social software

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pages: 201 words: 21,180

Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter

barriers to entry, classic study, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fail fast, Howard Rheingold, late fees, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Ralph Waldo Emerson, recommendation engine, social bookmarking, social software, social web, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Yale University Press, 2006. 5 6 DESIGNING FOR THE SOCIAL WEB We’ve barely seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to designing social software. I’m confident we’ll be discussing social software (and how to design it) for decades to come. It is the future of the web. Here are several reasons why: 1. Humans are innately social. Since humans are social, it makes sense that our software will be social, too. 2. Social software is a forced move. The sheer amount of information and choice we’re faced with forces us toward authentic conversations (and tools to help us find and have them). 3. Social software is accelerating. Social software is trending upward: it is already the fastest growing and most widely used software on the web.

Designing an interface that evokes the desired behavior is a huge challenge. If the interface is too confining, people won’t use it. If the interface is too flexible, people won’t know how to use it. In the middle, the sweet spot, interface designers can create powerful social software that supports the person and their personality, as well as the social environment and the groups they are a part of. The Challenge of Social Software Thus the challenge of social software is to design interfaces that support the current and desired social behavior of the people who use them. Designing an effective interface has always been tough, even when we were merely designing interfaces for one person to interact with content we controlled.

All of these social technologies predate the World Wide Web, which was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.11 The web is incomparable. Now, nearly two decades after its invention, the world has completely and permanently changed. It’s hard to imagine what life must have been like before we had web sites and applications. Starting with the social software precursors mentioned above, the web has evolved toward more mature social software. What follows is a very abridged history of the web from a social software point of 9 For more insight into the reasons why people use MySpace, read Danah Boyd’s: Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace http://www.danah.org/papers/AAAS2006.html 10 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email 11 Super cool link: Tim Berners-Lee announcing the World Wide Web on Usenet: http://groups.google. com/group/alt.hypertext/msg/395f282a67a1916c 13 14 DESIGNING FOR THE SOCIAL WEB view.


pages: 244 words: 76,192

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy

Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, business process, complexity theory, financial engineering, Iridium satellite, Long Term Capital Management, megaproject, NetJets, old-boy network, shareholder value, six sigma, social software, Socratic dialogue, supply-chain management

They don’t teach people to break a major concept down into smaller critical tasks that can be executed in the short term, which is difficult for some people. They don’t conduct the dialogues that surface realities, teach people how to think, or bring issues to closure. The missing part of the equation lies in what we call the social software of execution. THE SOCIAL SOFTWARE OF EXECUTION RAM: How many meetings have you attended where everyone seemed to agree at the end about what actions would be taken but nothing much actually happened as a result? These are the meetings where there’s no robust debate and therefore nobody states their misgivings.

The inability to act decisively—which translates into an inability to execute—is rooted in the corporate culture and seems to employees to be impervious to change. The key word here is “seems,” because, in fact, leaders create a culture of indecisiveness, and leaders can break it. The primary instrument at their disposal is the social software of the organization. Like a computer, a corporation has both hardware and software. We call the software of the corporation “social software” because any organization of two or more human beings is a social system. The hardware includes such things as organizational structure, design of rewards, compensation and sanctions, design of financial reports and their flow.

In part 1, chapters 1 and 2, we explain the discipline of execution, why it is so important today, and how it can differentiate you from your competitors. Part 2, chapters 3 to 5, shows that execution doesn’t just happen. Fundamental building blocks need to be in place, and we identify and describe the most important: the leader’s personal priorities, the social software of culture change, and the leader’s most important job—selecting and appraising people. Part 3 is the how-to section of the book. Chapters 6 to 9 discuss the three core processes of people, strategy, and operations. We show what makes them effective, and how the practice of each process is linked to and integrated with the other two.


pages: 292 words: 81,699

More Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Build a better mousetrap, business process, call centre, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, Dennis Ritchie, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, functional programming, George Gilder, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, lolcat, low cost airline, Mars Rover, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, price discrimination, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Oldenburg, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, The Great Good Place, The Soul of a New Machine, Tragedy of the Commons, type inference, unpaid internship, wage slave, web application, Y Combinator

The great thing about eBay is that it was a huge success precisely because it seemed like a terrible idea at the time, and so nobody else tried it, until eBay locked in the network effects and first-mover advantage. In addition to absolute success and failures in social software, there are also social software side effects. The way social software behaves determines a huge amount about the type of community that develops. Usenet clients have this big-R command, which is used to reply to a message while quoting the original message with those elegant >’s in the left It’s Not Just Usability 107 column.

Even though human beings had been debating for centuries, a tiny feature of a software product produced a whole new style of debating. Small changes in software can make big differences in the way that software supports, or fails to support, its social goals. Danah Boyd has a great critique of social software networks, “Autistic Social Software” (www.danah.org/papers/Supernova2004.html), blasting the current generation of this software for forcing people to behave autistically: Consider, for a moment, the recent surge of interest in articulated social networks such as Friendster, Tribe, LinkedIn, Orkut, and the like.

When software implements social interfaces while disregarding cultural anthropology, it’s creepy and awkward and doesn’t really work. 108 More from Joel on Software Designing social software L et me give you an example of social interface design. Suppose your user does something they shouldn’t have done. Good usability design says that you should tell them what they did wrong and tell them how to correct it. Usability consultants are marketing this under the brand name “Defensive Design.” When you’re working on social software, this is too naive. Maybe the thing that they did wrong was to post an advertisement for Viagra on a discussion group. Now you tell them, “Sorry, Viagra is not a suitable topic.


pages: 678 words: 216,204

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Again, the needs of the group as a group often differ from those of the individual participant. Thinking of the platform as social software entails designing it with characteristics [pg 374] that have a certain social-science or psychological model of the interactions of a group, and building the platform's affordances in order to enhance the survivability and efficacy of the group, even if it sometimes comes at the expense of the individual user's ease of use or comfort. 662 This emergence of social software--like blogs with opportunities to comment, Wikis, as well as social-norm-mediated Listservs or uses of the "cc" line in e-mail--underscores the nondeterministic nature of the claim about the relationship between the Internet and social relations.

