The art of building software: March 2011

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Social networks and the future of digital communication

Future of digital communication?
I recently ran across a fairly widely publicized job description that ends with the following, and I thought it would make a great topic for a blog posting:
Please reach out to email-address-withheld if you’re interested in being considered. Tell us about yourself, how you use social networks and your view on the future of digital communication.

There are a few well respected futurists, such as Carl SaganRay Kurzweil and Michio Kaku, who I like to follow.  But there is another futurist I'd like to make special mention of, because of his vision of the future of digital communications.

Stylish Nokia Cityman
Before I discuss the future of digital communication, I must make homage to Apple's Knowledge Navigator video, based on the amazingly prescient concept first explored by then Apple CEO John Sculley in the epilogue of his 1987 book Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple.  Before you watch this video, let's take a moment to remember what was going on in 1987.  To the left is the latest, hottest Nokia device to hit the streets.  World wide what?  Wasn't around yet, and the Internet itself wasn't quite all wired up yet.  Now check out the video and think about how close the iPad is to that today.

What is a social network?
Before answering the question of how I use social networks, I'd like to define what I think a social network is.  In this context, I'll use the term "social network" as a shorthand for "online social network service".  These services help people build relationships around shared interests.  They are especially powerful when they enable individuals to harvest the power of indirect relationships and potentially the entire network to, for example: (1) Ask questions; (2) Create new relationships; (3) Search for and exchange information; (4) View group aggregate statistics such as average group age or income; (5) Create entirely new groups based on specific shared interests, and; (6) buy or sell goods or services.

I love this snapshot of an evolving social network from FMS Advanced System Group because it instantly conveys how people are organized into a real-world society by their relationships.  The online view of the entire social network is intended to reflect an in-fact, real-world social network.  (I must resort to the term "real-world social network" to differentiate that from "social network" which by default in this context refers to an online service.)  From a mathematical perspective, a real-world social network can be viewed as a graph where the nodes are people and the links represent various types of relationships such as parent, manager, common interest, or friend - the types of relationships are infinite and can overlap and change over time.

Social networks usually can import a starting view of your social network by importing your address book from other sources, such as your email provider.  They typically leverage indirect relationships to create new direct relationships, increasing the connectedness of the social network.  Their user interfaces are designed to most effectively reinforce whatever the shared interests of the network are, whether they be your health, family and friends, professional interests, dating, food, gaming, or gardening.  They usually incorporate viral marketing mechanisms, so if the value they provide is real, they can grow exponentially fast upon reaching critical mass.

They generate revenue primarily by advertising but also by subscription, by purchase of virtual goods (a new hat for your avatar) and services (advancing through a game), through transaction fees for purchases of real goods, or by donation.  By taking advantage of the private information exchanged among members, social networks can create well targeted advertising campaigns with high conversion rates, and correspondingly charge a premium for advertising rates.

How I use social networks
I am not a connector, to use Malcom Gladwell's term for a basic personality type, so I don't invest time in maintaining a large contact database.  I make up for that by maintaining relationships with people who are connectors.  I personally don't find much value in larger, general purpose social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook due to their low "signal to noise ratio" and their constant problems with privacy.  You won't catch me playing Farmville.  I do use those tools occasionally just to study what they are doing with their product, since they are market leading products.  Personally, I tend to use special interest social networks when I can get value from them, participate while I'm interested in the topic, and then drop off again when I'm done.

I've also lead a few startups trying to create new social networks for specific purposes such as the job and recruiting market and maintaining family connections, and we faced a very daunting problem called the "cold start problem".  The problem is that the social network has no value until members join, and members only want to join once the social network has some value.  Basically, how do we get those first users in there before the group has really formed?  There are various solutions to this problem I won't go into here, but suffice it to say, once you get past this problem, you have a thriving social network.  We then moved onto more advanced problems, such as maximizing our total social value (aka social capital), maximizing our revenue per user, and trying to predict and manage our viral growth rates.  Cloud computing can be a great solution for these rapidly growing user bases, especially since their growth curves can be difficult to predict ahead of time even when using refined versions Jurvetson's famous viral growth formula.

What is digital communication?

