by Brendon J. Wilson

US Management Style

There’s been an interesting discussion over on the Vancouver Company of Friends list. This week’s topic has been “Building Bold Careers”, peppered with numerous interesting comments and insights from Ian Christie, Rajesh Taneja, Stewart Marshall, and Peter Rees. As the posts have started to turn to talk of employers’ role in motivating employees and nurturing employees’ development, I started to think about something I noticed soon after joining the workforce here in Silicon Valley: the role of praise in inspiring employees.

Standard management/HR textbooks emphasize the need for managers to encourage their employees – but how many managers or employers actually make the effort? If there’s one difference I’ve noticed between US and Canadian management styles, it’s that there appears to be an increased emphasis on continual feedback and encouragement here in the US. I first noticed it in a weekly meeting with my manager – he somehow interpreted my request for additional feedback on some documentation I had prepared as a request for an impromptu performance appraisal, rather than a request for additional input for the document. I was quite surprised with the result – he proceeded to tell me how impressed he had been with my work thus far, especially considering I had prior experience in the type of position I currently held. This response was completely unexpected.

Since then, I’ve noticed there is a consistently high level of positive feedback within my company directed at all employees and from all levels of the corporate hierarchy. I’m not certain if this experience is representative of all Silicon Valley companies, US management style in general, or merely the culture at my current employer. However, given my American wife’s complaints about the lack of feedback she received from her employer while working in Canada, it makes me wonder if Canadian employers don’t adequately reward employees, not with money, but with endorphin-inducing positive feedback.

I suspect this is true, partially on the basis of my own initial reaction to the feedback I received from my US manager. At first, I didn’t accept that the praise being offered was genuine – was he kidding? Personally, I’ve never received a lot of praise at Canadian companies except upon achieving major project milestones. I’ve always been a high achiever, ambitious, and self-motivated – but sometime after joining the workforce, it appears I subconsciously learned that unless someone told me I was screwing up, I should assume I was doing a good job. I learned not to expect kudos for my good work! That wasn’t such a problem for me – but imagine the effect the lack of praise might have on an employee who needs career guidance.

So – is this just my personal experience with Canadian employers? Is my experience with my current US employer an anomaly? And what does this say about the limits of an employer to motivate and shape an employee beyond the boundaries established by the society in which they operate?

in Business 2 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Life In The Bubble

My father once got lost in an IKEA, though he’d probably vehemently deny it if you asked him. Round and round he went, somehow skipping the stairs down into the Marketplace and looping instead through the restaurant to end up back where he started. You know what I’m talking about – every IKEA is the same. In fact, the IKEA in East Palo Alto is a disturbingly exact replica of the IKEA in Coquitlam, perhaps to prevent the kind of panic attacks that a sealed biosphere populated by particle board furniture and umlauts wreaks on the average male. You need the equivalent of a video game walkthrough guide to escape IKEA intact and financially solvent.

I had a bubble moment of my own last Friday while attending Shrek 2. In the stolen moments (stolen by the movie execs, not me, you can be sure) between the lights dimming and the start of the main feature, something struck me. I realized that every movie being advertised had been produced within the state of California. Pixar had an ad for its new movie – they’re in Emeryville, about an hour away. Disney and a few other Hollywood studios had their latest offerings on display – a mere five-hour drive away.

And, of course, the main feature itself was a cultural ouroboros, with numerous allusions to popular culture, most of which originated in some form or another in either LA or Hollywood. Weird.

Everywhere you look, there’s a reference to California in one form or another – it’s all-encompassing, but until you’re here you don’t really realize the origin of just about everything is Californian in one sense or another. When we first arrived, people asked how I was adjusting to life in the valley – I responded it hadn’t been much of a transition at all. After all, which magazines do I read? Which websites do I monitor regularly? Which inventors had I grown up admiring? A lot of them were located here in Silicon Valley. Not much of a cultural shock, when you think about it.

However, it’s not all 3D-animated ogres and pre-pubescent Internet multi-millionaires. While the importance and creativity of California can not be questioned (especially given it’s the eighth largest economy in the world), there are downsides to being in the Center Of The Universe. For one thing, the TV news is decidedly inward focused – I’d be hard-pressed to remember seeing an international story (beyond Iraq, which doesn’t count) since I arrived. I can’t blame California – when you’re the center of the universe, why do you care about what’s going in the outside world?

