Dancing in the darkness,
Your deepest desires …
Do you know why you’re here?
Do you think you have control?

– Lexicon Avenue, Why R U Here?

What a week. What a month.

Hard to believe I’m back on the fast track in the Silicon Valley startup scene.  Shipping!  Hiring!  Organizational issues!  Interpersonal conflicts!  Planning!  Strategy!  A third of my team is in Singapore, and if events had gone as planned I would have been there instead of at The Atrium last night.  Alas, when I went to check in for my flight, they noticed that my passport expires in September — and Singapore (like many other countries these days) requires documents to be valid for at least six months.  Sigh.

Control is an illusion.
Influence, however, is possible.

– dialog with Alayne Reesberg, 2004

But instead, after stressful times and long hours working down in the Bay Area, it was great to get back to Seattle Thursday night.  After a relaxing Saturday I was soooooo ready to dance.  And talk about perfect timing: a six-hour DJ Anomaly set at The Dark Before the Dawn at the Atrium!  Yay!!!!!!

The west coast psytrance scene seems to be doing pretty well these days.  I’ve been working so much that we’ve missed a lot of great shows, but I’ve still managed to see Cortex at Synchronize, Logic Bomb at Pulse, Full Power Friday at Retox.  The Atrium’s smaller than any of those clubs, but it’s a lot more comfy, with two great chill areas and tasty food and drinks till late.  DJ Anomaly had a lot of new tracks, and the vibe was great.  By the time cinnamon rolls magically appeared at 4:30, we were both feeling happy and relaxed.

I heart psytrance.

• the original post had a great headline
• Lisa Simeone on TSA News was the first to blog about it
• It got hot first on Twitter: 2000 hits in the first 2 1/2 hours after he posted it.
• A couple hours later it hit #1 on Hacker News, getting 10 hits/second.  Then Slashdot, Reddit, Mashable, the Daily Mail … after which Drudge and the Guardian,  CNET, The Consumerist,
• TSA’s less-than-compelling response threw gasonline on the flames and sparked coverage from GizModo, Wired, The Next Web, Reason, and once again Hacker News … plus lots more.

Mike Masnick at TechDirt and Steven Frischling on Flying With Fish point out that there’s nothing new here: security experts have been talking about the scanners’ high error rate and vulnerabilities to exploitation for years.  But video footage makes it very compelling.  And the spread through the tech community highlights that the same kind of grassroots coalitions that mobilized against SOPA are possible on other civil liberties issues — like the TSA, for example, and the PATRIOT Act and FISA next time they come up for renewal.

There’s plenty of other learning too, so it’ll be interesting to watch things unfold. Stay tuned!

The sold-out Women 2.0 PITCH Conference’s opening keynote features Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch,* on “Making and the True Path.”  The rest of the sessions look great too: case studies by Robin Chase of Zipcar and Julia Hu of Lark, and the “$50 Million Panel” featuring Deena Varshavskaya of Wanelo, Leah Busque of TaskRabbit, and Sheila Lirio Marcelo of Care.com.  There are a bunch of intriguing finalists for the pitch competition — including Tara Hunt’s Buyosphere!  And the judges for the competitions are no slouches either: Aileen Lee of Kleiner Perkins, Dave McClure of 500 Startups, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy of JOYUS … looks like a #diversitywin to me, and some great networking too!

A couple of weeks ago I had coffee with Pemo Theodore, who’s interviewed dozens of investors and entrepreneurs for her excellent  Why are Women Funded Less than Men?.  We both had the same feeling: momentum has steadily built over the last couple years** and it feels like there’s a tidal wave in progress.  The women-in-tech and women-near-tech communities are extraordinarily well networked.  And the data is compelling.  Here’s Vivek Wadhwa’s summary from his recent Inc article:

An analysis performed by the Kauffman Foundation showed that women are actually more capital-efficient than men. Babson’s Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found  that women-led high-tech startups have lower failure rates than those led by men. Other research has shown that venture-backed companies run by women have annual revenues 12 percent higher than those run by men, and that organizations that are the most inclusive of women in top management positions achieve a 35% higher return on equity and 34% higher total return to shareholders.

So while there’s still a long way to go, the trend is in the right direction.  Kudos to all the amazing women, the much smaller number of equally-amazing guys, and the outstanding organizations like Women 2.0, the Anita Borg Institute, Astia, Pipeline Fellowship, Women Who Tech, She’s Geeky, the Level Playing Field Institute, Geek Feminism and so many others how have worked so hard to make this happen!

Combine the momentum and community with great content and plenty of opportunity for networking, and it should be a great conference.   I’ll be live-blogging it in comments — and feel free to jump in as well.  Stay tuned!

jon

* and strong pseudonymity advocate!

** here on Liminal States threads like  Guys talking to guys who talk about guys, A #diversitywin as an opportunity, Fretting, asking, and begging isn’t a plan, The third wave and the anatomy of awesome, and Changing the ratio have some of the highlights

To ensure your future, some freedoms must be surrendered …
We will save you
We will save you
We will save you
From your selves

– Robot Revolution (Say no to SOPA remix), Virtual Light vs. Wizack Twizack vs. ?,

San Francisco over the holidays was a lot of fun but by early January we were really glad to be back in Washington.  We got there Thursday afternoon and spent the next few nights at The Atrium: psytrance Thursday, stompy darkwave on Friday, and then more psytrance on Saturday at Brightness.  The next week it was a darkwave set Wednesday, psytrance Thursday … happy 2012!

Saturday, it was all night psytrance at Gibbous/Deadly Snow. The drinks were strong, the snacks were tasty, the place looked fantastic, and DJ Anomaly was on a roll. Monday night was stompy darkwave at Dead Snow … hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here.

SnOMG!

After six inches of snow followed by freezing rain, the Seattle area took a couple of snow days.  The Atrium was almost empty Thursday night, and still pretty quiet Friday for Icy.  And despite a huge victory for grassroots social network activism (yay Tumblr!  yay Reddit!  yay RedState and DailyKos, together again for the first time! and yay for everybody else who got involved on SOPA and PIPA)  my mood wasn’t great either.   During the week, I had decided to put  Qweries on hold for the time being.   Sigh.

A friend of mine made the great suggestion that I write down my frame of mind, and when I read it over I was surprised how negative it was: frustration, disappointment, and beating myself up for decisions I wish I had made differently.   Intellectually, I know that it doesn’t always go smoothly: startups are hard.  But emotionally, it’s clearly taken a toll on me.

Fortunately, DJ Anomaly was once again headlining on Saturday night — psytrance at Digging Out.  w00t!  After a few days cooped up, people were ready to dance.   And as always, the lights, music, and vibe lifted my spirits.  A couple of hours into the evening, I was in a complete different frame of mind: looking forward to what’s next, and ready to enjoy the process of digging out.

I heart psytrance.

Here’s what I’m doing:

• My vote and my volunteering time are “in play” in 2012.   Along with civil liberties and LGBTQ issues, one of the things I’m judging Obama, Cantwell, gubernatorial candidate Jay Inslee and other candidates on is how assertively they’ll fight for women’s right to choose.
• And I’ll continue to raise awareness, with friends online and off, and discuss the issue.  Yes, I get in people’s face when they make excuses for anti-choice politicians — or downplay the importance of the issue.  [I'm looking at you, Ron Paul supporters.]

What are you doing?

2011 wasn’t the year I expected it to be.  But while it’s easy (and depressing) to look at what didn’t happen, one of my resolutions was to take a more asset-based thinking approach to life.  If I look at what I — and we — accomplished this year, it’s pretty impressive.

– NanoEvolution

In keeping with the goal I overachieved on the most in 2011 (”spend more time with family and friends”), we decided to spend a quiet New Years Eve at home hanging out with a few people … most of whom got sick and cancelled. So it was a very low-key wrap-up to 2011 and start to 2012, quite a contrast to the last couple years.

Which seems like a good thing to me.

Time to move on

This year was the most I’ve journalled since 2004, and it’s been interesting to reread the posts as I’ve been editing DJ Anomaly at the Atrium. 2011 started out great guns, but then there were some big “pivots” both professionally and personally.

Startups are hard, and some key things really are out of my control — Google’s stubbornness on the nymwars for example. And overachieving on “friends and family” goal took a lot of time and energy. So while I did a pretty good job on my resolutions, my progress against other goals wasn’t what I had hoped. Sigh.

More positively, though, things are in a good place as we head into 2012:

• After a lot of groping around, Qweries is on track for a minimum viable product and a killer go-to-market plan: privacy, diversity, startups, zombies, RAWRRRRRR!
• The network of people who have heard a bit about Qweries and like the idea continues to grow.
• While the writing I’ve been doing is far from a finished product, there’s plenty of grist for the mill for Change the World and Make Friends Doing It and no doubt some other projects.
• Creatively, DJ Anomaly at the Atrium is the best poetry year I’ve had in a long time.
• And most important, my connections with the people I love the most, the elements at the core of my world, continue to get richer and more magical; and new friendships are blossoming as well.

So: good progress — yay me! Still, it was a tough year – for me and a lot of my friends and family. I’m glad it’s done.

Meanwhile at the societal level, I would say much the same. It was a great year for social network activism: Arab Spring, bipartisan opposition to the Patriot Act, Save the Rave, Occupy, and SOPA. That said it was also a pretty depressing year politically, with Obama continuing to follow the Bush/Cheney lead on civil liberties, massacres in Syria and Libya, SCAF resisting change in Egypt, the crackdown on Occupy, NDAA, Iraq, Iran …

Once again, good progress, tough year. Time to move on.

A change is coming

There has never been a year like 2012, and it is unlikely that there will ever be one again.

– The year that will rock the world – “21st century revolution remix”

Building on last year’s flowering of protest, 2012’s movements will have people in the streets around the world. Meanwhile we’ve got the Eurozone crisis, ugly elections in Iran, the US, and elsewhere, and the 1% trying to hold on to power. Who knows how it’ll work out but change is in the air….

I’m still not entirely sure how to invest in this megatrend, but it sure feels like it is upon us.

– Fred Wilson, 2012: The Year that Movements go Mainstream?, A VC

I’m not completely sure either, but it seems like a great time to start up a project that thinks from the beginning about use cases involving activism and movements and rights as well as monetization.  It’s also a great time for us to have been writing about changing the world and social networks for the last four years. And from an activism perspective, all kinds of exciting opportunities are shaping up!

There has never been a successful social movement – from the Suffrage Movement to the Civil Rights Movement – that was successfully sustained exclusively by those who were not at the heart of the matter.

