This vision is brilliant in it's simplicity but it's a big shift in the grand scheme of human expression. I am sure there will be enough theories on how far reaching change this simple transformation will bring. We are in first inning here. We have seen the impact of social media on main stream media, we are yet to see that play out on other sectors such education, business (B2B or Enterprise 2.0?) and health.

Blogging 1.0 is almost complete and we are going through the birthing process of micro-blogging. Between these two spectrum, there are many forms and shapes of expression tools.

This vision is a long march but there are some interesting opportunities in near future. If you belong to entrepreneurial camp, then there are interesting problems to work on. Let me explain that by expanding on this social media pyramid shared by Don Dodge:

We keep hearing about this 1-10-100 ratio. This supply chain of content gets into action when that lone creator starts the thread. Since this ratio doesn't really translate into any actionable imagery I started calling this submit-to-scroll ratio. Submit-to-scroll ratio is really a contributer-to-lurker ratio. Reason I prefer this terminology as this helps in thinking more about Submit contexts. Slapping Submit sticker in every possible interface we can significantly increase number of creators.

By doing that we can expand Don's pyramid chart to this possibility:

By just focusing on creating more contexts for new users to hit submit button, we can expedite our march towards a fully participatory media.

Social media tools are still lacking when it comes to inviting new social media users. I don't have handy numbers but my guess is that lot of people who moved from Twitter were already familiar with blogging. Big opportunity lies in letting new users join social media way of expressing. When we started MessageDance, our vision was to focus on users who are very comfortable with email as an authoring tool. Extending email content into social networks, blogs and twitter is what we ended up doing. It feels good when users praise our effort for letting them use most well known Submit button!

If you want to add to social media revolution, think about contexts where we can invite new creators. New interfaces for allowing them to hit Submit button. It still amazes me to see many talented people not blogging due to all sorts of silly reasons. Behavior change will happen with the help of new interfaces.

This vision of social media where every online user is creating something is a major shift. We are lucky to be participating in this migration.

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First of all it’s open source and that will help create necessary motivation to add innovation around this API.

TechCrunch has good things to say about this plugin.
Download TypePad AntiSpam plugin from here.

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First I thought I will put  picture from Roland Joffe's classic The Killing Fields. I realized that will be offending to some people so I thought why not just emphasize what is burning in my eyes. I mean burning when I scan Techmeme from top to bottom.

Few disclaimers to start with. I have big respect for all these bloggers and journalists. They do fine job in enjoying themselves and in that process educating the great unwashed long tail. So by highlighting few words here and there I am not passing any judgment here. If you want to fault me for any thing then probably it should be my lame attempt in being funny.

To me the combination of three separate Techmeme headline with somewhat linked verbal symbolism did it.

First the BBC news piece. Jakob Nielsen shared his research study where he found online users are getting way more antsy.  Most website designers are naturally unaware of this and expect users to like their shiny gradient layout.

Users are setting expectation level from the best. Google search engine's sub-second response time is a big subliminal play. Every other website gets dissed because they are not as fast as Google. At least not as good in instant gratification as Google is. Gratification level offered by Google search engine is a new default happiness level. Every other website has to  offer superior or alternate instant gratification in order to suck less. Consistently fail in doing that and you invite WTF, F#$K OFF, SOB, and what not. I have faced it in couple of occasion, when MessageDance site was struggling to get IE support (we still suck on IE6 but we don't feel too bad about it).

Anger and frustration around wildly popular Twitter is a case study of it's own kind. I will not comment much on that. You can read Techmeme headline to get the idea. I had issues with people using "kill" or "killing" in headline but I guess that works well to raise passions couple of notches (not to say that it doesn't help page views!).

Last news item just happened to be there below Twitter cluster. Tim O Reilly's analysis is, as always, spot on. It's just that his choice of words (along with two other headlines) made for a strange eew!

Otherwise weekend is coming along just fine. Weather be damned.

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Two weeks, three announcements and wild west world of social networking is all topsy turvy.  Following Myspace and Facebook announcement, Google today gave a preview announcement of FriendConnect. Goals of FriendConnect are:

• Drive traffic: people who discover interesting sites can bring their friends with them, and can opt-in to publish their activities on those sites back into their social network, attracting even more visitors.
• Increase engagement: access to friends and OpenSocial applications provides more interesting content and richer social experiences.
• Less work: any site can have social components without hiring a programming team or becoming a social network.

I will see what more comes out of scheduled press conference. This is getting very interesting and options for developers are growing. In a true sense, walls are coming down and data is flowing across gardens :)  Now I need to go and dig into APIs and make MessageDance dance across these newly discovered openness.

Update: TechCrunch has more details on the story:

So if you go to a Website that is part of Friend Connect, you will be able to sign in under your Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, Orkut, or Plaxo IDs (you choose which one you want to sign in under, with more options coming). Then you authorize the site to go out and retrieve your friend’s list from that network. Any of those friends who also happen to be members of the site you are on will then show up and you can interact with them.

Friend Connect is geared at the Long Tail of small sites that don’t even have any user information. It allows them to tap into bigger sites and piggyback on their user sign-in and registration, list of friends, and interactions between those friends. It takes advantage of many existing standards, including Facebook’s (it is not an official partner, but it Google is taking advantage of its published APIs). Of the many standards emerging, Glazer thinks that OAuth is the way to do it right.

Glazer admits that Friend Connect is but one small step towards the larger goal of being able to connect to any friend on any application, on any site. But it is not there yet. For instance, it doesn’t work with Google’s Social Graph API, and many more social and identity networks still need to be connected.

The bigger downside of Friend Connect is that Websites using it cannot mash up the data with their own to make compelling new applications. Glazer confirmed that the data will be sent to third party sites via an iframe rather than directly through a set of APIs (as Michael speculated on Friday). However, Glazer also says that he wouldn’t be surprised if eventually Google or somebody else makes it possible for Websites to combine the Friend Connect data with their own.

Basically, what Friend Connect does is gather this data from big social networks in whatever way they make available and then presents it in a uniform way to third party sites. It also works as a pass-through between those third party sites and the big repositories of social data. This eliminates any programming hassles on the part of small Websites that want to tap into these social networks, but it also positions Google as the central switch connecting all of these different identity systems.

So its a still in work in progress. I think iFrame level integration is a bummer. Oauth seems to be gaining traction so that’s good. Atleast developers will see their efforts protected around Oauth. Oauth is primarily used by service providers to allow user to give Server A permissions to use data residing on Server B. Like the way MessageDance user grant permission to MessageDance to go fetch Blogger credentials from Blogger service. (OpenID is different from OAuth in the sense that it’s more of a user browser context to server side communication. Users use openID to identify themselves and login to various web services. It’s not between services to services, which is what OAuth does).

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Secondly, third party comments don’t work well on mobile handsets. This is a big drawback as we get into more and more mobile experience. I increasingly use iPhone for all blog posts and comments.

Thirdly, and this one is big, Twitter and blog post based response models will finally take over. I will elabore more on the last one in next post. Twitter will disrupt commenting system as we know them.

Now back to tennis.

Update: Just read Don Dodge’s analysis. He mentioned performance concerns as one of the sticking point. I think that will be resolved in near future.

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