Using Networked Communication to Work Around Authoritarian Control Toward a Networked Public Sphere Chapter 8 - Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical Cultural Freedom in Liberal Political Theory The Transparency of Internet Culture The Plasticity of Internet Culture: the Future of High-Production-Value Folk Culture A Participatory Culture: Toward Policy Chapter 9 - Justice and Development Liberal Theories of Justice and the Networked Information Economy Commons-Based Strategies for Human Welfare and Development Information-Embedded Goods and Tools, Information, and Knowledge Industrial Organization of Hdi-Related Information Industries Toward Adopting Commons-Based Strategies for Development Software Scientific Publication Commons-Based Research for Food and Medicines Food Security: Commons-Based Agricultural Innovation Access to Medicines: Commons-Based Strategies for Biomedical Research Commons-Based Strategies for Development: Conclusion Chapter 10 - Social Ties: Networking Together From "Virtual Communities" to Fear of Disintegration A More Positive Picture Emerges over Time Users Increase Their Connections with Preexisting Relations Networked Individuals The Internet As a Platform for Human Connection The Emergence of Social Software The Internet and Human Community Part Three - Policies of Freedom at a Moment of Transformation Introduction Chapter 11 - The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment Institutional Ecology and Path Dependence A Framework for Mapping the Institutional Ecology The Physical Layer Transport: Wires and Wireless Devices The Logical Layer The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 The Battle over Peer-to-Peer Networks The Domain Name System: From Public Trust to the Fetishism of Mnemonics The Browser Wars Free Software Software Patents The Content Layer Copyright Contractual Enclosure: Click-Wrap Licenses and the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) Trademark Dilution Database Protection Linking and Trespass to Chattels: New Forms of Information Exclusivity International "Harmonization" Countervailing Forces The Problem of Security Chapter 12 - Conclusion: The Stakes of Information Law and Policy Blurb Endnotes Index Copyright © 2006 Yochai Benkler.

Instead, it allows one, or a few, or even a limited large group to communicate to a large but limited group, where the limit is self-selection as being interested or even immersed in a subject. 388 The World Wide Web is the other major platform for tools that individuals use to communicate in the networked public sphere. It enables a wide range of applications, from basic static Web pages, to, more recently, blogs and various social-software-mediated platforms for large-scale conversations of the type described in chapter 3--like Slashdot. Static Web pages are the individual's basic "broadcast" medium. They allow any individual or organization to present basic texts, sounds, and images pertaining to their position. They allow small NGOs to have a worldwide presence and visibility.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

The first signs of a similar backlash to corporate visions of smart cities are now coming to light, as a radically different vision of how we might design and build them bubbles up from the street. Unlike the mainframes of IBM’s heyday, computing is no longer solely in the hands of big companies and governments. The raw material and the means of producing the smart city—smartphones, social software, open-source hardware, and cheap bandwidth—are widely democratized and inexpensive. Combining and recombining them in endless variations is cheap, easy, and fun. All over the world, a motley assortment of activists, entrepreneurs, and civic hackers are tinkering their ways toward a different kind of utopia.

A block north, the ghost of punk godfather Joey Ramone still haunts the tenth-floor apartment where he lived out the last days of his life. In the building that once housed the Electric Circus, the nightclub where the Velvet Underground held court in the late 1960s, now resides a chain Mexican joint. In 2003, across the street in the men’s room of the St. Mark’s Ale House, I had my first encounter with mobile social software. The wall space above urinals is essential meme circulation infrastructure for Manhattan’s downtown set. With a captive audience, promoters pile sticker upon sticker, which accumulate in a kind of postmodern sediment. On the underside of the toilet, a placement even more clever and impossible to ignore, a sticker reads “dodgeball.com . . . when NYC is your playground . . . now available on the wireless web!”

Conversely, the service helped pave the way for the app market by showing the wireless industry the huge demand for new software on mobiles. For nascent social networks, it highlighted how important and tricky location would be, but also proposed some creative solutions to the problems that cropped up, including the dreaded “ex-girlfriend problem” (which should be self-explanatory). Dodgeball showed how social software could be with us everywhere, and be fun without being annoying. Crowley himself is an archetype for smart-city hackers everywhere. Urban economists believe that cities thrive because they create opportunities for people to interact for commerce, learning, and entertainment. But it takes someone who intuitively understands cities to create a new way of doing that for the whole world to use.


pages: 518 words: 49,555

Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone

A Pattern Language, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, c2.com, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, ghettoisation, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, if you build it, they will come, information security, lolcat, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Network effects, Potemkin village, power law, recommendation engine, RFC: Request For Comment, semantic web, SETI@home, Skype, slashdot, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, social web, source of truth, stealth mode startup, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, Yochai Benkler

., 2000 The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited, by Mark Granovetter, State University of New York, Stony Brook, 1983, http://www.si.umich.edu/~rfrost/courses/ SI110/readings/In_Out_and_Beyond/Granovetter.pdf “You are who you know,” by Andrew Leonard, Salon, June 15, 2004, http://dir.salon.com/ story/tech/feature/2004/06/15/social_software_one/index.html “You are who you know: Part 2,” by Andrew Leonard, Salon, June 16, 2004, http://dir. salon.com/story/tech/feature/2004/06/16/social_software_two/index.html Download at WoweBook.Com Download at WoweBook.Com Chapter 15 Good Cop, Bad Cop In the past I engaged in the whack-a-mole game against abusers. I spent many man months on algorithmic approaches for fighting abuse.

Without that experience I would not have felt qualified to write this book. To Christina, extra thanks for giving me advice and the foreknowledge that the book would take over my life for a while. Special thanks to Matt Leacock, for helping me realize the Yahoo! Pattern Library into being and for keeping community applications and social software a constant in our team across six and a half years at AOL and Yahoo!. Thanks to Lucas Pettinati, for the amazing work designing and testing Yahoo!’s registration process and forms, and for defining a set of best practices around this work. Thanks to Bill Scott for pushing through the vision of an open pattern library from Yahoo!

