The most worthwhile class I ever took was my Economics of Technology course back in the fall of 2003.  The whole course involved reading papers about technology strategy and discussing them with smart, engaging people– it was everything a course is supposed to be.

One of the major themes of the course was technology standards– why certain things (e.g., QWERTY keyboards, x86 microprocessors, Microsoft Windows) become standards and other things don’t. In light of Google’s announcement of the Open Social API for connecting social networks with social application developers, and the widely held belief that this heralds a standards war with Facebook for the hearts and minds of social app developers and (by proxy) social network users.

Seriously.  Check out Techmeme.  People are freaking out.  As for me, I feel like I’m looking over at the dudes from uncov, waiting for them to say ‘FAIL‘.  (I love that picture.  Best fail ever.)  But no fail is forthcoming, so I’m going to step in and take a crack at it.

First of all, let me say that open standards (as Open Social purports to be) are generally a good thing.  The idea of Open Social is pretty nice– you write your application once against this common API, and then it works with any one of these different social networks.  The Open Social API abstracts away the underlying social network, just like HTML and the browser abstract away the operating system, or the Windows API abstracts away the underlying hardware.

The more technically-minded amongst you will have already detected the bullshit lurking in the previous paragraph, since the abstractions I just talked about are, shall we say, leaky.  They’re not perfect by any stretch,  so developers devote alot of time to handling the different special cases and quirks that arise from slightly different implementations of the same standard interfaces.

Josh’s Corollary To the Law of Leaky Abstractions: The number of leaks in an abstraction is proportional to the implementer’s incentives to go beyond the standard.  When the incentives are high enough, the abstraction gets forked.

Simple example of a relatively leak-free abstraction: you sell disk drives for PCs.  Microsoft specifies a set of functions your drive needs to perform in order for it to be usable by Windows.  You have no incentive to develop any functionality for your disk drives that isn’t completely covered by that standard, since Windows (and by extension, everyone else) won’t be able to use it.  It’s a pretty awesome situation for Microsoft, and a pretty crappy situation for you, the disk drive manufacturer.

The opposite case (and a textbook example of the oft-cited Josh’s Corollary to the Law of Leaky Abstractions) is the forking of Unix.  Once upon a time, there was this operating system called Unix that was developed at AT&T, and it was good.  But then AT&T did something bad to someone or something, and it had to sign an agreement not to sell Unix, and to license the Unix source code to all sorts of acronyms– SGI, IBM, DEC, SCO.  Each of these licensees took Unix and made it their own– creating their own version that implemented the original Unix plus some other stuff, which had the net effect of making all of the Unices incompatible with each other.  You see, they were all competing against each other for the same customers, and so they had very strong incentives to take the “open” Unix standard and make it very much their own.  And while they were fighting with each other and driving Unix application developers nuts (arrgh!), Microsoft swept in with their fixed API that ran on cheap hardware and took all of the developers and (by proxy) all of the users.

I don’t think it’s difficult to tell which of these two scenarios more closely resembles the dynamics in Open Social API vs. Facebook.  In my humble and undeniably correct opinion, the amount of time it will take for one of the original implementers to fork the Open Social API can be clocked with an egg timer.

This has been a longish post, so I’m going to wrap it up now.  In Part Two, I’m going to talk about how Open Social is more about Google trying to get companies to sign up to implement the API than it is about getting developers to create applications for it– in my mind, Google is even more interested in consuming this data than they are in providing it.

Labels: social networks, facebook, withdrawl

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My co-workers have been incredibly supportive during this difficult time, I really can’t thank them enough. When I got into work today, this was waiting for me:

The problem, of course, was that I spent the entire day getting up from my desk to check and see what people had written on it.  I must have done that, like, 50 times.  The net result was that I was even less productive today than usual, and it was all because I had to physically get up from my desk in order to see what people had written on my wall.  Tomorrow, I’m setting up a webcam so that I can monitor my wall from the comfort of my chair.

Of course, I picked the worst week possible to go off of the Facebook crunk, because there’s all sorts of crazy Facebook news on Techmeme this week.  Facebook is worth 100 billion dollars cause they’re going to track everyone (except me, suckers!) using cookies and ad networks and stuff.  Google and it’s “friends” (Google doesn’t really have friends, it should be more like “Google and a gang of insecure software hoodlums”) are about to gang up on Facebook with an open API.  How can I forget you Facebook, when there’s always something there to remind me?

Kids, anytime anyone tells you that Facebook is a waste of time, you point them at this blog post.  Let them see how much time and effort Luddites such as myself have to go to in order to get reminded of how drunk they got last night.

Labels: facebook, withdrawl

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After all, what’s Facebook fatigue without Facebook withdrawl?

I’m taking the week off from Facebook, primarily to prove that I can still live without it. Those of you who aren’t on Facebook may not understand why this is difficult to do, and I can empathize with that– I held out on the whole social networking thing for a really long time, and back before I plugged in, I found the whole phenomenon pretty ridiculous. Ever since I realized I was addicted, I’ve been trying to figure out the why and the how, so that I might find a cure.

