Ross Mayfield's Weblog

PC Forum: Identity, Reputation and Accreditation

The first open session covered identity, reputation and accreditation.  Meng Wong put it succinctly: identity is my story about who I am, reputation is other's story about you and accreditation is a story validated by a third party.  Not much came of it.  At first I was the only person to advocate alternatives to sender pay programs like Goodmail (a good thing to have in the market) like a sender pays but receiver receives (put a price on your inbox) that is decentralized.

PC Forum: edgeio

Sitting in the formal launch session for edgeio, a sucky Craigslist (I mean that in the best of ways) founded by Keith Teare and Michael Arrington.  They can blog about it themselves, and while I have my reservations about vertical search, what I can say is how interesting this is as a case of an instantly liquid market.

PC Forum: Conversation with Pierre Omidyar

Esther chatting with Pierre Omidyar.

Generally less choice can lead towards more satsification. I feel the need to reframe it.  If less choice is good, then is users in charge good?  It is so important because we are talking about individual self empowerment. When they are empowered, this leads to making the world a better place.  What is important is what environment they are in when they are excersizing their choice and their power. With eBay, I focused on the environment where when people act in their interest it leads to a greater good.

Esther: a certain number in the middle that if you treat them well and give them power, they will become better and better.  But some will do bad.

Focus on environment.  I founded eBay on the notion that people are basically good, and 10 years later we have evidence this is the case.  The kinds of structures I think are important:

1. Access: open access, level playing field, transparency, equal access to information are attributes of any environment with positive outcomes
2. Connection: enabling individuals to connect and interact with one another.  Market solutions, collaboration and wisdom of crowds.
3. Sense of ownership: skin in the game lets individuals feel there is an investment required to participate and accountability (e.g. reputation systems).

One of the ways that you can limit choice is by creating a structure, a set of rules that says this is what this environment is about.  So you do not have a choice to behave contrary to the rules.  Doing this can make people uncomfortable despite wanting to be inclusive.  Be most things to most people.  If you are a bad actor we don't want you in the community.  I map rules to limiting choice in this context.

Esther: start with one set of rules, what are the rules for changing rules?

And interesting set of questions.  If you start with the notion that people are good and enabling them to persue their self interest makes the world a better place, then you have to have the default assumption that allowing them to make their own choices is the right thing to do.  That means for eBay, Meetup or other systems -- you start with as little structure as possible, watch what they are doing and limit the behavior that is contradicting the environment you are trying to create.  Lots of consequences for over regulation.  Important to pay attention to what people do when they don't make a choice.

At eBay we have made a lot of decisions where we had to respond to the community.  In the early days we thought of the economic system and taxing behavior that we thought that was okay, but not great. E.g. imposing a tax on reverse price action because the price discovery mechanism was less transparent.  That was a good way to do it, can't think of a negative example offhand.  You don't want to legislate or criminalize all negative behavior. 

Esther: many people have free services here and are trying to find how to charge for them appropriately.

My approach to this kind of problem is that if you are providing a service of value to users, you as the provider, designing for the user, create a sustainable business model. The best way to do that is derive revenue from the core value you are creating.  With eBay, the transactions, rather than something that is happening on the side.  We need to be looking for businesses that are a force for social good.  But a lot of people do not believe this and think you have to make up for profits through contribution to charity.  If you can charge a fair price and can use that to build more services at charge that pays employees and puts their kids through school -- all this is a good thing. 

Zoe Baird: can you talk a little bit about what you see as the next wave of tools to have both transparency and privacy?

Transparency in a system doesn't mean transparency around individuals actions.  Not every user action needs to be transparent.  Having control over identity is critical.  If you are in an economic system, buyers and sellers need to know each other or intermediaries need to be known, but full transparency is not directly complementary with commerce.  Need to protect individual information with their own control, but some level of transparency is important.

Esther: allowing a second pseudonym that authenticates your identity (e.g. Opinity)

These are great solutions for privacy without loosing the ability to conduct commerce.

Gary Bolles: with eBay you have an infrastructure, but with the Network what are the kind of rules?

One of our important realizations is that business cannot be left out of the equation and can be a force for good.  I recently rediscovered Adam Smith, the classic baker selling to shoe maker example where the profit is evidence of the quality of life increasing for both parties.  Smith held that we needed competition and no negative externalities, but our modern economies are more complex.  Which is where we get to Access, Connection and Ownership.

The wonderful thing about an enabling environment is that it leads to trust.  Buy something from a stranger and it can teach you that you can trust a stranger.

Christina Koukkos: what example investments can you share?  Someone else asks about clean tech?