Well, I care. And that’s something I need to keep reminding myself about so I don’t get star-struck and forget about the rest of the world.

in Personal 1 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Jerry Kaplan’s Top Five

I had the pleasure this evening of hearing Jerry Kaplan talk to the Silicon Valley Chinese Software Professionals Association on the topic of The Five Biggest Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make. Kaplan, a former co-chairman of Egghead.com, co-founder of Onsale and GO, and author of Startup:A Silicon Valley Adventure, gave a thoroughly entertaining and informative presentation which I’m going to try to summarize here.

The arc of the presentation broke into three main areas, vaguely reminiscent of a scene between John Cusack and Jack Black in High Fidelity: a set of top 5 lists (alright, some of them are more than 5, but who’s counting – consider them “bonus tracks”). Where possible, I have included interesting remarks and anecdotes – the thoughts are Kaplan’s, any transcription or interpretation errors are mine.

Top 5 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make

  • They have unclear goals: If you don’t define your goals, how will you know when you’re successful? The exercise of writing down your goal for your venture focuses your thinking. Kaplan recounted one business venture for which he and his partner defined success as a valuation of $20 million – a fact that they had to recall when their venture reached a $2 billion valuation and they needed to figure out what to do.
  • They’re trying to prove they’re smarter than other people: This is the wrong reason to start a entrepreneurial venture – these people have a tendency to lay blame on others, and avoid responsibility for their failures.
  • They’re get too greedy: This mistake reflects a tendency by amateur entrepreneurs to hoard equity. There’s a saying in Silicon Valley about equity: “Equity is like manure. If the you pile it all in one place, all you have is a smelly pile of shit. Spread it around, and you create the conditions required to make things to grow.”
  • They hire people they like: That’s not to say that you have to hire people you hate, merely that an entrepreneur must avoid hiring the people they like instead of the right people for the job.
  • They don’t know when to let go: Company are like babies – when they’re small, they need you and there’s something satisfying about being needed and having to take care of everything for them. But when they’re 13, they just want your money and for you to go away. As the person that starts a company, you need to recognize that starting a company requires a completely different skill set than the one that grows the company to $100 million. Be prepared to let go – and make sure your team is prepared for you to leave.

Top 5 Critical Attitudes Entrepreneurs Need

Book Cover: Startup

  • The belief that they can make a difference: To overcome the odds against success, an entrepreneur needs to passionately believe in the idea that one person can make a different. And that they are that person.
  • Passion for making things happen: The people that make good entrepreneurs can’t help but make things happen. Lots of people have ideas, but if you don’t try, you’ll never succeed.
  • Unjustifiable optimism: If you’re going to be turned down by 30 venture capitalists, you’re going to need something to keep you going. Great anecdote: FedEx, early in its development, couldn’t make its payroll and it looked like the company was going to fold – so the head of the company took the remaining money to Las Vegas, bet it all, and won. You have to believe you’re going to succeed.
  • High tolerance for uncertainty: You’re not always going to have all the information you need, when you need it. If you wait for all the information, it’ll probably be too late to do anything useful. Deal with it.
  • Urgent patience: This is a balancing act between trying to get things done, and realizing that things take time.
  • Genuine concern for other people: The only way you’ll succeed is if you actually care about the people you work with – it breeds loyalty, and that breeds success. People love to work for people they know care about them.

Top 5 Critical Skills Entrepreneurs Need

Jerry Kaplan

  • Leadership: Leadership is a difficult thing to define. When things are going well, you don’t need leadership. But when things are going badly, the ability to get people to come together, make compromises, and move forward is what makes the difference between success and failure. That’s leadership.
  • Communication skills: Most people won’t remember what you said five minutes after you said it. You have to keep it simple. Which leads to the next point…
  • The ability to make sure people know their jobs: Communication is critical to making sure everyone knows where they fit in the company, what will happen if they aren’t successful in doing their job.
  • Know when to make a decision: Amateurs make decisions too early, before they have corrected all of the pertinent information. Perfectionists wait until everything is certain. An entrepreneur needs to learn to live in between those extremes.
  • Teamwork: Key to utilizing the people you hired (presumably the right people, right?) is having the sense to delegate tasks, accept their input, and let them get the job done. You can’t do it all yourself.
  • The ability to “telescope”: An entrepreneurs needs to be able to “zoom in” to examine the detail in various areas, while maintaining the ability to “zoom out” and take in the big picture.
  • The ability to be direct, but polite: At some point, you’re going to have to be able to be polite, but direct. Example: at some point you’re going to have to figure out how to say “Bob, it might be a good idea if you took a shower before you came to work”, but nicer.

