Online Check-in

In the past year, I’ve spent about one hundred days in an airport commuting to and from work every week.  When I enter the airport on Monday mornings, I realize that the next 84 hours will go by in a flash.  Next thing I know it’s Thursday afternoon, and it’s time to go back home.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot that happens in the 4 days I’m at work — just when I think about it, I cannot describe the passage of time at work.  It’s just a suspended bag of experiences in the purgatorial sense.  It’s the weekends that keep the clock ticking.In the year that I have been working in St. Louis, I have never stepped foot in a single apartment or house.  I have not had one home cooked meal.  I don’t know a single person in this city who isn’t staffed on the project that I am on.  The only weekend I spent here was when a tornado hit my airplane while it was on the tarmac.  The airport was shut down and I decided to stay, instead of driving back ‘home’.  It didn’t really matter much, I’d forget at times that I had an apartment in Chicago.

I began to seriously consider moving out of Chicago when I realized that the only things inside my apartment were an airbed, nightstand, desk, and bookshelf.  To me, it didn’t matter, I’ve always considered myself a nomad.  What made the decision easier is when I realized ever since I started working in St Louis I spent about one weekend a month in Chicago.

The way I felt when somebody would ask me the question “where do you live?” was the first sign of identity distortion.  I couldn’t quite answer that question.  Was it St. Louis?  Boston?  Chicago?  Tampa? I would visit each one of these cities frequently enough that my presence wasn’t that of a visitor, I didn’t visit any of these cities enough to be called a resident.  Except for tax purposes.  Now the question is much easier to answer ever since I relocated to Tampa.  Having identities in multiple cities at the same time is much different than I ever thought it would be.  Difficult is not the right word to describe it.  I just think there are a lot of side effects to this kind of lifestyle.

Six months ago I really tried to write a little piece about my perception of reality.  I kept thinking “my day to day just doesn’t feel real.”  At that time, the only thing that I thought was making me feel strange was that I was ‘living’ my life more on the Internet than in the external world.  I went on to describe how when I was a child, “the Internet was fundamentally different than reality.  It was more like an alternate universe.”  Damn, how things have changed in the past decade.

Around June or July, I really began to think that that I exist as a collection of text shared over the Internet to most of my friends.  I communicate to most people I know almost exclusively via writing.  Most of the time it’s in an asynchronous manner.  My Facebook profile, Quora account, and email address are the aliases that have become such an integral part of my identity.

This whole electronic identity thing is what sometimes keeps me restless in my impersonal hotel room.  People crave the real thing.  Not just electrical pulses.  Not just signals sent to somebody else through sentences.  That doesn’t sustain you, no matter how much you try. I think that’s why people don’t travel more than they do, without being permanently relocated.  People would go nuts, if they spent months at a time in a hotel room away from people who matter.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love what I do.  It’s a thrill.  Sustainable?  Sure, why not?  More on that later.  Enough to write a book… or more like a novella.

You might call me anti-clingy.  It’s somewhat a result of the way I live.  Now you see me, now you don’t.  It was nice catching up with you.  Maybe I’ll hear back, maybe not.  Doesn’t really matter either way.  I just wanted to take the opportunity to chat and let you know I’m still alive.  It’s time to shut down, I have a flight to catch in an hour.

Google Wave: the ripple effect

This piece has been on my to do list ever since Google announced in early August that they would pull support from Google Wave.

Google wave was one of the most highly anticipated online products of 2009.

Google Wave was unveiled at Google I/O on May 28, 2009 with an 80 minute introduction.  One of the first words Google used to describe Google Wave was that it was an “unbelievable product.”  That day, many analysts thought that Google was onto something big.  Something that would change the way that people communicated.  The original launch video is shown below.

Excitement

Google Wave was a mixture of twitter, email, and many other things — a hodgepodge.  There was one thing in particular, however, that defined the anticipation of this product.  What was that?  It was the ability to see the text that somebody is writing in real time — text would appear on screen as it was written, just like you are staring at the text you write in a word processor.

After daydreaming about the possibilities of real time, character by character, communication I immediately signed up for an invite.  I was extremely excited.