– Carla Rover, How to play to win, Women 2.0

Speaking of movements, change is in the air in the tech world, too.

Yeah, I know, it’s always been this way.   Thus does kyriarchy reproduce itself.   But I don’t think it’s going to be sustainable that much longer.

– In chaos there is opportunity

Facebook seems on top of the world, as it approaches a billion users and an IPO.  Google continues to grow despite its multi-front war against Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and its own users. But from a strategy perspective, they’re both looking vulnerable.  Meanwhile in the startup ecosystem, women, blacks, Latinos and others who haven’t had the same advantages as white guys continue to organize and network and succeed.

2011 was finally the year when the media spotlight shone on how under-represented women are in almost all power structures in business, government, technology and media – and how crucial it is that we leverage the leadership skill set that they bring to the table to tackle the problems facing the world today. The era of the patriarch is nearing an end.

– Jalak Jobanputra, A Venture Capitalist’s Take On 2011 Trends & What’s Next For 2012, Women 2.0

So it’s also a great time to be working on a  startup that’s prioritizing diversity!

See why I’m looking forward to 2012?

Meanwhile even as I write this, the House is debating #SOPA.

Remember back in 2006-8 when the Bush Administration rammed through PATRIOT Act reauthorization and FISA? Obama was on the right side for a while — at least until July 2008, when he broke his promise to filibuster. Now, he’s continuing and building on Bush policies. Senator Chris Dodd was heroic on FISA; now, he’s working for the MPAA and using China’s internet policies as a blueprint for the US. And how about Patrick Leahy, bulwark of civil liberties — and co-sponsor of the Senate equivalent of SOPA?

It’s not that I think the Republicans are any better on the whole. Both parties have a few standouts on civil liberties — Wyden, Nadler, the Pauls. But on the whole, the political establishment continues to show itself remarkably unconcerned with Americans’ rights.

Here’s hoping that in 2012 we’ll start to do something about it.

What leads to a pivot? You don’t just wake up one day and decide to do something entirely different. It’s a gradual process.

– Tara Hunt, The Pivot (or How to Learn Humility in 4 Steps), Inc.

Yeah really.  It had been a week of feedback and reflection (as well as action), taking stock of where things are with qweries and thinking about what next.   The consensus from my friends and advisors: I still can’t say just what “it” is that’s so transformational.  Sigh.  Startups are hard.

It’s frustrating because even though I can describe the opportunity, the underserved audience, and key requirements for a differentiated product … people don’t seem to put a lot of value on any of it because I don’t yet know what the answer is.   Fair enough.  It’s all too abstract.   What is qweries building and how is it so different?  Um …

Maybe it’s a mistake to position  qweries as a Q&A site.   It’s a ridiculously cluttered space, and most of the stories aren’t real happy: Yahoo! was never able to monetize Answers successfully; Cha Cha and Mahalo hemorrhaged money; Answers.com got wiped out by Google’s algorithm changes; Quora seems to have hit a wall.  True, there are successes like Stack Overflow and Naver’s Knowledge iN; but they’re the exceptions (and people in the US tend to discount Naver anyhow).   So perhaps it’s time to pivot and look at a new category.

In any case, it’s clearly time for a “minimum viable product”: get something out there and see what people’s reactions are.   As for the bigger picture transformational stuff, good solutions are clearly out there, they don’t defy the laws of physics, and I can describe a process for how to get there from there — and a short-term low-investment technology base for the initial MVP.  Good progress!

Which is why, after a gruelling Thursday evening shmoozefest at the GeekWire gala and a couple of big meetings Friday morning, I was ready for the weekend.  The walk in the woods, dinner, and napped had all helped me get to a different place — relaxing, instead of thinking about work.  A friend sent me an email with some insights from Vedic astrology.  This eclipse is in the Mrigashīrsha nakshakra and so relates to the power of fulfillment and desire.  “A good time for retrospection and introspection.  Look at how you fulfill your desires and reflect on that.”   Makes sense to me!

We got to The Atrium around 11 for Eclipse just as things were getting going. There were some problems in the kitchen so the usual “tasty snacks” weren’t around but nobody cared: DJ Anomaly was on a roll and the crowd was totally into it.    I introspected and reflected, on fulfillment and desire and many other pleasurable topics.  Things were still in high gear when we left around 2:30.

I heart psytrance.

The past few weeks have been pretty crazy for us here at Diaspora*. It is unbelievably painful to lose such a close friend and collaborator as Ilya, and we want to thank our countless community members, friends, family, and professional contacts for all of your support as we try to take care of ourselves and plot a course for Diaspora*’s future. We are forever grateful to the amazing community of people who have stepped up to help us get things back in order.

– Maxwell and Daniel, Diaspora * is Back in Action

Diaspora * co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy’s idealism, passion, and vision touched so many people — even those who like me who never had the pleasure of meeting him in person. So many moving tributes have been written that there isn’t much I can add. My heart goes out to his friends, family, and colleagues.

“There’s something deeper than making money off stuff,” he said. “Being part of creating stuff for the universe is awesome.”

Ilya, quoted in the New York Times obituary

It’s gratifying to see so many people in the community reaffirm their commitment to the vision in such difficult circumstances.  Now that the core team is back in action, after a few weeks for grieving and replanning, it’s a natural time to step back and look at what’s next.

First, though, there’s something I want to get off my chest.

Ilya struggled with depression, and the stress of people like you constantly badgering him and pestering him and constantly making him feel like nothing he ever did was good enough certainly did not help his situation.

– Ilya’s roommate David Kettler, on Diaspora

David was responding to some particularly nasty trolling with this comment, but I think the point he makes applies a lot more generally. Whether it’s due to cynicism, envy, or ageism, From the beginning, along with the excitement Diaspora *’s attracted a lot of negativity.

Of course just like any project, there are plenty of things that could be done better, mistakes that were obvious at the time, problems that still haven’t been addressed. But then again:

• literally hundreds of thousands of people have signed up, and the software’s surprisingly robust — I don’t think I’ve seen system failure or crash yet.
• the overall design is good enough that Google+ either copied it or came to the same conclusion independently.
• despite being a tiny team, they’ve managed to implement some extremely useful concepts like hashtags and the “like” and “commented on” streams, that Google with their infinite resources still hasn’t copied.

So yes, there are some significant challenges; and to be clear, I’m not saying to sweep problems under the rug.  What I am saying is to give the team some credit, and focus on the positive aspects as well.

Be an ally, not a hater.

Earlier posts in the series: A crucial time for Diaspora*
and 4 Things Diaspora* can learn from Google+

For more on depression and startups, see Megan Krogh’s On Tech, Depression, and Startup Madness on Persephone, Foster Kamer’s The Hushed Dangers of Startup Depression on BetaBeat and the Hacker News discussion, and Ben Huh’s When Death Feels Like a Good Option

Yeah really.  DJ Anomaly keeps getting better and better, the crowd was totally into it, the lighting made everybody look good, and at 5 a.m. cinnamon rolls appeared as if by magic … epic indeed!

We had both spent most of the week sitting and working so had a lot of pent-up energy.  D had hit her milestone and had that “I’ve earned it” feel.  I had gotten a lot done as well, evaluating potential platforms for the next iteration of qweries, although wasn’t as thrilled with the results: most of the options have glaring problems like “doesn’t work on mobile phones or iPads”, “logging in via Twitter doesn’t work”, or “sends passwords in plain text through email”.  Really?  In 2011?  Oh well, it is what it is; and by the time we got to the Atrium I wasn’t thinking about technology.

Instead, I was in a reflective mood.  Over the last 48 hours I had talked with several friends from the past — well, they’re still friends, I just don’t see them as often as I did about five years ago, so it brought back a lot of stuff.  And as always, the music triggered memories: Astral Projection and being a scientist in an irrational world, S.U.N. Project at the DNA Lounge, Penta and Cortex and Dutch and New Years Eves, the Pesky Neutrinos and Nymwars remixes from earlier this year …

2011 wasn’t the year I expected it to be.  I hate it when life gets in the way of life.  But while it’s easy (and depressing) to look at what didn’t happen, one of my resolutions was to take a more asset-based thinking approach to life.  If I look at what I — and we — accomplished this year, it’s pretty impressive.

So rather than lamenting the sad state of software, the sexism of Google+ (and Apple) (and Hacker News) (and …), and the way social networks like Diaspora * (or Google+ for that matter) never seem to pay attention to moderation, when I woke up this morning I realized that I was focusing much more on the opportunities for 2012.

Which leaves me in a much better frame of mind!

Not to sound like a broken record or anything: I heart psytrance.

We spent almost a month on the road, starting with Sacramento for a privacy coalition meeting,  and SF for Olli Wisdom at Space 550.  We had juggled our plans to be at IllumiNation, and it was totally the right call.   550 Barneveld is a great venue, and we ran into plenty of familiar faces from back in 2003/2004 when we used to hang out there all the time.  Musically, DJ Dragn’fly was great, and Olli was Olli — not as good as his legendary 2004 (((thump)) set, but still.  One of our friends was at her first psytrance party.  How cool is that?

The rest of the weekend was sunny in SF.  We took it easy on Saturday, and I spent Sunday hanging out in Dolores park with a friend.  Life is good.

Monday morning, it was on the train to DC.  Well, more accurately, the train to Chicago, which got there eight hours late.  So we missed our connection.  So we wound up on an overnight thirteen-hour bus ride to DC.  Fun!  Well no, not actually.  But still, we made it; and BORDC’s board retreat (the main reason we were there) was excellent.  From there it was on to Charleston to see my Mom; very weird not celebrating Halloween, but it was great to see her.  And then back to SF again, and finally home to Seattle.  After sleeping at four different hotels, three residences, the train, and the bus (or at least trying to, on a 14-hour overnight trip from Chicago to DC) … can I just say how good it is to be home?

Wednesday evening, when we finally got back here, I dropped by the Atrium.  They had been closed for a few days after their Halloween weekend blow-out, and it was fairly low-key, but it was great to be back.    Friday night was a stompy darkwave set by DJ Anomaly, and then last night was Transition II.

Of course The Atrium’s nowhere as big as Barneveld, but even with a small crowd the vibe is amazing.  It was looking partcularly trippy Friday night, with some new UV-active Cyberdog artifacts and gorgeous flowers.  And the light makes everybody look good!

no! its not a secret forbidden world that only a few fortunate transgressive people can/must participate in. it’s all of that but it is also a world anybody can enter….  and so its all about how you want the fantasies to be.

