A natural disappointment swelled as I assumed that my beloved, Lil’Grams, had not made it into another piece covering a space we entered oh so long ago.  Then I saw it, and realized just how wrong I was.

Call it convenient. Call it baby overshare. But a host of new sites, including Totspot, Odadeo, Lil’Grams and Kidmondo, now offer parents a chance to forgo the e-mail blasts of, say, their newborn’s first trip home and instead invite friends and family to join and contribute to a network geared to connecting them to the baby in their lives.

“It’s an interesting model,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Everyone can decide how much or little they want to know about a baby, which avoids the situation of receiving a few too many e-mails about someone’s wonderful child, and parents can decide how much they want to share — in minimal or maximal ways.”

Now I can’t tell you just how happy I am to be where I am right now.  Building Lil’Grams has been a challenge in a number of ways.  Professionally, it is a testament to our ability to understand a problem and create a solution that means something to the audience it serves.  Personally, it’s been a personal challenge filled with highs and lows, tears and fears.

We’re about a month away from the big reveal.  I’m looking forward to bringing our efforts out to the world at large.  We’re still making a number of important decisions about how things will work and what will be in the final release (we have more than we planned).

Until October 22nd, from Delhi.

Background
Last night was the SF New Tech event.  There were some interesting demonstrations, a little pornography, and a lot of chatter (my favorite part).  Towards the end of the night I found myself tucked in the corner with two other BrightKite users - I recognized them from their nametags and the fact that I got updates from the service that they had checked in.

An interesting conversation formed about the utility of BrightKite itself.  I suggested that a large part of its utility spawned from its integration with Twitter.  They both contested that they keep those spheres separate (an interesting discussion on its own).  Someone made the interesting comment that Twitter was the What and BrightKite is the Where.

And that got me to thinking….

Streams As Data Type
More and more my work with Blue Whale and increasingly with Lil’Grams is demanding a new type of perspective on the information design.  What I have been noticing, and to be honest embracing, is the notion of flows of information as a data type.  While there are a number of static concepts that we have become accustomed to, we are now forced to deal with data not as a repository but more as bookmarks around a series of time.

Flows are all around us, APIs are the hoses we use to manage the torrent.  Of course, this is not a localized phenomena and certainly it is not specific to Twitter (though they’ve made it fashionable to talk about them).  Managing the raw output of data from RSS feeds, IM conversations, Activity Streams, News Feeds and of course the whole flood of LifeStreams requires adjusting our hope that time can stand still, archived in the ever-overflowing Inbox of unread items.

Forget the Counter
An interesting theme I see amongst my friends and colleagues is “removing” unread items from their various Inboxes.  I often sit and laugh a little on the inside at the futility of it all.  I have 3775 unread in my Blue Whale account, 108 in Lil’Grams, and 4582 in syncpeople.  Now, it’s probably more of an annoyance sine the UI on these apps are designed to remind us of the things we haven’t done.  For most of those things, they just don’t matter enough, lacking the momentum to move them to the top.  Everything truly important circles back to the top, usually encased in new forms of sarcasm, urgency or anger.  I know, it’s probably not the best way to manage it all but it works well enough inside my bubble.

Concurrency
So when you think of digital presence - the online shadow of your physical/spiritual presence - how would you best want to represent that?  The emergence of streams in our digital lives is, in many ways, aligning our thinking in a way that we are only subtly appreciating.  I see this every time I overhear someone trying to explain Twitter to another.  There’s futility in writing straplines and elevator pitches for something that is quite fundamental to the way we experience life.

My advice is always the same to people when it comes to Twitter.  First, I’m not going to try and explain it.  Second, go sign up and follow 30 people.  Third, keep following and removing people until you find the right mix.  You’ll know when you got it since you won’t want to be without it.  Does that sound all that different from how we socialize on the playground?

Which brings me to my main point.  If we are attempting to build our own real-time personas online, which services service our needs the best.  Seems we have many questions to answer, but we can use the classic model:

• Who - Facebook?  LinkedIn?
• What - Twitter?  Pownce?
• When - Upcoming?  Socializr?
• Where - BrightKite? Dodgeball?
• How - Qik?  Seesmic?  Blogs?

I don’t claim to have the answers to these questions.  In fact I embrace not knowing the answers and look forward to the next steps.  Of course, I’ll use an analogy that’s quite fitting.  The secret to being in the water is to keep your entire body immersed - it’s usually when we stick our heads out and look around for too long that we are vulnerable.

