Organic Growth Issues

Why do we participate in things, particularly online web 2.0 based things? I guess there could be many different reasons, but I’m willing to suggest a fundamental (by appearances useless, but I shall prove otherwise) answer to this:

Because we want to.

This is more important than it might initially appear to be…

I work (As you probably know) in the University of Reading, and we’ve got this thing called “RedGloo”. It’s a social network for the School of Systems Engineering which is intended to have a somewhat academic and work focused bent. You can keep in contact with you peers, lecturers, and anyone else who’s hanging around, and theoretically get some help with work. That does actually sometimes happen! More generally though it’s a great place for the SSE types to gather and be enormous geeks at each other.

RedGloo is built on ELG, and bluntly, ELG sucks copious ass. The past versions have been patchy at best, but this time we had our own code monkey (Mr Ashton) who worked long and hard (well, long at any rate) and produce something half decent – a RedGloo which people might actually want to use. And lo, people came. Slowly, in drips and drabs, people came and signed up, and began to talk. The process was slow, but it works.

This is called “Organic Growth”. It depends on people wanting to use your tool.

One of the other projects I’ve mentioned before is MeAggregator. Now, I love MeAggregator, and everyone I’ve spoken to loves the idea of it too (a central hub from which you can effecitvely and efficiently view and control your online presence). People who ask what I’m working on and are talked at about it actually seem excited. They want it, as soon as possible.  From what I’ve just said, we should have a shed load of users.  There will be a lot of people wanting to use it.  This is elementary really.

But people get impatient, particularly in institutions (either educational or corporate).  When they spend money developing a tool, they want people to be using it as soon as possible – “We paid for it, how can we make them use it?” seems to be the prevalent attitude.  This is seriously at odds with what the thought process should be, i.e. “How can we make this so people want to use it?”.  It’s a massive problem concerning the creative process of web 2.0 tools.  The thing is, institutions seem convinced that there is some magic way to circumvent organic growth – they seem to believe that there must be some way to simply wave a magic memory stick and lo, everyone uses the tool.

There are, as far as I am concerned, only three reasons for uptake of a new tool:

1. It does something that nothing else does, i.e. is a totally new kind of tool.  MeAggregator works with this point because there is nothing else that does what it will do.
2. It does something better than the current options, i.e. it is better, fast, more user-friendly, etc than the other tools that are available.
3. There is absolutely no other option.  For example, a University Virutal Learning Environment might be adopted by students because it is (through a institute-based drive) the only way you can get access to lecture notes, course details, etc.  They need the information so they have to use the tool.

The thing is, institutions like option 3, and don’t understand why it doesn’t foster a pleasant working environment, though it should really be obvious.  Users want to choose their tools, even if they all end up using the same thing.  But they like the drive to adopt to be from themselves, not forced upon them.  Just like having a government forced upon you, it fosters resentment.

At UoR, almost all the students use Facebook.  Is this because it’s the only option?  No.  Is it because there it is forced upon them by the institution?  No.  Is it because it is the best as what it does?

That’s complicated.  You see, Facebook isn’t great – there are a number of serious flaws with it.  Event and Group noficiation is poor, it’s swamped with useless and irritating applications, and the blogging/notes utility is extremely basic, to name a few problems.  But that doesn’t mean that a) there is any other social networking system that is overall better, and b) that the features of the system are the only aspect of whether it is good or not.  The mere fact that so many people use it is in of itself a massive plus in its favour.

So, it comes back to: People want to use it.

And this is my worry:  At the moment, people want to use MeAggregator, but if an institution gets its hands on it, is it going to be wrested from the hands of the users and placed firmly under official control.  This will, undoubtably, foster resentment towards to the tool, and that means people don’t want to use it.  You can probably see where this is going.

So what have we learnt?  Organic growth (i.e. the only useful kind of growth), is only possible if institutions don’t walk over projects.

Hint: Be patient.  If it’s the best option available, they will come.

If it’s not, forcing them will only make things worse.

(not to say you shouldn’t advertise, but that’s a post for another day)

All or Nothing

This week has been pretty tough. Ignoring the fact that I came down with something desperately unpleasant during the night which meant I barely slept from my muscles screaming, I’ve been stupidly busy and stressed over the last few days. A combination of Fresher’s Fayre, trying to force Human Resources to pay me, and desperately trying to sort out the rest of my life (my PhD has now been defered until next October) has left me tired and unhappy. This is not what I was expecting from working part time doing a job I like. I haven’t even really managed to get any of my real work done at all.