Kaplan’s talk kept to a fairly constant theme: there is no cookie cutter to being a successful entrepreneur. The central parameter that determines an entrepreneur’s success is their ability to be honest in their assessment of their own abilities. I especially liked Kaplan’s comment that the personality of a company reflects the personality of the founder(s). Something to think about.

in Entrepreneurship 8 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Wired’s NextFest 2004

In Euclidean space, it’s a provable fact that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Unfortunately, the organizers of Wired’s NextFest ignored certain practical restrictions of two-dimensional space when they directed attendees to drive directly through the path of San Francisco’s famous Bay to Breakers cross-city race. Now, there’s a caveat you never see in a mathematical theorem: “The shortest distance between two points is a line – unless the two points lie on opposite sides of the course of a 12K race, in which case the shortest distance is a circular path the folds back on itself and takes three times as long to traverse.

It was the largest hiccup in the day, but it wasn’t the last.

The only reason I really wanted to go to NextFest was to see Asimo, Honda’s walking robot. Despite leaving Mountain View at 8:30 in the morning (on a Sunday, no less), we managed to miss the 10:00 show. By an hour. No problem – there was a 1:00 show. According to the event usher, we should line up at 12:30 to get tickets. Tickets? Yes, tickets. Apparently NextFest is like Disneyland – you line up for tickets to…line up for tickets.

And yet, still, we didn’t get to see Asimo – or any other show at the Main Theatre for that matter. Despite arriving at the Main Theatre at 12:15, tickets were gone. What a load of crap. Hint to Wired: if you’re going to host a conference and promise kick-ass visions of the not-too-distant future, people might actually expect to see the kick-ass visions of the not-too-distant future. Or not have to wade through people at every exhibit. In short: learn something about facilities planning.

Wired‘s misunderstanding of space and time notwithstanding, the event was only mildly interesting. Though I know Wired is a tech-centric magazine, what annoyed me the event’s gadget-centric vision of the future. It’s as if our vision of the future is limited to technology manifesting itself in silicon devices, hermetically-sealed pods of injection molded plastic created by a Scandinavian designer whose name includes an umlaut. It seemed like a lot of geeky navel-gazing.

Example: hydrogen-fueled cars. While the prospect of non-polluting cars is exciting, the practical limitations of fuel production, distribution, and social inertia mean this technology is a long way away. And yet politicians and technology innovators alike seem to be focused on a future which they never really have to deliver. Although useful innovations are the result of pure research, it still seemed that much of the technology at NextFest was internally-focused – a lot of intellectual wanking designed to produce “cool” devices, but not necessarily useful technologies with a definable road to market and real social change. But maybe that was its purpose – not to educate, but to entertain.

in Technology 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Money For Somethin’?

I’m a huge fan of the Amazon Associates program, notwithstanding my previous concerns that it seems unfair that someone can make more money in referral fees by linking to Amazon books than their authors make in royalties. That concern aside, it’s still a marvelous system that, when combined with Amazon’s Web Services APIs, has yielded some very interesting applications. I’ve recently seen two excellent applications that appear to effectively leverage Amazon’s programs to create value-added functionality that benefits both the application users (in terms of functionality) and the application authors (in terms of referral fees).

The first example is Toru Yano’s iTunes Radio Lover. It’s a simple little application that “displays the iTunes’ current streaming title along with the cover art”. Oh, and you can of course click on the album cover image and go to Amazon to buy the CD. Naturally. It’s simple, but it works.

A much more sophisticated example is provided by MusicPlasma. MusicPlasma is a Flash application that allows a user to view a map of the relationships between bands. Enter a band name and the application shows a map of different bands that might interest you – presumably based off of Amazon’s own recommendations data. See something you’d like to buy? The current artist’s discography shows that album cover for the application and links to Amazon, embedding an Amazon Associates ID along the way to make sure the MusicPlasma creators make something out of the transaction.

