ambient

Both GigaOm and TechCrunch are abuzz today with news about Ning 2.0, the recently revamped tool to allow anyone to ‘build a MySpace.’ Other players in this space include the recently acquired five across and peopleaggregator.

These feel like someone is giving me the fuselage of a plane and telling me to fly. Pinning down what makes high-growth social networks valuable could probably be someone’s dissertation, but it’s not the availability of features like pictures and video widgets. It may indeed be the aggregate of all of these features, but somehow I doubt that this can be turned into a valuable community just by spewing it out in little bits.

I’m no expert here, but in my estimation there are three social networks that are really successful. They are by no means as highly trafficked as MySpace, but they are also different from MySpace in that they actually encourage offline interaction. The first, with which I have the most familiarity is CouchSurfing.com. Its goal is simple - provide a place online for people looking for a place to crash to connect.

We traveled around the world two years ago and we met amazing people through this site. Here in San Diego, we host people all the time. Sure, it has some of the basic features that social networks these days use but, comparatively speaking, it is a low-tech, even campy, website. But I now have friends that I communicate with on a regular basis in Turkey, New Zealand, all over Europe. And these are people that I’ve shared meals with and met their folks.

Next up is Craigslist. Born out of the ideas originating with The Well, I don’t think many people have truly taken the time to understand how revolutionary Craigslist really is. My buddy Austin told me the best story I have yet heard about Craigslist. He posted some items for sale once when he was moving. A lady came to look at his stuff and they ended up in an hour long conversation about life and forgiveness.

Finally, Meetup.com is the site that I never use but highly respect. Their approach to building a place for local, grassroots campaigns does not need to be elaborated on here but, again, it meets and exceeds my criteria for successful online communities: it encourages offline interaction and views itself as the facilitator of community, not the community itself.

You think the collective jack-off session we call MySpace will ever result in those kinds of stories, with any kind of statistical regularity? I don’t think so. Instead we get this. I’ve been able to connect with old friends through MySpace, and I know it’s great for indy bands, but in terms of pound for pound community value-add, it just doesn’t stack up, IMHO.

As an entrepreneur, I would be much more proud of having built Craigslist or CouchSurfing, despite the fact that MySpace was sold for half a billion dollars and the others were not / will not be. If I had to identify one changing trend in our society it would be that a growing, and increasingly important minority values true community over economy. And I’m with them.

I watched a small protest march take place today in Mira Mesa. Mira Mesa is a suburban / office park wasteland. As I watched, I thought “how pointless.” There is no there there at which to protest.

This prompted three questions:

1. Do protests work anymore? Protests depend on disruption, and you need centrality (eg. a town square) in order to disrupt. Suburbs, by definition, are the opposite of centrality. I wonder if this is by design.

2. I sometimes wonder if the planners for the war in iraq actually counted on the insurgency to use as a training field for putting down urban protests. Without having been to Iraq, it’s hard to say. But my experience in other third-world countries does seem to support this hypothesis from an urban design perspective. Third world countries with no central infrastructure / town square are remarkably like the suburbs we live in today. Again, by design?

3. Does protest work in a country with lots of people, or does it all get lost in the static of every day life?

Not surprisingly, I’m nowhere near the first person to ask these questions. MIT has on their OpenCourseWare site a course entitled “Urban Design Politics.” In 2004, Jonathan Korman actually asked the exact same questions, and there is at least one book on the topic.

Andrew Leonard, at the excellent “How the World Works” has written a biting commentary on China’s environmental practices in light of their explosive growth over the last decade. As we continue to redefine and include new players into the perpetrators of exploitative practices that are often a part of globalization, China will likely appear again and again as one of the major culprits.

What I found equally interesting were the comments, including this scathing review of Chinese capitalist culture:

China is like a hyper active spoiled and rich 14 year old watching MTV on acid - soaking up all Western culture, private label brands, capitalism and the absolute worship of MONEY - they cannot distinguish good and bad taste, good or bad art, good or bad values, basics of honest communication and the entire warp speed nature of their rapid transition from 2nd or 3rd world agricultural society to becoming a dominant world super power, has impacted on their core values like a tsunami. Not an accident that they have been successful traders for 10,000 years - they now epitomize Glengarry Glen Ross values on a global scale. David Mamet Economic Perversities in China while smoking crack and in non stop meth craze.

And

A young colleague of mine, smart, educated, shy 25 year old, knocked down an old woman to get a taxi and told me that’s how things are in China. If you wait, if you’re polite, you’ll be left behind.

This last comment rings true for anyone who has personally experienced the extreme distaste that Chinese people seem to have for waiting in line.
It’s easy for this sort of analysis to come off sounding like frantic xenophobia. It does echo, at least in nuance, the fears that Americans harbored towards Japan in the late 80s and early 90s.

I have never been to China so I can’t speak to these accounts firsthand.

In many ways, the language reminds me of the language DeTocqueville and others. (althogh he was more admiring than these commenters are) used in his essays on American culture.

There is indeed an irony here, and it is this: America will one day experience firsthand the negative effects of its own biggest export — greed.

What should be sobering to us is twofold.