I waited patiently for six months for Google Wave to come out.  It’s the way technology works.  You see something one tech demo — and start imagining about the rosy possibilities that this new product will unlock.  It would be a whole new level of collaboration.

Beta

On November 26, 2009 — I found my Google Wave invite in my inbox.  It was an amazing moment.  All the waiting finally came to an end.  After I spent a few minutes configuring my account and adding some friends who already had the service I noticed that I had eight invitations to give out to other people.

Google Wave would not be a product if you had nobody to collaborate with.   It would be like having an email account with nobody to talk to or a Facebook account with no friends.  I decided to post a Facebook status to see if anybody else was interested in the product.  Responses came in pretty quick as shown below.

As soon as one of my friends signed up for the service I tested out the real-time document editing capabilities of Google Wave.  It was a blast — for about five minutes.  After you got over the fact that multiple users could edit a document at the same time with real-time character by character synchronization, you started to see the blemishes.  As with many things, the blemishes were enough to turn people away from using the product.  Namely, Google Wave was confusing and clunky.  Even the document editing was too basic and confined to get any real kind of work done.  Something that I spent six months day dreaming about only kept my attention for about thirty minutes when I started tinkering around with it.

Release

On May 19, 2010, Google Wave was released to the general public.  By then it was already too late.  As you can see from the figure below, the web search interest for Google Wave peaked in December of 2009 and then quickly dropped off.  The ‘official’ release of Google Wave was not even met with a spike in interest.  The fact of the matter is that the general public either did not want to try Google Wave or they heard that the functionality was not worth the price of admission.  The price of admission being simply creating a free Google Wave account.

Google announced that they would pull the plug on the development of Google Wave on August 4, 2010.  Were there some die hard users of Google Wave?  I’m sure there are, but how many of them do you personally know?  Well, Google Wave managed to create one wave — and that was a lot of hype.

You know what else Google Wave did?  It paved the way for the ripple effect.

The ripple effect

In April 2010, Google launched an updated version of Google Docs that had the feature that everybody was so excited about in Google Wave.  Below is the release video.

This was the first time that Google Docs had real-time, character by character, synchronization between multiple users. You could have multiple people working on the same document and text just appears.  As the months went on, this service got more responsive.  Now, multiple people can work on the same document and you see text appearing — almost like you are watching a phantom writer.

How is Google Wave tied into this?  The code that is required to make this kind of collaboration possible is no doubt very complex.  It takes a lot of testing and fine tuning to get it right.  A lot of trial, error, error, and more error.

What gave Google the ability to test this type of technology out until it finally worked?  Google Wave.  Even though Google Wave did not last — the code to real-time collaborative ability was reimplemented into one of Google’s signature products.  That’s what I like to call the ripple.

I would also like to conjecture that a lot of the Google Wave code that was fine tuned and tested made its way back into another Google product called Google Web Search.  You know, Google Instant.  That, again, is a very complicated chunk of code behind that minimalistic white bar.  I think Google learned a lot about how to code something that was ‘real-time’ while developing Google Wave.

Remember, I said Google Wave was clunky and confusing.  What it lead to though was quite the opposite.  It lead to some services that are quite elegant and minimalistic.  Now more people are starting to get on the real-time communication bandwagon.  It’s going to be an exciting time in technology.  Good bye Google Wave — hello new ways to communicate.

Is letter writing dead?

Today Facebook announced that they would implement a new messaging system that focuses on real-time, ‘conversational’, interaction throughout the next few months.  This messaging system has been in the works for over a year and uses many sophisticated data-processing methods.

I found that the most interesting part of the presentation had nothing to do with the new technology.  Rather, it had to do with Mark Zuckerburg’s comment stating that many people, “think that email is too slow.”  Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook employee, stated something along the lines of, “people don’t write letters anymore.  People don’t want to sit down and think about what they want to write.”

That made me think long and hard about the direction of modern communication. I think it is a great thing that communication has become almost instantaneous.  Video conferencing, real-time collaborative document editing, screen sharing, and instant messaging are such an integral part of my personal and professional life.

As these technologies advance, it is not surprising to think that people want a simpler way to communicate.  I have written before that one of the first major achievements of technology was that it bridged the physical gap between two separate locations.  Technology is now bridging the emotional gap between two separate locations.  Don’t get me wrong, that’s a good thing.