Another image in the group then prompts this further invitation that appears to facetiously parody the whole “Hi, I’m an administrator for a group called…” social interaction. Palimpsest In a talk that Matt “blackbeltjones” Jones gave at Adaptive Path’s MX week in 2008, he recommended the metaphor of the palimpsest (http://www.slideshare.net/blackbeltjones/ battle-for-the-planet-of-the-apes-a-perspective-on-social-software-and-social-networks/56) as a “model for social tools,” while speaking of Dopplr, a social network for frequent travelers: Our content itself gets smarter as it aggregates our thoughts about it…. I think the palimpsest as a model for social tools is a powerful one. Of course they originated from the scarcity of media, something we don’t exactly suffer [from].


pages: 313 words: 95,077

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, Andy Carvin, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, c2.com, Charles Lindbergh, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, hiring and firing, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kuiper Belt, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Merlin Mann, Metcalfe’s law, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Picturephone, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, prediction markets, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler, Yogi Berra

Page 222: Howard Dean’s presidential campaign The Howard Dean campaign in 2003-2004 was the high-water mark of the use of the internet in national politics, and a number of us were watching it closely (and generally enthusiastically) during that time. Dean’s actual performance, once he faced real voters, was so catastrophic that understanding what had happened became a critical task. I wrote two essays on the electoral implosion of the Dean campaign in early 2004: “Is Social Software Bad for the Dean Campaign?” (many.corante.com/archives/2004/01/26/is_social_software_bad_for_the_dean_campaign.php ) and “Exiting Deanspace,” a reference to a social tool used by the campaign (many.corante.com/archives/2004/02/03/exiting_deanspace.php ). Page 224: bonding and bridging social capital Robert D. Putnam followed up his 2000 book Bowling Alone with Better Together: Restoring the American Community, which he cowrote with Lewis Feldstein and Donald J.

—Kansas City Star “Shirky . . . has a novel response to the question of quality control: we will have to move to a publish-then-filter model, the opposite of today’s ‘gatekeeper’ structure.” —Columbia Journalism Review “I don’t think you’ll find a smarter, more articulate writer on the topic of internet community than Clay Shirky. . . . If you’re developing social software of any kind, this book should be required reading.” —D: All Things Digital “Meat and potatoes anecdotes about communication tools.” —statesman.com “Seriously, Clay Shirky’s new book is really good. (For once, no irony or snark: it’s just very well done.) Each time someone as insightful as Clay Shirky starts writing for the Web, the internet will get 1 percent better.

All the technologies we see in the story of Ivanna’s phone, the phones and computers, the e-mail and instant messages, and the webpages, are manifestations of a more fundamental shift. We now have communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities, and we are witnessing the rise of new ways of coordinating action that take advantage of that change. These communications tools have been given many names, all variations on a theme: “social software,” “social media,” “social computing,” and so on. Though there are some distinctions between these labels, the core idea is the same: we are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.


pages: 165 words: 45,397

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

The work of highly conceptual studios such as Abake, Metahaven, and Daniel Eatcock is regularly discussed, exhibited, and debated in the design press. In Facestate (2011) Metahaven use the kind of strategic thinking usually applied to commercial corporate identity projects to critique the political implications of blurring boundaries between consumerism and citizenship, especially when social software is embraced by governments in the name of improved transparency and interaction. Metahaven, Facestate, 2011. Photograph by Gene Pittman. Photograph courtesy of Walker Art Center. In fashion it ranges from one-off haute couture pieces for the catwalk to mass-produced diffusion lines for sale in high street shops.

The design collective Metahaven has developed a sustained critique of neoliberalism through a series of uncorporate identities for imaginary corporategovernment states by subverting branding and corporate identity strategies from a graphic design perspective.18 Their Facestate (2011) installation for Graphic Design: Now in Production at the Walker Art Center explored parallels between social software and the state: "It is about politicians hailing the entrepreneurship of Mark Zuckerberg, about the neoliberal dream of minimal government interference, about the governance of social networks, about face recognition, about debt, about the future of money and currency in social networks, and about the dream of total participation. "19 Metahaven combines extensive research with the setting out of fictional corporate government hybrids through design.


pages: 299 words: 91,839

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, business process, call centre, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, clean water, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Dunbar number, fake news, fear of failure, Firefox, future of journalism, G4S, Golden age of television, Google Earth, Googley, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, old-boy network, PageRank, peer-to-peer lending, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Zipcar

I learn differently, discuss differently, see differently, think differently. Thinking differently is the key product and skill of the Google age. It has been said that young people today may take on new behavioral norms and mores and political outlooks from games and social software—and I don’t mean sex and violence, but subtler worldviews. “Social software is political science in executable form,” NYU professor Clay Shirky said in one essay. “Social norms in game worlds have the effect of governance,” he said in another. Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig famously declared that code is law: “This code, or architecture, sets the terms on which life in cyberspace is experienced.

Note that to make the gift economy work, a project doesn’t need its entire community to contribute. Only about 1 percent of those who use Wikipedia create Wikipedia—that is Wikipedia’s 1 percent rule. Indeed, if that were doubled, it probably would create chaos. In Here Comes Everybody, NYU professor Clay Shirky, who studies social software, calculated the output of the authors of one article: “[O]f the 129 contributors on the subject of asphalt, a hundred of them contributed only one edit each, while the half-dozen most active editors contributed nearly fifty edits among them, almost a quarter of the total.” The most active contributor was 10 times more active than the least active.


pages: 25 words: 5,789

Data for the Public Good by Alex Howard

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Atul Gawande, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, Hernando de Soto, Internet of things, Kickstarter, lifelogging, machine readable, Network effects, openstreetmap, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social intelligence, social software, social web, web application

His work there focused on how regulations affect IT operations, including issues of data protection, privacy, security and enterprise IT strategy. Before moving the focus of his coverage to cybersecurity, online privacy and compliance, Howard was the associate editor of WhatIs.com, an online IT encyclopedia. In that role, he researched and wrote about nearly every aspect of enterprise IT, including the impact of social software on business and the media. In his spare time, he practiced writing about himself in the third person, with mixed results. Howard’s work experience also includes working in operations for an e-business consultancy, as a knowledge broker for a management consulting firm, as a middle school teacher, as a master home builder and, very briefly, as a garden manager at an outstanding Italian restaurant.


pages: 153 words: 52,175

Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload by Mark Hurst

en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Google Earth, mail merge, off-the-grid, pre–internet, profit motive, social bookmarking, social software, software patent, web application

Most users would prefer to eliminate the frustrations and complexity of technology, even with a loss in privacy. Bit overload, not privacy, will be their primary concern. As bits increase, new kinds of tools will become more important. Information visualization software will promise to display large data sets for easy scanning, and “social software” like blogs and wikis will offer users new ways to collaborate online. A few instances of these tools will succeed, but many more will fail.51 Ultimately, though, tools will play only a supporting role. The pertinent question is whether individual users will commit to learning and practicing bit literacy.