Watch out for the big swells on the horizon.

Still don’t believe me?  Watch Clay Shirky break it down like a fraction.

Tags: streams, flow, lifestreaming, presence, twitter, jaiku, pownce, facebook, linkedin, brightkite

Early on, we came up with the concept of our Killer Whale program. The general purpose of this was to find ways to go the extra mile with our clients and really have the level of comfort required to not just pour your time into something, but also your heart. Interestingly enough, we’ve had a couple of inductees into the program already and we’re happy to announce that the first one has just gone into a closed alpha.

The project is called Lil’Grams and it’s a new microblogging platform focused on the needs of new parents. I’ve posted about it at my personal blog:

Lil’Grams is a real-time baby book designed to make it absolutely simple for parents to capture the precious moments of their baby’s life and share it with their family and friends instantly.

Source: SocialTwister.com, “Unveiling Lil’Grams: A Parent’s Best (Micro) Blog”

The interesting part of this, from our point of view, is that I was the initial client. Lil’Grams was built by our fine team of developers in between development cycles with clients. Special thanks goes out to Shikha and Arjun who fought to get back to the project every chance they got and Ranvir for supporting the effort from the beginning. We applied our Social Architecture model as we worked our way through the strategy, design, and development of the application.

We’re currently doing a closed alpha of the application and gathering feedback from our parents. We plan to expand that a bit next week with the goal of launching fully in 2008. If you are a new parent, Savvy Auntie, uncle, grandma, or grandpa - please visit http://littlegrams.com and put your name in the signup box.

I’d also like to thank the community for the support they’ve given us so far:

• Amanda Mooney / LaunchPR
• Adriana Gascoigne / Girls In Tech
• Brian Solis / bub.blicio.us
• Allen Stern / Center Networks

We’ll be posting updates as frequently as possible.

Technorati Tags: blogging, bluewhalelabs, brian solis, greg narain, lilgrams, littlegrams, startup, twitter, web2.0

Since your search privacy settings are set to “Everyone,” you now have a public search listing. This means that friends who aren’t yet on Facebook will be able to search for you by name from our Welcome page. Public Search Listings may only include names and profile pictures.

In a few weeks, these public search listings can be found by search engines like Google. No privacy rules are changing; anyone who discovers your public search listing must register and log in to contact you via Facebook.

Source: Facebook

Ultimately, this is a necessary move for Facebook if it plans to divert more and more users away from the other leading social networking platforms (ahem, LinkedIn). As the note indicates, this is a configurable setting, which continues in Facebook’s tradition of offering the option for invisibility.

Technorati Tags: facebook, social+networking

In the last few days, we’ve seen some good activity around the video so it made sense to share it here again.

Technorati Tags: bluewhalelabs, f8, facebook, facebook+applications

Read “Twitter Channels, Hmm…”.

Technorati Tags: chris+messina, greg+narain, twitter

• Individual - the web of interests and needs held by each person
• Network - the new value created by shared spaces and experiences
• Marketplaces - the flow that is facilitated by networks converging

Our presentation has been in the side navigation for some time now. I’m embedding it right here.

However, I was reminded of this again, today, by a presentation given by Joshua Porter of Bokardo.com, as well as a post in response to Nick Carr:

First of all, the idea that we act in self-interest is not in any way novel as Davies suggests. In fact, it is patently obvious if you’ve ever spent any amount of time observing other people. The most interesting thing about this argument is that we’re having it at all…there is no question whatever that people act in their own self-interest. It is observable in all humans. Also, it is explicable in theory. One outcome of the Theory of Evolution is that those species that survive are the ones programmed to keep themselves and their close families safe. Self-interest is this survival instinct manifested. It is how we are programmed at a deep, deep level.

[…]

Second, Carr’s dichotomy (the one between “markets” and our “social lives”) is vaporware. To even think that efficiency in the marketplace is an intrinsic good is not only astounding, but offensive given the behavior of many companies in the world. Does not Carr see that markets affect the lives of people in the same way that any other social interaction would? Is it not clear that business is society, and society business?

Source, “Friday Rant: Are people self-interested?”, Bokardo.com

It’s a great rant and I recommend that you give a quick once over if you’re building or planning to build anything that’s inherently “social”.