– Can Fantasy Stand Against Hegemony?, 2003

Over a lunch at Samover in SF earlier in the week, I was talking with a friend about how the magic that happens when a psytrance party goes well — and how to get more of that magic in our day-to-day lives.   Saturday night I was thinking about her and all the wonderful times we’ve had together, and looking forward to the next time we go out.  After I while I let my mind turn off, enjoyed the music and the vibe, and danced with D.   It was another great night.   Plenty of magic.

I heart psytrance.

So let’s build on that success with a road trip, and bring the same kind of social networky goodness to Diaspora *!

If you’re thinking that you don’t have time for yet another social network, I feel your pain; the plan I’m suggesting only requires an hour of your time. Before we get there, though, I want to talk a bit about why I think it’s worth doing.

Why Diaspora *?

Diaspora shot to prominence last May, as four NYU undergrads raised money on Kickstarter for a distributed open-source privacy-friendly social network project just as a Facebook privacy storm kicked off. Good timing!

Eighteen months and $200,000 later, Sarah Mei and Yosem Companys have joined the core team, and there are dozens of public installations with tens of thousands of Diasporans. Liz Gannes’ Diaspora Prepares to Launch Open Source network on All Things D and Not vaporware, not a Nigerian prince on the team’s blog give an idea of the current status: an engineering team focused on getting to beta, a growing community, another round of fundraising in progress. Hanging out on Diaspora a lot for the last month, I’ve had interesting discussions with interesting people from across the world.

And one thing everybody that I’ve run into so far has in common:

They care about their privacy.

Sounds like a huge opportunity to me. Just by getting involved with Diaspora, we’ll be helping a privacy-friendly open-source social network project during a challenging time. And at the same time:

• non-profits and activists can engage with the grassroots — and find people to relay action alerts as well as potential new supporters
• privacy-focused startups can meet people who value privacy … aka potential beta testers, customers, and advocates
• corporate privacy professionals can get experience with a cutting-edge technology and dazzle your colleagues at IAPP (and the techies at your company!) with your insights into how the webfinger protocol enables decentralized name lookup

Sounds like a win/win situation to me!

It’s not all sweetness and unicorns of course. The software is nowhere near as polished as Facebook and Google. And there are lots of challenges from a privacy perspective: there’s no way to keep things on your profile private from your connections, the code hasn’t been through a security audit (so data is probably vulnerable to hackers), some pods have very weak privacy policies, and I’m not sure if it works with Tor.

Which leads to another potential benefit for a road trip. Feedback from the #privchat community about what it will take for them to be successful as a privacy-friendly social network is extremely valuable to the Diaspora team and pod operators — as well as to all the people working on other open source distributed social networks like Buddy Press, Friendika, Appleseed, status.net, and Buddy Cloud.

So let’s get started!

You can get a quick taste of Diaspora in just a few minutes. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll try to develop a good one-page overview (analogous to Getting Started on Twitter), but for now here’s a rough outline

1. Set up an account on one of the open “pods”. I’m on diasp.org; podupti.me and Pod Up have directories of other pods.
2. Use #privchat as one of the hashtags in your profile to make it easy for us to find each other.
3. Share an interesting link and include the #privchat hashtag
4. Follow the #privchat hashtag, and reshare the interesting stories and join in the comments
5. Add other privchatters to your aspects.
6. Take notes while you’re doing these things, and let the Diaspora team know about any problems you run into — as well as any pleasant surprises, of course!

Once a bunch of us have accounts over there, a good next step would be to have the privacy chat on Diaspora instead of Twitter one of these weeks. It’d be a very different dynamic: different threads for the different questions, a chance to use more than 140 characters, and a chance to interact with new people. And who knows, if it goes well enough there might be enough critical mass for a regular Diaspora privacy chat some other day of the week.

Something that comes up again and again on #privchat is that many people want an alternative to the corporate social networks of the world where we’re the product. Here’s a chance to experiment with a different environment. Please check it out!

jon

Also posted on Tales from the Net, Diaspora and Dreamwidth
My blogs drowning under spam so I’ve temporarily disabled comments here; please leave feedback at one of the cross-posts!

Carry on.

They’re how I follow the news, get different perspectives, stay in touch with friends — and make new ones. When people complain that online connections are just a poor substitute for “real life”, I just shake my head and tell them they’re doing it wrong. And as I’ve argued passionately in Cognitive evolution and revolution, The future of civil liberties, A grassroots social network activist’s perspective, and Freedom not fear, combining social network and real world activism is a great opportunity to regain our rights online and off.

But there are downsides as well. Facebook constantly changing its interface and finding new ways to violate my privacy, the arrogance and elitism of the guys running Google+ and their evil naming policy (along the incessant circling over the last few days), Diaspora*’s inability to edit posts or block obnoxious people … and the time I spend checking FB, G+, D*, Twitter, Quora, Dreamwidth, tribe.net, free-association and elsewhere.

So it’s time for a break from social networks.

See you in a week or two!

jon

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I’m flashing! Back in 2006, the Ad Astra project proposed a strategy for Microsoft to outflank Google by leveraging its employee base and social technologies. One of the key insights: social computing technologies allow a company to tap into the combined energy of employees and their networks. This can be a huge asset — and one that potentially grows non-linearly as a company grows. Alas, Microsoft took another approach, investing in algorithmic search to compete with Google head-on, and ceding the social market to Facebook, LinkedIn, and others..

Five years later, it’s Google in the role of a large company trying to use its size as an advantage against a more nimble competitor. If Google’s 20,000+ employees can work together effectively and are sufficiently motivated, they’ll be a huge asset in the “battle for social.” Tying bonuses across the company to success gets everybody to focus on the company’s priority. From a strategy perspective, a great move by Google.

Which doesn’t mean it will work.

– me, in a comment Prisms, Kool-Aid and Opportunity April 2011

One way to look at Google+ through the lens of what Robert Scoble calls the game of all games: the battle between Facebook, Google, and “own identity on the internet.”  In that context, it was a brilliant move against all the other big US-based corporations run and owned primarily by white guys who are fighting over who can profit from mining our personal information and selling our eyeballs to advertisers.

And in a lot of ways, it’s worked out quite well:

• Many early adopters prefer Google+ to Facebook, especially in some demographics like younger and middle-age guys, techies, photographers, and social media experts.
• With over 40 million people already signing up, Google+ is a big enough platform to woo brands, celebrities, and politicians — who, just like everybody else, often want to say things longer than 140 characters and are generally unhappy with their Facebook experience
• Google demo’ed how they can leverage their dominant position in search and advertising to reward people for using their new platform and undercut their competitors’ advertising prices — and even after reports that they pressured sites to put +1 buttons on if they want to continue to do well in search, Congress didn’t mention Google+ in their questions for Eric Schmidt.

Facebook is the next … Yahoo? MySpace? Friendster?

Facebook is certainly on the defensive right now. They’re making a lot of mistakes, and acting like a company under a lot of stress.   Groups?  Lists?  Subscribing?  Huh?  It’s looking more and more like old Microsoft products where there are three somewhat-incompatible ways to do things, none of which are particularly useful.  Here’s the poll I took about their latest changes.

Facebook’s fighting back, of course.  On the plus side they’ve already copied much of Google+’s functionality, improving on some of it in the process.  But they’ve also bewildered their users, created more privacy gotchas, and will now get rid of the Wall and introducing the Timeline instead so that you can share your whole life with advertisers, HR departments, data miners, and stalkers.

Hmm.

With 800,000,000 users they’re not going away any time soon but it increasingly looks that the third-largest country in the world is about to be undergoing some massive emigration at exactly the time they’re going to need to further ratchet up the exploitation to justify their valuation.

Can’t wait for the movie: Social Network II: Lockdown!

Google is the next Microsoft?

On the other hand, just because Facebook is hitting the wall, that doesn’t mean Google’s out of the woods.  In fact Google’s arrogance and tone-deafness are very reminiscent of Microsoft back in the evil empire days of the mid-90s. Their dominant, and arguably monopolistic, position is scaring regulators, and open source projects and competitors are banding together.

Back in the 1990s, Microsoft successfully fought of Netscape, won the browser market, and prolonged their hold on the desktop.  Even so, it wound up backfiring badly. By the end of the decade they were facing major political problems in the US and abroad, had fallen behind on the next big thing, and despite billions of dollars of investment still haven’t caught up.

Of course, times have changed; and Google’s not Microsoft.   Then again, Google’s core business is under threat.  In case you haven’t noticed, their advantage in search quality has largely disappeared.  With its overwhelmingly male population (currently two guys for every woman) and power base (80% of the “most followed users” are guys), Google+ isn’t likely to be the magic bullet they’re hoping for — at least not with the most valuable demographic on the web.**

So it’s good news for Duck Duck Go, Blekko, Quora, and yes even Microsoft.  As I predicted in February, a big chunk of the search market is up for grabs.

I’m noticing a pattern here …

It is the game to addict us, to impel us to give our identities over to Google or Facebook, and what will that do.

– Robert Scoble, The game of all games: content and context (why Mark, Marc, and Larry are carving up the social world)

But even though it’s fascinating to have a ringside seat as the lads of Silicon Valley battle over who will control our access to information, track our every move, and slice-and-dice our privacy, my first reaction to Robert’s  post was that I’m really tired of playing this game –  and a lot of other people are too.

At some level, how much does it really matter whether we’re carved up by Larry, Vic, and Eric or by Mark and Blake or Marc and whoever?  Or for that matter Jack and Dick or Mark (no relation) or any of John’s other companies or Charlie and Adam or …

With my civil liberties activists hat on, it’s depressingly clear that in any case more and more of the world’s information under the control of US-based companies and subject to the PATRIOT Act and FISA and whatever secret interpretation the current administration chooses.

And wearing my trendy little diversity chapeau, all the systems they’re building have huge biases that lead to most of the power, influence, and profit going to white guys.

Yeah, I know, it’s always been this way.   Thus does kyriarchy reproduce itself.   But I don’t think it’s going to be sustainable that much longer.

And in chaos there is opportunity.

Stay tuned for my next post, tentatively titled Hey, that sounds like a pretty good idea.

jon

* in the gender-neutral sense of the word, of course

** Aileen Lee of KPMG has some great data on this in TechCrunch, although the headline and framing are problematic; see CV Harquail’s  Why women DON’T rule the internet and comments from ptp, Terri, and others on Geek Feminism for more

Check out the previous posts in the series: A Work in Progress, Why it matters, #nymwars!, A tale of two searches, The double bind of oppression, Anxious masculinity under threat, Still a Ways to Go, Booberday, Talk about a hostile environment, and The Trend is in the Wrong Direction

Summer ended quickly in Seattle this year. One day it was sunny and 80 degrees; the next it was cloudy and 60. DJ Anomaly’s Thursday night Equinox+One marked the official start of fall with a great set — and some familiar faces. “Hey, I remember seeing you years ago at Infected Mushroom and Astral Projection at Premiere … what’s new?” Good times!