(“Breaking the Myth of Megapixels,” the New York Times, February 8, 2007.) 49 “The phone of the future,” The Economist, December 2, 2006. 50 One organization that fights corporate abuse of copyright law is the EFF, or Electronic Frontier Foundation, at eff.org. 51 In the December 3, 2006 New York Times Magazine article “Open Source Spying,” by Clive Thompson, NYU professor Clay Shirky put it best: “The normal case for social software is failure.” 52 The “paperless office” may also be within reach, at last, for some companies. As employees become more effective with bits, they will have less need to print out e-mails, documents, and other files. Paper will always be useful in some situations, but bit-literate users will avoid it when possible. 53 “Open Source Spying,” by Clive Thompson, the New York Times Magazine, December 3, 2006. 54 Popup text from Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac, version 11.0. 55 The SANS Internet Storm Center monitors the average "survival time" of a Windows PC at http://isc.sans.org/survivaltime.html. 56 The name was coined by Helen Moriarty, mother of my business partner Phil Terry, back in 1999. 57 Here's most of what we add: QuicKeys for one-touch access to applications and the team contacts file; Default Folder for one-touch folder access; Typinator or TypeIt4Me as the bit lever; TextWrangler as the text editor; AppleWorks as the word processor and wireframing tool; FileMaker for databases; Now Up-to-Date for the calendar; Firefox or Safari as the Web browser; a Gootodo.com account for the todo list; Mailsmith for the e-mail program; Microsoft Office for compatibility to client files; and for really dedicated learners, the Dvorak keymap for the keyboard.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

[to] be busy, to be connected, to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.”25 Recent developments in the Web coupled with the broadening of social networking encourage us to invert Stone’s coinage and move from attention to production. The growth of Web logs, or blogs, considered in tandem with Flickr, Digg, and other social softwares that enable posting and tagging accounts, creates an environment that I categorize as 34 STICK Y “continuous partial production.” As 99 percent of everything ever made is either purely for personal consumption, largely forgettable, or just plain junk, continuous partial production is not a huge problem.

Accounting for Web n.0 as an ever-escalating series of developments and redevelopments, this chapter offers a series of linked impact reports on the culture machine’s electronic environments. Taxonomics No matter the name, systems theorists have characterized the emergent Web as displaying robust architectures of participation, having evolved into a truly social software, with a myriad of new ways to link people together. The characteristic usage of the Web in the 1990s was surfing from one static Web page to another. The contemporary Web offers a more dynamic experience in which the users themselves contribute to the environment. Wikis, blogs, and networking sites create affordances for an ever-expanding number of people to share their experiences, perceptions, and productions.


pages: 302 words: 73,581

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary

3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, fake it until you make it, frictionless, game design, gamification, growth hacking, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, search costs, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, software as a service, software is eating the world, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, TaskRabbit, the long tail, the payments system, too big to fail, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Wave and Pay

Machines embedded with sensors constantly stream activity data into a platform that helps each machine learn from other machines and provides network-wide intelligence. These machines benefit from implicit network effects, and every machine learns from the community of machines it is connected to. • Enterprise 2.0. Andrew McAfee highlights the rise of social software in the enterprise and how it’s replacing traditional enterprise systems. Enterprise-wide social software needs an underlying data platform to aggregate the many workflows and knowledge exchanges within an organization. The streaming and aggregation of data from multiple input points and the subsequent provision of services to multiple stakeholders is an outcome of a central data platform


pages: 398 words: 86,023

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, HyperCard, index card, Jane Jacobs, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, jimmy wales, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, optical character recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons, Y2K, Yochai Benkler

Within Wikipedia’s community, we’re actually talking about very old-fashioned types of references. Good writing. Neutrality. Reliable sources. Verifiability. We’re talking about people’s behavior in the community. We’re not talking about some kind of magic process. Quality matters, and a thoughtful community has emerged around that ideal. I have a philosophy about the design of social software. Imagine that you’re going to design a restaurant. Just think about the problem of design for a restaurant. In this restaurant we’re going to be serving steak. Since we’re going to be serving steak, we’re going to have steak knives. And since we’re going to have steak knives, people might stab each other.

And since we’re going to have steak knives, people might stab each other. So how do we solve this problem? What we could do is build cages and keep everybody in cages to make sure no one stabs anyone. Well, this makes for a bad society. We reject this kind of thinking in restaurant design, and yet this is the predominant paradigm for social software design. Traditionally when we sit down to design a Web site, we think of all of the bad things people might do, and make sure that we have controls and permissions, everything to prevent people from doing the bad things. This has two effects. While you do prevent people from doing bad things, there are often very obvious and direct side effects that prevent them from doing good things.


pages: 387 words: 105,250

The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling

bread and circuses, carbon footprint, clean water, commons-based peer production, failed state, impulse control, machine translation, megaproject, negative equity, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, precautionary principle, semantic web, sexual politics, social software, space junk, starchitect, stem cell, supervolcano, urban renewal, Whole Earth Review

Men felt dishonored, deprived of all sense and meaning, when culture collapsed. Refugee men trapped in camp thought in bitter terms of escape and vengeance. “Fight or flight.” Women in a camp would search for female allies, for any means and methods to manage the day. “Tend and befriend.” So: In a proper modern camp like this one, the social software was designed to exploit those realities. First, the women had to be protected from desperate male violence until a community emerged. The women were grouped and trained with hand tools. The second wave of camp acculturation was designed for the men. It involved danger, difficulty, raw challenge, respect, and honor, in a bitter competition over power tools.