I was up in DC for Keith and Natalia’s wedding a couple weeks ago, and on the plane ride up I read Daniel Goleman’s Social Intelligence. Goleman has an odd writing style; the vast majority of his books involve him citing the research of people he went to grad school with at Harvard who are all really, really brilliant. I feel like he tends to short-change all of the mediocre psychologists and neuroscientists out there who are doing difficult, complicated research that isn’t remotely interesting to anyone.

All kidding aside, I really like Goleman’s stuff– he provides the neuroscience behind my gut feelings, which is immensely satisfying to my left brain, which loves to feel like it knows what’s going on in the world. There was one section in the book where Goleman talks about how our brains are wired for social interaction, so much so that our thoughts tend to turn to our social relationships when we don’t have anything else going on.

David Brooks wrote an article the other day on our outsourced brains that made me think about the ways in which I’ve come to depend on a handful of web services to act as an extension of my brain. Google is an obvious (and nearly universal) example of this– the module that our brains turn to whenever a question pops up from the ether (though I wonder when everyone else is going to notice that Google is rapidly turning into a front-end for the Wikipedia).

As Google is the 50 year old bordeaux for the prefrontal cortex, Facebook is the crack pipe for the orbitofrontal cortex. Our brains literally cannot get enough of what our friends are up to, and Facebook provides all of the raw materials via the news feed. Just as Google leverages user feedback to improve spam filtering, I could see a future where Facebook could predict which of your friends were about to get together or about to break up, and tell you how your actions might influence the outcome. Wouldn’t that just be insanely cool creepy?

So that’s 24 hours without Facebook. Let’s hope that I spend the next 24 thinking about it a little bit less.

Labels: cognition, social networks

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Long-time readers (all three of you) know that I have a great deal of respect for Fred Stutzman’s Unit Structures blog when it comes to all things social networking.  His roundup on the Microsoft-Facebook deal is even better than the one I would write if I had the time.

With respect to the 15 billion dollar valuation, I know alot of people feel it’s ridiculous, but as I’ve discussed before, if you look at the potential value of the data Facebook has, relatively small changes in their estimated probability of success add up to many billions of dollars.

The problem right now is that the confidence interval around that probability estimate is pretty wide, and Facebook’s challenge in the next year is to start tightening it up.  I think it’s safe to say that Facebook’s monetization strategies have been quite conservative thus far– their primary focus has been on building up the user base as much as possible and keeping those users happy.  The money they received from Microsoft and a couple of hedge funds gives them opportunity to build out the world’s best data mining operation, and even more importantly, it gives them the time and the freedom to experiment with different ways of using that information to create value.

Sergey was a little snippy about Facebook the other day, indicating that he felt like Google was better off because of the discipline that was required when they were building a company during the bust.  But it sounded to me like there was a tinge of jealousy in that statement (not to mention a general annoyance with Facebook for stealing many of Google’s engineers)– after all, I’m pretty sure Sergey would have taken 750 million dollars for 5% of Google back in 2001.

Labels: tech, social networks

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I haven’t blogged in almost a month, and I can totally feel it. My brain is so overflowing with ideas that I forgot to pay the electric bill this month, in between work, school, trips to DC and SF, and trying to come up with the ultimate Scrabble player ranking system.

I’m sure many of you have come across the spinning ballerina right brain/left brain test. I’m also sure many of you went through a 30 minute period of obsessively trying to make the ballerina spin the “other” way. (After several such 30 minute periods, I managed to make the ballerina switch at will, which led me to exclaim “I am master of my own mind!”) If you see the ballerina spinning counter-clockwise, you’re left brian dominant (logical, analytical, etc.) whereas if you see the ballerina spinning clockwise, you’re right brain dominant (creative, do things by feel).

For me, the ballerina spins clockwise by default, and it takes some effort to get her to switch and go counter-clockwise. I am (to my surprise, and maybe yours as well) utterly dominated by my right brain.

Well, maybe it’s not that surprising. If you look back at my post on not going to work at Facebook, there is very little evidence of any sort of rational thought. (As Facebook continues to hire amazing people and heads for a 15 billion dollar valuation, the decision seems less rational than ever.) That said, when I look back on major decisions I’ve made in my life, the only ones I regret are ones where I went with the pragmatic decision over what ‘felt’ best. I’ve been trying to learn from that, and figure out some way to get my left brain to shut the fuck up and let the right brain run the show.

Then there’s the whole math thing. For this, I’m going to reference my very first blog post ever. Looking back on it now, it reads like a plea from a right-brained student to all of those left-brained math teachers to teach math in a way that lets people like me connect with it. If I had never read The Man Who Knew Infinity, I might have become a lawyer or something (shudder.)

Labels: math, cognition

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