I’ve made one step forward, but I have so far to go.
Earlier this week I made the decision to use this blog for more than just music. I feel freer and more light hearted since the decision – exactly as I hoped to be. However, I still have so far to go towards my ultimate vision partly because of time and partly because of the current state of tech and business.
Time:
People don’t live lives the way our computers think we do. There’s a vast difference between the papers and pens on my desk and the start/programs/office/word/my_life on my desktop. Online isn’t much better and socially it’s even worse.
Social life in the real world – networking – is a friend/acquaintance/stranger network that revolves around me (or you). It does not revolve around a place. In other words, I don’t go to Chili’s to find my friends, I find my friends and we go to Chili’s. The context is me and them, not Chili’s. In fact, tomorrow, we’ll go to Arby’s.
But online, my life is segregated by place. Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, blog(s), e-mail, etc. Though it’s true that several friends are present in all of those, many of them are only in a few. The tough part comes when I want to talk to a sub-group of friends about a topic – say, social networking.
On the off chance that all my “friends” are interested, I’m currently forced to communicate something 5, 6 or more times, in different formats and forms. Not only is this time consuming, I know the failure rate is high because of the fact that the recipients are bombarded by stuff in their networks all day long. How will they know to read my thoughts on a topic they’re interested in when my last five thoughts have been on unrelated topics?
Tech and Business:
Which brings me to tech and business. Technology is simply not where it needs to be yet and it’s because of business. MySpace wants me to live in their network (Chili’s). Why? Because their advertisers are counting my eyeballs and those of my friends. Same with Facebook, LinkedIn, etc… There’s nothing inherently wrong with this of course, I’m just wanting the next phase to happen now (can you say impatient?).
What I (we) need is interconnected hubs with ourselves at the center as opposed to websites (Chili’s).
Vision:
In an interconnected world, we will most likely be connected through tags, but in a different structure than today. We currently use tags to describe content. These tags categorize the content by subject, usually several at a time. For instance, the post will be tagged life, social networking, personal development, about me. This works great in a world organized by sites and blogs.
But what if tags were the paths that interconnected our personal hubs? What if each tag represented levels of connectivity between us? Think concentric circles around a hub.
Imagine this post tagged like this: [stevegrossman – thoughts – about me – life – personal development – social networking – stevegrossman]. Now imagine your RSS feed reader set to look for [stevegrossman – social networking – personal development]. You would automatically receive any thing coming down my path that ended with [personal development – social networking – stevegrossman]. Likewise, a person’s feed reader looking for [thoughts – about me – life – personal development – social networking – stevegrossman] AND [thoughts – about me – music – success – personal development – stevegrossman] would receive my posts on both those subjects.
On my side, I would manage my content and contacts by looking out from my hub – me. My contacts would be tagged too. A close friend would be tagged: [friend, their name, e-mail (or message), thoughts] and any e-mail groupings I need like “church”. An “acquaintance” would be [tagged, name, thoughts].
Any e-mails or thoughts would go to the first person. The second person would only receive my thoughts, not e-mails. If I tagged a post e-mail, church, it would go to the first person and anyone else in that grouping. Automatically. More specifically, when I wrote a note tagged with [friend, their name, e-mail] – it would only go to one person.
This may sound like a set-up nightmare, but not really. Most of us already do this in our heads, and we have to “tag” every thing we write and usually across multiple sites and technologies. First we have to consider who will be interested in our message or who we want to contact. Where they are online – e-mail or social site. Which of their multiple e-mails will work. Where most of the people are who we want to contact and what are their addresses (what’s the MySpace nickname for Cathy?). Add to that the fact that we’re only guessing as to who is really interested in what we have to say, and TODAY is the nightmare.
The hub based network I envision connects everyone exactly where each person wants to connect. Remember, I only described my address book and content tagging. On the recipient end, they would control the input with similar tags. They can chose to accept everything I send by configuring their feeds deep into my hub, or only receive certain topics near the edge of my hub.
Either way, I sit down at my computer and sign into “Steve’s Hub”. I write a post with tags and hit send.
Across town or across the world a person sits down at their computer and signs on to “Cathy’s Hub”. They see my post because they wanted too.
Who would pay and what I’m thinking about doing while waiting for “Steve’s Hub” will have to wait for Part II
