed full of data, which means there will be a conflict between the people who want as little data on-screen as possible and those who want as much data on screen as possible.

The interface is crucial. Mostly one should be able to quickly visualize patterns and anomalies within his own data. And he should be encouraged to use less-known or less-utilized parts of the site. He should also get hooked, always finding something new to tweak or add. The site must be flexible. It should also feel as though there’s always lots of activity going on.

My two favorite examples of what Galapag.us might look like are iminlikewithyou.com and thesixtyone.com.

Check out iminlikewithyou.com. The frontpage is a vortex of activity: large colorful images of the multiplayer games on-site, blow-ups of individual games, easy-to-understand context menus, and on top of all that (!) there’s a ticker as well as pop-ups showing that people are logging in and playing games. The sense you immediately get is that you have to get right in on the action!! without delay. The number of “plays” for each game reinforce the feeling that you’re missing out if you’re not playing.

If you look further on the site, you can see how easy it is to get right into a game. You’ll get crushed immediately by the vicious userbase but you’ll eventually learn the games. The other aspect of the site worth mentioning is the high degree of useability. I get smiles every time I visit this site.

thesixtyone.com is a music-rating site that is not quite as flashy as the other one, but still allows for a high degree of interaction and personalization. You are encouraged through a point system to explore new music or music that isn’t listened to regularly, as you can bump songs you like and watch as they catch on with other users. You receive pop-up messages from the artist as you listen to songs, which keep playing even as you navigate the site. The site also makes use of Xbox Live-like achievements, such as listening to certain milestones of songs or bumping songs in under-listened genres. This incentivizes exploring the site more. It is unclear where the system will end up — levels do little right now except unlocking more abilities like bumping songs more times — but this site could be what people have envisioning for independent artists: a way to promote their new music in a way that ensures people will listen to their songs and gravitate towards the best ones.

So I’m hoping Galapag.us will employ lots of hooks and interaction with each user — I can just imagine a site where people spend all day adjusting and trimming their data in order to game the system and maintain their online reputations. I’m also looking at using achievements, incentives, and group structures, layered onto a text-based RPG as ways to increase stickiness and turn Galapag.us into its own functioning world.

[update: here's a video of the interview with Zuckerberg]

I read an interesting blurb from the broadstuff blog on Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) talking about privacy. This led me to a cnet report from the Future of Web Apps conference in London, which said,

“When talking about the central importance of sharing to Facebook, Zuckerberg described how members are now willing to share much more than they were when the site launched four years ago. He compared it to Moore’s Law, suggesting that the “exponential” rate of sharing could be charted and predicted when it came to future features that Facebook could add. One of those things could be location-awareness, which Carson asked about and which Zuckerberg implied in his Moore’s Law analogy that the alleged exponential curve simply hasn’t reached yet.”

I’ve seen this to be true among my Facebook friends. I think they are initially resistant but as more and more of their friends keep talking about it, they keep coming back and add more and more information each time as they grow more comfortable with it. It’s perhaps more about Metcalfe’s Law than Moore’s Law.

As an aside, Zuckerberg showed more of his uncompromising attitude towards his vision of what Facebook is:

“He also talked more candidly than usual about the shortcomings of the platform, and how it soon became a hub for goofy viral applications that users quickly started to find annoying. The redesigned look of Facebook pages relegates many of those apps to a separate “boxes” tab, which has irked many developers, but Zuckerberg implied that if apps are seeing a decline in use because of the redesign, they probably aren’t the sorts of apps that Facebook envisioned as part of its platform in the first place.”

Oh snap. That’s a 90’s era Microsoft-ish swipe at developers.

Over on the Yahoo! fellowship blog, I made two posts, one about Danah Boyd’s articles on privacy and how youths use the internet, and another on a wonderful marketing slideshow I found about the future economy being one of “reputation management”.

There’s two points from Boyd’s Facebook article that I didn’t make on the other blog.