D was out of town over the weekend, so after a long day of work on Saturday, instead of going out I decided to stay home, put on a DJ Anomaly mix, and enjoy the solitude.   At first I was thinking it would be a night filled with introspection, checking out old journals and photos and blog posts and reflecting on what’s happened and where I’m going next.

But as I listened to the music, my mind wound up turning off …

So instead I just enjoyed myself.

I heart psytrance.

Solitude (2011 remix)

Candles,
Grounding.
Sacred space.
Seduction. Goddesses

I look at the candles … and experience you
In the air … on my skin …
In my mind …
Throughout my being.

I remember (or imagine) other seductive times with you,
Grounded and sacred,
By candlelight
And other magic illumination.

I remember (or imagine)
Every moment we’ve spent together,
And all the moments I’ve remembered,
Imagined, anticipated, and fantasized about.

And then I realize
I’m thinking too much
And watch the candles
And experience you.

For the past 12 weeks we’ve been in field trial, and during that time we’ve listened and learned a great deal. We’re nowhere near done, but with the improvements we’ve made so far we’re ready to move from field trial to beta, and introduce our 100th feature: open signups.

– Vic Gundotra, Google+: 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99… 100.9/20/2011

Many aspects of Google+’s field trial went extremely well. Hangouts are clearly G+’s “killer app”.* It’s been remarkably reliable for such an early stage project: no “fail whales” and (at least for me) a lot fewer bugs than Facebook. G+ has a lot of momentum with social media experts, photographers, and 20-45-year old guys; and most of the reviews have been positive.

From a business strategy perspective, Google+ has been a huge win, highlighting how many people want an alternative to Facebook. Facebook’s fighting back, copying and improving on many of G+’s features and completely reworking their profile page. But with so many users sick of the constant changes, declining software quality, and postponing the IPO, they’re in a difficult — especially with Google’s far greater resources. Advantage Google.

But there are a few flies in the ointment …

It’s beginning to look a lot like MySpace

Google+’s minimal filtering, noise reduction, and moderation functionality is already a problem — and likely to become substantially worse as people start flooding in. Valeria Maltoni and others are seeing an exponential increase in spam. Guy Kawasaki is getting a lot of bad behavior in comments. I notice it too: when Google+ started, most of the people who circled me was interesting enough to circle back. Now, almost all the circle requests are from spammers or people who haven’t posted anything I’m remotely interested in.

Unsurprisingly, it’s noticeably worse for women.** I haven’t seen any recent statistics on gender ratios on G+, but anecdotally I’m seeing more and more women cut back their involvement or just leave.

Nymwars: it’s not over

The nymwars, resistance to Google’s insistence on policing what names people can call themselves, are still getting a lot of attention — in the mainstream media like ABC and Time, from VCs like Mark Suster and Fred Wilson, and of course on Google+.

There was a good example of this earlier this week when Google Community Manager Natalie Villalobos asked the community what questions they had for new member will.i.am’s upcoming hangout. Surprise, surprise: the top questions were all about pseudonymity and the naming policy. A few examples:

Emilio Osorio García – Why can you use a pseudonym in Google+ and endangered citizens in countries like Mexico can not?

Paul Hosking – I’d ask him what his real name is. Because… you know… here on G+, we don’t deal in “fake names.” Right, +Vic Gundotra?

Greg Krajewski – +Natalie Villalobos How is he able to use the Pseudo name, +will.i.am .? Just asking because if there is something internet users hate the most it’s a double standard.

Brandi Crowell – I anticipate Google staff to completely ignore all the comments regarding the double standard of allowing +will.i.am . to use that name, but here’s a serious question for him: What is his stance on Google+’s real name policy?

Google’s strategy seems to be to try to ignore the issue — they refused to comment when Harry McCracken contacted them for his story in Time, and none of the 100 improvements Vic Gundotra mentioned involve supporting pseudonyms — but as I discussed in Talk about a hostile environment, it’s shaping to be an ongoing drag on G+’s success.

About that suggested users list …

After Google+ has been opened for everyone in the last days, the follower numbers for the Top 10 exploded.

– Daniel Sandstein, Exploding numbers and a new Nr. 1 for the ladies

Remember a few weeks ago when Bradley Horowitz responded to the outcry about the suggested users list by talking about how the users on the list would rotate so we shouldn’t get upset? When I went back to check the “Picks” list — the one that all the new people signing up see by default — here’s the changes I see:

• +will.i.am . and +Trey Songz are there of +Chamillionaire The Ceo and +50 Cent. Aas Zennie Abraham pointed out in Google+ Suggested Users List is Overwhelmingly White, the black guys are all male rappers or athletes
• +Tyra Banks has replaced +Taylor Swift. It’s nice to see a black woman there; but it still fits the pattern that are primarily actresses, singers, or in sports and fitness
• +Guy Kawasaki has replaced +Robert Scoble.
• +Larry Page is now there too, along with Sergey and Vic. Because, y’know, everybody should be following the Google guys!

As Daniel’s fascinating site Circle Count illustrates, now that the doors are open, being on the suggested users list makes a huge difference to the number of followers people get. The rich get richer … and black and women techies, executives, photographers, investors, and politicians are virtually invisible.

That’s what field trials are for

Google+ hasn’t completely ignored diversity in their field trial. Two months ago, in A work in progress, I ticked off several things they did right early on: launching in multiple languages, reaching out to get suggestions for better hangout support for deaf people, allowing the gender field to be private. In her reply, Google community manager Frances Haugen said “trust us that we’re working on developing ways for our users to express who they are and to feel comfortable being themselves on Google+.” It seemed like a promising start.

Since then, though, it’s hard to point to any new examples of diversity. The shameful way they’re treating people like Skud and Identity Woman continues to send a strong message — as does Bradley “Elatable” Horowitz and Vivek “Vic” Gundotra’s ongoing pattern of refusing to engage with critics and making misleading communications.

Well, that’s what field trials are for. Google’s learned a lot. So have we.

From a diversity perspective, the trend is in the wrong direction.

And Google’s certainly acting like they couldn’t care less.

jon

* Rebecca Greenfield has a nice roundup in Google+ Hangouts May Have Gotten Good Enough to Lure Facebookers, quoting Jenna Wortham, Tim Carmody, and others on how the latest improvements like screensharing, Google Docs integration, mobile access, Sketchpad, and an API make Hangouts a great collaboration platform for groups and businesses.

** Unsurprisingly because women get harassed a lot more than guys online — and because Google’s ignored suggestions about how to make it a more woman-friendly environment.

Check out the previous posts in the series: A Work in Progress, Why it matters, #nymwars!, A tale of two searches, The double bind of oppression, Anxious masculinity under threat, Still a Ways to Go, Booberday, and Talk about a hostile environment

I feel very let down by Google’s behavior. I had hoped to escape the heavy-handedness that is Facebook, but that is not to be.

I’ll have a presence here; I have to, professionally. But the joy is gone.

– Kathy Gill, Google+ As An Identity Service Is Bait And Switch

Like Kathy, I’m feeling pretty disenchanted with Google right now.  As an entrepeneur, I was excited enough about Google+’s possibilities that I was ready to make a big bet on it.   If things had worked out differently, Kathy and I would have been starting up a G+-based business, and I would have been one of those developers eagerly waiting for the API to come out, developing and testing an app in Hangouts, sharing it with the world, recruiting all my friends to Google+ so they could use it …

But no.

Instead, I’m hanging out on Diaspora and having a great time — interesting discussions with a diverse group of interesting people from all over the world.  I’ve stopped using Google’s search and am encouraging my friends to de-Googlify themselves.  Instead of thinking about how to build software on Google+, I’m thinking about how to improve Diaspora, Dreamwdith, Friendika, Status.net and the other alternatives to Google’s and Facebook’s “identity systems”.

True, like Kathy, I’m still on Google+.   For what I do, I need to be there — and I’m more convinced than ever of its potential for activism, a topic I’ll turn to in a future post.

But overall Google+ turned into a job for me.  Fortunately I have some great colleagues and have some really good discussions in the break room, but still … its the kind of workplace where my friends get suspended, guys pass around photos of breasts,* and the people running it are committed to a policy that harms abuse survivors, LGBTQs, people with medical conditions, teachers, whistleblowers, activists, women, and so many others.  Talk about a hostile environment

So yeah, the joy is gone for me too.

Multiply me and Kathy by whatever percentage of Google+ 25,000,000 early users are upset and you get an idea of how much of an impact the nymwars have had on its success so far.   Sure, there are plenty of people who don’t care; but when so many talented well-connected people who would otherwise be passionate supporters are actively telling their friends and colleagues how much they dislike it, it’s a huge blow.  And there’s also the effect on the morale and productivity of the sizable contingent inside Google who disagree with the policy.

It’s hard to be optimistic

It’s still possible for Google to reverse course if they want to: G+ is still in field test, so all they have to do is say something along the lines of “this was our biggest learning from the field test, and here’s what we’re going to do about it” and then take Suw Charman’s advice

Reinstate everyone you’ve suspended. Remove your current name policy. Collaborate with the community on how best to moderate bad actors. If you need some sort of identity policy, let us help you write it. And, finally, apologise to everyone you’ve bullied. There are lots of them, so you might want to start now.

As I said two months ago in Why it matters

If Google then builds on this by actively all these groups they haven’t been paying a lot of attention to so far, my money’s on them to dethrone Facebook and Twitter.

At this point, though, it’s hard to be optimistic.   Bradley, Vic, Larry, Eric, et al. pretty clearly want to make Google+ a place for the Nicks, Davids, Eds, and Roberts of the world.    So they’re basing their future social and search strategy on a product and environment that’s so hostile to pretty much everybody other than cis males with names that don’t look “weird”.

It sure seems suboptimal to me.

jon

Revised, September 26.   Originally I had led with a section talking about how despite progress, there were also some warning signs: lack of adoption, Facebook’s response, and major functionality gaps.  Since then, Google’s finally integrated search, made some significant improvements in hangouts, and opened the doors: Paul Allen estimates that Google+ is up to 50,000,000 profiles already and seeing 2 million new signups each day, and Experian reported that traffic shot up an astonishing 1269% last week. Meanwhile Facebook’s much-anticipated response is confusing and annoying users.  So I chopped that section out and left the focus on the hostile environment.  Live and learn

* See A.V. Flox’ Painting It Pink Doesn’t Make It Less Sexist for a great discussion of the impact of Booberday on the community

Check out the previous posts in the series: A Work in Progress, Why it matters, #nymwars!, A tale of two searches, The double bind of oppression, Anxious masculinity under threat, Still a Ways to Go, and Booberday

This weekend I received an invitation through Facebook to join Diaspora. I had tried to join Diaspora last year when I learned about their Kickstarter success while writing my book on crowdsourcing, but I couldn’t get in. So of course I was curious and went immediately to sign up.