First, the Chinese, by these accounts anyway, don’t appear to have any moral qualms about exploitative greed while at least we pay lip service to a moral code that emphasizes the value of human life and the environment over financial gain.

Second, as our own societies inch ever closer to authoritarian policies, our leaders may be watching China as a model for an even more aggressive breed of capitalism for the 21st century, one equally free from the fetters of moral concern.

The Reuters Second Life bureau is reporting that Comverse Technology has released a Java mobile client which allows users to access the Second Life virtual world via their mobile phones. This is most likely a first response, and a very interesting innovation, to Linden Lab’s open sourcing of the Second Life client last month.

Jon Udell interviews Antonio Rodriguez, the founder of my favorite photo sharing site, Tabblo, in his latest podcast.

1. Schedulable named pipes callable with dynamic parameters from the URL. More string functions.

3. Plugin / extension system addressable by URLs

4. I need a sense of reliability / scalability. What if I want to use pipes to index 1 million pages and send the results to me via xml?

5. Other output formats, including xml. RSS output is very cool though, and it currently exists. I can create widgets based on pipes that I create.

6. APIs to programmatically create Pipes

The fact that I could even think about asking for these things in a generic service is mind-boggling because 2 days ago, I would have thought that these possibilities were years away. This is the another step in turning the internet into a real operating system. Openness would be nice.

Nice services to have around pipes:

1. A means to contact pipe authors in order to get my content added

2. Digg for Pipes.

I started to play with Pipes a little this morning.

My first pipe simply takes the output of this blog, pipes it through BabelFish to translate it into Japanese, and output the result. The character encoding seems screwed up when you view the result and, of course, the quality of the translation is subjected to the mercies of BabelFish’s translation algorithms. However, I’m very impressed with the potential that this sort of ad-hoc content merging / transformation holds.

Some of the more interesting pipes on the homepage are a list of TechCrunch citations, the very innovative New York Times Through Flickr pipe, and another one that merges all of the Yahoo Blogs. The last example demonstrates a different approach to creating RSS reader subscriptions and is more akin to the RSS-reader-as-News-River use case.

Perhaps an overarching trend here is a new breed of services / tools that allow a crossover from simple (or powerful) customizations on popular tools to publishing those customizations in order to make them useful to more people than just one. That would be yet another example of what makes the internet so powerful in a long history of innovation swapping.

Steve Yegge’s excellent essay last month on building software platforms touched on this as well. GreaseMonkey, for Firefox, is a better extension mechanism for Firefox in many ways that Firefox’s own plugin system. He’s not the first person to show me that many of the ideas from UNIX are alive and well on the internet, but he is the first that I know of to view Firefox as being as much Emacs as it is a web browser.

The inevitable question will be how to monetize this service, but the nice thing about it being developed by Yahoo is that they 1) have the resources to develop the features for awhile without worrying about how to make money from it and 2) have been very good with their acquisitions (including del.icio.us and flickr) by not overhauling what makes them work so well in order to fit into some convoluted business model.

Besides, the potential to monetize this service, both for Yahoo and, if Yahoo is smart, for users / publishers (notice the ongoing convergence there) is huge. As search and findability become increasingly mobilized, contextual, and regionalized (and tied directly to local and offline conversions), the ability to fund a network infrastructure that creates even more conversion opportunities between services, the opportunity is staggering. And if Yahoo is really smart, they will figure out a way to make even more money by empowering their users to first make money with the services they provide.

Exciting times ahead.

Read/Write Web ran a story today on Zlio.com, a startup from France that lets anybody easily create a store online. Does this sound familiar at all? Isn’t this what Paul Graham sold to Yahoo (now known as Yahoo Small Business) in 1998?

It’s easy for entrepreneurs focused on developing new businesses on the internet to miss opportunities by paying attention to markers. What are markers?

Russ Mann gave me this metaphor. In the Chinese / Japanese game of Go, you can occupy a great deal of territory just by placing a single marker. In business, this translates over to the strategy of trying corner a market by being the first one there. Would-be technological innovators often are fooled by these markers and ignore the opportunity to further innovate and deliver valuable services. In my mind, I had always treated Yahoo Small Business as a solution that had cornered the market on self-service store engines. In reality, it was just a marker.

Zlio.com is one example of a company that hasn’t been fooled by the markers. There is almost always room for improvement and innovation. Turning that innovation into a viable business model is another problem altogether.

NBC’s Jeff Zucker attacked YouTube the other day for not ensuring that copyrighted materials are being protected.

Here’s an insight: YouTube is not in the business of sharing videos.

YouTube is selling televisions.

It’s up to television networks to figure out how to make money on tv. It always has been.

Yahoo released a new service callled Pipes.

Tim O’Reilly immediately got it because this development is, in many ways, he and the rest of us have been waiting for ever since Jon Udell captured our imaginations with his comparison of internet to the venerable UNIX operating system.

It’s nice to read about the excitement coming from the developers (e.g. Kevin) of this unique service because it demonstrates something that most people assumed Yahoo had lost long ago: the ability to have fun.

Yahoo’s stock price and their lower than industry average P/E. Might be a good buy.