Example of our investments would not include clean energy.  Clearly clean energy is an example of a business that can be a force for good, something that can be sustainable as a business and a sustainable contribution.  Compare to the current industry which has a ton of externalities, an industry you cannot be convinced that you are making the world a better place if you work for in it.

A lot of ON investments in this room. Linden Lab demonstrates connection and collaboration, shared interests within world sometime, shared ownership.  Meetup: how does my group work?  Eventful: has an event demand aggregation tool that increases the level of ownership and user empowerment.

Someone asks: how do I extend my reputation I built within eBay into other environments?

Because you can have different environments with different rules and different structures, the reputations you build don't necessarily map to other environments.  There is a desire to say a local reputation should be extended nationally (Mayor of a small town to President of the US), but while it is relevant it may not necessarily map. 

Disclosure: Pierre's Omidyar Network is an investor in Socialtext.

PC Forum: The Paradox of Choice

If the users are in charge, they have more choices than before.  What does this mean?  More than commerce, psychology and sense of self.  Esther Dyson kicked PC Forum off with an interview with Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice which was handed out to attendees an hour before.  Barry introduces himself as a teacher (at Swarthmore).  The book is meant to problematize the notion of user in charge.

There is an official syllogism:  more freedom means more welfare, more choice means more freedom,  more choice means more welfare.  Look at all the choice in a super market, from 285 kinds of cookies to paper or plastic.  Complexity sends people to the store asking if you have a phone that doesn't do too much. 

Capability vs. Usability (Rust, Thompson & Hamilton, HBR, Feb 2006) people vastly preferred a CD player with more features (21) than not (7) even though they knew it would be harder to use.  Give them the ability to build their own, they add 19 features.  But people who use the 21 feature player first will choose the simpler one.   

Where when and how you work is a matter of choice.  Health care: the ethic of patient autonomy (Docs not telling you what to do), creates a new burden of making intelligent decisions.  In intimate relations: when I was younger the assumption was get married as soon as you can and have children, the only choice being with whom.  Nowadays there is no default, only live possibilities that students spend time thinking about instead of doing the work I assign.  Not force to live out the identity you inheret from you family.  " 

Is this good news or bad news?  YES!

People are so overwhelmed with choice that:

1. Instead of liberating people, it paralyzes them.
2. With all this choice, people may do better objectively than when there was less choice, but they will feel worse.

On Paralysis: (More options attracts attention, but doesn't attract intention).  401(k) investing for every 10 funds made available, the participation rate goes down 2%, throwing $5k down the tube each.  Throwing a dart at the sheet would be benefitial.

There is regret and anticipated regret.  This sucks away some of the satisfaction you should be getting with your good choice.  Anticipated is worse, preventing choice.  Opportunity costs.  And the mental load of opportunity costs.  The prospect of passing up an attractive opportunity to indulge another leads people to defer decisions.  I have learned the hard way to not ask graduating students what they are going to do when they graduate.  Choice also leads to the escalation of expectations.  We compare results with our expectations and largely are dissatisfied.  A NY Times cartoon: everything was better back when everthing was worse.  Because every now and then something could happen that exceeded expectations.  The secret to happiness is to have modest expectations.  Self-blame: when there are two kinds of jeans it is the world's fault, when there are hundreds, it is yours.  There is an explosion of clinical depression despite freedom and prosperity and I think this is a critical component.

The more options out there, the more the need for help.  Technology can help:

1. Provide intelligent filters, even personalized filters
2. Establishing the default (a theme of last year's event). What happens when people don't choose?  Libertarian paternalism is not an oxymoron.  When you have to choose to be an organ donor in California, 25% are.  In European countries you are by default, so 90% are.  Single biggest policy change achievable with zero cost is for people to pay attention to what people choose when choose nothing, and make it in their best interest.

Unless there are constraints, a metaphorical fishbowl, it isn't possible to be anything.  When there are limits, you can fulfill them.  We should be paying attention to how to structure contraints to enable people to live better lives, rather than preventing them.

Next, Philip Rosedale from Second Life talks with Esther, but I found it more difficult to take notes.  His primary point was in SL (as opposed to RL) you have an environment where certain costs are low to enable greater expression.  That's an interesting point, something there is even a role for in business.  Next next was Rediff.com and

IMHO: Technology can help, and filters and defaults are part of it.  But Barry it describing a cause and effect on individual psychology, when within his discipline the closest cure besides medication (which is the most common, and dare I say, prescriptive) -- is group therapy.  Your sense of identity when making decisions with choice abundance is strongly shaped by your peers.  They can help, or hurt, your confidence.  How can social technology embed defaults for help with choice?  Isn't the social network a filter that is prescriptive for this problem?  Think about how fads work to reduce the cost of choice, about how society trends towards the homogenous, for good and ill.