And then I was puzzled. Diaspora looked just like…Google+. Or did Google+ look just like Diaspora?

– Aliza Sherman, Google+ meet Diaspora – or maybe you know them already?

Yeah really. Dan Tynan, in Will the real anti-Facebook please stand up?, comments that “Given that G+ emerged some seven months after Diaspora went public, I’m guessing Google was taking notes.” Sure, the basic idea of having Aspects (in Diaspora) or Circles (in Google+) to organize your acquaintances isn’t new,* but G+’s web layout sure looks a heckuva lot like Diaspora’s.

What’s that they say about the sincerest form of flattery?

And conveniently enough, a large corporation has just spent millions of dollars on a “field test” that offers plenty of learning for Diaspora*. Thanks, Google!

So last week I started asking people what they thought Diaspora* could learn from Google+. Since then Kathy, Helena, Greg, Amy, Stephen, Gretchen, Dan, Paul, Andreas, David, Cindy, Geeky, powlsy, Drew, Terry, Sylvia, Edward, Anne, Hrafn, Shiyiya, Cavlec, Wiring, Madeleine, @PRC_Amber, @blakereidm, Arvind, Dan, and many others came up with new suggestions and refined the list in discussions on Google+, Dreamwidth, Diaspora, Twitter, earlier draft, and email. Thanks to everybody who got involved! As usual, the majority of the good ideas came from others; all of the clunkers and mistakes are mine.

The Diaspora* team’s getting a ton of feedback these days — 130 responses just since yesterday. Feedback from early users and passionate supporters is a sign that they want you to succeed, and the best roadmap to improving the product. At the same time, though, there’s only so many hours in the day; and my guess is the team’s list of tasks to accomplish is already more than full.

So I’ve tried to concentrate here on a handful of areas with fairly immediate impact that won’t add much work for the core team and where the community can do the bulk of the heavy lifting. Without further ado, here they are.

1. Focus on the “new user experience”

Google+ got 25,000,000 people to sign up in the first few weeks, but only a few million stayed. In the comments to the fascinating “feedback Friday” thread community manager Natalie Villalobos kicked off last month, a lot of people talk about how difficult the experience is for new people, especially if their friends aren’t there yet. Where are the discussions happening? How do you meet others? Who’s interesting to follow?

Diaspora’s got the same challenges — even moreso, because it’s so hard to find good help information. There are good resources out there on Diasporial and elsewhere (Eloísa Valdes has a nice short list), but no way for new people to discover them. And as Twitter and now Google+ are discovering, a “suggested users list” is fraught with peril.

A few straightforward things could help a lot here:

• have a “welcome” message for each new user, pointing them to resources and giving some suggestions for getting started. Ideally this would be something that’s easy for individual pod administrators to customize to add their own twist to it.
• more awareness of and easier access to the #help hashtag. Perhaps a link in the top right menu?
• since a lot of people still have most of their friends on Facebook, publicize Friendrika and other ways of bridging the gap
• create a volunteer-led “welcoming committee” to greet new users, help them through the inevitable gotchas, and answer questions*

2. Make it easier for people to extend the system and host their own pods

Different people prefer different ways of interacting with the system — dense information vs white space; text-heavy vs. image-heavy; comments expanded or contracted by default; and so on. From very early on, Chrome extensions like G+me, Plus Minus, Auto-colorizer, and the all-important Troll remover make a huge difference in Google+’s usability. Some good examples and instructions — as well as better visibility for the extensions people are already working on — could unleash the same creativity in the Diaspora* world.**

One of Diaspora*’s big advantages over Google+ is that people can install it themselves and run small pods for friends, families, clubs, churches, or roller derby teams. But for people to really take advantage of it, the installation needs to be as easy as Wordpress*** and ideally offer “one-click” installation — on Amazon, Heroku, and eventually ISP as well. There are lots of sysadmins and IT professionals in the early Diaspora* community who have a much better idea about what’s needed on this front than I do. Is there a way for a working group of them to take the lead here?

3. Get ready for trolls, hate speech, harassment, and spammers

Remember when Google thought that its odious “real name” policy would cut down on bad behavior?

Hahahahahaha.

Soon enough, just like every other online site, there was plenty of ugliness — and unlike Live Journal, Dreamwidth, Slashdot, or even the old Usenet groups with their killfiles, there aren’t any good tools to deal with it. But as weak as Google’s moderation tools and processes for reporting harassment are, they’re still a step up on Diaspora*. So far, nothing’s been implmented in Diaspora*; the vague description of what’s planned for pre-bata makes it seem like it’s repeating Google+’s mistakes (see Kee Hinckley, Linda Lawrey, and Lauren Weinstein for the problems with this approach).

This would be a great place to follow Dreamwidth’s model for community-driven discussion and design and come up with a better specification before the team implements something ineffective. And not to sound like a broken record or anything, but it would be great to have the equivalent of Troll Remover for Diaspora.

As for spammers, all those pretty women just out of college who love to advertise Southwest Air are going to discover Diaspora* soon enough. What’s the strategy to deal with spammers signing up on open pods? What happens when spammers start to set up pods of their own and add people to their aspects? And are pods vulnerable to spammers hacking into them? If the “privacy friendly social network” turns into a spam factory, it’ll be a huge blow to D*’s momentum.

Once again, this seems like an opportunity for the community to take the lead. There are plenty of early Diasporans who have hosted forums or run blogs and other sites that have dealt with spam. And while I haven’t seen a lot of security experts there so far, a lot of hackers support Diaspora*’s goals, and I have to believe that reaching out to them could help with security testing as well . Even something as simple as a weekly “hack this pod” contest could start getting the community involved in discovering problems before the spammers do.

4. Reach out to the people Google’s ignoring

It’s a huge challenge for any new social network these days to attract an audience. There are so many sites out there already … who has time for one more? So it makes sense to start by working with people whose needs aren’t getting met today. Google+’s core demographics are techies, 20-45 year old guys, affluent “kids and cabernet” couples, and social media experts. Diaspora*’s likeliest successes are with everybody else.

More specifically, the estimated 40% of people online who prefer “screen names” or pseudonyms are an really good target audience right now. Geek Feminism’s excellent list of Who is harmed by a “Real Names” policy and the “Who’s affected?” list on My Name is Me can be the basis of a great outreach and recruiting plan.

It’s not rocket science to reach out to a community — especially if there some passionate early adopters already on Diaspora*. A few basics:

• Work with people in the community to come up with scenarios and personas highlighting showing how Diaspora* helps with the challenges people have today
• Blog posts and articles from people within the community to raise awareness
• Lists of people within the community who are already on Diaspora* to help newcomers get involved
• Set up a virtuous cycle by providing ways for the community to influence the design and development of future versions of the product
• Set up a pod specifically for this community

Women (who are 25 times more likely to be harassed online than men), LGBTQs (at risk for bullying or worse — and already likely to look on Diaspora* favorably because gender is a text field), and activists could be good groups to start with. There are lots of other possibilities as well.

An interesting next few months …

Needless to say, these suggestions are only the tip of the iceberg. There’s a ton of stuff that needs to be done on the product side, including dealing with questions about security..   And there’s plenty of marketing as well.  In a comment on an earlier draft of this post, Dan Tynan suggested “Get Robert Scoble to be your cheerleader. Or Om Malik, or Guy Kawasaki, or one of those other guys.”  Indeed!  And maybe also some women …

Will the Diaspora* team and community step up to the challenge?  I’m optimistic.  As I said in A crucial time for Diaspora*

There are plenty of people (including me!) who are passionate about what open-source distributed social networks mean for intellectual freedom. And just as importantly, there are plenty of people (also including me!) whose social networking needs aren’t being met right now.

One way or another, it’ll be an interesting time for Diaspora* over the next few months.  Stay tuned!

jon

image from Giorgio * via Diaspora*

* Ardith Goodwin is piloting this on Google+; free-association.net, and no doubt other sites, have used similar approaches in the past.

** Speaking of which, even a limited read-only API that’s likely to change over time can lead to exciting apps like Mohamed Mansour’s Stream+, developed and released the same day Google published their API. I realize that API design is challenging, but at this there’s a lot of value in something that’s temporary and “good enough”.

*** Cindy Brown suggested Wordpress as a model on G+; Dan Patterson goes into more detail in a comment on Read Write Web, and

Although we’ve been quiet for a while, it’s because we’ve been working hard, head-down.

We’re thrilled to say we’ve built the first stage of a new social web, one better than what’s out there today: a place where each of us owns our own information, where each person controls his or her own privacy, where no-one is a product, and where we all control our own destinies.

– Maxwell, Daniel, Ilya, Sarah, Yosem and Peter, Diaspora* is making a difference

It’s a crucial time for Diaspora* right now, in a way that anybody who’s been involved in a startup can really appreciate. The initial money’s run out and they’re still in alpha. Everybody was hoping progress would be faster. Communications have been intermittent. There are a lot of questions about security.

And now a major corporation with deep pockets is introducing a somewhat-similar product that’s much easier to use.   The responsiveness and addictiveness of G+’s user experience, and the ability to edit your posts after you make them, raise the bar on user expectations.* With Circles giving better control over sharing (and Facebook once again trying to improve the usability of their “friend lists” in response), Diaspora’s functionality advantage has largely disappeared.

Gulp.

There’s good news too

D* wants to enable you to own your own data and enjoy the open web in a social way. It’s not about killing G+ or FB. It’s about enabling users to own their own social data and have the choice to use any service they want, which will force the walled gardens to provide better services, lest their users leave and take their own data to other services online that provide these for them.

– Diaspora * “Chief Evangelist” Yosem Companys

Fortunately, Diaspora* isn’t trying to compete with Google. Robert Scoble’s blog post on The game of all games outlines how Google, Facebook, and Salesforce are carving up the social world … Diaspora* and other open source distributes social networks are for the increasing number of people who are sick of being treated like a piece of meat.

