uncommon sense

Flying

2011-11-13T14:16:00.001-08:00

Sebastian, a photo by brondmo on Flickr.

Question everything...

2011-11-13T14:12:00.001-08:00

Dieter Rams, a photo by brondmo on Flickr.

Nokia Pulse is live

2011-11-13T13:50:00.000-08:00

Nokia Pulse is a new way to check in with the people you care about the most - close friends and family. There are no public options. It's just for the people you choose to connect with in groups that you or others set up.

This is the follow-on to Plum... yet so much better and cooler. Try it out.

Why I’m Rooting for Nokia. And Why You Should Too.

2011-10-31T18:04:00.000-07:00

Last week was a big week for Nokia. One year after Stephen Elop joined as CEO in a definitive turn around situation, and after burning platforms and painful restructurings, Nokia made it clear that – to paraphrase Monty Python – “it’s not dead yet”.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop giving pep talk to senior execs before Nokia World last week in UK

The press and blogosphere echoed big announcements at Nokia World in London where the company introduced a family of hot new phones for the developing world and two very sleek new smartphones running the Microsoft WindowsPhone operating system. The energy was good and the reception decidedly positive.

And for those who cared to take a closer look there were a number of smaller, exciting announcements too. Ranging from very cool WebGL powered 3D maps, to a really innovative public transport app, a free turn-by-turn navigation app on Nokia WPs, an augmented reality application leveraging the Nokia location platform and Nokia Pulse, a whole new way to think about checking in and small group communication as one and the same. A lot of innovation and a focus on delivering real value to the only persons who matter: you, the customers.

The naysayers who have written Nokia off for dead may want to reconsider.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m not a neutral party in this matter. Nokia pays my salary and benefits. I have many great Nokia colleagues that I plan to continue working with. I grew up in Norway and have an emotional attachment to the brand and personal desire to see a company founded and headquartered in Finland continue to be a dominant player in the mobile space.

Yet, my case is not primarily based on self-interest. It’s based on your interest.

If you believe as I do that healthy competition ultimately benefits customers and that innovation is best fueled by people from different cultures and with different perspectives and ideas collaborating and competing across the globe. Well, then you’ll want Nokia to be successful in its quest to become the mobile comeback kid. Apple and Google are great companies that have built good products. Yet there is so much more innovation and value still to be unlocked and it will take more than just a couple of Silicon Valley behemoths to keep the mobile party fun.

Two years ago the company I co-founded, Plum, was acquired by Nokia. The last two years have not always been easy. I admit that on more than one occasion I looked in the mirror and asked myself why in the world I was working so hard for a company that most people in Silicon Valley, where I live, had written off as a dinosaur on a death march towards extinction. And to be clear, a lot in the company was screwed up. Our lack of a modern software / OS platform, our lack of a proper cloud infrastructure, and our organizational complexity to name a few. Our problems were slowing us down and creating an environment of enormous friction and inefficiency at best, apathy at worst.

BUT, and there is a big but in this story, things have changed. When I joined, almost everyone I spoke to knew that change was needed. Still, change is hard. Change is painful. Change is complicated. Yet, change is what has happened. Every day I’ve seen change and with every day the rate of change accelerates.

Is Nokia out of the woods? Probably not. But it’s out of the dark. There is light up ahead and everybody in the company can now see a path towards that light.

I live and work in Silicon Valley. I know what a myopic worldview we often have out here. We tend to think that if something new didn’t happen somewhere between SOMA in San Francisco and Sunnyvale, it can’t be innovative, creative or hot. Silicon Valley is amazing. But let's not forget; so is the rest of the world.

And the rest of the world is BIG. What I love about Nokia is that we’re focused every day on the amazing rest of the world. The people in the rest of the world have great ambitions. They want more. They have great aspirations. They are amazing.

So the next time you’re considering getting a new mobile phone or simply looking something up on a map. The next time you need directions or want to always stay checked in with your family and close friends, I have a suggestion. Try Nokia.

Hey, you don’t have to buy anything you don’t like or don’t want. All I ask is that you simply do yourself a small favor. Explore choice and give something new, something colorful, something that understands the amazing rest of the world… give it a chance. You may even find your own everyday becomes a tad more colorful. Oh, and hell yes… you’ll help pay my salary too.

First Ride on Amazing new Mountain Bike

2011-10-31T17:42:00.000-07:00

I posting more bike pictures. No good reason why, other than I think they're really beautiful. Here is my newest addition. This time its an Ibis mountain bike. I rode it for the first time this week-end. AMAZING. Enjoy the photos (taken with the new Nokia Lumia 800 WP ;-)

The New Bike Arrives

2011-05-01T19:38:00.000-07:00

In my last post I wrote about designing a cool new bike at Mission Bicycle. They finished building it today. And here it is:

And it rides like a charm too!

Build your own

2011-03-27T11:50:00.001-07:00

Mine is going to be unpainted steel gray with silver and orange accents. Leather saddle and riser handlebars. I'm not audacious or crazy enough to opt for a fixie (fixed gear). Instead trying to decide whether to be pure with a single speed freewheel, or go with the Shimano Nexus eight speed hub.

Context: I've decided to get a city bike. So last week-end I spent a couple of hours at Mission Bicycle on Valencia Street in San Francisco "designing" my new two-wheeler. I should probably point out that by hard-core bike enthusiast terms I am not technically "designing" the bike. I'm simply picking and choosing all the components, colors and options in order to get a custom assembled bike. And that's exactly what I want.

Here is what "my bike" looked like last Saturday.

A few other customer's bikes were "a bit" further along hanging from the ceiling like art, fully assembled. (Lots more eye-candy here.)

The bikes are assembled around a few stock components such as the frame. I chose my frame size (with expert assistance from Jefferson the General Manager since I didn't know what I was doing) and then the fun began. Between the large variety of colors and combinations of parts I put my personal touch on the design of my bike, and then they hand assemble it for me. Very cool!

They have made some interesting and appealing decisions such as not adding a logo on the frame. This is going to be MY bike. It'll take 3-4 weeks before they actually complete. The wait actually adds to my total experience. I'm walking around excited to see how it all comes out in the end. I can't wait to see it and make final tweaks once it's done.... so I can begin to criss cross the city on my gray, silver and orange two-wheeler.

While Mission Bicycle "designed" the frame of my new bike, it is being manufactured overseas. My only complaint! Why can't they manufacture them in the US?

Mission Bicycle is pointing to an interesting trend of increasing personalization and customization options of an wide array of the products and services.

We've grown accustomed to personal iPhone covers, laser etchings on the back of mobile phones and laptop stickers as a way to express our individuality through our tools. Cool skiing stickers on the back of my laptop has become a way to say "hey I'm more than just another a bland corporate drone". Just like fashion has been a way to express our individuality, or not, simple product customization is becoming a way to do the same.

When I recently got a new car I configured it online. Even your new home can be now be designed and customized online from prefabricated components getting a semi-custom high quality product without the price tag normally associated with building a custom home.

In a world where almost everything is available in original and knock-off versions with a quick search online, I want the bike I ride, the computer bag I carry, the home I build to be a reflection of my values and my style without spending the huge premium that is normally associated with custom design and production.

Mission Bicycle offers assembly of a wide variety of standard components in order to build a product that fits my style and need. If you're looking for a city bike I suggest giving them a look. It's a good quality product AND you can make it a personal statement too. I predict this is just the beginning. New manufacturing techniques are going to allow us to custom assemble a larger and larger range of products until it becomes the expected norm.

What I Learned from Watching a Baker in Brooklyn

2010-05-08T13:59:00.000-07:00

I learned a tiny bit about what it takes to run a great bakery this morning. And not just any Bakery. I am sitting at Bakeri at the corner of N 8^th Street and Wythe Ave, in hipster infested Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Yet, in spite of a clientele that must exceed the national average of tattoos per square inch by a significant margin, walking into Bakeri is like stepping into a time capsule from a different era.

Try to imagine what having a sensual bread and pastry fantasy dream would be like? Bakeri, which in full disclosure was conceived and is owned and operated by my sister Nina, is that dream.

The beautiful marble counter, antique furniture and décor has been brought to Brooklyn from Argentina by Nina and her husband Pablo. The space is just small enough to be intimate, but not so small that it feels crammed. I saw people waiting for their latte for ten minutes, all the time with a smile on their faces.

As I sit by the door watching customers walk in, they stretch up on their toes a bit, peering to get a look in the counter at today’s selection from the baking elves in the basement. Their faces are filled with wonderment and eager anticipation. Yet their expressions reveal something else too. It took me a while to figure it out. Then I realize that it is a simple look of happiness. They are happy the way young children are happy and delighted when you bring them their favorite meal on their birthday.

Bakeri it turns out, sells happiness.