What concerns me is that people think the art of writing a well crafted message to another person is becoming obsolete.  I don’t think the classroom should be the only place where people learn how to communicate structured, analytic prose.  Many insights about life in general cannot be expressed in real-time.  Some things require time for reflection– creation.

I think that letter writing is one of the best ways to show somebody who you are.  I hope that practice does not go away, because I find that some of the most powerful conversations that I have had with people in the past and recently have been through letters.  Sure, we could have called each other.  But that would not allow us to construct a piece that stands on its own — only supported by the words contained in that one message.

Who thinks that letter writing is dead?  Maybe I’m becoming a dinosaur.

Facebook’s new messaging system at the moment is invite only.  You can request an invite by clicking here.

Real-Time Snapshot

The post How to brainstorm using Facebook which I wrote last month is already outdated by the new features that have been implemented into Facebook: notably Facebook Groups and Facebook Questions.

Here’s the million dollar question that I posted on Facebook Questions, a newly integrated feature that makes it easier to brainstorm by using Facebook.

“What would you do if you could have a complete snapshot of your business at any moment?”

If anyone has any suggestions, I would like to hear your comments.

Further Reading:
Business Intelligence
Data Mining
Neural Networks
Hadoop

IT and social media

The google global search queries for ‘information technology’ declined from the years 2003-2007, leveling off at a search volume index of about 0.7 in the year 2007 as shown in the figure below.  The global search query for ‘social media’ was level at about 0.5 from the years 2003-2007.  In the year 2007, however, the global search queries of ‘social media’ started growing. These results are displayed in the figures below.

Let’s try to think about what this data means.  Specifically, what does it mean for the future trend of content consumption and creation on the internet.

Learning Resources
Does this mean that IT is being replaced by social media?  Not so fast.  First it is important to understand how IT skills and social media skills are learned.  IT skills are learned in universities, technical schools, and within a business.  Each one of these organizations has its own learning resources specifically designed to teach people the technical skills that they need to know.  That means it is probable that many people in the IT industry search within their organization for the material they need to know.

Social media on the other hand is another animal all together.  It is what the name suggests — a social phenomenon developed by IT experts.  IT systems are the glue that make social media possible.  IT is the framework of social media.  People who use social media are content creators within the framework of the IT framework.

Social media strategies are so new, that people who want to get into social media would turn to an internet search to learn more about it.  Many times, this is an activity that they do on the side.  How many doctors, professors, musicians– take part in social media?  A lot.

Outsourcing
The only city in the United States ranked in the top 10 cities for ‘information technology’ queries is Washington D.C shown in the figure below.  That is probably due to the fact that the United States government spends $80B annually on information technology services.  The top 5 cities searching ‘information technology’ are located in India, a major outsourcing hub.

Changing the game
Before the advent of social media, in order to get your ideas out online you had to create your own website, join a forum, or use your company’s communicational resources.  Now all you need is a wordpress, twitter, or facebook account.  The level of entry has become intuitive.

The United States holds 7 out of the 10 top cities searching for ‘social media’ as shown in the figure below.  Notice that even though the US holds 7/10 of the top city searches, it still ranks fourth in countries that search the term ‘social media.’

Does that mean that social media is replacing IT?  I absolutely don’t think so.  Social media, rather, is a funnel that allows more people to participate in a dynamic internet.  It makes people who used to just be internet consumers, creators on the internet.  It wouldn’t work if there wasn’t an audience.  An audience will flock to social media based on the IT framework of the system.

IT systems have given us a field to play on which is social media.  What we do now is up to us.

Further Reading
About Google Trends — search volume index
http://www.google.com/intl/en/trends/about.html

Blink (182): the speed of the internet

If you’re under the age of 30, there is a pretty good chance that you partook in the social phenomenon that was Blink 182.  This band’s presence was viral circa 2000, right when the internet was becoming the main hub of information for the teens of that day.  For years I have been trying to understand how Blink 182  went from popular to viral, why a cult following would be an understatement for this group.

So let’s deconstruct this together.  Ready?  Blink.  That’s the speed at which information is shared on the internet.  Now in order to understand why Blink 182 spread like wildfire, I’ll take you back to when Blink 182 started going viral.

