Chris Saad

I was just watching a great TED video about the guy who runs ‘Improv Everywhere’. If you don’t know what that is I strongly suggest you google it and watch the video.

His TED talk had some great themes and some funny videos showing the result of their work, however my key takeaway was from a small innocuous line that he kept repeating as a one of his throw away comments… “and we didn’t even ask permission”.

His final summary in his talk speaks to our collective need to, as adults, remember to play and have fun. But I think that his statement about permission reveals what ‘Improve Everywhere’ is really doing. It’s showing people that it’s ok to impact the world… without asking permission.

Too many people assume that they need to ask permission to change the world.

“I’m studying to be a writer” basically suggests that you are waiting for someone to hand you a permission slip (A degree) which declares you an ‘English Major’. Then maybe you can call yourself a writer? Or maybe after you get your first writing job? Maybe after you publish your first book? Which of these permission slips allow you to declare yourself what you want to be – give you permission to change your little corner of the world?

This applies to everything we do. To be an entrepreneur, to love, to change the rules.

More people need to stop asking for permission – or worse, assuming they could never do something because it’s against the written or unwritten rules.

This theme was echoed by an old interview I recently watched featuring Steve Jobs. He said that the old electronics kits that he played with as a child showed him that ANYONE could build the things they saw around them. A radio, a TV, whatever – these were man made, understandable and attainable things to invent and build for yourself. He mused that these kits were one of the things in his early life that helped him understand that he could build anything he wanted and impact the environment of millions of people.

So for all of you out there waiting for permission to change your life, your career, your perspective or your world – stop waiting. Go do it. Be, Do, Act as my friend and colleague Philippe likes to say.

So at F8 last week Facebook announced Ticker, Timeline and extensions to the Open Graph API to allow for new verbs and nouns.

Here’s what really happened.

• They split their single ‘News Feed’ into 3 levels of filtering. Now (Ticker), Relevant (News Feed), Historical (Timeline). (Side note, we’ve had a ‘Ticker’ style product at Echo that we called ‘Community Stream’ for a long time now – and most of our customers and partners said to us ‘why would we want to show all that data it’s just noisy’. Maybe now they will take a second look.). Question: Will G+, Twitter and the REST of the web adopt the same model? They should.
• This allows FB to collect more ‘noise’ (also known as synaptic firings or Attention data) which, in turn, allows them to find more signal (also known as synaptic inferences or attention management). I’ve long said that the answer to information overload is not LESS information – it’s MORE. The more information you have the more ability you have to find patterns and surface them in relevant places (I said it so long ago I can’t even find the link). Question: Will independent websites think to collect their OWN Attention data BEFORE sending it to FB so they can leverage for their own purposes. The value of this data is incalculable.
• Having these new presentation metaphors in place, they then created a mechanism to collect more data in the form of expanded Verbs and Nouns in the Open Graph API. With this new API, user’s are now expected to abandon explicit gestures of sharing and instead, accept that every action they take is auto-shared to their friends. Question: When will the first horror stories start coming out about engagement ring purchases, personal health issues and sexual orientations being inappropriately revealed due to auto-sharing?
• Using all the bling of the Timeline, along with new messaging and a simple little opt in toggle of ‘Add to my timeline’ they managed to re-launch ‘Beacon’ without anyone noticing (none of the tech blogs I saw even mentioned it). Question: Why did none of the tech media cover that angle of the story?

I continue to be in awe of Facebook’s scale, seriousness, ambition and momentum. There has never been anything like it before.

They have created an Attention Management Platform that rivals Google Search and easily out classes many of my best ideas about Attention Management and Personal Relevancy back when I was thinking about the problem.

It’s breathtaking.

And since it is all done with hard links to a single proprietary hub, it is eating the web like a cancer.

Before F8 it was clear that Google+ was a 1 or 2 years behind FB. Now they are 3 or 4.

Only time will tell who, how and why more open systems will begin to reassert themselves in the ecosystem. My bet is that it wont come from a b2c copy-cat, though. It will come from a well organized, commercially incentivized b2b play.

The part that still confuses me, though, is why ANY serious media company would want their news to load in a ‘FB canvas app’ instead of their own website. It makes zero sense. None of this changes the reality that you need to own your own data and your own point source. I made a little comparison table earlier in the week that explains why.

Today WSJ announced that it has built a news publishing platform that lives inside Facebook - effectively outsourcing their core website to the Social Networking Giant.