I visited Nina in the basement this morning and witnessed the toil and care that produces cinnamon rolls that taste like your grandmother could have made them and savory bread puddings so tasty you don’t want to eat them due to the inevitable truth that every bite will fill you up while causing the pudding to disappear. For me though, the all time favorites are the “bolle med sjokolade” -- baked bun with chocolate -- and the “skolebrød” made with the same cardamom spiced dough as the “bolle”, but filled with vanilla custard. Even better than the ones I had as a kid growing up in Norway.

I don’t drink coffee, but the New York Times recently rated Bakeri as one of the top places to get your morning java fix in all of NYC. I hear it’s really good.

I am nibbling on a baguette that any French baker would be proud to call his own when some questions pop into my mind. How do you make a “product” that consistently pleases and even makes people happy? How do you create something that causes people to wait with eager anticipation to discover the delights of your hard toil?

I’ve been in the “product business” most of my life. I don’t bake artisanal breads. In fact I don’t even know how to make a good cappuccino, but I have developed many software products over the years. Sitting here today, I realize that what Nina is doing to make Bakeri stand apart, what gives it a special flavor that the guy next door simply cannot copy, her secret sauce if you like, relies on the same ingredients that all great products are built of.

So what are these ingredients? Simple: vision, commitment, drive, focus and accountability. In order to bake a standout product Nina is a hands on product owner involved in all the issues that affect her business, small and large. Yet she has also assembled a dedicated team that has ownership and responsibility to take the ingredients and mix them in a way that meets daily demand and to respond to customer feedback in real time. Most important, the product evolves and improves over time in response to seasonal, team and customer influences. Bakeri is an agile operation in the truest sense.

It’s not clear that Nina could scale Bakeri to become a big business. More important, it’s not clear that she wants to. She knows who her customer is and she is true to the quality of her product. The recipe that Nina is following to make Bakeri a high quality product, is creating strong customer loyalty, is causing the word of mouth to travel fast and has made the New York Times write about them several times in their first few months of operation.

I doesn’t matter whether you are a Fortune one hundred corporation or a fifteen person operation in Brooklyn, the recipe, ingredients and organizational structure you need to create great product are the same. Loose track of this and your product will become stale.

Acceleration and Tolerance - 01022010

2010-01-03T20:20:00.000-08:00

If you enjoy reading predictions and reflections at the beginning of a new year, like I do, then Twitter is your friend. During the first few of days of this new decade, people I follow are tweeting and re-tweeting overwhelmingly pessimistic reviews of the past ten years and a mix of generally optimistic predictions for the next ten.

As I sit down to write my own new year predictions I have iTunes – surely one of the winners of the past decade – on auto shuffle. And what starts playing, if not my current favorite Norwegian artist Thomas Dybdahl chiming in with “Honey I told you, these things never last. One of these days now, you’ll start dreaming of the past.” That kind of sums it up.

Said differently, if something seems too good to last, it won’t. Things are never as bad as they seem and they’ll look better at a distance and in the past. The future is a pretty blank slate and ours to screw up. In summary: life isn’t what it used to be, and it probably never was!

I know no more than you average reader of the New York Times, Wired, the Economist and blogs, blogs, blogs about green technology, energy and transportation infrastructure, biotech and bioinformatics, economics, climate change, politics, cultural trends, architecture and design, and many of the other topics that will shape our next decade. So I’ll constrain myself to sharing a few thoughts and observations about trends in the area that I spend much of my time obsessing about, namely how we make computers and phones become more social communications devices.

Moore’s law tells us that the long-term trend in information processing is on an exponential curve. Every two years capacity doubles – storage capacity, compute power, etc. – while the price stays the same. This trend has held up for the past couple of decades and it will probably continue to be a primary driver of the rate of change in all areas of our lives in the foreseeable future.

For instance, twenty years ago mobile phones where still an anomaly in the form of big, heavy built in “bricks” tethered to cars. Ten years ago, at the peak of the dot-com bubble, there were four hundred million mobile phones in the world. Today I believe the number is 4.4 billion. And the phones we buy today for a few hundred dollars are as powerful as the laptops costing a few thousand dollars a decade ago. Try figuring out where that curve takes us in the next ten years. It’s daunting.

Everything continues to accelerate. I predict even greater rates of change and here are my trend picks:

All about people – where do you get your information these days? Who answers your questions? If your answer is Google, Twitter and Facebook then you’re a part of the future. If not, then it soon will be. “Normal people" will become a greater and greater part of the fabric of how we engage with information, news, entertainment and commerce. Bottom up distribution and openness will define how we discover and choose our news, eat our food and consume our entertainment. User reviews based on earned reputation, overlapping open and closed networks of people sharing real-time advice, feedback and input and a long-tail of user contributed information will become the core fabric of how we learn and consume.

A return to intimacy – after a decade of putting it all out there, this decade will see a return to intimate, personal and private dialogue and sharing. Public sharing and self-expression is here to stay. BUT, it will be complemented by more private means of engaging with the people we really care about and trust. Private sharing and conversations will emerge as an important layer on top of the public sharing ecosystem. Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and many others have been built on business models that encourage openness and information sharing. The emergence of social networks and smart mobs – where random groups of people (the mobs) contribute and collaborate openly to answer questions aka Wikipedia – were important developments of the last decade. Yet, what has been lost is the private dialogue with room for intimacy and greater personal disclosure. Intimacy will re-emerge through new forms of expression supported by new tools and new business models in the next decade.

Communication, not computing – if you think that the "desktop" interface and computer model is the future, then the coming decade will prove you wrong. Shrinking the computer and calling it a smart phone is fine, but we’ll do much better than that? I have maintained for many years that all computing is all about communication. Whether we’re talking about super computers, laptops, video game devices or mobile phones, all have one thing in common; helping people connect with – communicate with – information, entertainment and other people. When we use Facebook and Twitter, we don’t think about computers, we think about people, information and entertainment. We think about connecting, learning, having fun and sharing. When we put together a spreadsheet we’re communicating information. When typing a search query into Google, we’re looking for information that somebody else is trying to communicate to us. When was the last time you did something that involved a computer that was not about communication and entertainment?

Computers will become less and less visible while information and people will be at the center of everything we do. Even today the computers that power the Internet are in the proverbial “cloud”. When was the last time you thought about what kind of computer powered your favorite web sites? All you see are web pages that can be displayed anywhere. The devices you will use in the next decade will become entirely focused on conversations (people) and experiences (information and entertainment).

Sensors that “see” everything – with the growth of the Internet of things, sensors embedded in the things and devices we use every day will become a rapidly growing, often automatic, input mechanism that fuels new dimensions of the real-time infoscape. For instance, imagine every bicycle connected to the net. (Not hard given that more and more people using a bike have a “phone” in their pocket.) Imagine stepping outside and unlocking a bike from a public bike-stand with your “phone” so you can ride to work. Imagine your bike tracking traffic patterns and the outside temperature. Want to see what parks and beaches are getting crowded, just log on and check with the bikes… Imagine location, orientation, acceleration, speed, temperature, humidity, ambient sound always available from every person with a communication device in their pocket. Then what happens? I sure don't know, but rest assured that the way we think about planning and navigating in our lives will change as much due to ubiquitous sensors as online maps and weather forecasts has changed how we plan trips and travel. Entirely new services and businesses will emerge enabled by public, aggregate real-time data, data and more data.

Experiences and design – many more products and services will emerge built around experiences and design. On-demand customization and personalization will become the expected norm. I have predicted mass customization for a long time. And I will predict it again for this coming decade. Our communications devices, our information portals, our clothes, our carrying cases, our notebooks, our furniture, our transportation devices (cars, bikes, skate boards…) will all be configured and designed to reflect who we are and to meet our individual needs and styles.

Web as platform – the web has become a platform and it will keep on growing in every dimension – ubiquity, speed, storage and breadth of services. I’ll resist the temptation to make another Moore’s law reference and simply remind you how big your hard drive was ten years ago. While the web became the technology and platform of choice for most software developers in the past decade, the same technologies will invade our “peripherals” during the next decade. Web technologies will run on and in everything from hand-held devices, to household appliances to bikes and cars. The Internet of things is the Internet of the next decade. A key enabler will be web technologies.

These are some of my quick reflections. Interested in more? Thanks to some of the people I follow or am “friends” with I came across a few other worthwhile musings and predictions. Read them and laugh:

Five Tech Themes for 2010 - The New York Times Bits Blog’s trend predictions.

Predictions 2010 - John Batelle’s contributions. He’s actually takes a flier on a few such as Apple’s rumored “tablet” computer being a flop. Oh, and he goes back and rates his performance from previous years. Refreshing!

Trends for 2010 - J.D. Meier’s Blog offers a very nice, pretty comprehensive summary of upcoming trends. Includes a comprensive list of references. A very good read!

A VC - Fred Wilson a NYC based Venture Capitalist shares his thoughts about where he’s going to focus this year.

2010’s hottest contenders: 8 products to watch - VentureBeat's contribution. A good, thoughtful roll-up of web services and software products that will make a difference in the next year.