Consumers become creators
Blink 182 started gaining mainstream popularity right as the internet was growing at such a rapid pace.  Search engines became more focused, forums were the big thing, and one movement took Blink 182 to the next level.  Whats that you ask?  Guitar tab websites.

What do guitar tab websites have to do with Blink 182?  Well, Blink 182′s music was mainly constructed with power chords at the time.  These are simple three-finger chords with repetitive melodies.  What does that mean?  Once people listened to Blink 182, they began to reverse engineer it and transcribe it via guitar tabs.

Whats so interesting about this?  The technical composition of the music was simple enough that teens with artistic ability were able to play Blink 182′s music by trial and error. The people who were able to reverse engineer Blink 182′s music were the people that the music was aimed at– not professional musicians.

This is only the start of the social phenomenon.  Guitar tab websites gave these teens an outlet to post the music in a way that anyone with a guitar and fingers could read.  Circa 2000, web search was getting better day by day.  That means teens that were searching ‘how to play Blink 182′ were directed to music forums which in turn redirected them to instructions on how to play the music.

What does this mean?  This means that on a fundamental level, Blink 182 caused teens to become creators in a limited sense of the term.  People who just used to listen to music started deconstructing music.  Soon enough, there was another consumer market for Blink 182.  This market was how to play Blink 182.  Blink 182′s music was being heard on the radio, analyzed by teens, learnt how to play by teens, and played by teens.  Their music, for many, could be called a way of life since so much time was spent actively participating with the music in a very personal way.

Cover Bands

The history of the band fueled their viral success even further.  They had humble beginnings, starting as three members recording on an analogue device in a bedroom.  They only managed to hit mainstream after a long period of commercially unsuccessful recordings.

How is this history important? The creative base of Blink 182 fans saw this an opportunity to use the band’s history to fuel their own creative thought.  In that sense, the fan base reevaluated the past, circa 1992, in the context of the present, circa 2000.  Blink 182′s history became a mantra that ‘average’ kids can make and create music — whether that be for commercial or personal consumption.

In high school I remember many cover bands that strictly played Blink 182 music.  Many of them evolved to create their own music.  Ask anyone around you, I’m sure you’re not the only one that knew how to play Dammit.

Blink 182: self titled album

Blink 182 moved away from their power chord structure in their last album that was self titled.  They started experimenting with music styles that were more complicated.  This led to alienation of their fan base.  Silly, light hearted,  and profane music themes describing high school were replaced with something more serious.

Blink 182 went on an indefinite hiatus in 2005.  I still remember the day.  Do you?  There was widespread sadness.  Without knowing it at the time, it was an end of an era.  Notice how the google search activity, shown in the image below, of Blink 182 has been declining steadily from 2004 until tailing off until mid 2007.  The announcement of a reunion in 2009 at the Grammy’s (indicated with the letter c), however, was able to stir up a slightly higher search index than the day they released their last album in 2003.  That means that their reunion caused more searches than their final release!  Something with that kind of attention deserves to be called a social movement.

Starting a worldwide wave

Even though the global search activity of Blink 182 has been declining, surprisingly the United States only ranks in the 8th nation for total Blink 182 searches.  Only two US cities even make the list for the top ranked cities for the search query as shown below.

Why is that you might ask?  I have a theory based on what I have experienced in Brazil this summer.  When I went to any event in Brazil, the bands played music that consisted of power chords.  They even sung in English.  I told my brother “so Brazil’s music finally reached the year 2000.”  It wasn’t until I showed this article to friends that they pushed me to research more.

What did I suggest that made Blink 182′s success so viral?  The internet.  Guess what idea is now viral in the countries ranked from 1-7?  The internet.  Every subsequent time that I have gone to Brazil in the past four years, I have noticed more and more people using the internet.  Not just using the internet, but using the internet to Americanize their culture.

The fact that I heard Blink 182 covers while in Brazil, leads me to suggest that I think Blink 182 made its dent on American culture.  Not only that, but the proliferation of the internet… is hitting other countries — in much the same manner that it did one decade ago here in the United States.

