Hacking the nature of existence

Nic Brisbourne concludes a thoughtful post "On widgets, social networks and the nature of existence": "[W]e find ourselves in a situation where internet companies might not even need their own website. A kind of virtual, virtual company if you will…."

I completely agree with Nic's sentiment at a high level. This concept of a virtualised service was what lead i-together to deploy Blog Friends within Facebook in the first place. However, the tactical view from within an early-stage startup like Blog Friends turns out to look subtly different than I expected. I left a comment on Nic's post:

Your "web brand virtualisation via open social nets" point is well taken. As you say, Blog Friends within Facebook is an example of this trend.

However, we are now building a central presence for Blog Friends beyond 3rd-party sites. To start with, we plan to deploy some key new Blog Friends features exclusively at i-together.com, over the next month or so, keeping the main feedreader service within Facebook. Then we intend to comprehensively re-architect Blog Friends around a set of APIs, which will make it relatively trivial to deploy (or for others to deploy) Blog Friends on diverse platforms and devices. (Incidentally, we didn't start off with an API-based approach back in June 2007 because we knew we had to get Blog Friends out as soon as possible to catch the Facebook adoption wave—a decision we still regard as correct.)

But why do we not feel that spreading across multiple social nets alone is an optimum strategy?

Two reasons: firstly, having our own "place" on the web gives us an air of solid independence; it safeguards us against the varying fortunes of any given 3rd-party platform (witness Facebook's fall from grace amongst the In Crowd of late). Secondly, it is *so* much quicker to implement and test features when e.g. FBML and FBJS are not involved, and those features can be a lot richer and run much faster. With our tiny development resources (three of us!), and with competition breathing down our neck, we can't afford to waste even an ounce of effort.

Presence distribution is immensely valuable as a strategy, but the current state of the web and the tech that powers it, along with startup resource limitations can necessitate some toughly pragmatic tactical choices.

The social web is not a machine—it is (evolving into) us

Chris Brogan wonders if the social web could be understood as a machine that we can learn to "program".

After adding a couple of rather emotive comments that didn't respond fairly to Chris's whole post (I've learned to open my mouth before thinking too much these days—I rarely regret it in the long run!), I managed to say what I really meant:

@Chris- My point (clumsily made, for which apologies) is that the programming metaphor only goes so far in encapsulating our activity on the social web, because we are (hopefully) not just using the social web as a “machine” to achieve a particular, pre-planned outcome that we desire (a blog in the Technorati Top 100, a new consultancy contract etc.), but rather are embedded in a complex and quite mysterious world of cybernetically-extended human relationship.

It’s only when we give up “knowing” where we are going or need to go that we open ourselves up to truth, surely? And your positivistic programming metaphor doesn’t seem to me to foster this kind of Zen Mind state.

All that said, the social web *is* at a stage right now where we do need “programming” skills just to use the damn thing, motivations not-withstanding. So from that point of view, absolutely I agree with the utility of your metaphor.

Let’s just not forget the larger goal—of facilitating the evolution of the web such that it comes to be transparent to our time and space-shifted *human* communication. : )

Powerful metaphors need judicious useage.

My hairstylist is a Blog Friends user

Well, I must say I was pretty chuffed today when my Brazilian hairstylist, Pedro, told me that not only had he taken up my invitation to sign up for Blog Friends, but also that he really likes it and has found some great posts, including one that I had also read and that we both loved—Scoble's "What I've learned in 2007".

How cool is that? : )

Clearly, the days when all hairdressers were interested in was where you were going on your holidays are long gone. Seriously though, Pedro is one of the most thoughtful and interesting people I've met in a while, so the fact he enjoys Blog Friends makes me happy.

All of a Twitter

I'm really enjoying using Twitter wholeheartedly for the first time. It's a bit like tracking down an elusive party—a lot of my mates are hanging out there already. I'm also getting lots of inspiration for ideas for the integration of Blog Friends with Twitter (which is actually what prompted me to get Twittering). And you can now track my latest Tweets (should you really want to!) in the weaverluke sidebar.

But where's Twitter's business model? Fred Wilson, one of their investors, clearly feels that it would be a mistake to worry about that too soon, as it could distract them from growing their userbase as fast as possible. Nic Brisbourne agrees, but also points out that web entrepreneurs should at least have a "Plan A" for monetisation in their back pocket.

I suspect Jason Calacanis is right to point to mobile advertising as an attractive monetisation option for Twitter, but I'd go even further: maybe Twitter should get themselves acquired by a mobile telco who could pay for the SMS bills and integrate Tweets with mobile ads..?

Advance Aid: a cause worth getting blogged up about

Aha, this is much better: a really heartfelt description of why That charitable cause is worth getting excited about, from an email to me from one of its Directors, David Dickie:

It really is a good concept and one that can engender a culture of trade not aid on the continent of Africa. Our basic mission is simple: sending aid to Africa does not work; the only solution is to create real and sustainable employment there which will create lasting sustainability. The first project we have been involved is the opening of a plastics factory in Kenya which will create 300 jobs in Nairobi on day one. Believe me, this is a big deal out there and will lift lots and lots of families from the poverty trap.

We are really ready to spread the word now and need to use the cheapest and most efficient media for doing this. If there is a way in which you could help us get the word out there, that would be great.

Check out www.advanceaid.org for some more info.

I wish Advance Aid all the best for 2008—it sounds like they are indeed doing very valuable work. I can't help but feel, though, that they could do very well to blog (etc.) about it from the rooftops themselves and leverage social web tools to spread the word. I would certainly favourite them in Blog Friends if they joined, as I'd love to track and share with friends how they get on. : )