From my own experience, I found the Amazon Associates program to be invaluable even without using the Web Services APIs. When I launched my book, I used Google Adwords to guide people to the book and an Amazon Associates ID to capture extra revenue. The Amazon referral fee more than covered the costs of the Google AdWord campaign. Though it may seem like the developers of these applications are making money for nothing, I’d argue these applications are finding unique and interesting niches to fill in order to drive viewership and capture referral revenues.

Though I originally couldn’t figure out why Jeff Bezos was hailed as a visionary – now it’s abundantly clear: he’s created a system that permits free innovation that supports Amazon’s ability to generate revenue. Like the developers who create applications built on top of the Amazon APIs and Associates program, all he has to do is sit back and let the system make money for itself. The only way this could be improved would be if developers building on top of Amazon’s programs could in turn enable others to re-use their applications and continue the process ad-infinitum. I’m not such if that would technically count as a digital pyramid-scheme, but with useful applications like this, who cares?

in Entertainment / Technology 1 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Doing Things Once

A number of years ago, I had the pleasure of working with Roy Philips at BC Tel Advanced Communications. At the time, BC Tel was heavily investing in fiber optic installations, and the Advanced Communications arm was pushing hard to sell “Ubiquity” – a high-end videoconferencing service – to leverage the fiber investment. At $15K a month, plus installation costs, Ubiquity was a hard sell in 1994. Roy, however, saw an interesting future for the technology, one which sadly has yet to come to fruition.

On numerous occasions, Roy and I discussed the process of university education. I was, as usual, quite disappointed with the methods used by professors to communicate with students. In many cases, university professors just weren’t very good teachers – nor, to be fair, was that their purpose. They were there to do research. Every so often, you’d have a brilliant professor, someone who not only really knew their stuff, but also knew how to make it stick to the inside of the skull of an undergraduate at 8:30 in the morning, despite the student’s half-inebriated state. Those star professors were few and far between – I often wish we could capture those professors, and make them available to everyone.

One-to-many broadcasting was a perfect solution. As Roy saw it, universities should collaborate to find the best professor for a subject, capture his lecture series on video, and make it generally available. Instead of attending lectures, students would watch the video and then attend a videoconference tutorial session with that professor. Thus, the “best” teacher could be made available to the masses, improving the overall quality of education.

Unfortunately, the form of education has changed very little, despite the widespread availability of high-bandwidth networks. In one shining example of thought leadership, MIT’s OpenCourseWare has made the notes from its courses available. In other areas, two MIT professors have released their thermal physics textbook online, completely free. These efforts, though worthy of praise, signal only the beginning of a movement to make education freely and easily available.

To be truly successful, such a movement requires educational content that is both freely available and freely subject to revision to encourage constant and rapid improvement (perhaps the lessons learned by the Wikipedia). It seems that it would in the best interest of everyone to produce and maintain such a repository to not only improve education, but reduce the cost of education as well. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t exactly think it appropriate for publishers to charge me over $100 for the new edition of a Calculus textbook, especially when the concepts hadn’t changed since their creation by Newton. Were these publishers really adding any value?

If free education content were created and unleashed, it could even provide some interesting opportunities for education tailored to the student. In an ideal world, content would consist of not only static text, but also interactive questions to test the student’s comprehension. How the student fared on the informal quizzing could be used to fine tune how information is presented to the student, adapting to the particular learning styles of the individual. As I’ve lamented before, there has got to be a better way to approach education than the rote learning we currently use.

All of these ideas are far in the future – for now, why don’t we try to eliminate the empires being built on public domain knowledge? Seriously, how much has first-year physics changed in the past hundred years? Very little – so why should a student pay $100 for that knowledge? It will be interesting to see MIT lead the way by demonstrating that we can be more productive as a society by doing things once by doing them right the first time.

in Technology 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

The Killer RFID App

RFID has been in the news on and off again, with industry and privacy advocates lining up to do battle over whether this technology is the greatest thing since the UPC code, or the worst thing since Echelon. What’s really interesting is the central focus of the discussion is over something so mind-numbingly boring to a casual observer, it hardly seems to warrant all the attention: inventory control.