Want some more evidence to the rest of the world becoming Americanized?  Look at the figure below.  The United States ranks third for the language that Blink 182 is searched in.  Compare the volume of searches, to the languages being searched in.

What makes this interesting isn’t the number of searches, but the number of searches relative to a country’s population.  For example, Dutch searches account for about half of the United States searches.  Lets assume that English searches are only conducted in the United States (underestimation) and that Dutch searches are only conducted in the Netherlands (underestimation). That means there are 16 million possible Dutch searchers compared to  307 million possible English searchers, as shown in the two figures below.

What does this mean?  Within the framework of the stated assumptions, the average search per capita of the Netherlands versus the United States is about 10:1 with regards to Blink 182.  This doesn’t even include all of the other English speaking nations, or the people searching in English in other countries.  It also doesn’t include other Dutch speaking people.  A conjecture is that English penetration is much larger worldwide when compared to Dutch penetration.  This conjecture,however, was not taken into account in these calculations.

So from this trend, I would like to suggest that globalization of not only information but culture is already happening.  However, other nations are currently adopting trends that are already a part of the American past.  I haven’t examined which trends that they are adopting that are a part of the American present.  Thats grounds for other research.

What does this mean for the future?  Who knows.  It’s a disruptive technology and social phenomenon that probably won’t be fully understood until time takes its course.

Blink again
Blink again.  Now turn 182 degrees.  We’re looking (almost) directly back in time.  Blink 182′s story should be one for the record books.  That phenomenon spurred a wealth of young artists pursuing modern music creation, instead of just music consumption.  The unexpected part, for me, was to see how this effect that happened 10 years ago is having subsequent ripples in other nations currently.  I’ll end with a question: how many bands do you think attribute influence to Blink 182?  That’s a project in itself.

One more question: how can we use this data of yesterday to predict the future of tomorrow?

This blog post is a product of the Facebook brainstorming strategy developed in the previous post.

How to brainstorm using Facebook

Brainstorming is an activity that is taught in universities but I find that once the topic hits a curriculum, it is already outdated based on the capabilities of today’s social networks.  In college it was very easy to develop ideas within your respective social circles.  Have a question or idea?  You can express it to the person who is most interested in it the next time you see them in class, at lunch, or in extracurriculars.

I’ve brainstormed so much with everyone tagged in this note. This led me to develop a Facebook brainstorming strategy in order to keep these connections accessible at the speed of light.  The visibility is set for my friends of friends, so yes the note will appear on your wall… but it will only be visible by our shared social network.

How to Brainstorm Using Facebook

1. Status Updates: If you have an idea that you think other people will enjoy reading, share it don’t hoard it.  If it sparks enough interest in somebody else they might comment on it.  From there, they might share an interesting perspective on your thought making you think about what you said in a different framework.  From there, the conversation might continue.  At any point, somebody else might enter in the conversation and share their views.  This process is iterative.
2. Facebook Notes: If the idea that you have is developed further, you can write a Facebook note.  If your idea is directly affiliated with a conversation you had with someone else, tag them in it.  Credit should be cited where it is due.  From there anybody in your two respective social circles can view the work and comment on it.  Again, the posts below it can spring some ideas that never would have come to fruition if you had simply hoarded the ideas.  This process again is iterative.
3. Patience: Sometimes it takes months or even years for an idea to hit fruition.  So this step is all about patience. If you’re stuck or don’t think your idea is interesting, just let it go.  From time to time, I look though my notes and Facebook wall, rereading comments and posts.  When I hit an interesting burst of comments from a friend it inspires something in a new framework. The next step is to rework your idea for what you have planned at the moment.  The key is being able to synthesize the information you have after you analyze it. Having this dynamic archive of your most trusted social circle, selectively available on your page can take good ideas to great ideas.
4. Reworking: Once you have a collection of ideas relating to a certain subject, you can rework the past in the context of the present.  This might mean posting a new status update, note, blog post, or even a new conversation with a friend.  The possibilities of using real-time social networks to develop your ideas has not been tapped yet to its potential.  We live in a world where our own personal network of professionals, academics, students, friends, and family coexist.  In the words of IBM, “let’s build a smarter planet.”

This post was originally a Facebook note.  Any modifications that have been made are to preserve the anonymity of the people mentioned.