The number of reasons this is a bad idea is staggering. I’ve tried to summarize them in a spreadsheet comparing a FB approach verses an Open Web approach.

Please feel free to contribute

There’s a lot of fury on the web right now about ‘Real Names’. FB is trying to use it as a unique feature of their comments system claiming it reduces trolling and low value comments.

Of course that isn’t really true. For one, any commenting system could force FB login. Two, users will troll with or without their name attached and, worse yet, many legitimate users won’t participate for any number of reasons if they can’t use a pseudonym. There are plenty of better ways to increase quality in your comments including participation from the content creators, game mechanics, community moderation and more.

The real debate, however, is about G+ trying to copy FB’s stance on Real Names. They are insisting all user accounts use them and are actively shutting down accounts that violate the policy. They are being so heavy handed about that even people who ARE using their real name are getting notices of violation – most notable Violet Blue.

I’m not really an expert on pseudonyms, shared contexts and anonymity so I’m going to stay out of this debate.

The real question for me, however, is what is Google’s strategic business reason for this policy. There must be a long term plan/reason for it otherwise they wouldn’t be insisting so hard.

My assumption is that it’s related to their intention to become a canonical people directory and identity provider on the internet to compete with FB in this space.

FB, after all, does not just get it’s power from news feeds and photo apps – it gets it from the deep roots it has laid down into the DNA of the internet as the provider of 1st class identity infrastructure and identity information.

In this sense, FB’s social contract has served them very well, and Google’s attempt to copy it is a hint that they understand FB is not just a .com feature set, but a powerful identity utility. They must (and in some cases seem to be) understand that strategy and it’s aggressiveness if they are to properly compete with the monopoly. My only hope, however, is that they are coming up with their own inspired counter strategy rather than just copying the moves they see on the surface – because that’s doomed to fail.

First, to define ‘Real-time’

Real-time is no CDN or Cache latency. When there is new data in the database, it’s available to the end-user.

Real-time is not needing to hit the refresh button to see new information. It’s when information folds into the page while you’re reading it.

Real-time is a new volume and velocity of data. A lot of web data used to consist of ‘Blog Posts’ or ‘News Articles’. Documents. Real-time web data is about activities. Granular, human readable micro-stories about the activities that users make.

“I read this”, “I rated this”, “I commented on this”, “I shared this”, “I edited this” and so on. Why? Because capturing, surfacing and socializing real-time activity data is part of the core essence of the social web. The ability to see not just the result of actions by users, but the play-by-play stream of those actions along side faces, names and time/date stamps takes an experience from a static ‘snapshot’ into a living, breathing stream. Further, by enabling users to like, reply, flag, share and otherwise interact with these activities, sites are creating new opportunities for engagement, conversation and conversion.

Real-time is a presentation metaphor. It often (but not always) takes the form of a reverse chronological stream with nested comments and likes. It helps users understand the order of things and mixes content with conversation in a way that drives engagement and return visits.

Real-time means filters instead of facts. Let the user decide what they want to see – to craft an experience that makes sense for them, and their friends.

Now, what is ‘Real-time as a Service’?

If all the things above are true, then it changes everything we used to know about web infrastructure, databases, user interfaces and tools for moderation or curation.

APIs can no longer be request-response. Databases must now store far more data at far faster rates. User interfaces need to factor in names, faces and actions. Moderation and curation tools must leverage algorithms, crowd sourcing and real-time flows.

Real-time as a service, then, is cloud infrastructure that helps make this transition easier.

It is a database that can handle new magnitudes of scale – handling hundreds or thousands of write events per section. Not just to a flat table, but to a hierarchical tree of arbitrary activities.

Site -> Section -> Article -> Rating -> Comment -> Reply -> Like.

It’s a database that can store all items permanently so that users can visit old streams at any time. Permanent storage that can also handle localized annotations. Localized annotations are the ability to modify the metadata of an activity – say a Tweet (Promote it, tag it, retarget it in the tree etc) – in such a way that that your view of a tweet is different from another customer’s view.

It’s a database that enables not just the ability to perform an SQL-like search query, but also continuously updates you when the data changes – so that you can modify the UI on the fly.

It’s a database that returns not just flat query results, but a hierarchical tree – allowing you to present the activity in context.

It’s a database that handles not just a few hundred users requesting (reading) data, but a few million users swarming to see the latest action in a sports game or a concert.

It’s a database that organically makes connections between items by understanding the relationships of URLs and #tags to make implicit links in the graph where and when they’re needed. For example a tweet mentioning acme.com should be attached to Acme.com in the tree.