Google’s To-Do List for 2010 - Kevin Kelleher takes a fresh approach on GigaOm and gets the "best prediction quote" award with "Predictions are like Christmas toys — they come tumbling out in late December, only to be cast aside and forgotten a few weeks later.”

This Week On TechCrunch: The seventeen best ‘best-of… …of the year’ (and the decade) lists, of the week - Tongue in cheek roll-up of best-of lists.

Top Ten Digital M&A Deals For 2010 More TechCrunch Silicon Valley navel gazing.

NYT Op-Ed Guest Columnist Ten for the Next Ten - Rock star Bono makes his top ten predictions too. With humor!

Let me end with a wish and plea for some old fashioned, low-tech tolerance.

Diversity, openness and transparency are powerful forces. When matched with tolerance they become unbeatable. I hope that this emerging decade will be one that we can look back on as a decade of openness, acceptance and increased tolerance. Our technologies can and I hope will, fuel openness and transparency and they will connect us to each other and to information like never before. And once we're connected lets recognize that we all have a voice and a choice how we use it. Let's use it to practice tolerance.

Tolerance is something we can all practice in our daily lives. Tolerance does not have to mean acceptance. It simply means making room for points of view and perspectives other than your own. Stay open to influence, integrate a broader range of people, entertainment, information and experiences into your life. It may even make you a happier and more fulfilled person than if any of the above predictions came to fruition.

Nokia to Acquire Plum

2009-09-11T07:31:00.000-07:00

Today it was announced that Plum has been acquired by Nokia in an asset sale. We will join Nokia’s Social Location unit.

Margaret Olson and I started the company in early 2005. It's been a lot of work and a very fun ride. I have learned more from the past four and a half years than any other period in my life. More to come on this shortly.

For now, very excited to have 110,000 new colleagues at Nokia and to move to Berlin in the fall to join the Social Location unit there.

Not so social networking

2009-05-08T16:20:00.000-07:00

Kara Swisher posted an interview with me: Plum’s Hans Peter Brøndmo Speaks About the Less-Social Social Network! on her Boomtown blog on Friday. I like the "less social social network" angle. It captures what we are doing quite well. Here is the video interview she did with me a few weeks ago at our "swanky" SF office.

We are all obsessing about how we can blurt out anything about everything in increasingly small and public chunks. We can follow Opra, Ashton Kutcher and and now the White House on Twitter and have thousands of friends on Facebook. While, all this is fun and useful, it's such a small part of how we actually share and communicate.

Personal sharing and personal communication whether with family, close friends or co-workers is a critical part of my everyday life. Plum Groups has become the main way I have private, contextual, ongoing, social exchanges with the people in my real life while Twitter is where I get bombarded with the fun, funny, interesting and trivial status updates of people I've deemed worth paying attention to.

Breaking News: Norway to acquire Plum

2009-04-01T13:31:00.000-07:00

Check it out, it's official: Norway to acquire Plum in asset sale

Really excited to be moving back to the 'ol country this summer. It will be a Plum assignment.

Who owns my address book?

2009-03-18T12:40:00.000-07:00

There is a simple answer to that question: I do. I own my address book. You own yours. The question should really be: "Who will control my address book?"

I am speaking tomorrow on a panel at the ThinkMobile conference in NYC. The title of the panel is - you guessed it - Who owns my address book?

This is an interesting subject. As Facebook just announced Facebook Connect for iPhone and Twitter announces Open Authentication (OAuth) support it is pretty clear that there is a battle for my identity.

And that's really what this is about. It's a question of who controls my identity. A part of my identity is who I am connected to. My address book, or to use social-web speak, my social graph, is an important part of who I am. This is really just the beginning though, because the really interesting data turns out not to be who is in my social graph, but who I interact with.

Therefore step one in the social graph wars is controlling my identity. Once you control my identity you become my passport (MSFT pun intended) for signing in. Next you become my social coordinator, helping me stay in touch with my friends from anywhere. And finally you become my event coordinator and activity tracker. At this point you know who I am, who I know, who I talk to where I go (on the web and in real life) and presumably where I live too.

If that's not the holy grail of marketing information then I don't know what is. Check out my February post Who owns you(r electronic soul)? for more thoughts on the subject.

More during my panel talk tomorrow.

When the conversation gets too big

2009-03-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

Is there such a thing as a "big conversation"? I think the answer is "Twitter" -- a conversation with a lot of talking, some listening and a falling signal to noise ratio.

A common objection I hear to Twitter is along the lines of: "what's so interesting about knowing when people are putting their kids to bed or eating dinner". And yes, there is a lot of fairly meaningless or trivial chatter in the Tweetsphere. Yet, the bigger challenge for the social utilities and microblogging sites like Facebook and Twitter is not handling the trivia, it's about how to keep the conversations from getting "too big" and hence too noisy and ultimately irrelevant or useless due to its sheer volume and lack of context.

CNET posted At SXSW, attendees confront Twitter saturation on Sunday and the New York Times Bits blog made similar points here: Social Media Overload Allows Web Apps to Shine. They both raise the question of whether the utility of microblogging, tagging and following breaks down at scale.

What is the value of sifting through tweet, after tweet after retweet from people that you don't or barely know? Information? Entertainment? Awareness? Probably all of the above. The question dujour is when the flow of information starts loosing its value due to its unfiltered volume.

I've been spending more time reading Tweets in the last few months than I spend looking at my Facebook feed. Why? Presumably because I find value in the experience. In fact I do. This shift in behavior is probably the reason why Facebook adopted a more Twitter-like user interface last week.

But the questions being raised about Twitter and the new Facebook interface is mostly about how we manage the overwhelming input. My question is different. I want to know where the "conversations" happen? You know **real** conversations with people interacting and actually listening to each other. Where can I discuss the things I discover in a format that makes sense. Where can I ask for advice and input from people I know?

The tweet spout is an interesting experiment. For the experiment to become a permanent fixture in my life I need to be able to engage in personal conversations with the people I trust and respect. And those conversations have to be separate from the ever growing public Facebook and Twitter flows, or else it just becomes too noisy, too impersonal and "too big".

Can you be social and private at the same time?

2009-03-11T13:14:00.000-07:00

Sure you can. Plum Groups launched today and we are making a bet that the answer to that question is a resounding yes.

I'm social when I have dinner with my family.
I'm social when I play soccer with friends.
I'm social when I hang at the proverbial water cooler chatting with people at work.

Each one of these happenings, and many, many more in my daily life are private. I have a constant need to have social interactions and exchange information, news and "status updates" with different groups of people.

Plum Groups is built on Plum's social media sharing platform to accomplish just that - make it easy to share the things you care about with the people you care about. Private or public. You decide.

I know I need it. Hopefully you do too.

Small is beautiful – bringing intimacy to social networking

2009-03-09T20:28:00.000-07:00

Hanging out on Facebook today is social like going to a party or reunion with 300 people you went to school with is social.

Sure it can be fun. You run into a lot of folks you know or used to know. Some you may be happy to see. Others you say a polite hello to, but you really don't want to hear about the minutia of their lives, see pictures of their kids, learn about the struggles they are having at work.

It's just not all that interesting. Now imagine that the party happens every day. Phuh!
Today's social networking sites are not well suited for intimate and truly personal social sharing and communication. That's because social networks are getting bigger by the minute, and as they grow they are becoming impersonal and turning into directories of people you know, with a a "bulletin board" and an inbox. Or according to a recent article in The Economist:

...people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project

Don't get me wrong. I love Facebook and look to my newsfeed as valuable source of updates of a certain kind. When my “friends” post status messages that are funny or informative or news articles that match my interest it provides great value. The same applies to Twitter and other social utilities. Yet I do not feel comfortable sharing intimate or personal information in this environment because I would be sharing it with almost four hundred people ranging from family, to friends, to high school buddies, to business associates and sundry others. So when I considered where to share photos from a recent family trip, Facebook was not an option for me.

Yet I do want my close friends and family to see and comment on my personal photos. I also want to post status updates and have various other online social exchanges with different groups of friends and colleagues.

There is no good solution for more private, group oriented social sharing today. Sharing is an all or nothing proposition. As I have scoured the landscape I find that traditional online groups services like Yahoo! Groups or Google Groups can be a partial solution to my social sharing needs. Sometimes private blogs or email may suffice. All useful tools, but they don’t support the powerful ability that social networks have to post status updates, post media, comment and easily track all of the above (and more) in an “activity feed”.

We need something new, something I am going to call social networks for groups, or just “social groups”. Social groups are kind of a marriage of the functionality you find in social portals like Facebook and traditional online groups services like Yahoo Groups. Social groups provide a way for groups of people with a real-world connections to engage and share in an environment where they don't have to worry about who sees what. Social groups are for groups of people who already know each other, mirroring “real life” relationships and connecting us online.