One, I disagree with Boyd’s opinion of News Feed, but wonder how she thinks of it now, a year or two later, when it’s pretty standard practice over at Facebook…

“Facebook says that the News Feed is here to say. This makes me sad. I understand why they want to provide it, i understand what users are tempted by it. But i also think that it is unhealthy, socially disruptive, and far worse for the users than the lurking employers ready to strike down upon thee with great vengeance for the mere presence of a red plastic cup.

“I also think that it will be gamed. Given a new channel for identity performance, people will begin engaging in a new form of impression management. They already write wall posts to be seen – it will be taken to a new level. Their public displays of connection will take on new strength as they seek to make a performance out of the friending act. They will remove friendship statuses in the most dramatic fashion possible, announcing as far as possible about the evilness of the other person. Facebook News Feeds could make LJ drama look like child’s play.”

Certainly impression management is not a bad thing, is it? That’s what we call having a reputation… Look at it this way: what if, if someone drops

Currently we have very crude ways of managing our reputations. It’s so crude in fact that we avoid saying things just so we don’t deliver an ultimate crushing verdict of “I don’t like you” to anyone. Which is something Boyd points out later:

“The term “friend” in the context of social network sites is not the same as in everyday vernacular. And people know this. This is why they used to say fun things like “Well, she’s my Friendster but not my friend.” (The language doesn’t work out so cleanly on Facebook.) The term is terrible but it means something different on these sites; it’s not to anyone’s advantage to assume that the rules of friendship apply to Friendship.”

Right. We need a social networking tool that gives us granularity to capture the essence of all our relationships. Not everyone is a best friend forever; some are enemies. This needs to be reflected in some way in our online social networks.

The Trendbuero slideshow is awesome. It says that the recognition economy of the future will allow us to self-actualize:

“Opportunities for design will continue to increase. Compulsory self-responsibility will force consumers to optimise their own self. This will call for deliberate decisions and new orientation frames. Identity will become a management assignment. Tomorrow’s economy will be shaped by the lack of identity and affiliation. Recognition will become the new key quantity.”

It also tries to employ the word “egonomics”:

Egonomics — an economy geared to the own self.

-Body: Healthstyle
-Security: Authentication
-Relationships: Connectivity
-Recognition: Reputation
-Self-actualisation: Creativity

Man, I think Galapag.us is really on to something!

This semester, I have a lot of reading material for my four classes, plus one audit class. In addition, I have two research projects and my own independent reading that I do.

So I’m coping by doing a lot of skimming and fast reading. Last year I learned which stuff is important to read carefully and which stuff is just boilerplate agency-speak.

And it occurred to me while sitting in class today that what I’m really looking for when I read are connections between ideas and facts. And what I really get excited about are bridge ideas or facts that open up whole new networks of information.

Then I started to draw a network diagram on my notes, conceiving of a big node of knowledge that I have explored already (counter-terrorism) and lots of smaller nodes linked from it, like my experiences in Iraq, books about Zarqawi, the Scheuer class, articles from my IR theory class on terrorism.

Some links will bridge across two worlds, like terrorism and politics. There are a lot of large knowledge nodes in my head now for the topical areas I’ve worked in and studied in my 30+ years.

I don’t seek to memorize all the facts within those nodes. I want to keep exploring into new webs of nodes, into new areas of knowledge. I imagine exploring through a cave, finding new tunnels that lead to large caverns and openings back to the outside, with the outside being a metaphor for my overall, general worldview.

I just want connections. I want to discover new fields of study. I want to map it all out, so that I know how to get back to it, should I need it.

And it occurred to me that search engines on the internet are not particularly good at helping you explore a new network. It can take a while to learn who the major leaders in a field are, who the chief researchers are, what the competing arguments are, etc.

And then I started thinking about the anthropograph, and how I would like to see a network analysis of large nodes for the most well-known, well-connected people like Albert Einstein or John Locke or Jesus, and see who the major nodes are linking from them. I’m sure this has already been done to a large degree.