And most importantly, it’s a database company that understands that the opportunity of the Real-time, Social Web is far too big and moves far too quickly to possibly be built by a single vendor. A company that, as a result of this understanding, chooses open standards over proprietary formats; Partnership with best-of-breed partners over trying to build mediocre versions of everything by itself.

Polls, Ratings, Comments, Live Blogging, Forums, Data Bridging, Data Enriching, Visualization, Moderation, Curation, Analytics Game Mechanics, Authentication… the list is endless. They are all transformed by the Real-time web. They must all be part of Real-time as a Service.

And finally, Real-time as a Service is about service. Enterprise grade support. Best in class uptime. White label.

That’s Real-time as a Service.

Further Reading

• Another way to describe it here.
• Here are some Case Studies for what you can build with such a service.

It’s certainly very slick, but it’s a few years behind FB.

I mean that not just in timing and network effects, but in the much more strategic sense of platform ambition. FB.com was the FB strategy 4 years ago. FB is now going for the rest of the web. It’s reach and role as an identity provider and social infrastructure player makes it much more important (and harder to beat) than launching a cool new service. So hopefully the Google+ team is thinking WAY beyond this as a destination site when they are thinking Google Social Strategy.

So far the broad ranging announcements from the +1 button to Google Analytics adding Social bode well for this being a company wide, product wide refresh. The key to success will be in thinking about the need to compete with FB beyond the walls and products of Google.

The key to that, of course, will be to get deep adoption by major sites.

Update: Upon thinking about it a little more. Google has once again missed an opportunity to play to their strengths. With the document web they played the role of aggregator and algorithmic signal detection system. With the social web, their ideal strategy would be to build the ultimate social inbox. A place where I can navigate, consume AND interact with Facebook + Twitter + Foursquare + Quora +++ in one place.

Instead they created yet another content source.

I recently wrote down the latest version of my belief system. Here it is.

Part 1

Part 2

Over the last few days I have been debating the NYT pay wall on a private email thread of friends.

I didn’t feel the need to post it on my blog because I thought that pay walls were so obviously a losing strategy that it was a waste of time to comment.

But combined with the recent law suit against the Huffingon Post and Arianna Huffington’s eqloquent response yesterday, I felt it was worth while to re-publish my thoughts here. Most of them are based on thinking and writing that I did many years ago around Attention. Most of that old writing has been lost in the blog shuffle. Hopefully one day I will dig it up and re-post it in a safe place.

On to the issue…

The price of content

I believe that people have historically paid for the medium not the content.

They pay for ‘Cable’ not for ‘CNN News’. They pay for ‘The Paper’ not for the content in the newspaper. They pay for ‘CDs’ not for the music on the album.

Also they paid a lot because the medium was perceived to be scarce (scarce materials, scarce shelf space, scarce advertising dollars), scarce talented people.

Consumers are not stupid, they understand (if only somewhere at the back of their mind) that the COST of creating and distributing things has been deflated by a growing list of converging trends.

We live in a world of abundance (in the area of digital content anyway). Shelf space is infinite (database entries), any kid in a basement can make content and there is no physical media anymore so cost of distribution has disappeared as well.

The scarcity now is on the consumption side – Attention is the scarce resource. Value is derived from scarcity.

That’s why on the Internet, Attention allocation systems (Google Search, FB News Feed etc) are attracting traffic, engagement and ultimately profit.

In this new world, the price of content must be reduced significantly as shakeouts and rebalancing occurs – because the cost of producing it is approaching zero.

The more the Music, TV and News industry fight this, the more they leave themselves open to disruption by Google, FB, Twitter and the rest of silicon valley.

This is not even to mention that everyone is producing content now. Tweets, Photos, Videos – it’s abundant. Of course most of it isn’t very ‘good’ by J school standards – but that’s irrelevant. The world has never rewarded good with any consistency.

Also just because content is not good, doesn’t mean it isn’t personally meaningful.

For example, I care more what my child (theoretical child of course) posts to FB than the most important journalist in all the world says on CNN.

But please don’t confuse my dispassionate assessment of the issue as pleasure or happiness at the demise of mainstream media though.

I am simply stating the facts because without understanding those we can’t begin to change them (if that’s what the media world decided to do).