Much of the furor has been prompted by Wal-Mart’s decision to finally proceed with pilots of the technology with the goal of having all of suppliers using the technology by January. This is seen by many as the green light for the technology, which uses chips equipped with radio antennas to provide additional product meta-date information, allowing vendors to locate items and provide real-time tracking of inventory levels. Real-time tracking would eliminate traditional inventory tracking costs, while providing much better stocking planning capabilities for vendors.

However, retailers’ silver lining is unfortunately attached to the looming dark cloud of privacy advocates concerned that the technology could spur further privacy invasions. If every item eventually contains RFID tags, what’s to prevent massive tracking of individuals based on the tags embedded in the clothes they wear or the shoes they wear. These tags would become a real-world equivalent of the browser cookies used to track web site visitors, thereby allowing people to be tracked and targeted (perhaps fatally, as pointed out by John Gilmore) endlessly.

Though it has been suggested that this would be one way to allow a homeowner to find lost items within their house, my idea is slightly different: I want a comprehensive inventory of everything I own for both moving and insurance purposes. This idea occurred to me during my recent move, during which the movers had to guestimate weights and sizes to provide an estimate, and then tag everything manually. If everything I owned had an RFID tag, they could simply look up the item and get exact details on weight size, thereby providing an instant and accurate estimate of moving costs. Similarly, my insurer could ensure that I had enough insurance coverage for all of my items (after all, who can accurately guess how much all their stuff is worth?).

Taking the idea a step further, I could perform a scan of everything I own and upload the info to e-tailers like Amazon in order to obtain better personalized recommendations. Though Amazon already tracks past purchases, it is limited to purchases made from Amazon.com, and requires a manual process to upload additional information on items you own. This would streamline the process, and eliminate Amazon from suggesting items I already own. If all retailers did this, maybe they’d stop advertising crap I would never buy in a million years (nice dream, but probably unlikely).

On the other hand, maybe having everything tagged with RFID is not such a good idea – a burglar could easily wardrive for RFID tags, enabling a thief to target homes containing the high-value items. Then again, if I have the proper amount of insurance, what do I care?

in Technology 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Spying With GMail

If you haven’t noticed, there’s lately been an overabundance of news about Google, including a deluge of product announcements, GMail privacy histrionics, and IPO speculations. Though I’m reluctant to contribute to the insanity, there is one element of the GMail privacy flap that I haven’t yet seen discussed, and so I feel the need to discuss the topic.

The GMail privacy discussions have taken one of two predictable forms. In one camp, privacy advocates tug their tinfoil hats further down their heads, and mutter to themselves that GMail will inevitably be bad because allowing someone to read all your email is never a good thing. In the other camp, seemingly level-headed, though somewhat indifferent, pseudo-champions of GMail point out that no one is holding a gun to anyone’s head – if you don’t want Google or advertisers getting access to your email, they say, simply don’t use the service.

Into this arena, I would like to present a third possibility: GMail might be a threat to your privacy, even if you don’t use the service. To illustrate how this is possible, it’s necessary to understand a little about signaling.

If you want to know whether or not a major operation is underway at the local FBI office, there’s a simple way to find out: watch the office over a long period of time and record the number of pizzas deliveries. Those nights that differ significantly from the average represent nights on which an operation is underway. Though this example is known to be an urban legend, it does provide a simple example to use to explain signaling – as you can probably guess, signaling reveals information to an outside party through an indirect channel. In the case of the FBI example, someone monitoring the deliveries knows that something is up; however, they don’t know exactly what operation is taking place. Nevertheless, the signal that the FBI is working harder/later than usual may be enough to convince a criminal to change their plans, and hence foil the FBI’s operation.

So how does this relate to GMail?

Well, you have to consider how Google’s advertising system, AdWords, works. Anyone can get an AdWords account with Google, allowing them to create a campaign that will display a specific advertisement to users when they search for the keywords associated with the campaign. For example, I created an AdWords campaign for my book, associating a simple text ad with the keywords “java”, “p2p”, and “jxta” – whenever someone entered those words into Google, they saw my ad.

Google’s AdWords system provides an advertiser with reports on the ad campaign detailing the number of times an advertisement has been displayed and the number of times a user has clicked on the ad. Though the AdWords administrative interface doesn’t report who saw my advertisement, throwing GMail into the mix makes this irrelevant. In order for me to be able to spy on a GMail user, I only need to carefully craft an AdWords campaign with a very specific set of keywords, and monitor if anyone ever triggers the display of my advertisement. This technique allows any user, not just Google, to effectively monitor GMail-based email communications, and only requires one of the parties (preferably the recipient) to be a GMail user.

