Many have listed their reasoning for Twitter’s ultimate demise ranging from spam, to lack of monetization, to a steep dropoff of new users, but I believe the best argument has been articulated in various forms by Dave Winer and Marc Canter who have been saying for a while that the service Twitter offers should not be controlled by a single company and in fact cannot be controlled by a single company long term. A single owner creates a bottleneck, fail whales, and stifled innovation. A communication platform such as this will be subsumed into the web as a distributed service. There is no one Email Company, no RSS Company — these are distributed services that interact through standard interfaces.


What if every email in the world was forced to go through a single company? A single bottleneck? It would make no sense. Within a couple of years a standardized set of protocols will develop such that there will be thousands of Twitter clearinghouses through which messages travel — with robust new features and use cases that haven’t been imagined yet.

“Take a look at internet history: News Groups (NNTP), Email (SMTP/POP3), Web Pages (HTTP), Voice over IP, Video Conference, etc. All have standards and generally operate in a distributed fashion.” (Via Sumolabs)

Facebook has already moved in the direction of testing Twitter-like status updates in that one can open up their updates to everyone on an individual post basis. Add the ability to follow other people’s public status updates without requiring a reciprocal relationship, and most of Twitter’s utility disappears.

The original innovator is rarely on top when the market shakes out, so Twitter better sell out to a larger company soon or evolve to accept the future open standards.

A further opening of the system through open standards (extensively laid out by Marc Canter) will pave the way for the next incarnation of posts of status updates, photos, videos, links, etc — the concept of Twitter which will live on. This type of communication, asymmetric following, and sharing will not be going away. It will evolve and expand through thousands of decentralized services… one of which will be Twitter.

The reason for Twitter’s downfall is a post from: co>innovative

Once you know what a ripple looks like, and the content of that ripple, you can track it. And you start to see the others. And eventually, you start to identify the ripples that preceded a discrete event instead of the ones that followed. (Via OccasRazr)

Item 1: Google Search Trends and Insights allow you to enter any search term and see how it has relatively trended over the last 5 years. Beanie babies (why beanie babies? why NOT beanie babies!?) for example, had been on the steady decline [thankfully] until recently when they got a huge spike when Teenie Beanie Babies were brought back (whatever that means). The highest search volume coming from Reston, VA. Of mild interest unless you are a seller or manufacturer of beanie babies, then it becomes massively important. If I were looking to start a beanie baby store, Reston, VA would be at the top of my list for potential locations.

Large companies would pay handsomely for an up to the minute trending of their relevant keywords. Imagine being able to have a week or two of advance notice that a product is about to hit it big? I would guess the evidence in searches would predate the data on the ground by weeks or months.

And, what about as a measure of the success of a branding campaign? Companies could track exactly how much of an effect a campaign is having. Are people searching for the brand more? Has one campaign been more successful than others? Did one particular brand exposure have a disproportionate effect?

Item 2: Google Finance Domestic Trends Indexes These track search terms related to various industries. Combined with data on consumer price indexes and consumer confidence, one might be able to predict a rebound in a particular industry. After all, financial markets are built on the confidence and sentiment of the universe of investors and if you can wedge yourself in the time between the upswell of negative/positive feeling about an industry and the increase/decrease of an index, you can rule the world.

(Here’s a tip: the lowest volume of searches around airlines and travel have occurred at about December 15th each year over the last 5. I’m guessing if you want to reserve a room or a plane ticket, that is the time to do it. That also happens to be a good time to buy a car.)

Item 3: Google Flu Trends. Google has “found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms” and can predict flu outbreaks 1 to 2 weeks earlier than the CDC and is 97% to 98% accurate. (This becomes less useful when cases are in the hundreds as opposed to thousands, becoming far more valuable in an epi- or pandemic.)

As Hal Varian and Hyunyoung Choi (Google’s Chief economist and Decision Support Engineering Analyst) pointed out they are currently only focusing on predicting the present, but given the mounting data available, the diverse channels and types of data available, and the identification of significantly correlated variables in models they will be able to predict the future. (Here is a model that uses Google trend data to improve predictions of changes in credit levels.)