And there’s plenty of good news too. Diaspora’s early users are enthusiastic. Communications have picked up with Yosem joining the team, and Sarah Mei kicking off a series of technical blog posts. And the nymwars and Eric Schmidt’s creepy characterization of G+ as an “identity system” has spotlighted the need for alternatives, so more and more people are signing up.**

For those who care about Intellectual Freedom … making this happen for a such a critical piece of infrastructure should be a compelling goal…. We are the logical early-adopters for this technology, and I think it’s time we started adopting it. If we want a free future for the social web, we’re going to have to support it.

– Terry Hancock, Why You Should Join Diaspora Now, Like Your Freedom Depends on It

A common theme underlying all of my suggestions is a belief that the community is the key to Diaspora*’s success — and that in the right circumstances people are ready to step forward and help. There are plenty of people (including me!) who are passionate about what open-source distributed social networks mean for intellectual freedom. And just as importantly, there are plenty of people (also including me!) whose social networking needs aren’t being met right now.

If Diaspora* can reach out to these people, get them interested, make them feel welcome when they join and appreciated once they start contributing, listen to their feedback, and find ways to get them more involved … then Google’s army of programmers, zillion-dollar marketing budget, and busloads of “social media experts” lining up to praise the next big thing won’t really matter.

Some ideas about how to do that coming up in the next installment, 4 things Diaspora* can learn from Google+.  Stay tuned!

jon

image from Giorgio * via Diaspora*

* I know, I know, many social network sites and discussion boards have the ability to edit posts … but most people’s social network experience has been with Facebook, MySpace, and various forms of IM, which don’t allow it.

** while the main site at http://joindiaspora.com remains invite-only, quite a few “pods” have open signup. podupti.me and Pod Up have directories of dozens of pods.

In the aftermath of my events on Sept. 11, 2011, I feel violated, humiliated and sure that I was taken from the plane simply because of my appearance. Though I never left my seat, spoke to anyone on the flight or tinkered with any “suspicious” device, I was forced into a situation where I was stripped of my freedom and liberty that so many of my fellow Americans purport are the foundations of this country and should be protected at any cost….

This country has operated for the last 10 years through fear. We’ve been a country at war and going bankrupt for much of this time. What is the next step?

– Shoshana Hebshi, Some real Shock and Awe: Racially profiled and cuffed in Detroit, Tales from the Heartland

The F-16 fighters that had shadowed the plane before it landed in Detroit and the SWAT team that dragged Shoshanna and her two Indian seatmates from their seats was responding to the crew’s report that … somebody had been spending too long in the bathroom. On the same day, F-16s also scrambled for another flight where … three people made repeated trips to the bathroom. WTF?

Following a catastrophic national event, such as 9/11 in the United States, conditions are anything but ordinary. The people are traumatized, they long for someone to make them feel secure, and an ancient paranoia switch is once again waiting to snap on. Under these conditions, fear mongers thrive. Their characteristics are so hand in glove with the trauma reaction of the population that their identifying behaviors are scarcely “seen” at all. In short, after we have been thoroughly traumatized, we cannot see the devil.

– Martha Stout, The Paranoia Switch

The fear brokers continue to rule in DC, with the TSA ratcheting up the oppression and Obama breaking his campaign promises and pushing through a PATRIOT Act extension without any additional protections. Economic fears are in overdrive as well, with so many people living close to the edge, scared of their job disappearing, or working ridiculous hours just to almost make ends meet. It’s depressing even to write about it.

But fear only works so long. Jane Jacobs used to tell a story about community organizing and trying to collect signatures in Manhattan at the height of Mcarthyism in the 50s. Day afer day, everybody was scared to sign — and who could blame them? And then one day … people started signing.

Starting late last year enough people in Tunisia got to the point where they were so done with living in fear that they put their lives on the line day after day until things changed. Which kicked off Arab Spring kicked off, with people in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, and Syria also risking torture and death. Now there are huge demonstrations in Spain, Greece, and Israel. At some point, people collectively say “enough is enough”.

This Saturday, September 17th, concerned European citizens with the Freedom not Fear movement have decided to take their protest to the capital of the European Union, Brussels. Their slogan: Stop the surveillance mania

– Katitza Rodriguez, Freedom Not Fear: Ending A Decade Long Legacy of International Privacy Erosion, EFF’s Deep Links

Back in 2009, I was on a panel at CFP where Ralf Bendrath talked about the first years of Freedom not Fear. I coveredGet FISA Right and Join the Impact, Gaurav Mishra discussed Vote Report India, and moderator Nancy Scola led us in a debate about whether social networks were more likely to be a tool for liberation — or for repression. I was optimistic, and it seems to me that events since then have largely justified that optimism.

Of course it’s the people who make the difference, and social network sites are only one of many tools they use. But as tools go, they’re mighty powerful — especially combined with the kind of local and national organizing Shahid Buttar of Bill of Rights Defense Committee describes in Restoring the Fourth Amendment: How We the People can Win Over Washington.

So while the fear brokers still seem in control in DC, I think we’re in the middle of a shift. At the height of February’s unexpected resistance, the PATRIOT Act was the hottest topic on blogs and Twitter. Even the Wall Street Journal is against e-Verify, the latest incarnation of a National ID Card. And the TSA’s continued overreach and incompetence is sparking more and more anger across the political spectrum.

By the time Constitution Day 2012 rolls around, I expect we’ll see a lot more people choosing freedom over fear here in the US as well.

Why not start today?

Happy Constitution Day!

Most people won’t have even heard of it. Diaspora is an up and coming social network which is getting a lot more attention in some circles in the wake of Google+’s ‘real names’ policy.

Users are climbing on board after being tipped off that there’s a network just like Google+, only without having anything to do with Google, where you can be who you want to be, how you want to be, and still retain full ownership of everything you put there.

– Rebecca Baker, Diaspora still trying to reinvent social networks with open source, TechEye

Sounds great!  And while the Diaspora team still hasn’t sent out invites to the thousands of people who have signed up, some “pods” allow open signups.  So I set up a profile on http://diasp.org to check it out … and my, it looked familiar.

This weekend I received an invitation through Facebook to join Diaspora. I had tried to join Diaspora last year when I learned about their Kickstarter success while writing my book on crowdsourcing, but I couldn’t get in. So of course I was curious and went immediately to sign up.

And then I was puzzled. Diaspora looked just like…Google+. Or did Google+ look just like Diaspora?

Aliza Sherman, Google+ meet Diaspora – or maybe you know them already?

Yeah really.  Dan Tynan, in Will the real anti-Facebook please stand up?, comments that “Given that G+ emerged some seven months after Diaspora went public, I’m guessing Google was taking notes.”  Sure, the basic idea of having Aspects (in Diaspora) or Circles (in Google+) to organize your acquaintances isn’t new,* but G+’s web layout sure looks a lot like Diaspora’s.

What’s that they say about the sincerest form of flattery?

The opportunity’s still there …

Although we’ve been quiet for a while, it’s because we’ve been working hard, head-down.

We’re thrilled to say we’ve built the first stage of a new social web, one better than what’s out there today: a place where each of us owns our own information, where each person controls his or her own privacy, where no-one is a product, and where we all control our own destinies.

– Maxwell, Daniel, Ilya, Sarah, Yosem and Peter, Diaspora* is making a difference

It’s a crucial time for Diaspora right now, in a way that’s very hard for people who haven’t ever been involved in a startup to relate to.   Everybody expected progress to be more rapid.   There are a lot of questions about security.  The team’s been so busy that communications haven’t been great (although they’ve improved recently, with Yosem Companys taking on the role as Diaspora’s “chief evangelist”).   The money’s run out and they’re still in alpha. And now a major corporation with deep pockets is introducing a somewhat-similar product that’s much easier to use.  Gulp.

Looking at it more positively, though, Google+ has validated some of Diaspora’s key design choice.   The user base seems fairly enthusiastic despite the limitations of the alpha release.   And the nymwars and Eric Schmidt’s creepy characterization of G+ as an “identity system” underlines the need for the new social web the Diaspora team is talking about.  So the huge opportunity is still there.

And not just for Diaspora.  Sites like Hibe (whose Facets play the same role as Apects and Circles) are also seeing a lot of interest in the aftermath.  Wikipedia lists over 40 distributed social network projects — including Friendika, which inter-operates with Diaspora as well as Twitter, Facebook, and others.    Google+ presents a great learning opportunity for all of these projects.

Ten things to learn

If Google Plus has taught us anything …

Jon Mitchell, How Can Diaspora Help Us in a Facebook and Google Plus World?

Last week I started asking people what they thought Diaspora could learn from Google+.   Since then Kathy, Helena, Greg, Amy, Stephen, Gretchen, Dan, Paul, Andreas, David, Cindy, Geeky, powlsy, Drew, Terry, Sylvia, Edward, Anne, Hrafn, Shiyiya, Cavlec, Wiring, Madeleine, @PRC_Amber, @blakereid and many others came up with new suggestions and refined the list in discussions on Google+, Dreamwidth, Diaspora, and Twitter.  Thanks to everybody who got involved!

Over the course of the discussion, I took a couple of polls on Google+, and both times the same recommendation came out on top:

• The estimated 40% of people online who prefer “screen names” or pseudonyms are a really good target audience right now. Geek Feminism’s excellent list of Who is harmed by a “Real Names” policy could be the basis of a great go-to-market strategy for Diaspora or any other privacy-friendly social network.

It’s a huge challenge for any new social network these days to attract an audience.  There are so many sites out there already … who has time for one more?  As so many early Google+ users found, it can be very hard to get your friends and relatives to try another site if they’re basically happy with their Facebook experience.   So it makes sense to start by working with people whose needs aren’t getting met today.  As the battle over Google’s naming policy so clearly showed, there are a lot of us out there — and we’re not happy.

Diaspora, or any other site, has a great chance to reach out to these audiences and involve them in the design and deployment of the software.  What are the key “use cases”?  What will it take to create an environment that’s waaaaay better than anything else out there for women, LGBTQs, people with disabilities, activists, whistleblowers, health professionals, and everybody else who’s harmed by Google’s and Facebook’s “real names” policy?  And how to get early adoption in the various communities to set up a virtuous cycle where feedback leads to an improved product leads to broader use?

Several of the other recommendations can help make Diaspora more attractive to this “sweet spot” audience — and the first two of these are areas where the competition is weak.

• Good moderation tools (ranging from fine-grained per thread controls to a “block” that really works) are essential.  Google+’s are mediocre.  Diaspora’s are virtually non-existent.
• The new user experience is crucial; and setting up a “suggested users list” isn’t likely to work out well.  Instead, why not try something more community-oriented like the “welcoming committee” idea that Ardith Goodwin et. al. are experimenting with on Google+?
• Different people prefer different was of interacting with the system — dense information vs white space; text-heavy vs. image-heavy; comments expanded or contracted by default; and so on.  Fortunately, a lot of creative people want to customize the user experience.  Good instructions for writing Firefox, Chrome, and other browser extensions can engage developers which in turn helps users.
• Phones matter. Many people use phones more than desktop or laptop computers.  Even more importantly, many people have phones but don’t have computers.   It’s great that work on the Android app has started, but as of now Diaspora still isn’t usable via mobile browsers.

