The Big Picture

Wonderful three days at PC Forum. Diligently shared session notes and captured a few other things in the PC Forum Eventspace. Socialtext was in the Gallery this year, so unfortunately I was playing booth babe during what usually are some of the most interesting session where smaller companies dish the reality of the trenches.

Above all, the quality of the networking at this event was penultimate. Not just being able to meet the CEOs of most major tech companies, but also an air of ponder to share ideas with minds wide open. This year's theme, The Big Picture, attempted to diversify topics beyond tech and into such things that coexist with tech like politics and globalization. The content of the offbeat panels weren't perhaps as well received, but I did notice that hallway conversations were more diverse. Perhaps we have learned that the world and our interests are larger than our industry.

So what was the Big Picture? The Bottom Up phenomenon.

Large portal players on the From Player to Platform panel had dipped their toes in the blogging waters and were now grappling with the connotations that conversations in social context mattered more than content. The Users Make Content Their Own panel seemed to be the most well received, although the companies themselves were just scratching the surface of user mixes. Part of The Big Picture was pictures themselves. Steven Johnson noticed this theme too. The closing conversation with Pierre Omidyar and Stewart Brand even touched on the potential and challenges of unleashing bottom up forces for sake of social good.

So why is it the Bottom Up Phenomenon? In our days of fear, independent developers, consumers and select folks in the enterprise used the Net for social means. This is producing complex results, but also real commercial opportunities. The simplest things that could possibly work, did. This doesn't fit into the linear models, select scenarios or arbitrary assumptions of most VCs and is disruptive enough that the larger players act upon the opportunities too late. But now its happening and everyone wants to harness what is fundamentally about freedom.

Let me add a small picture, one of unmet expectations. I was really looking forward to the Attention Management panel, one of my favorite topics and nicely queued up with a talk by Eric Johnson. Eric has done some fascinating behavioral economist research looking at the impact of defaults, the second leading cause of information fatigue after abundance of information itself, which also happens to have increasing impact because of the scarcity of attention (Moore's Law vs. Simon's Law).

The panel had Raymie Stata, whose Bloomba product is perhaps the best at managing email overload (disclosure: Stata Labs is a customer of Socialtext), Irene Greif of IBM (collaboration group manager, working on a new email threading concept) and Scott Kurnit of Dotomi (even more personalized advertising) and Goodmail (anti-spam).

Here is what Dan Gillmor had to say of it:

The panelists discussing the e-mail meltdown at PC Forum have talked about lots of solutions to the various problems with the medium, notably spam and the overall difficulty of making e-mail work right for all the uses we've created for it. But there wasn't even a mention of RSS, which could solve many of the problems. Sheesh.

Spam is not only killing email, but it practically killed this panel too. Should have been a topic elsewhere and personalized advertising is part of the problem, not the solution. Raymie did talk about the better unstructured approach that relies more on search of unstructured data than attempts to institute structure and the danger of real-time. I was flattered that Irene kept giving Socialtext Eventspace's notifications as examples of how other applications leverage email. She was one 20 people to opt-in to them and had full control over their frequency.

Yes, the panel almost completely missed RSS (Bloomba is a reader too), but it also missed the role social networking plays in managing attention and interest as well. In some companies, people spend four hours a day in their Inbox, each IM carries an interruption tax of 15 minutes recovery time, volume is growing at 30% per year and its intruding into our personal lives. What's new that old guard vendors don't get is that half of attention is control. The Pull model of RSS and throttling notifications by space for users, but also giving up control to the networks you are a part of to let them filter the world for you. We have to help people get out of their Inbox (even Ray Ozzie agrees). A someone noted in the wiki: People are pulling tasks out of email via wikis, RSS and IM..

Comments

[Bill Seitz]

In terms of Attention management, I think the opposite will happen. We'll have a UniversalInbox/Toolbox that takes email, RSS, tasks, schedules, maybe even IM session-requests, and prioritizes it for us to help us manage attention and interruptions.

I don't like thinking of a single app trying to handle all those things together, but it just seems kind of inevitable, because the filtering/prioritizing you're going to want to do needs to apply across those media.

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/UniversalInbox
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/UniversalToolbox