Search can be an early warning of people’s shifting interests and intentions, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. However, the accuracy and importance of these predictions will be ever increasing given:

• the increasing number of people online
• improvements in sentiment analysis and scoring
• increasing importance of real time search (i.e. Twitter search)
• their ability to bring in data from other services such as Gmail, blogs, and news sources

Google Predicts the Present… and soon The Future is a post from: co>innovative

I put the idea on the back-burner and, thankfully, Kickstarter read my mind and began working on what they launched a few months ago which is an almost perfect manifestation of what I had envisioned. (I also wrote a general overview of crowdfunding with a ton of examples back in June, 08. Here are more examples over at the crowdfunding wiki. If you don’t like the term crowdfunding, perhaps you would prefer “collective ex-ante fundraising”.) Creators have long had the option of posting a paypal link and begging for money, but this provides the infrastructure and eases the process along with much more powerful tracking tools available.

How it works:

1. Post a specific, potential project, listing available pre-order/pledge levels
2. Set an amount to be raised and a deadline
3. Promote to your fans and wealthy friends.
4. If you hit the amount raised before the deadline the project is a go, otherwise, you don’t get the money.

Check out what appears to be the largest fund-raising projects so far: a book called Designing Obama. Looking to raise $65K and so far have made it to $42K.

Now, there is a certain amount of trust necessary in this process. Kickstarter writes: “Project creators are wholly responsible for their promises. Kickstarter is a venue, like eBay or Etsy.” In the early stages, I would imagine this won’t be a much of a difficulty, but it will be something to look out for. But, in the end, most of the people pledging will either know or know of the person/group and will have some kind of existing relationship with them. That or the projects themselves will be so clever or worthwhile that people with no connection will pledge as well.

So, how is this an innovation?
Fans/customers:

Feel a part of the process, a deeper connection with the project creator.
Can help make a project possible.

Project creators:

Get access to capital and some way to survive while they work
Get real feedback on the desire of supporters for a particular project, measured in cold cash
Decrease the risk of a project: if you have essentially pre-sold the first run of your project, you’re much farther along

Just as microfinance provider Kiva allows for the direct, small, impactful loan between individual and entrepreneur, so does this allow for the same in the form of a pledge/preorder.

It’s just amazing when something of value catches on and people pile on to provide funds for a worthwhile project that would likely have never seen the light of day, but for crowdfunding. And the best part is, usually, you have something to show for it: a book, an album, an event to go to, or a good deed done.

Need money for your project? Crowdfunding comes of age with Kickstarter is a post from: co>innovative

If you want to design a product and have it built you currently have three options — short of contracting with a manufacturer which is complex and expensive.

Slap a graphic design on a commodity product: You might be familiar with Zazzle and Cafepress which allow anyone to upload a design and sell physical products, but these services are limited in that you are stuck simply printing a graphic design on a preselected commodity product which is then shipped from a central location.
Design an object from flat materials that are laser cut. Ponoko is the best example of this. You can choose from a whole host of materials. Designers post designs, Ponoko handles the sale, cuts the material, and either sends it to the seller or directly to the buyer. (Can I interest you in some biohazard coasters, perhaps?)
Design an object in 3D and have it “printed”. Shapeways takes 3D models and creates physical objects from them. (Or would you prefer a small skeleton sculpture?)

Each of these services have been available in the past to people and companies with significant resources, but never before have they all been available and affordable for normal folk. And now, ShopBot and Ponoko have partnered to create 100KGarages. Ponoko is supplying it’s online “click to make” system and ShopBot, which makes CNC routers, brings the distributed digital fabricators who are in 54 countries around the world. Products designed anywhere, printed wherever you are, in runs as small as 1 unit.

This allows for designers and builders to essentially sell a product before it exists! Instead of design->prototype->test->manufacture->market->retail->Sale, the process can look like this: design->market->Sale->manufacture.

The great innovation here is not only the atomization of the process (you can design a product and put it out in the world to see if someone else wants to build it or you can just build other people’s designs) but at the same time the loose coupling of the process (if you want you can take it from start to finish using several services that are tied together). The basic infrastructure is there.

For now it will be relegated largely to hobbyists and, no, it can be expensive (3D printing in particular), but I would imagine within a few years we may see a successful product that comes about through this loosely coupled chain of services… a design student in India uses a free online design tool… a retail site such as Ponoko hosts the design… a buyer in the NY purchases… a 3D printer NY that has the correct materials prints the object and ships it to the buyer.