Is this attack practical for general-purpose spying? Probably not. It’s unclear at this point whether GMail uses email headers that would permit this attack to be specific to an email address. It’s also unclear whether Google will filter out proper names to limit the ability of an attacker to target a particular person. However, an attacker could conceivably use knowledge of their victim to tailor the AdWords campaigns’ keywords to be arbitrarily precise.

That said, this flaw isn’t as bad as it seems – I doubt we’ll see companies blocking access to GMail, or filtering email destined for GMail accounts. After all, companies a hemorrhaging intellectual property via unencrypted email every day. Though this attack may allow GMail to be used to spy on a user from afar, the limited scope of any attack puts its risk below most of the other virus or spyware-based threats.

in Technology 2 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

So-Crates/Kansas Moment

I was perusing Joi Ito’s explanation of the Japanese reaction to the Japanese hostages in Iraq, when I remarked upon a peculiar statement.

Joi remarked:

“I have something like 16 or so generations before me on my gravestone and I often feel like a mere blip in the history of my family.”

Talk about heavy. I had to wonder about Japanese burial customs, so I shot Joi an email, fully expecting the email to land in /dev/null and never get answered:

“At the risk of betraying my ignorance of Japanese burial customs, I have to ask: am I to understand from this sentence that you already have a gravestone prepared? That seems a bit, uhm, overly pessimistic to me.”

To which Joi, surprisingly, responded:

“I will [be] buried in the same grave as my ancestors. We are cremated and my ashes will be dumped on top of all of my relatives. ;-)”

Whoa. Talk about a weighty responsibility. I’ve always figured most people want to be remembered when they’ve passed on – I know I do. But on the other hand, to glower from the depths of history at those who come after me might be a legacy I’d rather skip. I already feel the pressure of trying to live up to the achievements of non-relatives, to make my place in history (and failing at it, now that I come to think of it), and I’m glad to live in blissful ignorance of my family tree, if only to avoid additional pressure.

Then again, part of me is curious. I find myself asking “is this it?” a little too often, so perhaps the benefit of the stories and wisdom of 16 generations of relatives would be somewhat comforting. Or informative at the very least – what were the things that really mattered to them, made them keep going, rather than deciding not to wash their clothes and risk death by the Black Plague? Maybe the pressure would be worth the wisdom – as long as it wasn’t something lame like “we are all, like, dust – dust in the wind. Dude.”

in Culture 0 comments
 by Brendon J. Wilson

Anti-Social Software

I was recently invited by Lauren Zuravleff, Helen Chen, and Daniel Steinberg to blog on java.net. I have accepted this invitation, and will be writing about some of the less programming-centric issues in the world of software. In the interest of maintaining my own web site’s whuffie, I will be reproducing these articles here. The original version of this article appears here.

In light of the recent announcement that Sun Microsystems and Microsoft would stop their bickering and play nicely with each other, I thought it only appropriate to write my first entry on java.net about the need for software that knows how to be social and play well with others. Social networking systems, despite being the new Hot Technology to grab the attention of Valley venture capitalists, are lately being subjected to a healthy dose of criticism: for systems designed to help people interact, why can’t any of the systems interact? And why have the systems overlooked some of the most obvious functionality a user or a developer might want?

The design of the current breed of social networking software repeats the mistakes of another social technology: instant messaging. Whether you chose to use ICQ, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, or MSN Messenger as your messenger of choice, one thing became abundantly clear the minute you clicked “I agree” to the End User License Agreement – you were part of their system now. Instant messaging companies put a wall around their users by design, and they liked it that way. For one thing, it gave them a chance to figure out how they were going to make any money – at least until astute companies like Jabber and Cerulean Studios figured out that instant messaging companies had overlooked the fact that people using different chat systems still wanted to chat with each other! Imagine that!

Social networking systems have followed a similar path, coding users into the very same corner, building high and thick walls between their communities and discouraging the very activities for which they claim they were designed. Social networking systems are pathologically anti-social on three fronts: their lack of functionality, lack of a web services API, and lack of federation.