One of the things that’s continually stressing me is trying to keep up with all my correspondance and online activites. As someone who works in the tech field, it’s expected that I keep on top of my emails, as well as facebook, Redgloo (Reading Uni’s social network for the School of Systems Engineering), and whatever else is in vogue currently. The problem is, of course, that when you spend a lot of time actually out doing stuff and trying to keep everything going on the ground level you don’t get a lot of time to do that kind of thing. Even a couple of hours away from a net connection can throw me massively behind as I can’t respond to emails as and when they turn up, and what should have taken me an hour spread across the whole day suddenly becomes a long and tedious chore as I scrabble to keep on top of everything.

So am I saying that internet connectivity is causing me stress? Well, no, but I almost wrote a blog post saying exactly that – dependence on online communication is a serious problem, and we need to strike a careful balance. But after thinking about it some more I realised that actually the major problem was not the connectivity itself, but the occasional bursts of it where you try and catch up on all the time you weren’t online. If you spend all your time in front of a computer coding or whatever then it’s actually easier to keep on top of things and it doesn’t stress you out nearly as much. If you can respond to things as you work it breaks down into nice managable chunks, and it doesn’t seem like an insurmountable task in the same way. But when you peel yourself away from the lab (which, I’m constantly told, is the “healthy” thing to do) then it’s all stress stress stress.

What’s far more irritating about this is that it doesn’t need to be so stressful. I actually have many individual minutes when I’m out an about to catch up with this kind of thing, but I’m perpetually defeated by technical limits. The fifteen minutes I’m on the bus, or the lull in the crowds when you’re manning the desk at an event, or any of the other hundred moments that crop up during the day when I’m not actually doing anything at all could be spent just to keep on top of things, but almost universally I’m out of wireless range, or my laptop is too unwieldy to use at the time, or it’s simply out of battery.

Now some people solve this problem by using their mobile phones to connect to the internet and keep on top of things that way, and I agree this is definately a good start (if an expensive one – currently very much not within my budget) but it doesn’t solve the problem completely. Firstly, connections to mobiles tend to be pretty poor, and even if I am connected my data is in so many different places that it takes me forever to check through everything if I’m not permenantly logged in.

As my friend Pat would tell me, what I need is a MeAggregator.

Let me give you some background on that.

There’s a small project team doing some work on a project called MeAggreggator who I’ve done some work with recently. The idea is, in theory, deceptively simply: The MeAggreggator collects and aggregates my data and correspondance from many different sources into one simple to use central location so I can keep up to date on everything at once, and provides a universal toolbar so I can control this content to suit my prefered online persona. Actually, now I say it, it’s not simple at all… no, really, it’s not. But it is happening (I designed the lovely shiny PC interface for it), and hopefully there should be a working prototype in the next few weeks. What I need is a MeAggregator for my phone. I’ll make a note to mention mobile technologies to people in the next meeting.

Also what would help is better mobile connectivity and access. Currently the best thing available for mobile “anywhere” internet access is the KDDI/AU CDMA2000-1x-WIN service which runs at about 2.4 Mbps on a good day, but slows down horribly when the network is busy and is incredibly prohibative both financially and geopgraphically. Most of us are stuck with 3G, which runs at a measely 200kbit/s – not really fast enough for modern web usage that approaches anything remotely intensive. Luckily, there’s a new system just around the corner – 4G – which is supposed to be roughly 20Mbps. Whilst it’s likely it’ll really cost you to start with, these kind of services tend to drop in price relatively quickly, and it seems reasonable that we, the techie masses, will get our hands on it pretty soon. I’m told they’re already testing it in Korea, which bodes well.

So yes, give me a MeAggregator and a 4G phone, and my stress will just fade away. Until then, I guess I’m stuck living with it, or living at my computer.

It’s a tough choice right now, let me tell you.

Privacy and Boundaries

One thing that continues to bother me with modern social networking tools (particularly utlities such as Facebook) is the way that they institute such strict and uncompromising boundaries and divisions amongst their users. For example, I am in both my University network and the London network on Facebook… which means that for the most part, I can’t view or interact with members of other networks. This is, I am told, done for very simple privacy reasons and considering the fact that there is the choice to have your data open I have no real problem with this, except of course for the problem of groups.

Groups are clearly designed to allow members of disparate networks to discuss and interact with each other by providing a mutual meeting place based upon mutual interests, beliefs, and so on. The major problem with this is, I think, the lack of intelligence built into the group system, and how this carries over to the user base. Let me give you an example.

When I did my English degree my dissertation was in one of my favourite authors, Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Feeling well disposed to him last November I set up a group on Facebook entitled “Howard Phillips Lovecraft: Writer, Thinker, Gentleman” which attracted a few members, and I promptly mostly forgot about. I looked it up the other day to discover it had several hundred members, and decided to search for what other groups might be providing similar services. There were, in fact, several almost identical groups. So why did these different groups all exist, and moreover, why do they still exist?