Before talking about the future of digital communication, I'd like to define precisely what I mean by this term in the context of this blog posting.  Digital communication is the transfer, to or from a sentient being, of information encoded into discrete (not continuous) values, usually encoded as binary data .  In making this definition, I use the phrase "sentient being" because digital communications have been used by other species such as dolphins and apes.  I'm using the words "information" and "data" fairly precisely in this context too, and at the risk of causing infinite dictionary recursion, I'll briefly say that data corresponds to a real world phenomenon, such as bits or qubits on a disk or in memory and can be operated on by a computer.  I'm hoping this definition still works in the coming age of quantum computing as well.  Information is an emergent property of data when it is formatted and perceived in a way that the meaning of the data can be understood by a sentient being.  If you wanted to go further, knowledge is an emergent property of information that provides a way to control or manipulate the real world, and power is the exercise of knowledge in the pursuit of a specific intention, and wisdom is having the right intentions.  But I digress into a fun philosophical territory we could all probably wonder off into for quite some time...

From that somewhat extended definition of digital communication, we can derive some interesting features.  First, the means of information transfer is not important, although characteristics like speed, latency, quality of information architecture, and reliability are important.  Second, the sensory modalities by which information is transfered to or from the sentient being are not important, whether that be by images projected on a computer screen that we look at, sounds played through a speaker that we listen to, or haptics that we feel.  Hellen Keller first learned language by feeling fingers pressed upon her hand.  You could also call that a form of "digital" communication, but a different kind of digit!

The future of digital communication

As digital communication evolves, social networks will always move to the new evolving communication devices and modalities.  Where digital communication goes, so goes social networks too.

Digital communication will likely change in the following ways in the future:
  • Communications will move away from email and more towards mobile based applications, specifically those based on the architectures created by Google, Apple, and Microsoft (yes, predicting that MS will pull a rabbit out of their butt).
  • Gaming and sex will continue to drive significant amounts of social, digital communication.
  • Actual privacy may erode as users voluntarily give up their privacy in exchange for free services they want to use, paid for by advertising, even in the face of legislation designed to protect privacy.
  • 3D user interfaces will begin to evolve, eventually not requiring special eye-wear.
  • New form factors like the iPad will continue to emerge and communication will move to the hot new platform, as the older platforms die off.  For example, cheap, flexible display devices that look and weigh about like paper.
  • Advances in power management and ubiquitous free or low cost, high speed wireless networks will extend these capabilities to a broad reach of the population.
  • Augmented reality applications will become mainstream, and drive display devices into more diverse places like goggles, heads-up displays on cars, on walls, desks, or ceilings of rooms.
  • Complex hand gestures not requiring direct touch will be used.
  • Full haptic, tactile feedback will allow us to feel things with our hands
  • Voice interaction will be used.
  • Artificially intelligent agents will be used that can recognize facial gestures and vocal inflection.
  • Sound induction will allow us to privately project sound directly into your ears (and eventually directly into your brain), not requiring you to hold a phone up to your ear or wear clunky headphones.
  • Immersive reality will directly project 3D augmented reality either onto special glasses, contact lenses, directly into the eye, and then eventually (drum roll...) direct cybernetic hardwired connection to the brain.

And ultimately, the future of digital communication is...

If you believe in the singularity predicted by many first rate futurists, then we can't really see past that point because advances in technology make the future too variable to predict.  Sounds like interesting times to me - hope I get to see it.

The future of social networks

Although the job posting that motivated this blog posting didn't ask about the future of social networks, I think that's a worthwhile question and also the hardest of all questions to answer.

Technologies like OpenSocial make it possible for originally separate social networks to interconnect, even though those networks are run by different vendors on different platforms.  This is a good start, but the process will eventually get a lot smoother and more transparent to end users.

We'll get more customizable, social networking web 2.0 widgets we can drop into our blogs or web sites so we can easily build our own, highly customized social networks.

Some large brands will try to drive their market into their own social network, for the purpose of learning from them, but also for the purpose of increasing customer loyalty which translates into greater sales.

Privacy will be a major issue over the coming years, especially as new legislation is introduced both in the U.S. and in the E.U. to limit the manner in which social network vendors can profit from their user's private information.

Advertising will directly support access to the social network of fans, stars, users, customers, customer service representatives, and so on around what is being advertised.

Political races will be won or lost based on how well the candidates are able to leverage social networking and social media.

Don't forget the real world

With all this talk of computers, it's easy to forget that relationships are a real-world, human phenomenon that we directly experience, whether we're communicating with someone in person or through social networking.  Many relationships exist both on and off the online social network service, and the real world network may or may not be close to the online view of the same network.