Stone Age brains and the social web

I just listened to a brilliant "All In The Mind" podcast on "Stone Age brains in 21st century skulls" while jogging around Highgate Woods:

Front up to your shrink, and you bring a menagerie of hunter gatherers, anteaters and reptiles from your ancestral past with you. Or so Professor Daniel Wilson and Dr Gary Galambos believe. Both clinical psychiatrists, they provocatively challenge their profession to look to the Darwinian roots of human neuroses, and the evolutionary battleground that is our stone-age brain.

The podcast confirmed my thoughts on the importance of intimate social context in our lives—specifically, social intimacy appears to limit the extent to which the dynamics between manic/dominant and depressive/submissive personalities become excessively polarised within groups.

Such polarisation of social dynamics is an adaptive behaviour that is deeply rooted in the reptilian brain: assertion of leadership by the few within a small community allows the community to function without constant fighting. 

However, the exploded social contexts we live within in the modern world can distort assertion and submission into manic/psychotic and depressive behaviours respectively. Fascinatingly, we're told that all four of the major leaders in WWII (Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt and Tojo) had manic personality disorders of one kind or another.

Given all the above, how might we build social software that helps us rediscover intimacy of social context in an exploded society? Sounds like it's a fairly urgent mission.

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.

A Big Day for Blog Friends

I feel like a bit like a trapeze artist at the moment, arcing through the air between swings. (Admittedly I feel like a trapeze artist very definitely in a metaphorical sense only, as I put my back out yesterday and am hobbling around the flat!)

We took the current Blog Friends service down a few minutes ago, and are now working furiously to get Blog Friends v1 Beta ready for prime time—hopefully sometime later today.

So whether you are an existing or would-be user of Blog Friends, please bear with us: we very much hope the wait will be more than worthwhile.

And the view up here is amaaaaaaaaaazing! ; )

[Cross-posted from The Blog Friends Blog]

Blog Friends v1 Beta launches tomorrow!

I can't quite believe it but it's true—Blog Friends v1 Public Beta launches tomorrow, after months of preparation and weeks of testing and bug fixing (it's hard to convey to those who haven't experienced it just how fiendishly difficult it is to get a complex web service working properly in Internet Explorer ; ).

I'll be blogging about Blog Friends v1 Beta at The Blog Friends Blog tomorrow, but in the meantime you can find some more annotated screenshots of the app in action on our flickr group.

Looking forward to welcoming y'all to the new Blog Friends tomorrow. (If you don't yet have Blog Friends added to your facebook account, just follow this link.) Oh, and the current Blog Friends service will be out of action for much of tomorrow while Benjie updates the servers—not a trivial task now we have over 18,000 users!

Blog Friends latest

We must really start a Blog Friends blog so I can go back to just writing about identity at weaverluke! In the meantime, it seemed about time to write an update on Blog Friends' progress.

Firstly, I'm delighted to report that we closed some more seed investment yesterday, which gives us plenty of runway to launch the upcoming "v.1" release (of which more shortly).

We have 5,422 registered users as I write, and had 22,000 unique people in total use Blog Friends in the last month. Growth is gradually accelerating and currently averages around 150 registrations per day.

In the last few weeks, Benjie has been focusing on optimising the code and server setup in order to cope with our growing user base, along with various bug fixes, feature tweaks, and now support for multiple blogs (a much-requested feature).

So what next?

From user's feedback, and our own observations, we believe that we are doing a great job of serving bloggers and their friends (the reviews have been very kind*), but a lousy job of serving people who may only have heard of these curious things called "blogs", but have no idea how or where to find good ones to read.

For this reason, our forthcoming v.1 release (in a few weeks' time) will focus on redressing this deficit: our aim is that a new user, however little they may be networked on facebook, let alone with bloggers, should get a great experience from the get go!

We also hope to make Blog Friends much more useful and fun for all our users with a set of ratings and recommendation features that will help you, your friends and the whole network find more and more personally-interesting posts.

Finally, they do say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery... ; )

As ever, your feedback and thoughts are treasured—feel free to comment here or drop by our facebook group*.

*Link requires facebook login.

Identity Society—happenings and musings

I found the Mobile Monday "Mobile Digital Identity" event at SUN pretty interesting. Alex Craxton (his report here) did a great job of organising and MD-ing the evening, and the panel session seemed to go well.

As ever, though, the topic of identity quickly escaped the confines of "mobile" and we ended up talking about facebook and its privacy implications! The discussion reminded me a lot of the "Dark Side of Social Media" Chinwag event the other month, with both panel and audience divided between the privacy worriers and the information-must-be-free advocates.

I guess I attempt to span both camps with my "i-together" philosophy, which goes something like this:

It's natural that human beings assert and protect the boundaries of their individual identity in "win-lose" situations (my money, not yours!—"i"); on the other hand, people allow those boundaries to become increasingly permeable to others as they discover mutual interests and common purpose (saving the planet etc.—"together").

The individual and collective aspects of identity look set to weave ever more intricately through one another in our evolving culture, creating all sorts of social patterns at many scales ("i-together"). And networked technologies like facebook and new mobile capabilities are only accelerating the pace of the identity loom's machinations.

A weaver's view, you might say.

Incidentally, Charla and I spent a lovely day with my friend John Madelin and his delightful family yesterday, and John and I took the opportunity to make some good progress on the Identity Society wiki. Do check it out and edit away!