Tagging in the Enterprise

One of the most popular sessions at PC Forum was the Roundtable on User-generated Metadata. Moderated by David Weinberger and Esther Dyson, it engaged the former audience in a conversation.  Good thing too, as many of the experts were in the room.  You can see from my raw notes that it covered the topic widely. 

But the gem was from two comments by JP Rangaswami, CIO of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.  Not just because he is one of my favorite customers, but its a rare insight into tagging in the enterprise:

Using Socialtext in my bank... Two dimensions that work: people tag things for themselves and whatever I am doing, can I do it in a way that makes collaboration easier. All it is doing is making things easier. The thing that got me on tagging was when I went to Ross and he said it was the simplest thing that could work. I will do things with tags to try to help people remember.  And I don't want to be committed into a structure.

Going to use tags to solve a problem in my organization. People label things differently in different cultures in the same organization. Today English might be the language, but there are perhaps 300 dialects and the labels are different. Tagging lets structure cross-reference, where patterns emerge. Important for me in a commercial context. To let people in different contexts collaborate, keeping it simple and gaining a high adoption rate. Not pushing or pulling, its a community, which is why I like social software.

I helped provide an intro to tagging alongside Caterina Fake from Flickr and Dave Sifry from Technorati -- making points on relative cost, potential scale and social incentives that drive adoption.  But after JP's comments, I knew to shut up and let the customer do the talking.

The other enterprise social software highlight from the show was John Seely Brown and John Hagel finally talking about their forthcoming book:

The notion of productive friction has major implications for IT across multi-tiered process networks. Hagel said the combination of service-oriented architecture (loosely coupled), virtualization and social software (a shared collaborative workspaces like Wikis) is key to developing a work culture that can support productive friction and facilitate conflict resolution, allowing the stakeholders to browse the context to figure out how to "unstuck" an exception (problem).

See Dan Farber's post and the session page on the wiki.

EVDB

Notes from a company presentation (disclosure: I am an advisor) by Brian Dear on EVDB.
The problem

• the application: inconsistent ui, no synch hard to read, etx.
• What presentation would be right without this reference: the long tail
• little to no structured data, no search engine, no prospective searches
• All results in the "had I known" syndrome

The solution

• address the problems, naturally

Events of all kinds -- an event is anything that occurs or will occur.  Not necessarily at a place, it is at a time.  Not necessarily something in the newspaper, could be something important to you only.  Webinars, podcasts, meetups.

The spectrum of events: Search, Find and Go

1. logistics, planning
2. promotion
3. discovery
4. registration, ticketing, fulfillment

Their focus is discovery.  Everywhere.

The V in EVDB stands for Venues.  Venue data is one of the biggest problems in publishing events.  Rich venue, include lat and long. and enable people to annotate/tag.

Views help people discover events.

Data beyond scraping (inefficient), a hybrid smart crawl.  Very inspired with Wikipedia, counter-intutive that it works.

Detail. Mere pointers are good enough vs. mere pointers are not good enough.  We'll build the tools, but we'll let the community decide.

Distribution:

• web services api
• point of entry support: Point of entry (like point of sale or care): who is entering the data and how.  Very few tools to let people publish.
• publishing support: plugin to publish to blog
• syndication: took a big drink of the blog kool-aid.
• open-source development

Demand: using perscriptive effects to generate demand.

Positioning: between events are the focus or feature.  between web portal orientation and a web services orientation.  EVDB is focused on events with an increasingly web services orientation.

Business model:

• Targeted advertising: local search, plus time, plus events
• Licensed API

Powered by apps (web, mobile)

• bounties from ticket/event registration partners
• Consumers can use for free

[email protected]

System is personalized.  Starts with a command line.  Event items, with parents. Lets you tag events.  Select from sessions during an event to compose a personalized calendar.  Calendars have RSS and iCal feeds.  Calendars can be publsihed as HTML.  For things that haven't happened yet, SmartCalendars are persistent structured queries. Integrated with Meetup.  Talks through entering an event.

You earn reputation based upon what people do with your events, not by creating events.  Looking to have community moderation.

The promise is having your web services interop with others.

IMHO, Next year's Flickr and icon of obsession.

PC Forum Company Presentations

Trumba

It's not easy being me. You wouldn't know that from looking at my outlook calendar. Trumba is not just a personal calendar or group calendar we help people build calendar networks across communities.

EVDB

Have you ever found out about an event after the fact, one you would have gone to if you had known? Movies, concerts, interviews on NPR, business meetings that were right down the steet. Ever try to use the web to keep up? With all these mapping apps, wonder what is going on in all the building. In 2005 the web has still not delivered on the promise and potential of the long tail of events.