In terms of making a judgement of those facts, I think that curators who weave and summarize a broader narrative in the form of ‘reporting’ are critical for an informed citizenship and a functional democracy. I believe in it so much that I have dedicate my life to helping mainstream media companies staying relevant and co-writing things like this: http://aboutecho.com/2010/08/18/essay-real-time-storytelling/

But I also believe that mainstream mass media broke an ancient (and by ancient, I mean as old as rudimentary human communication) pattern of people telling each other personal stories vs. getting all their stories/news from editorialized mass broadcasts.

The Internet may just be restoring the balance. The result is some massive restructuring of inflated budgets, processes, offices, costs etc. While we’re in the middle of that restructuring, it looks like a media apocalypse. Until it settles down and a new equilibrium is found.

Here’s what Arianna wrote on the subject:

The key point that the lawsuit completely ignores (or perhaps fails to understand) is how new media, new technologies, and the linked economy have changed the game, enabling millions of people to shift their focus from passive observation to active participation — from couch potato to self-expression. Writing blogs, sending tweets, updating your Facebook page, editing photos, uploading videos, and making music are options made possible by new technologies.

The same people who never question why someone would sit on a couch and watch TV for eight hours straight can’t understand why someone would find it rewarding to weigh in on the issues — great and small — that interest them. For free. They don’t understand the people who contribute to Wikipedia for free, who maintain their own blogs for free, who tweet for free, who constantly refresh and update their Facebook pages for free, and who want to help tell the stories of what is happening in their lives and in their communities… for free.

Free content — shared by people who want to connect, share their passions, and have their opinions heard — fuels much of what appears on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Yelp, Foursquare, TripAdvisor, Flickr, and YouTube. As John Hrvatska, a commenter on the New York Times, wrote of the Tasini suit, “So, does this mean when YouTube was sold to Google that all the people who posted videos on YouTube should have been compensated?” (And Mr. Hrvatska no doubt contributed that original and well-reasoned thought without any expectation he’d be paid for it. He just wanted to weigh in.)

Read more on her post

Update

And here’s a bit of ‘Free Content’ – A conversation I had on Twitter wish someone who disagreed with this post.

Yesterday we announced a new Echo product called StreamServer.

There is very little more I can say that Khris Loux has not already said so eloquently on stage at the #e2 launch event

When you work so hard and long on something (depending on how you look at it, StreamServer was either 15, 2.5 or 1 year in the making) its hard to sum it all up in one, 1 hour event.

But that’s what we tried to do.

We tried to thread the needle between a contemporary story about activity data, the existential change (read: opportunity or threat) occurring on the web as traffic and monetization flows to proprietary social networking platforms, the opportunity for every major node on the web to be just as powerful and innovative, the need for open standards and powerful cloud services as the basis of the the rebuttal and our deep desire to make this an industry wide effort. We tried to communicate the important role of aggregation and the pivotal job of mainstream media, e-commerce, entertainment, startup and agencies play in curating activity information for the masses.

We also tried to communicate that this was not just a pipe dream, but rather a commercial reality for major customers. A solution running at scale. A new distribution and monetization opportunity for 3rd party devs and a future ready piece of infrastructure for media companies.

I think we did the best job possible at threading all these stories, and doing it with a human, authentic voice through the lens of customer and partner experiences.

I’m proud of the work we’ve done so far, and the tireless efforts of the Echo team and our customer/partner devs.

And all of that being said, though, we are only at the beginning. We have just planted the first seed and I look forward to helping it grow.

So what is StreamServer in my words?

It is the real-time, social scale database that Twitter, Facebook, Quora, Foursquare and others built, delivered as an ec2 style cloud service. Turn it on, and forget about managing the data or scaling the infrastructure.

It is the first of its kind and it will hopefully form the basis of many new companies as they deliver many new, novel and innovative experiences to customers and end users everywhere.

And it’s a bet on the future of open standards, developer ecosystems, a heterogeneous web made up of first class social nodes.

It’s Real-time as a Service.

Denis, one of our superstar engineers, took these pics on his recent tour of the Echo data center. I thought I’d share!

Echo is excited to announce the addition of Ron Bouganim, VP of Corporate Development and Partnerships, and Kristin Hersant, VP of Marketing to our management team! These additions come at a time of strong growth for Echo, who is currently serving over 1 billion real-time streams per month for brands in social tv, social music, social news, social sports and social commerce. Both Ron and Kristin are uniquely positioned to help fuel the adoption of Echo’s platform and the rapid expansion of real-time web in 2012.

You can read all about the new hires in our press release. Stay tuned for more exciting announcements soon to come!