Against a backdrop of high unemployment, economic uncertainty and globalism we seek connection, a sense of belonging and community. Social groups can support connection and community by giving people who know and care about each other ways to easily share and stay in touch through private and intimate ongoing and ephemeral exchanges. Why should there only be one place to congregate and “be social”? And does it make sense that all your four hundred “friends” are there every time you want to share something? In real life you belong to different social groups. Some open. Some closed. Why not online?Social groups are a natural evolution of the social net. The future of social networks has to be a future that facilitates sharing and discussing the things we care about with the different groups of people we care about. We will belong to many social groups and they will by their nature be smaller than today's social networks.

Small is beautiful because small is intimate and because small is personal.

FB and T’s bad date

2009-03-06T14:44:00.000-08:00

FB: Hey T I’d like to buy you.

T: That’ll be $400million

FB: Now, now, I like you and all, but really! You’re just a status update.

T: That’ll be $450million.

FB: Hmmm, I thought you said $400?

T: That’ll be $500million

FB: You’re pissing me off. I’m the giant in this space you know. I could crush you.

T: Hold on. I’m down.

FB: My status feature is more sophisticated than your entire service. You should really let me buy you.

T: That’ll be $600million

FB: Ok, that’s enough. I’ve been trying to play ball with you and am willing to be flexible, but if I were you I wouldn’t poke a giant gift horse in the eye.

T: That’ll be $700million

FB: That’s it! I’m outta here. You just wait, I’m going to blow your lamo status updates out of the water.

six months later

G: T, you're just a poor man's email system.

T: Email system? That’ll be $1billion.

FB: Now I am more open just like you T and I have celebrities with profiles. I am going to make you wish you weren’t such a twit back then. Just you wait and see.

T: That'll be... hold on, let me think about it for a sec...

What kind of friend(er) are you?

2009-02-25T17:16:00.000-08:00

What do you do when somebody "friends" you on Facebook?
a) Hit accept
b) Ask yourself "Who is this person?", "Do I know them?" before you hit accept
c) Apply some kind of rule to determine whether they should be a part of your "friend" circle
d) You're not really bought into the whole social networking, Facebook, Twitter thing.

There is a new social order. The one who has the most friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter is the cool one. Kind of like high school.

But to what point? How do you use these new social networks and utilities? For broadcasting trivia and opinions? Marketing your company? Self promotion? All the above.

I'm fine with having hundreds of friends and followers, but it means I'm on a soap box every time I post or comment.

Control and privacy is becoming a growing issue. Is there such a thing as intimate communications and connections in these environments? I think not. It's fun. Its public. It ain't private.

What's a social mobile phone?

2009-02-19T23:37:00.001-08:00

As far as I'm concerned, mobile phones have always been social devices. They contain your address book and let you call people. That's pretty social. They are good for sending short text messages. That's social too. And they have built in cameras. Social again.

Now the INQ phone is claiming that it's the first social mobile. It looks like a mobile with a bunch of "social" apps. Not a bad idea mind you. And it seems like they have done a pretty good job at integrating with services like Facebook, MSN messenger and Skype.

How is this more than an iPhone with some apps on it? I'm going to have to get my hands on one soon to find out.

Meanwhile, the idea of a phone with truly integrated communications and sharing apps where messages from a bunch of different services show up in my inbox and my address book is "live" and shows status updates is neat.

What this points to is that the social handset games have started. It makes all the sense in the world that these "mission critical" personal devices become tightly coupled with all our favorite social utilities. To borrow from Nokia, these devices are all about "connecting people". Are we witnessing the beginning of connecting people 2.0?

Interesting question is whether we will just see a bunch of new onramps for Facebook and Twitter, or whether new models for connecting and communicating will evolve.

The conversation moves to where your friends are

2009-02-17T13:11:00.000-08:00

Have you noticed that the conversation is no longer just happening "on" the content.

It used to be that you had to have your conversation about an article or a blog post "on" the article. I.e. the place you consumed content was also the place you talked about it. It's kind of like watching a movie and only being able to talk about it while you're in the movie theater. That makes no sense.

Now the conversation is happening where the people are - just like in real life. Blog posts are of course a part of the conversation. But increasingly the conversation is happening at places like Facebook, Twitter and my own favorite, Plum ;-)

Who owns you(r electronic soul)?

2009-02-16T23:12:00.000-08:00

Another privacy storm is brewing fueled by Facebook's Feb 4th change to their terms of service (TOS). See posts on Consumerist and LA Times for good discussion and summaries.

In the fall of 2007 I wrote this post about a new framework and model for personal information ownership. Here's a brief excerpt:

Until we agree who has primary interest in and control of the information that represents an intimate profile of our private person, the legal landscape will continue to be a patchwork and we won’t be able to define broad and mutually beneficial practices that govern the use of personal information. The best we can expect is a wide variety of unpredictable and inconsistent use, the worst is gross inaccuracies, lost economic value and threats to our civil liberties.

The debate that Facebook's TOS change has ignited has its root in the fact that the most important asset in the information economy - personal information - has no underlying legal ownership model. It's basically a finders keepers world out there in personal information land. If you manage to get hold of my personal information, you can claim ownership to it.

My Facebook profile is a pretty intimate portrait of me. Besides the obvious personal information that I have entered, it contains my social graph, my semi-public and private communications patterns and history, a knowledge of the ads I have clicked on and more. Yet, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Layer on the information that Google gathers about my search and surf paths, my credit card records and as of recent, my genetic footprint courtesy of Navigenics. What surfaces is a snapshot that tells someone with access and the right predictive tools more about me than I am probably aware of myself.

Facebook's Zuckerberg posted this response today on the FB blog: On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information. While vague and non-commital, directionally it is promising. I'm in the Facebook-probably-does–not-have-nefarious-motives camp. The problem is that this is a much bigger issue than what's in a Facebook TOS.

The big issue is not whether Facebook or Google know too much about us. (They do, get over it.) Nor whether they get to keep our records if we kill our accounts. This issue is about people not having control or legal rights over their personal life stream and digital footprints.

The debate needs to be lot more comprehensive than a discussion of what happens to our personal messages if we close our account on Facebook. A meaningful outcome cannot be affected by any single player. Personally, I would like to see leadership from Washington on this issue. We've heard a promise of "change". Isn't it time we change the way we own and control our electronic souls?

I Am Contribute, And So Can You

2009-01-19T17:40:00.000-08:00

New Study Makes It Official That People Like To Share

Yes, that's a really bad riff on Colbert’s book title. Ok, now that that's out of the way, a new study from the consulting firm McKinsey and Co proves what many of us already kind of know: people like to share. In fact, one third of all Internet users now contribute to the net weekly. YES, one third! And it's not just the kids and the 20-something MySpace and Facebook generation they're talking about. Those guys are actually at 70% per week.

From McKinsey’s iConsumer Study conducted in October 2008

Sample of 20,000 US Internet users.

With the common wisdom being that a very small percentage of people online contribute original content and only 10% are somehow active with 90% being passive info-voyeurs, the numbers from the iConsumer report represent a huge shift. And if we assume that 70% of people 18-24 contributing weekly is a trend indicator, this speaks volumes about the direction that things are heading.

Why is this happening? And what might it mean? Is the study…

…debunking conventional wisdom that a very small percentage of users will contribute?
…a function of “Facebook and MySpace training” where people have become conditioned to sharing media and posting comments and status updates?
…pointing to a fundamental shift from email and IM as primary communication tools to status updates and feed posts within “friend networks”?
...proving that microblogging and status updates makes it so easy to contribute that everybody can do it?
…all of the above?

Witnessing my DP (domestic partner) @juleshanna’s new Twitter addiction it was easy to frame her new obsession as a leading indicator of broader adoption. She’s gone from being relatively quiet on the contributor front, to becoming an active Tweeter in the last few months.

Not so fast says the study. While the iConsumer study proves that people are sharing and contributing online more than ever before, it's also saying that groups of people exhibit very different behaviors. In fact it identifies seven distinct segments of user behavior.

So while living here in Silicon Valley can leave us to believe that the rest of the world finds Twitter and all the other services that we like to obsess about as compelling as we do, that is actually not the case at all and probably won't be for quite some time. Different cohorts spend their time online in very predictably ways doing very different things. Want to find out who you should be targeting? Talk to McKinsey.

All said, the bottom line is that behavior IS changing. And fast it would seem.

I am not at liberty to post the entire study, but ping me if you want more detail and I’ll put you in touch with my friend at McKinsey in Palo Alto who leads the practice that did the study.

Everything was going so well - what happened?

2008-11-18T01:17:00.000-08:00

Do you ever wonder what changed? Sure people where borrowing too much. Spending beyond their means by buying homes they could not afford and taking out loans on assets that where valued higher than they probably should have been. And sure rich bankers where getting richer by trading in something called derivatives that Warren Buffet calls economic weapons of mass destruction. But...

