Lesson learned?

In the last months I've had several times a dejavu feeling. All this web2.0 noise is starting to sound more and more like the .com thing nine years ago.

On one side, it is a little bit deceiving: am I so old to tell yarns and anecdotes about how insanely money was made and lost those days?. But looking at the past is also a good way to reflect on what is going on, and question whether past lessons have been learned...

All these thoughts come because I've just read an article on the Lessons from the Las Bubble, and I found some of the ideas really interesting.

One of the best points is when the authors talk about network externalities and exponential growth. They rightly point out that the fact that you have an internet based business model does not imply that you are going to have network effects. Network externalities are not about the technology you use to build your service, but about the way users use it and value the social network that is build on top. And that was one of the mistakes repeated over and over again in the .com era. There are no network externalities to draw from in a internet based retail store, as there are no network externalities in setting up a brick and mortar retail store.

But that should not be a problem for Web2.0, isn't it?. Since Web2.0 is all about social networking, that mistake will not happen again: we are definitely going to have network externalities and, consequently, exponential growth. Wrong!!!

The fact that some of the technologies collected under the Web2.0 name enable the formation (I should say the facilitation) of social networks does not mean that any venture in the Web2.0 world is going to build one. It is not about social networks, it is about the value of they provide to users.

There have been lots of serious studies on how social networks are formed, used, and, at the end, valued by people. Social networking is a natural human activity, not something that was invented a couple of years ago by MySpace or Flickr. The fact that these two business (and a few others) have been very successful at using the human tendency to interact with other people to extract an economic profit does not mean that any venture that talks about network externalities in its business plan is going to be as successful and profitable.

When technological jargon becomes mainstream

It is very common that during the process of development of a new technology, an specific jargon is created. When the technological innovation starts to get deployed, the jargon acts as a symbol to differentiate those who know about it. But as the new technological features become mainstream, and with some good marketing help, the jargon words detach from the original technical field and get incorporated into the consumer language.

That evolution is specially visible in technologies related to consumer products (how many people who look at the L2Cache size spec for microprocessors has an idea, beyond bigger number is better, about the meaning of that spec?). But in certain circumstances this jargon evolution can also happen in other technologies not so consumer oriented.


In Bangalore, the major center of the software export industry in India, in an environment with a very high IT employment demand, IT and programming related skills becomes a very valuable asset. The consequence is that the programming jargon is becoming part of the regular language. Small signs advertising training in very specific programming technologies abound, and, in certain situations, it is quite easy to start a conversation with an stranger about specific programming languages, platforms, and techniques.

Web 3.0 (?)

Web2.0 has become the big buzz word of the year.

Reading certain news and hearing some people talk, it seems that we are back in time to 1999, but with tagging and social networking substituting portal and e-commerce as the bright ideas that will change the world, and make (some of) us very rich. Web2.0 has its new heroes (the googles, the flickrs,...) and villains (guess who...). And obviously, there are the pundits that talk a lot about it and create all the hype, and in some cases make a lot of money out of it.

But, we cannot say that we did not learn our lessons: the Web2.0 bubble may explode as the .com bubble did a few years ago, so it is better that we have a new concept ready when this happens: an the term is, obviously, Web3.0.

Web3.0 is just a fancy name for a concept that has been lying around for a few years: the semantic web. I guess that the term semantic web sounds too geeky to attract venture capital, so somebody came up with the fancier Web3.0, and then, publications such as the MIT Technology Review have picked it up, so it is becoming mainstream in the internet and technology related circles. According to Nova Spivack, blogger and founder of one startup using semantic web technologies, there is even a Web4.0 waiting somewhere in the future...

But besides all the naming fireworks, there is a more subtle issue around the concept itself of an intelligent (as in artificial intelligence) network. I've already talked about the goods and bads of the collective intelligence that some of the new internet based technologies enable. The underlying question is how much intelligence are you ready to outsource to somebody else, be it some artificial intelligence search engine, be it the collective seating somewhere in cyberspace or, most probably, a combination of both.

It is obvious that any technology, and Web *.0 is not an exception, embodies in its design lots of cognitive and social assumptions and when adopting those technological artifacts we are, up to a certain extent, adopting those assumptions. And that is fine if you are aware of what are those underlying assumptions and what do they mean for you.

An example with serach engines: although Google's page ranking algorithm is kept as the company's major trade secret, it is well known that it is somehow based on the number of pages that link to a certain page, so, when I'm using Google as a search engine, I know that I'm actually looking, more or less, for the most popular pages about something, and hope that the most popular are also the best. But of course, that is not always the case, so it is nice to have other search engines that are based on other criteria and even a different search space (some of them provided by Google itself, like Google Scholar for research papers).

At the end, I end up using different search engines for different things, and I guess that the Web3.0 response to it would be building some kind of intelligent agent that can embody part of the criteria I use to select between the different criteria embodied in the different search engine options. The only problem I see is that somewhere in this chain of building intelligence on top of intelligence there must be some place left to personal, private, options and criteria.

I have to admit that I have not digged deep enough in the semantic web theories and technologies to understand how personal option and individual difference can be implemented in a way that is also easy to understand and use. But it is also true that I have not seen this issue addressed by any of the Web3.0 visions and predictions I have seen so far. So, at least for the time being, I will remain in the skeptic side about Web3.0 and I'll be, at least, a little reluctant to outsource the small portion of intelligence I have left to some unknown agent...