Now, sitting years later in the sagging deck chair in an old boat with the island sinking into darkness, Vera knew that no single person had ever done that. Mljet was a web of emerging technologies, around which people accreted. Nothing much had been “invented” on Mljet. The brain scanners, the attention tracking, the neural software, the social software inside the camps, the sensors, the everyware, the communal property, even the heavy-duty exoskeletons—they all had years of development behind them, somewhere else. The one innovation was the way they’d been brought to life by people willing to believe in them, wanting to believe in them. Herbert had always claimed that she, Vera, had “inspired” his efforts.


pages: 666 words: 181,495

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

The owners of paradise.com and utopia.com were similarly unaccommodating. Finally, the product manager and Mayer thought of naming it after its creator. “Orkut.com” belonged to Buyukkokten himself. Google convinced him, and its social networking service was called Orkut. Was it a sign of the company’s distrust of the insufficiently algorithmic nature of social software that the product was not branded with the Google name? “We wanted to see if it could stand on its own two feet,” says Mayer, a stricture not required from such Google services as Gmail and Google Maps. In fact, Orkut almost immediately stood tall. Even though the software was available only by invitation—the first users were Googlers who invited their own friends—hundreds of thousands of people signed up in the first month alone.

Skimming twenty engineers each from a separate team meant that you would be losing an average of 15 percent of the manpower in those teams. As it was, twenty people had to be temporarily recruited that August to fix Orkut’s lingering problems. “I do think we made the right trade-off and the right balance,” Mayer would later argue. Considering how important social software would become, it was hard to agree. Orkut was far from the only opportunity in the social sphere that Google missed. In May 2005, Google bought a small company in the promising area known as mobile social. Founded by Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, Dodgeball was a pioneering service that let mobile phone users turn their city into a giant hide-and-seek game where they could discover (or avoid) nearby friends.

In Silicon Valley, people assumed that delays in Google’s “Facebook killer” hinted at another failed effort in social networking, a harbinger perhaps of a fall from primacy for Google itself. Still, Gundotra and Horowitz were energized by what they felt were significant innovations in the initiative, and believed that Emerald Sea would finally establish itself as a primary player in the crucial area of social software. “This is the next generation of Google—it’s Google plus one,” said Gundotra. In its forays into other areas, like phones, videos, maps, applications, and operating systems, Google had not acted in response to competition. If it had a good idea, it simply pursued it, no matter who was occupying the space.


pages: 455 words: 133,322

The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Benchmark Capital, billion-dollar mistake, Burning Man, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, global village, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Network effects, Peter Thiel, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, SoftBank, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, UUNET, Whole Earth Review, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

During the first months of Harvard’s fall 2003 semester, Zuckerberg began making waves with ad hoc bad-boy applications that were intrinsically social—first Course Match, then Facemash. Narendra and the Winkelvosses read about him in the Crimson’s coverage of the Facemash episode. They got in touch and arranged a meeting. He agreed to help out, but says now he thought of it as just another of his many social software “projects.” Zuckerberg worked off and on writing code for Harvard Connection. After a few weeks he appears to have lost interest, though he apparently didn’t make that clear to the Winkelvosses and Narendra. They began to complain that he was taking too long. At one point Zuckerberg apologized for a delay, explaining he had forgotten to bring the charger for his laptop home with him for the Thanksgiving holidays.

During the time he was working for Harvard Connection, Zuckerberg may have become uneasy about the fact that he was already working on his own social network. He certainly should have alerted the Winkelvoss brothers and Narendra earlier about what to expect. He was rude. He became very uncooperative. But long before he met the Winkelvosses and Divya Narendra he already was thinking about what kind of social software was possible on the Internet. That’s why the Harvard Connection project interested him in the first place. The civil lawsuit filed on behalf of the three alleges behavior considerably worse than rudeness: “copyright infringement, breach of actual or implied contract, misappropriation of trade secrets, breach of fiduciary duty, unjust enrichment, unfair business practices, intentional interference with prospective business advantage, breach of duty of good faith and fair dealing, fraud, and breach of confidence.”


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

Rather, it is corporatism itself: a logic we have internalized into our very being, a lens through which we view the world around us, and an ethos with which we justify our behaviors. Making matters worse, we accept its dominance over us as preexisting—as a given circumstance of the human condition. It just is. But it isn’t. Corporatism didn’t evolve naturally. The landscape on which we are living—the operating system on which we are now running our social software—was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self-sustaining reality. It is a map that has replaced the territory. Its basic laws were set in motion as far back as the Renaissance; it was accelerated by the Industrial Age; and it was sold to us as a better way of life by a determined generation of corporate leaders who believed they had our best interests at heart and who ultimately succeeded in their dream of controlling the masses from above.

Different currencies incentivize different behaviors and, hence, yield different economies. Information Age economies will replace commercial markets with more efficient, high-trust, self-organizing social networks that immediately channel appropriate resources where they are needed. Just as factories and finance were high-leverage tools of the Industrial Age, social software and reputation currencies that fuel these new social markets are the tools of the new economy. And yes, these markets move real value. It is already happening with software (open source), accommodations (couchsurfing), knowledge (MIT open courseware), and many domains. There is a family of projects fostering these new economies and wielding currencies as something more powerful than money.


pages: 499 words: 144,278

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

(Krieger and Systrom left Instagram in September 2018, citing a desire to explore new ideas; Everingham moved that spring to a division of Facebook that develops blockchain technology.) Neither Krieger nor Systrom actively set out to erode anyone’s self-esteem, of course. They loved photography, dug code, and aimed to unlock the latent energy of a world where everyone’s already carrying a camera 24/7. But social software has impacts that the inventors, who are usually focused on the short-term goal of simply getting their new prototypes to work (and then scale), often fail to predict. And frankly, the money was deforming decisions—what code gets written and why. By the time Instagram exploded, the finances of big start-ups were pretty well known.

Understanding the huge ethical dangers that come with pell-mell growth isn’t second nature for techies, he notes: “None of that is obvious, and they don’t teach any of that in computer science programs.” Granted, Dash’s advice isn’t easy for start-ups to follow. Many need investment to get off the ground. If that culture is going to shift away from promoting manic growth, it’ll likely happen slowly. And the final plank of reforming today’s social software would be weaning it off advertising. As the ex-Googler James Williams notes, advertising that seeks to monetize attention is what makes coders and designers become “adversarial” to their user. In contrast, software that doesn’t rely on ads can focus on serving precisely what its users want. Wikipedia’s management, for example, has historically decided to raise money directly from users instead of running ads.