UPDATE: A few weeks after 100KGarages launched, a similar idea was introduced through CloudFab.com, “a central marketplace to connect buyers and sellers” of 3D printed parts and objects. So, for now, think of this as very similar to 100KGarages, with the main point of differentiation being that CloudFab is focused on 3D printing, and 100K Garages is focused on 2D materials. More info at MadeForOne

Distributed design and manufacturing is here; or How I correctly predicted the future… is a post from: co>innovative

To illustrate, my personal Internet media habits consist of publishing:

Status updates/links: Twitter, Facebook
Articles: here at Co-innovative
Bookmarks: delicious
Photos: Flickr, Facebook
Email: Gmail

Comments: rarely.

And consuming — nee devouring! — content from:

10 news/tech sites I check regularly
Google Reader where I subscribe to 150 less frequently updated sites that I don’t want to miss a word of
Facebook
Twitter
Email
Youtube, Vimeo, Hulu
Podcasts

And I have tried to limit this list, while more heavy users would list dozens of sites.

What doesn’t exist yet is a useful, intuitive dashboard that allows for digital lifestyle aggregation and seamless lifestreaming: one place to go in which I can easily interact with, consume from, and publish to all of these disparate services through the use of various media. It may end up being impossible to handle all in one place, but who knows.

The problem is some content I don’t want to miss — certain feeds, contacts from friends, emails — while other content I am happy to look in on occasionally to see the latest stuff — Twitter, links posted by friends, news sites. On the flip side, when I’m posting content sometimes I want to share it with the world at large — this article — other times I want to share it with just my family or just my friends — Facebook. Throwing in another wrench is the fine line between business and professional related online interactions and personal interactions.

It’s a confusing mess involving a ton of different sites. Just posting photos is annoying: “I want to post this for just my family as my friends will be bored to tears.” “One of my friends in these photos isn’t on Facebook…” What comes along with this is a certain amount of inexplicable, ridiculous anxiety; “Am I missing something awesome?” “I better document this and remember to post it.” “I’ve got to get through my emails and my RSS feeds.” While there is some inherent attraction to capturing and aggregating everything digital in your daily life from books you rate highly on Goodreads to a Flip video, there is no easy way to set it all up in a nice looking centralized site, though Posterous is pretty close. But really, is it of value to anyone to see EVERYTHING you do? Few people care and they only care to a point. It might be satisfying for you to see and to look back occasionally on what was going on at a particular time, but that’s about it.

Selectivity in publishing will make the online experience better for everyone.

Facebook is getting close to solving some of these problems but still has a variety of issues. Further, a centralized service is not in our best interests as users; content and connections should flow freely through standards based connections that allow for multiple front and back ends and mashups. Decentralized, distributed services wouldn’t be beholden to outages nor would one company have all the power and it would spur innovation to boot.

Dave Winer and Marc Canter have been saying similar things since about the Clinton administration from the standpoint of infrastructure and connections while Steve Rubel has been more recently discussing it from a publishing and consumption lifestream perspective.

All of this ignores the higher level issue of whether one should even be doing any of this, whether one should disengage more fully and focus on what is really important in their personal, professional, and creative lives — a la Tim Ferriss and Zen Habits. For me, I think I have found a good balance of checking in when I can but unplugging the rest of the time — notwithstanding the occasional marathon sessions.

My prediction: services will become increasingly open until information is exchanged between services via standards that will allow for the type of innovation, reliability, and decentralization to produce a better, more coherent experience online.

The Fractured Digital Life: How many more social and media sharing sites can we handle? is a post from: co>innovative

You may not have heard about the Dunbar number, but in essence it is a “a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationship”. Developed by a fellow named Dunbar, as luck would have it, he came up with about 150 — but the number swings from 100 to 230 with 95% confidence intervals.

Regardless of the exact number, we as humans are limited by our neocortex to hold a certain number of social relationships with any significance in our head at once.

Dunbar’s surveys of village and tribe sizes also appeared to approximate this predicted value, including 150 as the estimated size of a neolithic farming village; 150 as the splitting point of Hutterite settlements; 200 as the upper bound on the number of academics in a discipline’s sub-specialization; 150 as the basic unit size of professional armies in Roman antiquity and in modern times since the 16th century; and notions of appropriate company size.