Part of the problem is that there is no intelligent system sitting behind the group construction and maintainence facility, and thus these superfluous groups do seem to form with alarming regularity. How hard, really, could it be to have the system do a quick search when you enter a group name and say “Did you know that there are already several groups devoted to this subject?”. If that’s too difficult for the programmers over at Facebook HQ to deal with, what the hell is the problem with using a simple tagging interface? You already have to select a broad category, why not allow your users to tag their groups (and events come to that) with more specific words. If I had tagged my group with “Lovecraft” “Literature” and “H.P. Lovecraft” there would have been a swift BING and I would have known that setting up this group was more or less pointless. And if I didn’t think it was more or less pointless, I could have ignored the warnings and gone ahead anyway. This is an absurdly simple system, so why isn’t it in place?

What makes it worse is that there is no way to correct this mistake once it’s been made. It’s impossible to kick people from a group, and the creator leaving just hands over admin rights to some other chump. If only you could merge your group with another as long as, say, the officers or creators both agreed. Then the Lovecraft groups could merge into one glorious whole, with no real disadvantage. All you’d need to do was port the officers, discussions, and wall, and lo and behold, you have a single group. Exactly how this was done could be left up to the individual creators, but it can’t be difficult to implement. Seriously guys, get with the program.

But this isn’t really just Facebook. We’re such an active tagging community online these days, particularly in the blogging world, and it seems surreal that we’re not extending this to other internet-based media, or even those strange things we do when we’re offline. If Facebook could benefit (even in this limited and pretty obvious example) why can’t other facilities? Why shouldn’t my hardrive be taggable? If I could tag my fiction output it would make searching and organisation about a million times easier, and if you can’t be bothered to use it… well, don’t.

Manual tagging is a very useful tool, and it needs to be used more often, but there is also a place, I think for an automatic tagging tool. Though it would be much more difficult, it could be feasible to create a tool that monitored what you were typing, and associated it with a key tags that slotted into an ontological dictionary. I type “brownie” and later on I write something about “biscuits” and the computer goes “Oh ho! He’s talking about baked goods today!” and could, if it were useful, alert me to this fact. Of course, I’ve touched upon the major problem here – what is useful? Well, that’s just a small crease to iron out in the scheme… honest.

Well, it’s a nice thought for the future. But until then: GET TAGGING!

Run Fatboy Run Review

So, I went to see Run Fatboy Run today, the new film starring Simon Pegg. I’d heard some really good things about this film so I was looking forwards to it, and I was suprised to be… very unimpressed. This was not good. Really not good.

Now, ok, so, I’m a huge fan of Simon Pegg’s, and of the whole new comedy group that he works with, so don’t think I’m at all biased against him. I adore his work, and Dylan Moran’s, and indeed Moran gives by far the best performance here as the dodgy cousin of Libby, Pegg’s character’s almost-wife. The sequences with him and his incredibly dubious poker buddies are the highlight of this otherwise dreary picture.

So what’s actually wrong with it? Well, the direction is uninspired, but not awful, and the production values are suprisingly good now I come to think about it. The actors all give pretty solid performances, but apart from Moran aren’t exceptional. To be honest, and this is where a film should shine, it is the script that really lets Run Fatboy Run down. There are a couple of good moments (the commentary by the flustered BBC reporter at the end entertains) but for the most part it’s lackluster and unexciting. It is bereft of the usual Pegg flair, and I have to wonder why. Instead of the usual surreal and smart dialogue we have slightly uncomfortable slapstick, and shock swearing that’s clearly supposed to be funny.

Which is a suprise until I notice David Schwimmer’s named tacked onto it, and it all clicks into place. The reason this feel uncomfortable, a balance between a no-brain US comedy and a sensitive British rom-com, is that Schwimmer is clearly battling against Pegg for control.

Or maybe I’m being mean. Who knows.

Overall rating? Probably a five or six out of ten. It’s not a *bad* film by any stretch, but I wouldn’t watch it again either. The beginning was slow and pretty depressing, but the ending pulled it up out of total mediocracy. All in all, a slow and dull film that can’t quite work out what it wants to be.

Human 2.0

Welcome the Fourth Eye Utopia, a blog discussing new social, political, and spiritual ideas that slot into a new and ever developing technological world.  It seems to me that there are profound impacts upon all spheres on human existence (and human existence itself) from technological and especially digital advance.  This blog is intended to explain how I think the world could, should, and will change to adapt, focusing primarily on the more “human” and personal aspects of our lives.