pages: 189 words: 57,632

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I'm inclined to think that these systems are subject to a Brook's-law parallel: "Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance." Perhaps we can call this "boyd's Law" [NOTE TO EDITOR: "boyd" is always lower-case] for danah [TO EDITOR: "danah" too!] boyd, the social scientist who has studied many of these networks from the inside as a keen-eyed net-anthropologist and who has described the many ways in which social software does violence to sociability in a series of sharp papers. Here's one of boyd's examples, a true story: a young woman, an elementary school teacher, joins Friendster after some of her Burning Man buddies send her an invite. All is well until her students sign up and notice that all the friends in her profile are sunburnt, drug-addled techno-pagans whose own profiles are adorned with digital photos of their painted genitals flapping over the Playa.


pages: 197 words: 59,946

The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Golden age of television, hiring and firing, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, new economy, pre–internet, Skype, social software, Tony Hsieh

It Takes Just One Customer If Irena Vaksman had not established herself on all of those social media sites, Loïc Le Meur probably would never have mentioned her unless someone he knew asked him to recommend a dentist. But Loïc Le Meur is very interested in social media—he is an internationally known entrepreneur, the developer of the social software app Seesmic, and was ranked by BusinessWeek as one of 2008’s twenty-five most influential people on the Web. So when Le Meur found out that his new dentist had a social media presence, he thought that was worth writing about, and he posted some thoughts about it on his blog. Like most of Dr. Vaksman’s other patients, he was complimentary and pleased with the thorough care he received and with the office’s use of sophisticated, state-of-the-art technology.


Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean

4chan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, bash_history, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, finite state, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Conference 1984, Ian Bogost, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, Larry Wall, late capitalism, means of production, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, power law, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Slavoj Žižek, social software, social web, software studies, speech recognition, SQL injection, stem cell, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, Turing machine, Turing test, Vilfredo Pareto, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

This attention to publicness has implications also for the connection to property regimes and the ways that social technologies (especially popular platforms like Twitter and Facebook) tend to encourage ever more voices to be heard but only with restricted registers and effects. The concern is to consider some of the mainstream implementations of social software, to register the conditions under which this is done and the language employed to do so, and to examine the consequences in terms of the production of social relations and subjectivities. Through their reliance on proprietary logic, these developments seem to legislate against a plurality of voices that have unique attributes, which Arendt considers to be necessary for politics.


pages: 236 words: 66,081

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, behavioural economics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, citizen journalism, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, experimental economics, experimental subject, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Kevin Kelly, lolcat, means of production, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, seminal paper, social contagion, social software, Steve Ballmer, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Similarly, YouTube was only one of many video-sharing services in 2005, when it was used to share the popular music video “Lazy Sunday.” Whatever YouTube’s technical advantages over its competitors, it became synonymous with video sharing in part because of its lucky break in being the service used to host that video. That input to its success was user-driven and accidental rather than technological and planned. With social software, there are no foolproof recipes for success. (I speak from bitter experience, having participated in the creation of both successful and failed social media.) And yet we’ve learned some things about human interaction in the last few decades. The trick for creating new social media is to use those lessons to weight the odds in your favor, rather than as a set of instructions that guarantees success.


pages: 270 words: 64,235

Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code by Jeff Atwood

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, endowment effect, fail fast, Firefox, fizzbuzz, Ford Model T, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Chrome, gravity well, Hacker News, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Merlin Mann, Minecraft, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, price anchoring, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, science of happiness, Skype, social software, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

I’ve always associated hellbanning with the Something Awful Forums. Per this amazing MetaFilter discussion, it turns out the roots of hellbanning go much deeper — all the way back to an early Telnet BBS system called Citadel, where the “problem user bit” was introduced around 1986. Like so many other things in social software, it keeps getting reinvented over and over again by clueless software developers who believe they’re the first programmer smart enough to figure out how people work. It’s supported in most popular forum and blog software, as documented in the Drupal Cave module. (There is one additional form of hellbanning that I feel compelled to mention because it is particularly cruel – when hellbanned users can see only themselves and other hellbanned users.


Smart Cities, Digital Nations by Caspar Herzberg

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, business climate, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hive mind, Internet of things, knowledge economy, Masdar, megacity, New Urbanism, operational security, packet switching, QR code, remote working, RFID, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart meter, social software, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, X Prize

To be sure, citizens ideally can have oversight of the process, but planning citywide service platforms is complicated enough with a relatively limited circle of stakeholders. Townsend’s Smart Cities points out that “computing is no longer solely in the hands of big companies and governments. The raw material and the means of producing a smart city—smartphones, social software, open-source hardware, and cheap bandwidth—are widely democratized and inexpensive. Combining and recombining them in endless variations is cheap, easy, and fun.”5 This is true, but the work of ripping out existing infrastructure to lay down new cables and sensors, or envisioning a brand-new system, is neither cheap nor easy.


pages: 274 words: 75,846

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Bret Taylor, Facebook’s platform lead, announced that users were sharing 25 billion items a month. Google, once the undisputed leader in the push for relevance, seemed worried about the rival a few miles down the road. The two giants are now in hand-to-hand combat: Facebook poaches key executives from Google; Google’s hard at work constructing social software like Facebook. But it’s not totally obvious why the two new-media monoliths should be at war. Google, after all, is built around answering questions; Facebook’s core mission is to help people connect with their friends. But both businesses’ bottom lines depend on the same thing: targeted, highly relevant advertising.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Chinese surveillance technology has been sold to at least eighty countries, according to Professor Sheena Greitens. These include many countries without sufficient checks and balances to protect citizens from government abuses. Even more troubling is China’s export of its laws and policies, the social “software” that enables the spread of China’s evolving model of techno-authoritarianism. (Country data from Sheena Chestnut Greitens. Map created by Melody Cook / Center for a New American Security.) Chinese firms have been aggressively selling their surveillance technology worldwide. In Malaysia, the Chinese firm Yitu has sold facial recognition bodycams to police.