It does not make any sense. It's not like production facilities suddenly evaporated or consumers are less interested in consuming. Nor is the service industry saying, we don't want to perform services any more. Ok, so values got a bit out of hand and some of that leverage stuff was a Ponzi scheme, but how about we just fire those guys and wipe the slate clean. It's only paper money anyways. And since governments are in a mood to print money, they can hand it back to the underlying owners of the leveraged assets.

A bunch of value was created on paper that turned out to be worthless. Now its really hard to figure out who should be held accountable. Kind of like the dot-com boom and bust. Just on a much bigger scale. So now a bunch of people wake up and don't have the money they thought they had. It sucks. I know, it happened to me in the dot-com bust. But I got over it. Lets tell the bankers to get over it. Look at the upside: finally it may become possibly to buy a two bedroom apartment in New York and London for someone who has a normal job.

Beyond all the paper value that got created and then vanished, nothing really changed. We're all the same. Surely the American consumer will continue to consume if given more cash. Just hand it out and watch - it'll happen all over again. The Chinese can continue to produce and grow. The Europeans can continue to host tourists. In short, this doesn't have to stop. Why don't we just all start it over again. I suggest we all volunteer to take a 30% write-down in our net asset values (based on where we were 2 months ago) and then start the whole thing over again. How's that for a plan?

Share Space Personal announced today

2008-11-17T07:22:00.000-08:00

Big changes over at www.plum.com. We just announced Share Space Personal today - a free way to create personal micro-sharing networks.

Kind of like social networking meets groups. We're really stoked about this. Try it out.

No new MacBooks for the digerati in Monaco

2008-11-16T15:28:00.000-08:00

The people I see on the conference circuit tend to like gadgets - a lot. Most have or have had an iPhone by now. Some are on their second one as 3G became a "must". Others decided they didn't like it so they're sporting Nokia N95s or the latest Blackberries. Cameras - still and motion - with the highest megapixel and HD resolution is a part of the repertoire. Small is good, but big can be impressive too as witnessed by recent lusty comments over the announced new over the top Cannon EOS 5D Mark II. Its not uncommon for folks to show up with a dedicated (big) bag for the gizmos and cameras - yes David Sifry, that's you I'm talking about.

What was surprising at the Monaco Media Forum last week was the lack of new Macbooks. These hot, new, shiny, eco devices - where notable in their absence. This is the crowd that would normally have them first.

Might even the digerati be walking the talk? Cutting costs to the point that they're not picking up the latest, fastest and hippest of tech gadgets?

This, the America I love

2008-11-04T22:03:00.000-08:00

In 1982 I boarded a plane in Oslo Norway bound for America. I was moving to a country of freedom, of great promise and unbounded opportunity. A country of optimism and diversity. I was full of hope and I was full of gratitude. I was among the fortunate few that had been awarded the privilege to study at one of the world's finest educational institutions. I had been given an opportunity that I to this day am humbled by, the opportunity to receive a fantastic education, to meet people from every corner of the world and an opportunity to expose myself to ideas and thoughts that pushed my buttons and challenged my views in ways I had never before imagined.

The America I so strongly believe in has been ill. She has been infected with a disease called "fear". It is an insidious disease. It breeds anger and resentment. It kills hope and it stifles openness. It causes us to loose sight of our greater purpose. It replaces connections with consumption. It substitutes dialogue with dogma. It favors aggression over diplomacy. It leads us astray.

The America I knew in 1982 is the America I believe in. It is the America that billions of people around the world believe in. It is the America of light and promise, of a higher purpose and of hope. That America is alive again. Tonight is the proof. The America I know and love was reborn tonight.

America has been very good to me. I have formed deep friendships. I have found love. I have learned and I have achieved. But, most of all I have made the American spirit my own. The American spirit of acceptance, of ideas and of wonder and openness. A spirit of endurance and of optimism. Generosity. Creativity and ingenuity. That American spirit was reborn tonight.

Tonight is the beginning of something different and something new that is old. I have a strong intuition. I feel it in my bones and I know it in my heart. Today is a new beginning. Thank you Barack Hussein Obama. Thank you for holding up the promise of change. Thank you for leading. Thank you for having the audacity of hope and for reintroducing me to the America I love.

Berlin now, not then

2008-10-22T07:16:00.000-07:00

In 1981 I spent a year in the Norwegian army some 500 miles north of the polar circle. It was in the middle of the cold war. Ronald Regan had just become president in the US. The Russians and Eastern Europeans were the bad guys. Alarms would sound in the middle of the night and we'd have to wade out into the snow and the dark to fight some (hopefully) imaginary enemy kids our own age from a "land called communism".

I've seen that enemy this week, 27 years later. They looked and acted pretty friendly. I found them quite welcoming.

Yesterday I went for a bike ride with my friends Martin Varsavsky and Barak Kassar. We cycled around Berlin, under the Brandenburg gate and past the Reichstag. I spoke with a woman at dinner last night, in a hip cool restaurant that is in the former East Berlin. She was born in East Berlin. The wall came down when she was three. She didn't remember the wall.

The web2.o euro-hipsters where there this week. It was full of energy. Martin described Berlin as feeling like the East Village in NYC 20 years ago. Parts feel like Williamsburg today. Trendy stores. Buildings old and new. Young.

We the people have an amazing ability to change. Change our perspectives. Adapt. Adopt. Allow change to be a constant force. There is an energy of optimism here. I like this place. Sure glad I never had to fire a gun as a kid, towards a kid from around here back in 1981.

OMG, my mother is becoming a blogger

2008-10-19T02:58:00.000-07:00

I just spent a short week-end in Oslo visiting my family between meetings and speaking engagements in Amsterdam and Berlin. After i arrive Friday afternoon and after giving my mom a hello hug, one of the first things she tells me is that she is writing a blog. "'Really?' I say. 'I didn't know you where a blogger.'" She admits that she does not really know what a blog is, but that she has something she has been working on.

A couple of weeks ago mom was in Madrid with a group of her friends. (She's the youngest in the bunch). They had a wonderful time and stayed in a wonderful little hotel. Upon returning home she realized that she had left something precious behind in her hotel room. Not of any monetary value, but of great emotional import. She tries to call but nobody picks up. Then tries to send them email but gets no response. Finally, after a second email they respond that, yes indeed they have her left article and will drop it in the mail (at no cost) the next day. She is so relieved and thrilled that she decides to "write a blog".

Saturday afternoon I see my brother and sister and the oldest of my nieces and nephews, my brother's thirteen year old daughter asks me how she can set up a "net page" to write about fashion.

My mom has had a computer for a while. She buys book on amazon, pays her bills online and googles now and then. She's also become pretty hooked on email, checking it a couple of times a day. My niece has her own laptop too. She mostly uses it to write stories and visit some internet sites now and then.

Why would they both independently want to become "bloggers"? What would compel them to share their opinions for the world to see? I something happening in my family? Is it a "tipping point" of sorts? And if so, what does it mean?

Not very much data to predict a big trend, but anecdotally pretty interesting that my seventy year old mom and thirteen year old Norwegian niece want to write blog posts. Seem like a pretty good indication that "citizen journalism" is a lot more real than not.

I was in Amsterdam and spoke at the World Association of Newspapers Digital Content conference on Wednesday. A pervasive theme was how people creating content, telling their stories, sharing their perspectives is something every newspaper and media outlet needs to integrate and leverage as a part of their strategy. Pretty real.

So NOW we suddenly want the government to help

2008-10-14T20:52:00.000-07:00

The crisis in the financial markets are revealing the fallacy of a "no government intervention, never" approach. That "philosophy" is just plain old ignorant. The world, the financial markets and the needs of citizens are too complex to be left to capitalism run amok.

Governments play an important role in regulating and managing the societies they have been empowered to govern. Not perfect by any means. Nor particularly efficient either. No issues with those arguments. But, what do you think would have led to a greater waste of resources and loss of value over the past ten years. 1) Government playing a more active, regulatory role in areas like derivatives trading, leveraged debt offerings, hedge funds, mortgage backed securities. Or 2) The trillions of dollars of losses that have occurred in the last few months due to complete lack of oversight and regulation.

That was a trick question by the way. And while I'm on the subject of government playing a more active role. Social security. Education reform. Healthcare reform. Prison reform. These are NOT areas where free market forces alone will result in good solutions. Does a market based incentive model create a fair, just and efficient incarceration incentives and policies? Hardly! If somebody profits, and stands to profit big, from putting more people in jail, what will markets based incentives do? They will align and influence (with money) politics and public opinion to support putting more people in jail. The US has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's inmates. Isn't something wrong with that picture.

If one "good thing" comes out of the current financial crisis it's a willingness to question assumed truths and challenge the belief that market based approaches to public-good issues is a panacea. If nothing else, that is a BIG step in the right direction.