Technorati Tags: bokardo, joshua+porter, social+architecture

We’ve gathered data from all the top apps on Facebook now that we’re one month into Platform, and one thing’s clear: Facebook applications have taken off like wildfire. In fact, to the tune of 65 million net application installs over the course of the past 30 days. That’s an average of 2.5 installed applications per every registered Facebook user. And I may even be missing some.

20 applications now sport over 1 million Facebook users. 35 more have over 100,000.

Source: InsideFacebook, “Facebook users add 65 million apps in first month - average of 2.5 per person”

While most are intrigued by the opportunity, it’s not entirely clear if the universe of applications will ultimately serve as a platform for doing business. Some companies, however, aren’t waiting to find out. So far, there have already been 2 acquisitions for Facebook applications. ReadWriteWeb outlines these purchases noting that, so far, the cited reasons are largely to acquire users or talent. The conclusion puts a finger on the pulse of this matter:

So will Facebook acquisitions continue? I think that’s probably highly likely. With more than 38,000 developers already using the Facebook Developer app (which helps you create applications for the platform), buying popular apps is a good way for companies looking to get into the Facebook ecosystem to screen developers. And with the Facebook platform continuing to grow in popularity among its rapidly expanding user base, it seems inevitable that companies will try to buy their way to the top, especially given the relatively cheap price of purchasing Facebook apps (Favorite Peeps, for example, was had for only just over US 4 cents per user).

Source: ReadWriteWeb, “Facebook Acquisitions: Fad or Proof of Platform Success?”

I’m not sure that I would expect the valuation for users to remain consistently low. If anything, would estimate that as the nature of applications evolve into, well, more traditional applications, and developers loose their stage fright regarding monetizing their actions, that the lifetime value of a user will increase significantly. I can say for sure we’re making that bet.

Technorati Tags: facebook applications, ilike, puppy, slide

Of course, getting that many “users” in that short a period of time is somewhat suspect, no matter how you count it. We’re more accustomed to this type of growth in things are are either highly fashionable (think Tamagachi, ipods) or highly utilitarian (think vaccines, technologies). In certain circles, software, services, and the combination of the two) are often trumpeted by waves of early adopters. It’s this particular pocket that’s most curious.

Paul Kedrosky raises the specter of this in his recent post, “Option F and the Facebook 500,000″:

Around this time last year Josh Kopelman came up with the idea of the Techcrunch chasm. The root idea is/was that too many companies were targeting the then-53,651 readers of Mike A’s popular Techcrunch blog. A good review in Techcrunch, as Josh pointed out, gets you 5-25k beta users, and then you’re stuck.

I’m wondering if something similar isn’t happening in Facebook. I keep hearing about companies that are exercising “Option F” and launching a Facebook version of their app, only to suddenly have 500,000 users. But for how long? I’m betting, pace the Techcrunch chasm, that those people are an ephemeral crew, and that they try pretty much anything, and then drop it again.

I see that behavior quite clearly in my Facebook news feed. People all add one app; people all drop that app. Repeat, repeat, repeat. This is not a mainstream audience, nor does it seem to have much permanence. It’s just tire-kickers and try-ers.

Source: Paul Kedrosky, “Option F and the Facebook 500,000″

Indeed, there probably is a great deal of tire-kicking going on with loads of applications, but the rate of decay is not clear. While it’s not a bad bet that something which grows with meteoric rates will burn back down to something much smaller over time, the unique circumstances of Facebook applications may work to preserve the scale. Specifically, while other applications build their audiences, they require that we, the user, go to a variety of different destinations to participate. With Facebook, we largely broadcast our usage and the stream of incidents that define our involvement. This town-sqaure, gossip-oriented model seem to create a different set of wrappers on how we approach our usage:

• You can be an early adopter by discovering and app first amongst your network of friends (a network you don’t need to invite over and over to prove you made a discovery).
• Your usage is not only informative, but competitive. When everyone sees as you do, they can learn quickly about what drives you. When groups of friends emulate, there’s often a bit of one-upsmanship to see who can find the more interesting resources to lasso into the mix or who can most cleverly make use of something already assigned a “purpose.”

• Your interest in a subject matter is perpetuated by your peers’ involvement and usage

I think with time we will know quite a bit more about the usage patterns and the usage intervals, but for now, it’s an interesting new pasture that we’ve been given to graze in.

Technorati Tags: f8, facebook, paul kedrosky