Zimbabwe’s government, whose officials attended Chinese seminars, has pushed for a sweeping cybersecurity law that would strengthen surveillance and clamp down on internet freedoms. While the global spread of Chinese technology helps China gain access to new datasets as well as inroads for spying abroad, it is the social “software” of laws and policies that help China export its evolving model of high-tech authoritarianism. The proliferation of Chinese-style state surveillance is due to a number of factors. First among these is the desire of Chinese companies to make money and the international demand for surveillance networks.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

* * * The Summit was as much a strategy session as it was a business seminar. Sometimes the political subtext became the text. The bold tech-empowered future would require an “update” to “our leadership structures,” as one Summit speaker put it. “The Constitution needs to be updated,” he said. “It’s the software that runs our society.” The next social software update would certainly crush all sorts of workers, as Rob Nail made clear when he spoke once more about robots and the automation of all labor. “It’s not going to be just blue-collar labor that’s replaced—or enhanced,” he said. Managers would also have robot replacements, he went on. This warning was echoed by SU past president and in-house ethicist Neil Jacobstein, a wry veteran of the revolving-door establishment who previously worked as a consultant for NASA, the Pentagon, and large contractors like Boeing.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Looked at through the lens of collaboration, a good question to ask is: Which advanced social technologies within GitHub can corporations implement in a controlled manner? More on the topic of collaboration: VentureBeat reports that more than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies have deployed social software such as Yammer. However, according to Altimeter Group’s Charlene Li and Brian Solis, only 34 percent of 700 executives and social strategists surveyed felt their social efforts had an effect on business outcomes. Similarly, Computing magazine recently surveyed one hundred senior IT professionals and found the following: 68 percent said their organization is using some sort of collaboration.


pages: 843 words: 223,858

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

With the prospects of expanding infrastructure and declining prices of communication, it is not a prediction but an observation to say that on-line communities are fast developing not as a virtual world, but as a real virtuality integrated with other forms of interaction in an increasingly hybridized everyday life. A new generation of social software programs have made possible the explosion of interactive computer and video games, today a multibillion-dollar global industry. In its first day of release in September 2007, Sony’s Halo 3 earned $170 million, more than the weekend gross of any Hollywood film to date. The largest on-line game community, World of Warcraft (WOW), which accounts for just over half of the Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) industry, reached over 10 million active members (over half of which reside in the Asian continent) in 2008.

The growing interest of corporate media for Internet-based forms of communication recognizes the significance of the rise of a new form of societal communication, the one I have conceptualized as mass self-communication. It is mass communication because it reaches a potentially global audience through p2p networks and Internet connection. It is multimodal, as the digitization of content and advanced social software, often based on open source programs that can be downloaded for free, allows the reformatting of almost any content in almost any form, increasingly distributed via wireless networks. It also is self-generated in content, self-directed in emission, and self-selected in reception by many who communicate with many.


pages: 291 words: 90,200

Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age by Manuel Castells

"World Economic Forum" Davos, access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, call centre, centre right, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, income inequality, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Port of Oakland, social software, statistical model, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

In continuity with this emphasis on autonomy building, the deepest social transformation of the Internet came in the first decade of the twenty-first century, from the shift from individual and corporate interaction on the Internet (the use of email, for instance), to the autonomous construction of social networks controlled and guided by their users. It came from improvements in broadband, and in social software and from the rise of a wide range of distribution systems feeding the Internet networks. Furthermore, wireless communication connects devices, data, people, organizations, everything, with the cloud emerging as the repository of widespread social networking, as a web of communication laid over everything and everybody.


pages: 343 words: 91,080

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Instead, they frame these jobs as a form of social reciprocity—users are simply sharing their homes, cars, tools, skills, or time with other users on the platform. This logic comes from the technology culture at large. As an article of faith, Facebook holds that all 2 billion of its users are a “community.” Social software, like Wikipedia, fosters collaborative environments across communities of users who can contribute equitably to a common goal.52 (Although this is the idea behind collaborative, open-source software projects, there are many examples where this vision of equity doesn’t hold true. Women’s edits to Wikipedia pages, for example, are rejected or reverted more often than men’s edits.


pages: 375 words: 88,306

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Some Challenges and Opportunities In many ways, this new generation of decentralized peer-to-peer technologies mirrors the P2P vision of Michel Bauwens that we discussed in chapter 1, and promises to create immense economic value over the coming decades. As the venture capitalist Chris Dixon wrote on his blog in 2014, Bitcoin makes activities like international microfinance, markets for computing capacity, incentivized social software, and other micropayments possible—not because we haven’t considered the value of these before, but because the transaction costs were too high.16 There are signs that traditional businesses will embrace many of the new capabilities of decentralized peer-to-peer technologies, much like Facebook actively uses BitTorrent within its privately owned server farms.


pages: 411 words: 95,852

Britain Etc by Mark Easton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Boris Johnson, British Empire, credit crunch, digital divide, digital rights, drug harm reduction, financial independence, garden city movement, global village, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, social software, traumatic brain injury

Fine, The Political Economy of Diet, Health and Food Policy (Routledge, 1998) W is for www 1. R. Kraut, M. Patterson, V. Lundmark, et al., ‘Internet paradox: a social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being?’ American Psychological Association, 53 (1998) 2. W. Davies, You Don’t Know Me, but . . . Social Capital and Social Software (The Work Foundation, 2003), wwwtheworkfoundation.com 3. A. Morris, ‘E-literacy and the Grey Digital Divide’, Journal of Information Literacy, 1 (2007) N. Nie and L. Erbring, Internet and Society (Stanford University, 2000) H. Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison Wesley, 1993) 5.


pages: 379 words: 109,612

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

I think there’s a better way to detect absences, one that bypasses ad hoc search by creating a public place where knowledge comes into focus. We could benefit immensely from a medium that is as good at representing factual controversies as Wikipedia is at representing factual consensus. What I mean by this is a social software system and community much like Wikipedia—perhaps an organic offshoot—that would operate to draw forth and present what is, roughly speaking, the best evidence on each side of a factual controversy. To function well, it would require a core community that shares many of the Wikipedia norms but would invite advocates to present a far-from-neutral point of view.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Although Smith did not invent markets, he notated the code which enabled a tribal primate, wired for personal relationships in small, usually related groups, to cooperate impersonally across unbounded networks of strangers, and to do so without any central authority organizing markets and issuing commands. Economic liberalism—market cooperation—is a species-transforming piece of social software, one which enables humans to function far above our designed capacity. Political liberalism grapples with another version of the cooperation problem: can we make rules which channel self-interest, ambition, and bias to benefit society as a whole? Can we provide social stability without squelching social dynamism, and without submitting to a Hobbesian authority?