Micropayments are here

2008-08-26T19:23:00.000-07:00

I just got an email receipt from iTunes. My total was $4.97 for five iPhone applications and one movie rental during the last few days. Three of the apps were free. The movie rental was $2.99

For a long time the idea of micro payments online have been a great idea without a reality to match. Is iTunes making it real? Hey Apple, why not let me use my iTunes account like a PayPal account where I can read, rent, download, buy anything from anywhere with one click?

Better groups anyone?

2008-08-20T14:28:00.000-07:00

Why aren't the social networking and groups applications merging? The functionality, not the companies. What does Y! Groups or Google Groups do that's not possible in Facebook? Ok, so they're good ways to blast a bunch of emails around between people of like interest, but they could be so much more... and they're not. Why?

It seems that if Y! just joined Flickr, 360 and del.icio.us with their Groups product and stirred it up a bit they'd have such a nice offering. Probably too much dysfunction these days to pull that one off.

I predict that what we think of as "social networking" apps and what we should expect from "groups" apps will soon start to blend to a point where end-users will not (and should not) see a difference.

Keith Benjamin

2008-08-04T09:25:00.000-07:00

It is with great sorrow I write this post to honor the passing of Keith Benjamin. Keith was the lead investor in Plum for Levensohn Venture Partners and a board member. Over the past year, he became a friend.

Keith was a smart, insightful, dedicated, funny, quirky and upbeat man. He was a very active board member, eager to support me and the business in any way possible and always quick to offer help. Yet he did so with no ego or agenda other than to further the growth and prospects of the business. I consider myself very fortunate to have gotten to know and work with him over the past twelve months.

Keith had a sporting accident and now he is gone. It is not easy to accept nor understand when someone passes so suddenly. It seems so unfair, so unjust, so untimely. It is all those things. I want to make it different. I want to pretend it hasn't happened, that its all just a bad dream. While my mind understands that Keith has moved on, no words can capture that which my emotions and spirit cannot yet fathom.

Keith leaves a wife and two beautiful children behind. My thoughts and sorrow go out to them. I cannot begin to understand their grief in this moment. It must feel bottomless. May time be their friend. May time heal the wound and sooth their tragic loss.

Keith loved the outdoors and the Marin Headlands. Next time you have the privilege to visit the Headlands or some equally beautiful spot in nature, keep a small commemoration of Keith's living spirit and this Hopi Payer in mind.

I am the soft stars that shine at night
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there
I do not sleep
I am a thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond glints on the snow
I am the sunlight on the ripened grain
I am the gentle Autumn's rain
When you awaken in the morning hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds circled in flight
I am the soft stars that shine at night
Do no stand at my grave and cry
I am not there
I did not die

The world at large, your business associates, your friends and most of all your family will miss you terribly Keith. Sending you light and fond memories wherever you are.

A new purple Plum... now live, open and oh so exciting

2008-07-10T17:49:00.001-07:00

Today is a big Plum day. We are opening up the beta with a brand new site, new UI, lots of improved functionality, iPhone application and so much more.

Plum is your spot on the web to save and share anything. We've been working real hard on getting to this point so I hope you'll check it out. This is still a beta and a pretty new approach, so please bear with us as we work on refining it. And please let me know what you think.

MacBook Air - thin is big, real big

2008-02-23T10:30:00.001-08:00

I got one. A - world's thinnest laptop - MacBook Air. With SSD (solid state drive) and all. I love it!

It was a royal pain to get it set up. My (two and a half year) old MacBook Pro had a 100Gb hard drive and the Air is 64Gb. Try downsizing when doing a migration from one computer to another. Then try doing it over a wireless network. In the end I had to resort to copying over individual files (including system and library files). Total pain in the neck.

As has been pointed out by others, the battery life is not as good as advertised. It's a (bad) joke to claim that you can get 5 hours of use on a charge. If I turn off both wireless functions (WiFi and Bluetooth), run only a couple of applications, put it in power saving mode and turn down screen brightness to its lowest settings I'm guessing I get 3.5, maybe 4 hours of life. And that presupposes that the cooling fan doesn't kick in during use, which it does too oftern. Given the sound of that thing its got to be pretty energy inefficient. And the fact that I cannot swap my battery is a real drawback when I play road warrior. The performance is fine, but doesn't make me jump out of my seat. I've seen some stuttering a few times with the mouse temporarily freezing every few seconds which worries me.

Yet, I love it. What all the reviews seem to miss is the subtle, yet incredibly importance of the size - thinness really. Carrying this thing around with me is like carrying a notepad. Closing the screen is like closing a book. Opening it up is silent. No whirring hard drive. It's just there. Keyboard is great. LED back-lit screen is fantastic. Eco friendly construction is another reason to buy Apple. The way all the parts come together and the beautiful design just work.

I find myself just carrying the thing with me everywhere. The other day I even went for a run in the Marin Headlands, slipping my Air in my running pack as I left. I stopped at the top of a trail overlooking the Pacific and sat down for 30 minutes taking notes, and working through some problems I had not been able to get to in the office. It's not just a smaller laptop. It's a different laptop.

I don't have a Time Capsule yet but I plan to get one. The thought of being automatically backed up every time I get on my home network and having a big drive that can store all my media.... well that just changes the rules.

Apple has earned their reputation for innovation by pushing boundaries and by breaking rules. This machine breaks a bunch of the rules. Some of the innovations (like the small number of ports and the battery design) will perhaps be seen as mistakes, but I think we will look back at the Air in a couple of years and realize that Apple raised the bar once more and changed what we expect from a laptop.

Why I have questions about Obama

2008-02-17T21:10:00.005-08:00

I support Hillary Clinton. It's not that I don't like Obama, nor the energy and excitement he has been able to instill in people around him. I do. Obama is a strong speaker. He is inspirational. He seems able to unify. I like him for all those reasons.

Yet when I watch him speak in town hall style meetings. Watch the debates. Look at his record. I end up with a big unanswered question: What makes us believe this man can get stuff done on the national and international stage AFTER he's become president? Does he have what it takes to sit down with the real wolves in Washington, China, Russia, Iran... not the ones we see on TV, but the ones that eat their own young for breakfast if they become a tad too hungry? Does he have the gravitas and the real behind-closed-doors leadership to bully the bullies? Overpower the powerbrokers? Outmaneuver the politicos? Can he surround himself with an A-team and then lead that team to through the biggest obstacle course imaginable to achieve successes? Does he know when to make the tough calls, understanding that many won't like it and that people will be hurt regardless of his decision?

Will the "change" he is promising backfire? What if things are more complicated than they sound on the stump? What if change happens slowly? If powerful people have it as their agenda to stop "change", and they surely do, is he setting himself up for failure? If so will people become disillusioned leaving him "stranded" without the popular support that is the very centerpiece of his strategy for change.

Analogies have been made to John F. Kennedy by many, including some prominent Kennedys. So what would Obama do in today's version of the Bay of Pigs? Kennedy was no superhero. He screwed that one up pretty bad. The consequences today could be much worse. We recall Kennedy's presidency based on being too young to remember it (I'm one of those) or with a lens that has been colored by historical rose-colored-glasses. Kennedy was an inspirational man, but he it is not clear to me that he was a great president.

This country needs a great president.

No predictions

2008-01-07T17:33:00.000-08:00

I make no predictions for 2008. None whatsoever. But were I to have predicted, what a juicy time it would be to have been making them. I may have made predictions about the new president of the USA, Sarkozy's arrogance, Putin, melting ice caps, the web 2.0 bubble, snowfall and ski conditions, the US dollar, Kenya, Pakistan, China, $100 / barrels of oil, green tech, Chilean seabass and other overfished fish, trade deficits, olpc, Iran, South Africa, morality, fashion, tech accessories, location based services, refugee crisis, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, craftsmanship, hybrid plugins, Plum, the Brazilian rain forests, cultures where I want to live, something beyond capitalism, war, peace, design, spirituality, atheism, net neutrality, LED lighting, European tech entrepreneurship, food...

Technology policy and innovation

2007-12-12T02:50:00.000-08:00

john markoff wrote a great piece in the ny times on sunday on the forces that created and shaped the early internet.

as a technology and policy wonk and a product of 70s scandinavian semi-socialism i've always thought that government has an important long-term role to play in our technology infrastructure and innovation landscape. radical ey!

capitalism works fine with a one year horizon, sometimes it can look out three years and occasionally even five years. but try doing something longer than that and it requires the kind of leadership and long-term thinking that is at odds with most corporate charters... i.e. profit. layer in a situation where the profit motive is unclear or non-existent and free market forces won't do.

At Starbucks with new camera

2007-11-05T09:41:00.001-08:00

At Starbucks with new Leica
Originally uploaded by hanbron

Got a new Panasonic DMC-LX2 camera a few weeks back. 10mp and manual mode option. Will replace my five year old Cannon D60 and complement the iPhone and Photobooth :-). Leica private labels this camera for an extra $200 if you're so inclined.