And here are several more suggestions  transition still needs work, sorry

• Streams get overloaded quickly, so better circle management (combining them, “venn diagrams”), filtering and notification controls — along with some kind of collapsing multiple reshares of the same post — are vital.
• People want the ability to make any field on their profile private.   Diaspora gives the user less control here than Google+ — or for that matter Facebook.  And speaking of profiles, it would be great to have something much richer, with room for links, photos, and formatted text.
• It’s a big advantage for Diaspora that unlike Google+ you can install it on their own servers. But the installation needs to be as easy as Wordpress,** and minimize dependencies.
• For Diaspora to succeed, it has to involve the community.  Regular communications, and participation by team members and community managers, makes a huge difference.  The steady stream of Google+ announcements kept people informed and pumped up the enthusiasm; Natalie Villalobos and her team have done a great job  working with the community — and so did the other Googler’s who got involved in the early days.  With more and more invitations going out and pods getting set up, now’s a perfect time to add a community manager (or equivalent position) and for the whole team to shift to a community focus.

Dynamite conclusion here, still needed!

* cites needed

** Cindy Brown suggested Wordpress as a model on G+; Dan PatTerson goes into more detail in a comment on Read Write Web

Summary: it’s a “share pictures of your cleavage because of… breast cancer! yeah!” meme. That meta-meme is potent, folks. Got something you want people to do? Claim it’s about preventing or ameliorating or alerting or grieving breast cancer. You are now the untouchable saviour. The end.

– Mary, on Geek Feminism

A surprising number of guys don’t seem to get why so many women found the G+ weekend meme of sharing pictures of cleavage under the guise of “breast cancer awareness” offensive.   Mary’s article is a great roundup, with quotes from Christa Laser, Randall Monroe, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Peggy Orenstein, as well as links out to Twisty on I Blame the Patriarchy and Lauradhel of Hoyden about Town … but even so, there’s plenty of whining about “censorship” and mansplaining about how women who feel objectified are just wrong.  Sigh.

As M. M. Faulkner said six weeks ago on Pay Attention People in Why Women Users are Important for Google+,

Furthermore, although making a joke here or there, posting a somewhat mysogynist photo, or remarking on women’s love of Farmville may seem harmless enough, I think we need to recognize there is a larger picture. What I am speaking of is a collective conscience that forms when people are bombarded with the same images and messages over and over and over. The message for the past week has been ramping up and it seems to be suggesting that we are simply are not as “ready” for Google’s latest social media network. It reminds us, as women, we are in the “wrong place” at Google Plus.

Of course there are plenty of exceptions.  All of the people I’m following steered clear from Booberday, and guys like Randall Monroe and Mohamed Mansour (who worked overnight to get out Filter Stream for Google+) really stepped forward.  But still.

A heck of a lot of women have been talking for months about things that make Google+ a hostile environment to women … and Google’s largely ignored them.

I wonder what, if anything, they’ll do in the aftermath of Booberday?

Check out the previous posts in the series: A Work in Progress, Why it matters, #nymwars!, A tale of two searches, The double bind of oppression, Anxious masculinity under threat, and Still a Ways to Go

It had been a week of solid work so by the time the weekend came around we were both more than ready for a break.  Friday night was 80s night at The Atrium … the champagne flowed freely and the hits just kept on coming, everything from Head over Heels to Two of Hearts (!), the Bangles to ABC.   The lighting made everybody look great, and there were cupcakes!  What’s not to like?

Sunny days and warm nights
Appreciating good friends
The moon smiling down

Saturday DJ Anomaly kicked off Interim with One World One Sky, of all things, but after that it turned into some serious psytrance and another great night.    The name struck a chord: we were both in something of an interim mood, enjoying a brief respite as the summer wraps up before heading into what’s looking like a packed fall.   And with 9/11 and Constitution Day coming up, my thoughts were as usual on social networks and civil liberties.

A lot’s happened in 10 years.  Fifty years from now, how will people look back on this decade?   The economy’s in the toilet here in the US, as the discrimination and greed of “rich get richer” corporate capitalism continues to ratchet up inequality.  And on the civil liberties side, Shahid Buttar’s The America We Knew and the ACLU’s A Call to Courage tally up what we’ve lost.   Psychologically the paranoia switch is still thrown, with fear and negativity saturating media coverage, hate and ignorance opposing marriage equality, ENDA, and evolution, and the stress of so many people living on the edge financially.

But it’s not all bad …

today, hierarchical organizations (consolidating corporations) and totalitarian states are even more powerful and hegemonic than they were. what can stand against them? belief in something else that translates to a different set of rules, so not only the ability to overcome fear to resist but also the non-linearity to avoid getting crushed by the power….

there’s power in unleashing fantasy. there’s power in connecting people and finding shared fantasies…  is it possible to construct fantasies that are liberating instead of repressive?

– Can fantasy stand against hegemony? from Rationality’s not looking too good these days, 2003

When I’m right, I’m right.  Ten years later there’s still an emergency powers law is still in place in the US — but not in Tunisia or Egypt where it has been swept away by Arab Spring.   So yes, it most assuredly is possible for people to create new rules and share liberating fantasies.  And the non-linearity of radically decentralized communications (yay, mobile phones and social networks) can change the dynamics of power.  So while rationality still isn’t looking in remarkably good shape these days, on the whole I’m optimistic.

Do I know how to have a good time at a psytrance party or what?

After a while though my mind turned off and I got into the music. We danced almost non-stop from 11 until 2:30 and there were once again cupcakes — so tasty at 3 a.m.!

Lights dancing above
Jupiter high in the sky
The moon through the trees

I slept until 11, and the weather remains beautiful so I went for a long walk in the park.    I heart psytrance.

J’aime Ohm won the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon as a solo hacker with a personal safety iPhone app.  WiseDame’s tag line is “making safe living easier, one application release at a time”. It takes basic safety practices – letting friends or family know what time you expect to be home,  leaving a note about your plans for the day – and makes them better, faster, and easier.  Brilliant.

And a great case study in agile software engineering, too. J’aime started with an idea for a product she wanted and a set of use cases based her own experience. Next she talked with a bunch of potential early adopters who were variants on a target persona (”women who go out”) and had enough information to build a prototype. Which she did, and iterated rapidly continuing to get feedback, all in less than 24 hours.

– me in Now *that’s* what I call disruptive, October 2010

What a difference a year makes!  Last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco took place in the aftermath of the the Arrington Kerfuffle and Angelgate, and wound up with AOL acquiring TechCrunch.  This year, it’s in the midst of an ugly breakup, involving “tense severance negotations” between AOL and former editor Michael Arrington.   Pass the popcorn!

Techcrunch Disrupt has gotten a lot of heat for its underrepresentation of women.  This year’s speaker list includes Hilary Mason of bit.ly, Rebekah Cox of Quora, Gina Bianchini of Ning, Aileen Lee of Kleiner Perkins, and Marissa Meyer of Google … and over 50 guys, including the author of The Diversity Myth, a VC known for his quote about preferring to fund straight white guys, and an investor who thinks startups have a competitive advantage because they can discriminate.  And remember how rapper/CEO Chamillionaire was the only black speaker last time?  This time, there don’t seem to be any blacks at all on the list.  Nice.

Oh well, it is what it is.  And despite all its imperfections, Disrupt is a great opportunity for visibility for the companies participating in the Startup Battlefield — and for the people participating in the opening Hackathon.  There are some serious prizes this year.

So for those of you making a run at it, here’s some advice.

J’aime suggests …

Not from me, of course.  I’ve never been.  Instead, I asked J’aime for suggestions.  Here’s what she said:

• What to bring: Snacks! Also, a list of ideas, a good night’s sleep, your tools of the trade and (if you have them) friends
• How to arrive: Say hello to people. Learn something about them. You may want advice from each other later and you may make friends.
• How to start: Wireframes (or a flow diagram) are your first prototype; spend 2-3 hours getting those on paper and getting feedback
• How to behave: Wear your chill pants at all times — don’t let team dynamics or interruptions distract you after you’ve responded to them.
• Whether to take a break: YES. I went to the Embarcadero with a couple friends around 10pm and walked along the bay for an hour.
• Whether to sleep: Nah. Work through the night if you can. That’s the spirit of the event.
• When demo time comes: Be ok with imperfection (looking at your peers’ equally-unfinished work helps) and present no matter what you have/haven’t finished.

Of course, everybody approaches an event like a Hackathon in their own way; what works for J’aime might not work for you. Still, these all seem really sensible.  Thanks, J’aime!   For more about the Hackathon experience, check out Evelyn Rusli’s excellent interview below.

Good luck to everybody participating … looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

jon

Earlier posts in the TechCrunch, Disrupted series:

Fretting, asking, and begging isn’t a plan, Collusion is sooo hot right now,
The third wave meets the anatomy of awesome, Changing the ratio,
A public service announcement, A celebration of disruptive women,
Hold that thought and a href=”http://bit.ly/tcdisrupted6″>Now *that’s* what I call disruptive

Ten weeks into the G+ experiment, what are the key learnings for a privacy-friendly distributed social network.  Here’s a few early thoughts.

• Diaspora’s on the right track.  Google+’s “circle” concept and page layout look like they’re based on Diaspora’s work — and imitation is the sincerest form of flatter.
• Diaspora’s current functionally + longer posts + easy link sharing + video = enough to get people excited
• The estimated 40% of people online who prefer “screen names” or pseudonyms are a really good target audience right now.   Geek Feminism’s excellent list of Who Is Harmed By a “Real Names” policy could be the basis of a great go-to-market plan for Diaspora
• Gender is a text field, but corporations run by cis guys still don’t see it that way

Your thoughts welcome, either about these ideas or new ones!
jon

So once again I was ready for the weekend.  Friday night, we dropped by Gibbous, DJ Anomaly’s bi-weekly, for a couple hours.  Saturday was burn night on the playa; here in the Seattle area, it was Intention, again with DJ Anomaly.  And then Sunday, while the Temple of Transition burned in Black Rock Desert, I was back at The Atrium one more time for Transition.