Endeca

The future of search is find. Enterprise software. Search today is anachronistic, assumes the user is an application, not a human. Future of search mirrors human behavior. Not sure what this company specifically does from the pitch.

Siderian

Why is it after all that has been achieved with information access on the web are will frustrated with search engines and portals. They do not let us manage information in the way we think. We think of documents as tangible objects with surrounding relationships. We know what information matters to us, but systems make it difficult. Enterprises have built KM systems that cannot keep pace with how we think, or have given up and gone with search that does not reflect they way we think.

Impinj

Makes chips for RFID. Tiny indeed. Small, low cost, simple manufacturing, consume less power than the brain of a honeybee. 10's of billions will be deployed annually, replacing bar codes, new apps, more processing power than an Intel 8086. The largest Platform for Communications on earth. Patents, performance, scalable manufacturing, system solutions company, first to market.

Grouper

A peer to peer network introduced by two people (Esther says its appropriately so). May remember them from Spinner, the first internet only radio station service. Grouper is a private media network. Came back from Burning Man and wanted to share media. Sharing with friends, integrates file sharing, social networking and desktop search. Create private groups. No restriction or size or quantity of files. Private encyrpted. Numanuma.

Epocrates

Millions of medical errors happen each year. Suite of software on handhelds for use by physicians at the point of care. 1 in 4 physicians in the US use Epocrates. Layering on services from the top 10 drug companies to deliver drug info, drug recall, insurance information. Have the largest medical research community for polling doctors. Grew 70% last year.

Brightcove

John Malone in 93: "out new network, the infostructure network, will do blah blah blah" 10 years later this is all true, but on a dumb network. Barry Diller: "Rupert Murdoch is the only person in the world able to deliver content on three content." Brightcove fosters and enables this transformation, an era of information television.

Rearden Commerce

Five years ago, founded at the peak of the boom. Massive infrastructure is available, but we have diminishing returns for productivity or user satisfaction. Shift from technology to user centric. They are building Internet 2.0, perhaps they do something with web services.

Opera Software

They make browsers "we are coming from scandinavia and its difficult to talk up things." Fastest, most secure, best browser. WAP browsers only let you get to a certain amount of sites. They port the same desktop browser and put it on the mobile device. Use web technologies to make standardized solutions. Much of this is not visible in the US. If you are making Active X big screen sites, you will have to make whole new sites.

JotSpot

Joe talks about his background. Ward Cunningham and the Wiki Wiki bus. No comment on the rest of it.

Enterprise Strength, Wiki Simple

Today Socialtext relaunched it's product line at PC Forum with three core offerings:

• Socialtext Enterprise: Enterprise Strength, Wiki Simplicity
• Socialtext.net: Quick and Simple Hosted Collaboration
• Socialtext.org: Affordable Collaboration for Non-Profits

What's new is the Enterprise product now has all that boring stuff that enterprises actually need for collaboration at scale.  We have had our Appliance deployed at great companies like Veritas for over a year now.  Over time, an ecology of use arises and before it becomes a victim of its own success you really need enterprise monitoring, storage and backup.

Also new, besides the look and feel, are email integration features that let you work from your email client.  Email to category or blog post, email this page using the address book of the space, HTML email so you can WYSIWYG if you really have to and round-trip editing.  Gaining adoption for a wiki is not an easy thing, and most of the success is in practices we have learned over the last two years, but features that adapt to the existing information flow really help.

But more than anything, we are keeping things simple.  If you ever need to explain what a wiki is to someone, just point them to this page.

Jerry Yang on Buying Flickr

Notes from one of the first PC Forum sessions, while hanging out in irc://irc.freenode.net/#pcforum just after Jerry said something about how most bloggers are bad bloggers and new competition from real writers will crush us...

Esther hinted about it... Jerry said, "I know you were involved in a company we just bot, we just announced we acquired Flickr"

Marc Canter yelled out loud something for the first time in two years that wasn't "FOAF" and we all applauded Caterina while Stewart was in IRC.

Jerry continued: "I am a little embarassed.." and Esther took Jerry's picture. "We had to have these people with us... I hope stewart and caterina become our vanguards as we venture forward..."

James mentioned in IRC that drinks were on Stewart tonight.

"...Part of it is because as users we were admirers of the services and communities, then got to know the people, to help us build the next generation, we learned they liked us, and we will boldly venture into a whole new world... Hopefully one of these things where we will understand the communitity, help it grow, help Caterina and Stewart grow it."

There will be much much more:

• Jeremy Zawodny
• Dick Hardt