Lack of Functionality

People have different kinds of relationships: some of their colleagues are friends, some of them are business acquaintances, and some of them are random people they only seem to run into when neither of them has a pen. One would think that the ability to categorize and segment classes of relationships would be a central requirement for a social networking system. Unfortunately, not one of the social networking systems I’ve used (Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut, Zerendipity) is capable of distinguishing between types of relationship networks.

Only Orkut provides a faint acknowledgement of this user requirement, allowing a user to categorize their relationships from the neutral “haven’t met” category to the exuberant “best friend” category. It makes me wonder: am I the only one with enemies? I don’t know about you, but personally I’d like to track my enemies and their friends, if only in the interest of keeping all my organs in their designated anatomical configuration. The current systems seem to ignore the fact that people belong to many social groups, and have relationships with people which they’d prefer members of their other groups didn’t know about.

Putting this shortcoming aside, one has to consider what benefit a user gains from joining a social networking system. Alright, I’ve joined – now what? Oh, I can find other people – I, uh, guess that’s kind of cool. Can I import my friend’s contact information into my Outlook address book and keep it up to date (like Plaxo)? No? Can I send and receive messages to and from my social network from my regular email client? No? So what, exactly, is it that I’m supposed to do with this thing? The current state of social networking systems mimics the early days of the laser – a technology searching for an application. What better way to enable application of social networking systems than a new-fangled web services API?

Lack of a Web Services API

One of the smartest things Amazon ever did was create the Amazon Associates program – the service through which web sites can get compensated for directing surfers to Amazon products. All you have to do is add an associates ID to the end of an Amazon URL in your web page and poof you get a commission on each time one of your surfers goes to Amazon and buys something. Though technically not a web service, the program allowed developers outside of Amazon to leverage its technology, extending Amazon’s reach to people who weren’t even surfing Amazon.com.

Since then, both Amazon and Google have provided developers with access to their technology through web services APIs, spawning numerous unique applications and the odd book or two. But Amazon and Google didn’t do it for charity – new applications tie users and developers to their platforms, which in turn drive revenue through more books sales and advertising revenue. It’s apparently called a business model.

Meanwhile, social networking systems are sitting around with gobs of personal information, relationship information, and no way to let anyone else use it. Think of the applications these systems could enable! For example: Amazon makes personalized recommendations by comparing your previous purchases to those of other Amazon shoppers – but does this really make sense? Amazon makes a bold assumption that people who buy one item have the same tastes in other items – what if instead Amazon refined its personalization by knowing the identity of your friends and tying your recommendations to what you had in common with what they had bought recently? Exposing this kind of information through a web services API would allow other companies to refine their personalization, resulting better efficiency for licensees of the technology and a nice revenue stream for the social networking system. Two words: cha, and ching!

Lack of Federation

The worst part about social networking systems is the duplication of effort they require of the user. Do they honestly expect someone who is already a part of another system to upload all their information and invite all their friends to yet another social networking system – YASNS? I don’t know about you, but I consider it a bad sign when your target users have to invent an acronym for the sole purpose of describing how annoying they find your service.

When you think about it, it doesn’t really make sense to have a centralized system to track distributed relationships – hence the invention of the FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) schema. The only hope for social networking systems, now that developers (like TypePad) are starting to adopt FOAF, is to figure out how quickly to reposition themselves to leverage their existing database of personal information, index publicly available FOAF data from the web, and start providing value-added personalization services to other companies.

Conclusion

Although I’m normally not one to condone stereotypes, I found I couldn’t disagree when I overheard someone lament: Isn’t it a little ironic that social networking software is being created by a bunch of antisocial geeks? Yup. Social networking systems are currently like the geeky guy in “Singles“, the one with the high-tech watch full of pretty girls’ phone numbers that he’ll never actually call. If there’s one shortcoming we geeks suffer, it’s our obsession with creating new technology or re-creating existing technology in the name of “doing it better”, while remaining blissfully oblivious of the fact that no one can actually use it.

On the other hand, the people behind these systems aren’t dumb and neither are their venture capitalists. I doubt that anything I’m suggesting here hasn’t already crossed the minds of those involved in the development of social networking systems. Given the involvement of Google in Orkut, coupled with Google’s recent move into search personalization technology, it seems likely that these companies had these types of strategies in mind from the beginning. I can only guess that I don’t know the right people to be privy to such knowledge – now if only there were some kind of computer service to correct that.

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