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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I like the sound of it. I have been selling virtues of open source strategy for some time and I know it works.

Facebook will have a convincing claim for leadership in emerging internet operating system if they let other developers run with significant chunk of social networking shell. Shell which hosts all social graph processing. Allow other developers to enhance and implement. This maybe a move to counter Open Social but indirectly it can affect Ning.

Facebook is primarily a database repository.  For database company to go open source means what gets distributed will be marginal. This codebase cannot threaten core offering, which is all  about enriching and protecting social graph (Scoble is always right!). Which means APIs for read and write can go totally open source but actual data repository will be hard to release. Privacy issues will be real.

If I allow conspiracy theory to run for a while then I see a nice complement to Microsoft's cloud computing initiatives. Also possibilities for tight desktop strategy with WPF/Silverlight APIs linked in. Mother and satellite node picture always gets product managers drooling and I can definitely sense similar temptation here.

With enough user base and third party apps in Facebook.com, they seems to be  just ready to pursue bigger architecture ambition.

[Pic thanks to Gapingvoid]

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Trying to understand evolving signals around silent web. Web which we users leave behind when we share our profile data, friends information and information related to transactional experience.  I think something significant is just around the corner. These signals are coming up in memes such as Implicit Web, Atomization of conversations, Interface for telling and news feeds.

First the idea of Implicit Web, which is a fancy name for a model where systems and online services act on your digital information without explicitly asking for your interaction. Josh Kopelman, First Round VC,  has really amplified core ideas of Implicit Web. He used simple use case to demonstrate how systems are now silently working on our data and creating opportunities for smart orchestrations.

Implicit Web trend received unanimous nod at recent Churchill Club discussion -

Later on Josh expanded on Implicit Web theme by giving examples of “atomization of conversation” meme.

• Why call someone and tell them you're coming to town?  They've seen it on Dopplr. 
• Want to tell someone about your recent trip to England?  Don't bother, they've seen the pictures on Flickr. 
• No need to call me and ask whether the new movie I just saw is any good — you've seen my review on Flickster. 
• Want to know what music I'm listening to right now? — check out iLike.
• Is someone you know suffering from an illness or injury? — stay connected and informed (and offer support) at their Carepage.
  
• Did your friend just open a bottle of wine?  You can stay up to date on what they like (and don't) by following their CellarTracker reviews.
  
• And if that didn't cover it, don't worry, you probably saw it in my Facebook Status updates or Twitter feed.

Online services leveraging user information and then feeding value-addition back in user's social context is what results in atomization of  conversations. Status distribution in lifestreaming format but all acting on the data pool of implicit web. User A saying to User B, just give me your feed and I will know what you are up to!

There are two ends to this. Machine enhanced conversations consumed by my social network and my own intent as smartly captured by new tools.

This discrete transformation of our intent is what is really interesting. Though this drags us into semantic territory. Beauty of this transformation is that it's riding on our natural motivations (What are you doing?) and does not require major format/tag surgery.  It's happening right now under the banner of 140 constraint in Twitter, search-for-interestingness motivation for picture tagging in Flickr or SEO motivation to make sure that the gist of your expression is captured in your blog post title. There are many more examples like that.

What has really expedited the trend towards atomization of conversation is this new input interface, which is greatly influenced by mobile handset constraints.

Interface of constraint, which Cliff Gerrish calls it Interface for telling, is where we are going to see Implicit Web getting most of it’s innovation. I think Cliff's description is by far the best one I have seen in recent time.  This new interface of constraint is really the one which is ensuring best capturing of intent at the entry point. Commonplace expressions like "this restaurant sucks" released from iPhone triggers a chain of event and engages my complete social network. My friends get to see my expression in different contexts - Facebook news feed, Yelp restaurant review, Twitter status, picture in MessageDance so on and so forth. 

Interface of constraint is the starting point of implicit web and this constraint is a business rule which translates user's intent in a flurry of conversations. This is a very significant development and this puts systems like Twitter at the center of next generation computing architecture.  As Adam Green , CEO of Grazr, puts it Twitter is the IBM punchcard of the 21st century.

Implicit web, atomization of conversations, interface for telling and constraint-based read/write designs are all linked. Apply this new understanding in every social applications out there and you will see opportunity for refactoring lot of existing designs, I think that's where you will see, in next 2-3 years, many new startups to come in and create new values. That's where entrepreneurs step in

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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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Facebook and Myspace are extremely busy in wooing  developers. Yesterday Facebook announced changes in Profile display and API support. Today Myspace came out with a significantly expanded approach to data sharing. Or as they are calling it Data Availability. Myspace also formally joined Data Portability group.

Let's understand full significance of this announcement from developer's point of view. Here is a full press release (thanks to Silicon Alley Insider!)

So there you have it, in a nutshell category 5 marketing announcement. If implemented in full spirit (as claimed ) this will let developers (like MessageDance) focus on higher level user interactions and not worry about data requests. Myspace is a leader in social networking space and by picking leading players in email/IM (Yahoo), photo (Photobucket), commerce (Ebay), presence/micro-blogging (Twitter), they are laying down blueprints for the next generation social applications.

I have talked about Experience Graph in the past and I strongly believe Myspace will be pursuing experience graph strategy as against Facebook's  plan to mine social graph. Both have merit and it's way too early in the post-social-network phase to declare who will come out as a winner.

For developers like MessageDance, this is a great announcement.

[Photo thanks to Dazzie]

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To me they are yin and yang in the battle to capture user’s intention. Don’t rush into asking where is the revenue model. By the time revenue model becomes clear to everybody, Twitter will be another blockbuster story. It will be too late by that time.

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Update: I like the way Tom Simonite at NewScientist describes Twitter: column-inch grabbing microblog platform

Update: Looks like today is going to be the day of education for me. Rajesh sent link for twittervision.com.

I see seeds of post-Google world in fast evolving twitter ecosystem.