It was a sparse crowd and the DJs were okay but nothing out of the ordinary.  D stayed home writing and I wound up running into a friend I used to hang out with a lot a few years ago.  After we exchanged hellos and caught up on what was happening, she told me that she was thinking of buying a new Android phone but was concerned about Google tracking her.   From there we drifted to a discussion of Google+ and pseudonymity.

The two of us first met online, at a social network site where almost everybody used pseudonyms.  I spent most of my online time there for a couple years, back before Facebook and Twitter.  The discussions were great, the people were interesting, and over the years many of us wound up meeting and often becoming friends in real life.   Long-awaited first meetings, dancing at Bar Sinister, zooming through the streets of DC at 3 a.m. on the back of a scooter … you don’t need to know somebody’s “real name” for any of this.

And over the last 30 years millions of people have had similar experiences, on BBSs, discussion boards, chat rooms, Live Journal,tribe, free-association, MySpace, Dreamwidth, and zillions of other places.  Sorry, Google; the way you expect people to interact in your “identity system” isn’t “just like the real world” no matter how many times you say it.  Grr.

Do I know how to have a good time at a psytrance party or what?

Fortunately the music got better and I shut up and danced.   The food and drink specials were tasty as always, the light made everybody look great.   D showed up at close to 3:30, and we hung out for a while before heading home.  It was a fine evening, and a great chance to reflect on where I am two-thirds of the way through 2011.

Crossing me (opposing forces, good or bad): Seven of Cups: Dreams, castles in the air, imagination working overtime — the seekers’ forces have been too scattered. A unifying story that speaks of limitless diversity, unbounded potential.  Are you distracted by the diversity before you? If so, how can you obtain clear focus?

– from the Tarot reading in DJ Anomaly at the Party Without a Name

You talking to me?  Yeah, I have been known to get distracted by limitless diversity.  And with a lot of stuff happening on the personal side, focusing has been a real challenge this year.   Sounds like yet another opportunity for inflection.

That night of the party without a name is also when I finalized my goals and resolutions for the year.  I’m doing pretty well on the resolutions, with the glaring exception of “spend more time on diversity-friendly social networks, and less in sexist, racist, and elitist environments” … as Melissa Hall says, dear Google, we really need to have a talk about our relationship.  But the disruptions, upheavals, and suspended decisions foreshadowed by the Tower, Three of Swords, and Hanged Man — along with a couple of decisions that could have worked out better — mean that I’m lagging on some of my goals.  Ah well.

But more positively, everything that’s happened validates my intention for qweries and highlights that the opportunity probably isn’t going away any time soon.  There is a huge audience for a site that helps everybody (not just the elite) find answers, get in the conversation, and contribute to their communities.  Google+ could fill this rule but based on what we’ve seen so far it doesn’t look likely.

Over the summer, I’ve learned a lot about the current technology situation and identified key audiences to target. The Q&A space remains attractive, the search market remains ripe for disruption, and a diversity-focused strategy can lead to a sustainable competitive advantage.   True, it’s still not completely clear how to get there from here. at least in a way that leads to a sustainable business, but I’m sure there’s a way.  And hey, if changing the world was easy, everybody would do it.

So despite all the challenges, I’m in a great frame of mind.  As I danced, I found myself thinking about a handful of my closest friends — in keeping with the theme of pseudonymity, I’ll call Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Space and Consciousness [not their real names].  It was another clear night, and once again Jupiter shone brightly over the dance floor.    I was in a creative enough mood that I wound up writing a haiku.

Warm light and psytrance
Intention and transition
Jupiter above

(For the elements who transform my world)

I heart psytrance.

jon

Google Plus launched a “suggested users” list yesterday. I’m not on it, and I bet you aren’t either, particularly if you’re an educator — because, well, there aren’t any educators on the list.

– Audrey Watters, Personal Learning Networks and the Google+ “Suggested Users” list

The Google Suggested User List reads like the typical San Francisco Bay Area tech firm’s view of the World: most of the “interesting and famous people” are white, and if they’re black, they’re male rappers or athletes. Hello, Snoop Dog, Chamillionaire, 50 Cent, Dwight Howard, and Floyd Mayweather!

– Zennie Abraham, Google+ Suggested Users List is Overwhelmingly White

A couple of weeks go, Google community manager Natalie Villalobos asked for feedback on why people’s friends weren’t staying on G+.   One of the things that came up was that it was often very hard for new users to find people the thought would be interesting to follow and engage with.  There are a lot of creative ways to approach this, for example Ardith Goodwin’s suggestion of a welcoming committee.  Instead, Google+’s decided to take the same approach that worked out spectacularly badly for Twitter two years ago.  Will they fare better?

The early returns aren’t encouraging.  Dave, Robert,  and others immediately criticized the idea of a “suggested users” list and Bradley’s outreach to the Twitter elite.  After Bradley responded in Dave’s comments, and then  shared more details Saturday morning,  Robert asked to be removed from the list.  Bradley responded again in Robert’s comments.  And the discussion rages on.

Google VP Vic Gundotra’s comment is from Violet Blue’s discussion of the list.  As well as Violet Blue, Google also included prominent nymwars critics Jillian C. York, A.V. Flox, and Xeni Jardin. Congrats to all of them, and kudos to Google for giving visibility to dissenting views.  Lynette Young of “Women of Google+” is there too, as are ladyada (aka Limor Fried), Elisa Camahort Page of Blogher, and tech journalists like Sarah Perez and Christina Warren.  These are all great signals to send from a diversity perspective. Once again, congrats and kudos.

Like Vic says, though, there’s still a ways to go.

Room for improvement

The suggestions in the politics list are probably the most extreme example of the lack of diversity.  They’re all from North American.  They’re all native English speakers.  They represent a fairly narrow range of the political spectrum.  [Yes, even in the US, there's a lot more perspectives than "Northern California Democrats" and "long-shot secular Republican presidential candidates".]  Oh yeah, and they’re all straight white guys too.

Or take the top 22 “picks” — what new users see when they first log in.

• 15 (68%) of them are guys.
• The women* are primarily actresses, singers, or in sports and fitness – no writers, photographers, techies, executives, investors … or educators, of course.
• There aren’t any women of color.
• While there’s some racial diversity with the guys, as Zennie points out the only three blacks are Chamilionaire the Ceo, 50 Cent, and Snoop Dogg.  As Shireen Mitchell says in A tale of two challenges

The stereotype that the only way to get diversity is through entertainment or sports is an ongoing saga in the view of Blacks in Tech.

I hope this doesn’t come across as criticizing anybody who is on the list. I respect what they’ve accomplished.  There are some truly inspired choices.

But the overall distribution definitely leaves room for improvement.

Just like the real world …

from “Intersectionality and you”
originally in Cognitive evolution and revolution

Emotions run high in debates about “suggested followers” lists. Who’s part of the in crowd? Who’s been left out? Two years after Twitter’s suggested user list, Robert still feels resentful about being left off and watching Pete and Mike soar past him.  So does Brooks Bayne of #tcot fame.

It’s unfair.

It’s arbitrary.

It brings back the worst feelings from high school.

So one reason the suggested users list matters is that it will help shape the feel of the community Google’s creating.   As Christina Trapolino points out in What is a community manager, “A real community has to be treated with care and respect. It is a living thing.” Introducing a suggested users list sets up the community so that there’s an in-crowd and an out-crowd.

And the in-crowd favors the big names who at the expense of people who are really engaged with the community. Where are emerging Google+ stars like Daria Musk, Lee Allison, Natalie Villalobos, Ryan Estrada, and Christina Trapolino?  Instead we’ve got Tom from MySpace, Richard Branson (who didn’t post at all in August), Google biographer Steven Levy (who only posts twice a week or so) and Google founder Sergey Brin.   The list sets up a power structure that privileges guys, and where the prominent women and blacks are entertainers. Is this what Vic, Bradley, Joseph, and Eric are talking about when they talk about wanting Google+ to mirror how people interact in the “real world”?

Being one of the first people new users at the time a social network starts to explode can be incredibly valuable. Back in 2009, Jason offered $250,000 for a spot on the Twitter suggested users list. And on Google+? In Google just gave me thousands of dollars, maybe more, Marshall Kirkpatrick writes:

We will all now get tens of thousands if not millions of new subscribers to our updates on the network. We will have all the more incentive to keep posting to Plus and to say nice things about it. Those of us who make money doing these sorts of things, as I do when people click my links and view the ads on ReadWriteWeb or consider my consulting services through this site, will probably see a windfall of thousands of dollars. At least. For some new media brands, if Google Plus gets as big as Twitter, it could mean millions of dollars.

A huge windfall being doled out by guys, mostly going to guys, none of it for educators, very little of it for women of color … the media benefitting with incentives not to write about it … hey it is a lot like the real world!

The rich get richer?

Suggested users’ lists typically favor people who are already well-known or well-connected. This list is no exception.   And as Google follows through on its vision of an “identity service” and reputation engine, the people on the list are likely to see their influence increase further.   Their posts are more likely to be +1′ed and reshared.  A reshare from them will become more and more valuable.   As Google integrates G+ more deeply into search rankings, their “People Rank” (or whatever Google calls it) will be higher than others.  And so on …

Of course, it’s still a pilot.

To be clear (and per my post) the list was derived algorithmically but was also “bootstrapped” and augmented with people known to be popular on other services (yes, including services like broadcast television.) This algorithmic component is why users with many followers but little activity are often not on the list… and conversely users with much activity and fewer followers did make it. I referred to the curated users as “hypotheses” that we’re testing, and mentioned that if they fail to produce great content “Justice will be served” and they’ll be removed over time.

The list is “dynamic.” I know that’s hard to see in a day, but folks will discover that there should be far less concern about who is “on” or “off” the list…. Importantly, by the time we launch Google+, we’ll have implemented the much more targeted means of discovering both interesting users and interesting content that I spoke to in my post

– Bradley, replying to Robert

We shall see.

Meanwhile, back on the nymwars front, several of the people on the suggested users list have names that violate the guidelines.  It really highlights the inconsistency of Google’s policies: Dj ASHBA and Chamillionaire the Ceo are ok; Doc Popular, Technogran, and Kaliya IdentityWoman aren’t.  50 Cent and Jennifer 8. Lee are cool; M3 Sweatt isn’t.   Once again, to quote Vic, there’s still a ways to go.

To be continued …

jon

Thanks to Craig Kanally for taking the time to create a copy of the initial list in an easy-to-use format

* Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Dolly Parton, Jessi June, Erin Williams, Taylor Swift, and Erin Richards.

Check out the previous posts in the series: A Work in Progress, Why it matters, #nymwars!, A tale of two searches, The double bind of oppression, and Anxious masculinity under threat