OpenSocial - Open or Not?

2007-11-04T23:54:00.000-08:00

Let the games begin. Facebook has had the stage all to themselves for six months with their application platform. That's enough. Enter Google last week with OpenSocial.

Exactly who is it open for/to? Developers or users? So far it is an API that a bunch of different players have said that they will adopt in order to support third party application developers. That's a fine start and it reduces friction for the developers by creating better widget portability. But OpenSocial's real openness test is going to be whether I can bring my friends along from one network to another. And bring along my profile too. Or see my newsfeed from one site on another. etc. etc.

The "openness" will be determined by the networks that choose to adopt the OpenSocial APIs. They don't have to support the full API so lets wait and see what they choose to support before anyone declares it open.

Cornucopia

2007-10-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

"a curved goat's horn overflowing with fruit and ears of grain that is used as a decorative motif emblematic of abundance"... ah no that's not the definition I was looking for. How about: an inexhaustible store : abundance.

Where do I turn? How do I filter? What's worth following? Who should I listen to? And even if I answer those questions today, how about tomorrow? Then how do I get to it all?

I have a strong interest in politics and international affairs. I love the movies and I like to sail. Skiing is a passion. I'm in my forties and I suddenly care more about my health than I used to. Nutrition matters and I want to understand the effects of what society as we live it is doing to our planet - socially, culturally, environmentally. I'm a geek at heart and really like gadgets. I want to track what's going on in technology. I run a business and care about trends. I obsess about big questions and small ones too. I like to write code.... and so much more.

I am overwhelmed with too much information for me to process it in meaningful ways. Yet I love the fire hose of the useless and the profound that comes at me through the net every day. So I need help.

When I need help I turn to my friends. I think friends are the answer. I have really smart, really interesting friends. I need to convince them to be my filters? I must be a voice for them too?

My friends' opinions matter to me most. I should be able to tune to their attention.

ninemillion.org

2007-09-27T13:39:00.000-07:00

"There are more than nine million children around the world who are suffering as a result of the global refugee crisis. Whether displaced from their homes by war, hatred and persecution, or natural disaster, these children are in desperate need of help – and hope. UNHCR will begin to address this dire situation by helping 9 million of these children immediately through this ground-breaking initiative.

Ninemillion’s mission is to create a global movement – leveraging new media and Web 2.0 technology – that will educate people about this issue, catalyze action by those in a position to do so, and most importantly provide the children who are so terribly in need with a way to connect – to their displaced families, to communities, and to other children globally. This program also serves to bridge the digital gap for the UN Refugee Agency by bringing its established presence forward using leading-edge technologies."

Thrilled to be a part of this!

Your Electronic Soul

2007-09-27T06:08:00.000-07:00

Back in the summer of 2001 I testified at a US Senate hearing on Internet and Privacy. I proposed a new model in my testimony that would create greater accountability in the way personal information is managed by private organizations and the government alike. And in the spring of 2003 I started work on a book with the title: Your Electronic Soul - Why you must… and how you can… take control of your personal information and digital identity.

Here is an excerpt from my introduction:

Your Electronic Soul is a small book with a big idea. It jumps into the middle of a raging battle in the quest for corporate profitability, the need for national security and the inalienable right in a free society for personal privacy. It is a blueprint for a radical and intuitive new model built on the premise that in an information economy, our personal information and identity is a valuable asset. And like all valuable assets powerful forces are vying to harvest and control it. Big businesses are trying to control the asset, and governments want it too. And in the shadows of cyberspace sundry characters are lurking, trying to steal it. The problem is that while everyone wants control over the asset we have no established framework that defines who has the legal right to claim ownership. Business and government is claiming rights to what they collect at the same time as the individuals’ legal rights to access, manage, and control information about themselves are very limited.

In short, we don’t own or control personal information about ourselves, information that is becoming more comprehensive, detailed and intimate every day and this spells big trouble, the scope of which is only beginning to become apparent.

Your Electronic Soul exposes the core issue and dilemma of personal information control and ownership facing the information society. It does so by moving beyond diagnostics and analysis and proposing a powerful, usable framework that gets to the heart of the matter – how to reconcile the reality and inevitability of living in a “surveillance society” with the rights of the individual to control their identities and protect their “electronic souls”.

I chose not to write the book back then, but am glad to see that the issues of personal information control and ownership are getting well deserved air time. Earlier this week Google called for Global Privacy Rules within 5 years. And on a related topic, a few veritable 2.0-ers Smarr, Canter, Scoble and Arrington recently posted a call for a Bill of Rights for the Social Web. It proposes "ownership" as one of those rights. While a great start, this issue is much bigger than "taking my friends with me" from Facebook and other social networks. Central to this discussion is the legal issue of personal information ownership. In order to legally own something there needs to be an underlying model that makes it possible to claim and protect ownership.

When I was working on the book I discussed the issues of personal information ownership with a few IP lawyers I know, but the moment you put the word "ownership" and "personal information" in the same sentence they uniformly seem to get palpitations. As far as I'm concerned, property rights is the best model we have. But, the legal community will shoot that down based on case history.

So while I agree that Ownership and Control are two foundational elements, there are significant legal hurdles that stand in the way of real change. Here is what I said about it in my non-book:

Let us therefore begin with the simple and powerful notion that individuals should own and control personal information about themselves – their identities and reputations. Today we have no clear and accepted model for ownership of personal information. This does not make sense in an information economy where information is becoming an increasingly valuable, critical and strategic asset. While legal property rights and copyrights are established foundations upon which our entire economy rests, personal information rights have not yet been defined so we must begin here.

Until we agree who has primary interest in and control of the information that represents an intimate profile of our private person, the legal landscape will continue to be a patchwork and we won’t be able to define broad and mutually beneficial practices that govern the use of personal information. The best we can expect is a wide variety of unpredictable and inconsistent use, the worst is gross inaccuracies, lost economic value and threats to our civil liberties.

Between the inadequate patchwork of international privacy rules (or total lack thereof), the social networks trying to create lock-in, the Patriot Act shenanigans that render us open to all kinds of surveillance and wiretapping and the rising public awareness of how much information is available on each and every one of us in the public domain... might there be a perfect storm brewing?

Beyond social networks

2007-09-20T16:03:00.000-07:00

I swear, there is a new one every day. You know what I'm talking about. A new social network. Invitations to join social networks of all kinds and flavors are coming at me from the bit-space faster than I can figure out how many monkey friends it takes to make one of these new networks nominally interesting....

The world doesn't need more social networks. VCs take note. Don't invest in more social networks. They are not going to make it. The model is old. This gets a lot more interesting when the people and the network are not joined. Check out Marc Canter et. al. with their Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web.

Mark Zuckerberg's "social graph" is cool. Facebook has changed the rules in a bold, game-changing way. This will make Mark and many people around him a lot of money. But get this: Facebook denies being a “social network”. They call what they are doing a "social utility". Yet the last time I looked (7 minutes ago) they sure seemed a lot like a portal and a destination to me. I say we call them a social network.

So what is hot if new social networks are not? What is hot is being able to be social where you want to be social.

Why should I have to go to Facebook or Myspace to be social? Why can't my friends just come with me so we can all interact whereever we want to? In the world of atoms I go to a club to hang out with people there. Then I go to a friend's house. I stop by my local Internet cafe to get my iced tea and a croissant, do some plumming and write a blog post. All the while I meet and communicate with friends. Some in person others through the cloud.

As I cruise around to my favorite places online, I'd like to hang out with people I know, check in with my friends wherever they may be and share my discoveries, thoughts and ideas as I go. I want my friends to come with me. I want to connect with them wherever they are. How about if I could know where they are too so I can stop by and say hi. Why should I have to go back to one single place or application - read: a social network" - to hang with my friends. Doesn't make any sense.

Yahoo Mash - new network or fun feature?

2007-09-16T15:34:00.000-07:00

Yahoo Mash was “accidentally leaked” this week to the NYT according to this post by Saul Hansell on the NYT Bits blog yesterday. A social network where you can mess with your friends’ pages. MySpace ugly meets Facebook friend access without basic communication features. Hmmm.

Interesting comment by Saul’s on why Y!’s last social networking foray, 360 didn’t get more traction: “the site was so utilitarian that no one used it.” Not sure I buy that. Exhibit LinkedIn. Social utilitarianism works if there is utility to the utility.

Mash sounds to me like a cross between a cool feature, more akin to the many cute Facebook applications that let you mess with your friends profiles, and a network where you can hang out with your friends. Unclear to me why Y! chose to built YASN (yet-another-social-network), rather than fix 360... "spray painting" somebody else's profile would seem like the perfect way to spruce things up a bit if they're too utilitarian. Wonder what the inside story is on this one?

Conversational marketing summit quotes

2007-09-12T12:19:00.000-07:00

I'm at Federated Media's conversational marketing summit in the Presidio in San Francisco. A few notable quotes.