What I really want is something like Facebook where I can click on tabs corresponding to different fields, like economics or sports, and then see who in my friend network are the most important, most knowledgeable, most well-connected — i.e. the biggest nodes — out of them all.

The network would look different based on which field view I was looking at. Some people of course would be larger nodes in many different field views.

I want to graph the people Malcolm Gladwell would call the mavens and early adopters. I want to do far more than just “Facebook friend” someone.

I want to explore previously darkened nodal networks and map them out.

Here’s an interesting video that is quite long about how we can use human cycles, currently being wasted on billions of hours of playing solitaire, to perhaps make artificial intelligence smarter.

By turning visual and semantic relationships into a match-making game, we can categorize all the photos from Google Images in little time at all, if we were to employ the cognitive surplus out there in a way that people would find it fun to tag images.

The example the PhD uses is the ESP game, which shows two players the same image. They have no knowledge of what the other is guessing. However, if they both end up guessing the same word in the allotted time, they win points. Another game tests semantic relationships: if the narrator’s word is “milk” and he gives the other person clues like “is near to cereal” and “is a liquid” then hopefully the other person will guess it correctly. In these games, the links between words and images are verified by two different parties per test, aggregated over multiple tests.

Could it be possible to use crowdsourcing/the cognitive surplus to rate people accurately and fill out their biographical information in a trusted manner? What other ways can we use this to solve large messy problems using simple, fun games?

Probably the best article recently was a NYTimes piece by Clive Thompson on ambient awareness. It was good because it allows those who are not already involved in microblogging and the newer web tools to understand why this stuff is important. It’s the kind of article that you point people to when you want them to “get it”.

“Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a Web site and messaging service that allows its two-million-plus users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates — limited to 140 characters, as brief as a mobile-phone text message — on what they’re doing. There are other services for reporting where you’re traveling (Dopplr) or for quickly tossing online a stream of the pictures, videos or Web sites you’re looking at (Tumblr). And there are even tools that give your location. When the new iPhone, with built-in tracking, was introduced in July, one million people began using Loopt, a piece of software that automatically tells all your friends exactly where you are.”

Later in the article, it calls ambient awareness a kind of ESP. This is how I like to think about it.

That ESP is what a reputation standard can help reinforce. It’s your intuition, it’s your perception and judgment about people. Hopefully it wouldn’t be your only measure, but it’d go a long way in helping you understand the disconnect between how you see the world and how it actually is.

There needs to be tools to make this ESP work first. TechCrunch, a site that reports on web startup news mostly, is currently holding an expo of the top 50 startups they selected from a pool of applicants. A lot have been said to be useless, but here are a couple that piqued my interest for Galapag.us.

Me-trics strives “to be “Google analytics for your life.” By doing that, it collects data from countless places on the Web based on your activity and will let you input data like blood pressure or stress level to find correlations between something you have observed and the data you input.”

Critics say that it may require too much manual entry, a problem I’ll have with my project. It looks like Me-trics is taking a slightly different tack and playing into a health angle, instead of where I want to go which is to turn it into reputation.

FitBit is a small device that you wear with you all the time.

“The first “gadget” we’ve seen at TC50 is the FitBit, a wireless 3D pedometer and diet monitoring system that will cost $99 and connect online to upload activity levels and food intake. The device, which is getting a lot of buzz, clips to almost any piece of clothing and is almost invisible. When you pass by the wireless base station the FitBit transmits all of its collected data and transmits it to the website where it is processed. You can also add food eaten and other data and it also tracks sleeping patterns.”

Both of these companies got good marks from the panels judging them. Tim O’Reilly said he valued companies that are focused on what makes them money (sounds more obvious than it is) and what their advantage is.

That sounds like a problem for Galapag.us — its goals are pretty lofty (advocacy project for privacy/openness as well as a for-profit component) and it will require widespread adoption in order to fully work. Although I think it’d be possible to make Galapag.us work with a small number of users, by coming up with baseline standards and keeping the Galapag.us staff involved with their own Galapag.user profiles.