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

He discovered Burning Man, the annual weeklong gathering in the Nevada desert that attracted tens of thousands of the Valley’s digerati. When Gruber’s sabbatical year ended he was ready to build a new company. He knew Reid Hoffman, who had by then started LinkedIn, the business networking company. Because of his experience at Intraspect, Gruber had good insights into “social software.” The two men had a long series of conversations about Gruber joining the start-up, which was on track to become one of Silicon Valley’s early social networking success stories. Gruber wanted to focus on design issues and Hoffman was looking for a new CTO, but in the end the LinkedIn board vetoed the idea because the company was on the verge of a large investment round.


pages: 312 words: 93,504

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia by Dariusz Jemielniak

Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), citation needed, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, Debian, deskilling, digital Maoism, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Google Glasses, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Menlo Park, moral hazard, online collectivism, pirate software, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, Wikivoyage, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

This online encyclopedia community has been able to generate about 16,500 articles, of which fewer than 200 are expert approved (even though some featured articles from Wikipedia were used as “seed capital”), over its six years of existence so far (“Welcome,” 2013), which does not give hope for creating anything even remotely close to what an encyclopedia should be in the foreseeable future. Apparently, the costs of credentialing and identifying experts in open collaboration exceed the possible benefits (O’Neil, 2010). The social software of Wikipedia makes vandalizing an article more time-consuming than restoring its acceptable version (Lih, 2004), since it dramatically reduces costs of protection against graffiti attacks (Ciffolilli, 2003). Also, as shown in the previous chapter, understanding bureaucratic rules and their cryptic abbreviations leads to status in a community.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

“I’m excited about the idea that you have a fully distributed mechanism for accounting, for actions, and for digital resources across anything; whether it’s currency, whether it’s social relations and exchange, or whether its an organization.”38 Today, commercial collaboration tools are beginning to change the nature of knowledge work and management inside organizations.39 Products like Jive, IBM Connections, Salesforce Chatter, Cisco Quad, Microsoft Yammer, Google Apps for Work, and Facebook at Work are being used to improve performance and foster innovation. Social software will become a vital tool for transforming virtually every part of business operations, from product development to human resources, marketing, customer service, and sales—in a sense the new operating system for the twenty-first-century organization. But there are clear limitations to today’s suites of tools, and the blockchain takes these technologies to the next level.


Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell

A Pattern Language, business intelligence, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, Firefox, longitudinal study, school vouchers, seminal paper, social software, social web, sorting algorithm, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, web application

Each time someone uses an application, or any digital product, he carries on a conversation with the machine. It may be literal, as with a command line or phone menu, or tacit, like the “conversation” an artist has with her paints and canvas—the give and take between the craftsperson and the thing being built. With social software, it may even be a conversation by proxy. Whatever the case, the user interface mediates that conversation, helping users achieve whatever ends they had in mind. As the user interface designer, then, you get to script that conversation, or at least define its terms. And if you’re going to script a conversation, you should understand the human’s side as well as possible.


pages: 567 words: 122,311

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, constrained optimization, data science, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, frictionless market, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, Network effects, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, platform as a service, power law, price elasticity of demand, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social software, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, web application, Y Combinator

Joel kick-started Buffer because of a pain he was experiencing: the difficulty of posting great content he was finding regularly to Twitter. Solutions already existed for scheduling tweets, but nothing as simple and easy to use as what Joel was looking for, so he joined forces with Tom and Leo, and they built Buffer. Unlike most companies in the social software space, they decided to charge customers right off the bat. Joel had two assumptions: that the problem was painful enough for people, and that they would pay. Taking a very Lean approach, the trio built and launched the app and had their first paying customers in seven weeks.[75] For Buffer, their One Metric That Matters was revenue.


pages: 475 words: 134,707

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt by Sinan Aral

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, death of newspapers, deep learning, deepfake, digital divide, digital nomad, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, George Floyd, global pandemic, hive mind, illegal immigration, income inequality, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, performance metric, phenotype, recommendation engine, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Russian election interference, Second Machine Age, seminal paper, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social intelligence, social software, social web, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yogi Berra

Do we really want a world dominated by popularity? (Such worlds tip toward madness and away from wisdom, as we learned.) Or would we rather promote those who uplift our spirit, enhance our knowledge, and deepen our emotional stability? The “time well spent” movement is admirable, but design alone cannot achieve its goals. Yes, we need social software designed to support the values we want to promote, but we need to advocate for those values through our own collective behavior as well. The #deletefacebook movement is an expression of that desire. Even without real alternatives, society is pushing back on the Hype Machine’s current designs.


pages: 960 words: 140,978

Android Cookbook by Ian F. Darwin

crowdsourcing, Debian, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, full text search, openstreetmap, QR code, social software, web application

Application Type There are currently two choices: Applications or Games. Category The allowable list of categories varies depending on application type. The currently available categories for applications are Communications, Demo, Entertainment, Finance, Lifestyle, Multimedia, News & Weather, Productivity, Reference, Shopping, Social, Software Libraries, Tools, and Travel. For games, the currently available categories include Arcade & Action, Brain & Puzzle, Cards & Casino, and Casual. Price This may be “Free” or a fixed price. Refer to the agreement you agreed to earlier to see what percentage you actually get to keep. Geography You can limit where your application is available, or choose to make it available everywhere.


pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

He looked fourteen, and totally owned it, wearing flip-flops and long basketball shorts. His business card read, “I’m CEO . . . bitch.” But it was Thefacebook’s story, at least as Parker explained it, that blew Pincus’s mind. Something like 80 percent of its users signed on every day. This was unheard of, and a dramatic contrast to the metrics at Pincus’s own social software, tribe.net, where a single-digit percentage of members logged on daily. He’s created the Cocktail Party! Pincus thought, albeit one where the guests weren’t old enough to drink yet. Hoffman was eager to meet Zuckerberg, too, but was sensitive to criticism he’d gotten after his Friendster investment.


pages: 468 words: 233,091

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

But what’s interesting is that it has a market and you can trade things with other people in the game. The little area that I cornered the market on was trading JubJub hats. My sister became completely absorbed in it, and we thought, “Wow, there’s something interesting here.” Both of us have backgrounds in web design and development, and I have a focus on social software. Before Ludicorp, I worked on or participated in a bunch of online communities including the WELL, Electric Minds, the Netscape online communities, and various sites I’d started on my own. At Interval Research, I worked on a collaborative animation game, which was a cousin to the Game Neverending idea.