Scott Cook, Founder Intuit - "Best way to kill a brand is to drive people to a product that won't delight them."

Jeff Weiner, Yahoo! "We make money by understanding the intention of people's attention. From a media perspective the media is becoming object oriented. To the extent you can allow media objects to become embedded, that object has value."

Steve Hayden, Vice Chairman Ogilvy "67% of economy influenced by "word of mouth"

Ross Levinsohn, Former President Fox Interactive Media "All we're doing is waiting for the advertisers to catch up. If I could reset the world I would make all music free... the real money [for the artist] is in touring, but the labels don't make any money that way.... the executives at the music companies are hanging on by their fingernails waiting to retire."

Jon Miller, Former CHairman & CEO AOL "All the big search companies are trying to become the operating system for advertising."

Carla Hendra, Co-CEO Ogilvy "Only 2% of women worldwide think they are beautiful. 85% of women said they felt worse about themselves after looking at a fashion magazine."

Plus, lots of YouTube videos and questions that all map back to "so how do you make money again"?

How social can you get?

2007-09-08T21:11:00.000-07:00

All of a sudden there seem to be more social networks than you can shake a stick at. Social networks for kids in high school, social networks for college kids... ok so that's not news. How about a social network for euro trash, a social network for boomers, a social network for 18-30 year old disabled people, social network for people who like corsets... if you can think of it, there is probably a social network you can join for it.

Exactly what is a "social network"? I sure don't know. The folks over at Facebook seem to be trying to distance themselves from the concept. They are NOT a social network any more. According to the Guardian "the site is simply a utility, a communications tool, and a social graph that maps the real world actions of its users".

If you believe Facebook is a trend setter - I sure do - then its worth paying attention to how they are positioning themselves. Is "social network" yesterday's label? I think it may be.

Social networks have a stigma of being a place where young kids "hang out and party". That's not what this all this social stuff is about.

NetFlix just made an interesting announcement in an updated terms of use email they sent out this week. Here is part of what it said:

Effective this weekend, we're improving our Netflix Friends feature so you can enjoy:

Seeing your Friends' Friends - including their 5-star movies as well as their nickname, city and state.
Saving reviewers and other members of the Netflix Community as "Favorites."
A new Community home page that shows your Friends (and Favorites) rating and review activity, as well as other ways to discover movies Community members have enjoyed.

That's a lot of "friends" stuff in a terms of service upgrade. The point?

The point is that social must become a part of the fabric of any web property or application that wants to stay current. Netflix is making their rent-a-movie experience a more social experience. Social is about sharing, discussing and discovering with friends and that will start happening everywhere you go. It's not about joining a network, its about being able to share, compare and collaborate where you are. That's social.

What it means to "friend"?

2007-08-30T10:47:00.000-07:00

Steve Rubel raises some excellent questions about what it means to be a friend in the world of social networks in the post The Web Changes How We Define Friendship on his Micro Persuasion blog.

He missed two really important aspects of the "friend phenomenon" though. First, being somebody's friend on a social network is not the equivalent to saying that they are your terrestrial friend. The verbification of the word "friend" is something you would expect William Safire to cover in his On Language column as an interesting linguistic evolution. To "friend" someone on MySpace or Facebook is not the same as being their friend. Second, the issue of how people brag about how many friends they have should not be taken as a meaningful indicator of a broader social phenomenon. To hypothesize that having 700 friends in a social network makes a statement about the demise of meaningful social relations in our society, seems like a gross oversimplification. Rather, I see it as a function of the fact that the social networks don't offer a good way to segment relationships a.k.a. friends.

I want to bucket my online "friends" into three groups. The first group is my family and very close real friends with whom I share intimate information, photos, videos, messages and more. The second group is my extended social and pseudo personal network where I am willing to share lots of the stuff I care about, but perhaps not the fact that I'm about to have a colonoscopy. (That's a hypothetical!). Finally, the third group is everyone else. Former co-workers, industry acquaintances, and others that I find it interesting to have an informal relationship with. I may network with them and want to receive their updates and share information, humor and perspectives.

The problem with "friending" is that every relationship is indiscriminately dealt with through a model that was not designed for the many facets of our online lives. If you are in high school (MySpace) or college (Facebook) or if you want to have professional relations (LinkedIn), or you are looking to date (Match) these are some of the many social applications that have been designed to serve the specific needs and interests of their niche constituents. Yet, many of the applications that worked well for one constituency are not scaling or keeping up as new people enter the world of online social networks with their own needs and requirements.

Finallly, if you did not catch the NYT article omg my mom joined facebook describing a young woman's angst as her mom tries to friend her on Facebook, its a must read. Captures a really funny and poignant POV on the question of what it means to be "friends" online.

Facebook applications hit 3k

2007-08-18T13:14:00.000-07:00

The number of applications on the Facebook platform just passed the 3,000 mark. And that's after being live just over two months. Pretty amazing.

I wonder what number of installed applications the average FB user has? And what is the average user count for all applications. One thing is certain, there have been 10s of millions of applications installed. That makes Facebook look a lot like an OS to me.

So when is Microsoft going to buy these guys?

DropBox is live!

2007-08-15T16:23:00.001-07:00

Plum's new cool app DropBox on Facebook is live. Its our second app. Shoebox was the first. We think of it like an open inbox. A place to share, discuss and discover with friends.

I want to improve the way we have discussions. DropBox is a start. Try it out.

Shoot me your thoughts. hanspeter-at-plum-dot-com

What's the revenue potential of Facebook applications?

2007-08-15T10:43:00.000-07:00

There are 2,872 applications in the Facebook application directory today... and counting. I was speaking with my friend Scott Rafer yesterday at the DEMO alumni shtick down in Palo Alto. His new gig Lookery is trying to become the ad network for FB apps.

So I was wondering. What is the actual revenue potential if you could place an ad on every third party application page approximately two months after Facebook launches the application platform.

Say that the average CPM for a FB app is inching up to $0.30. Its a bit lower but we'll be generous and let Rafer convince us that he can get us there soon. How may page views per day do all the applications combined generate today? Lets say its 100million. Here's the math:

10 million FB users use one or more third-party applications every day.
Every user has on average 10 page views per application session. (Only the canvas pages count since that's the only place you can add external ads.)
Math = 100 million page views per day.
I'm assuming that every page view has an ad opportunity AND that there is enough inventory to fill the space... these assumptions cannot be supported today, but we're talking "potential" here.

At $0.30 CPM that's $30,000 in revenue potential per day, $1m per month, $12m annualized.

What's going to change? Improved targeting and new ad formats will help boost CPMs. Usage will continue to rise so there is huge growth potential in page inventory. No doubt that there is growth potential.

I could be off by orders of magnitude regarding today's numbers and probably am. But even with order of magnitude corrections, we've got a ways to go before there is an eco-system that supports real businesses here.

What am I missing?

Thoughts on violence

2007-08-14T23:53:00.001-07:00

I was watching the Bourne Ultimatum the other day. The camera sure did move a lot. The previews were painful. One they're-out-to-get-us-and-I-the-lonely-hero-will-save-the-day-flick after another. If movie previews represent a snapshot of popular culture, Moore was right. We're inundated by fear based news and entertainment.

My inlaws are visiting. They are from Alabama. Don't live in this world with Facebook, Twitter and Plum. So we were having a conversation about violence in media. I think it started (branched off) with my musings about how much Facebook is changing social exchanges. I wasn't participating much in the violence discussion. Just listening and thinking that its basically harmless escapism. Realized I've adopted a defeatist POV really.

The point that resonated with me was hearing Harry (my father in law) describe a scene from the film about Daniel Pearl (the WSJ reporter killed by his abductors in Pakistan). The wife's grief was in your face. You saw the ramifications of her loss up close and personal. So he asked the question, what if every person killed in a video game or movie was accompanied by a snapshot into the grief and loss. What if "the bad guys" had brothers, sisters, wives and mothers too. Pretty good question.

Chick n plum

2007-06-01T18:56:00.001-07:00

Skyler and Julie

2007-05-31T09:49:00.001-07:00

Howard on food

2007-05-26T21:56:00.001-07:00

Rich and Margaret

2007-05-25T19:05:00.001-07:00

I'm a plummer on Facebook

2007-05-24T21:32:00.001-07:00

The final crunch

2007-05-24T11:00:00.001-07:00

In pizza cage

2007-05-23T13:07:00.001-07:00

David punchy

2007-05-22T21:57:00.001-07:00

Trying to pose for a non-serialkiller like mugshot

Plum chicks

2007-05-21T13:34:00.001-07:00

Shadow man

2007-05-19T16:45:00.001-07:00

John

2007-05-19T08:59:00.001-07:00

Dinner in the hood

Me

2007-05-19T08:47:00.001-07:00

First photo. Uploaded from my cool new w880i SonyEricsson phone.