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing U,

It seems that Web2.0 is the buzzword of the moment. Everybody is talking about it, and, as usually, lots of nonsense is being said, as people try to seem smart and proof that they know better, specially when talking about how Web2.0 is changing all types of social relations (and how they know the best way of making money out of it...)

That is why I find this video interesting. It is well done, goes straight to the point and it is thought provoking. It does not try to define what Web2.0 is (I don't think anybody really knows what it is...) but points out some of the changes that new web based technologies may bring and the controversies that they generate.

Beautification

The city landscape is full of dull looking artifacts that make things such as semaphores, street lighting... work. But they can also become aesthetic objects with some, sometimes minimal, intervention...

On being an ANT

These days, I'm slowly progressing on the self-imposed task of reading Brumo Latour's introduction to Actor-Network Theory: Reassembling the Social. Although Latour's writing style is relatively light, at least compared to other sociology theorists such as Habermas or Bordieu, I still find quite difficult to grasp all the subtilities of actors, mediators, translation, oligopticons, plug-ins...

My first experience with ANT was in a doctoral course about Technology, Economy and Society, where different theories about the interaction between technology and society, such as technological determinism or social construction of technology, were briefly described. What I found most interesting about ANT, and differentiating to other theories and frameworks, was the role it gives to non-human actors.

Society and Technology Studies have always struggled to accommodate the mechanisms in which technological artifacts and society interact and shape each other. The solution that ANT gives to this problem is quite simple and, at least apparently, neat: there is no technology and society as two separate realms that interact with each other: technological artifacts, and also science facts, are actors in the social network, that interact with other actors in a process of constant reshaping and reassembling.

This concept may sound strange at first, but if you look at it in more detail it starts to make, at least, some sense. It is quite obvious that technological artifacts, such as for example the Internet, on one side embody the values, concepts, ideas, cliches.... of the people, groups, and organizations that participate in their design and development (in their construction...); but they also reshape, reorganize, reassemble those other actors, be them humans or not.

ANT has also had its antagonists and it has been, and still is, subjected to very passionate debates (passionate, at least, for academics standards...), such as the Science Wars episode of the early nineties. Hard core positivists freak out whenever the concept of science being socially constructed is introduced. Latour addresses this topic in Reassembling the social with, I think, a good point: saying that science is constructed does not mean that scientific and technological knowledge is not true, but rather that there are lots of resources, interactions and relations between different actors (remember both human and not human) that have to be assembled to construct it.

However, the part I've found most interesting of the book is the section about how to do ANT research, how to write risky accounts in Latour's terms. The author describes an ethnographic approach and a method to capture data about actors and associations, using four notebooks to ensure that both the actors' own perceptions and the effect of the field data on the research and the researcher are logged.

Technorati Tags: actor-network, ANT, society and technology, ethnography, technology

Standard wars in the Internet age

Standard wars are, probably, one of the better studied cases in technology and innovation management textbooks. There is no serious book in these areas that does not cite the VHS vs. Beta case, as a paradigm of how non technical issues play a key role in the evolution of technologies. This is a concept that is, very often, difficult to assume by pure techies that think that the best technology, best using some quantifiable measure such as speed, image quality,..., is the one that should win regardless of the environment. Market, society, culture... are concepts that are easier to describe than to measure (and, consequently, predict), so they should not appear in the engineer's drawing board.

But standard wars are here to stay, as one of the modes in which conflicts of interests around technology definition and evolution are deployed and, in most of the cases, closed, with winners and losers.

And they are important: can anybody think that internet, as the network of networks, would have evolved to the Internet we know today if the ISO/OSI standards, and its underlying centralized model, had won over TCP/IP in the standards war over computer networking protocols in the 1980s?. Usually, there are high stakes in the game (benefit, control, power,...) and the winner takes it all.

And that's why standards wars are fought with all the weapons available, and in the Internet age, that means, of course, the Internet itself. Standard wars are as much about perception than technology, and Internet is, today, one of the best mechanisms to build or destroy perceptions.

One of the standards wars that is very active these days is the one over standards for document file formats. It has been going on for a couple of years now, with different contenders and fronts: Microsoft with Open Office XML (OOXML) vs. IBM and OASIS with OpenDocument Format(ODF) on the office document front; Microsoft with XML Paper Specification (XPS) vs. Adobe with the Portable Document Format (PDF) on the fixed document front.

As in any standards war, different companies and interest groups are trying to push their standard as the one that better meets customer needs, which usually means the customer needs that can be met by their own standard. The difference is that, in this case, the battle is not only being fought in committee meetings, ballots over draft specs, or corporate alliances. Blogs and wikis have are the places where all the tricks (some of them clean, some of them dirty...) are being played, trying to change the perception of the different technologies at stake.

In this framework, the latest news about Microsoft paying somebody to change the contents of the wikipedia article on OOXML to make it sound more positive, and the reaction that it has caused shows how, for good or for bad, Internet has become an important medium to influence the shaping of technology.

For some this may sound positive: more democracy in the technology shaping process, while for others, it may sound really unsettling as more and more non technical issues will influence what gets designed and implemented. Welcome to the standards wars in the Internet age....