Through my semi-coherent logic, it seems to follow that a Communist group in which everyone knows everyone else and in which the contributions, points of view, and needs of everyone are understood, the group can prosper. Bureaucratic layers are not present and people are on generally equal footing, all working towards the group’s survival. This hypothetical, isolated group falls apart when it expands beyond this point.

And to the main point: would this not argue for companies or operating groups to remain under 150 or 200 people? If a company or group of people who have to work together grows beyond that point, the friction and interaction costs become too great, and people fall outside of your Monkeysphere. The amount of social “grooming” (attention and communication between group members) becomes too great. The center cannot hold. The group (whether a commune or business) has an incentive to stay together and work towards a common goal of survival — actual survival in the case of the commune; marketplace survival in the case of the business. Christopher Allen sees the number for active creative and technical groups as “somewhere between 25-80, but is best around 45-50″

We covered a case in school in which a successful manufacturing company capped it’s plants to 150 people. Once a plant got above 150 they would open a new plant, thereby keeping each group under 150. (Of course, I can’t find the case, but the general thrust of the above is correct.)

Whether the Dunbar number is correct or useful within a business context, there is something to the concept of considering the impact of a group growing too large. The number of people in your team, company, society dictate the best operating approach, as the dynamics change dramatically based on the situation.

Pay attention to the tribes within your organization; understand the monkeysphere.

The magic Dunbar number: Why Communist societies and operating groups should be fewer than 150 people is a post from: co>innovative

If I got better at working the system I could probably kick the earnings up to $3. Assuming a 50 hour work week, I could make up to $600 a month, $7200 a year. Of course, I would have long before gone completely insane and been evicted.

So, what kind of work did I do?

Subscribed to a YouTube channel. $0.01.
Reviewed website layout and copy. $0.05.
Evaluated whether 100 sites were phishing or not. $1.
Transcribed audio, a difficult-to-hear 5 minute interview. $2.

The Original Mechanical Turk

The Mechanical Turk Experiment: How I made $2.18 an hour – and how you can too! is a post from: co>innovative

Many people mistakenly think that open source projects are emergent, self-organized and democratic. The truth is just the opposite: most are run by a benevolent dictator or two. What makes successful open source projects is leadership, plain and simple. One or two people articulate a vision, start building towards it and bring others on board with specific tasks and permissions.

Remember this concept if you ever decide to run a crowdsourcing, idea generation, or co-creation system with your customers — or anyone, for that matter. Simply making the tools available will do not good. Nor will a vague sense of who is in charge. Central leadership is still necessary. Enterprises shouldn’t believe that putting a project out in the wild without definitive leadership and support will produce anything of value. Everything needs a champion to drive it forward.

Simple enough, but the real value I see created in what I write about here has sprung out of a – sometimes hypothetical – balancing and blending of external inputs or votes or intellectual property or funding or designs with a strong plan, leadership, and vision. That includes rejecting bad ideas. Saying NO to your customers when you feel strongly about it (37 Signals’ favorite past-time.). Retaining focus on what is important and getting rid of the extraneous.

Essentially: co-creation doesn’t take the work out of what you do but it can enhance it and help you more deeply understand the people you serve.

Open source succeeds under a benevolent dictatorship — and so do co-creation projects is a post from: co>innovative

1. Centralized aggregators: Get Satisfaction, Suggestion Box, FeVote, Featurelist

   Anyone can start a product or company page on these sites to submit ideas, suggestions, or complaints which are then voted up or down, Digg-style, and commented on. Companies pay for access to data, more powerful features, and the ability to “claim” pages and register official employee moderators. Similar to review sites like Epinions, the conversation will happen on these sites with or without you.

2. Tool providers: SalesForce Ideas Management, Uservoice, IdeaScale, Get Satisfaction, Kindling.
   

   These systems provide similar functionality to the above sites but are controlled by and run by the companies themselves. They include features such as ratings or up/down votes, moderation, limiting the number of votes per user, running time-limited contests, limiting access to certain groups, and automatically searching for duplicate ideas during idea submission.

3. Integrated innovation management suites: Imaginatik, Brainbank, SalesForce Ideas Management, BrightIdea, Spigit.
   

   The idea management portion of these suites generally have more robust capabilities such as weighting the contribution of particular users according to expertise and trust, creating virtual currency systems, providing enterprise class security, and customizing information captured. By integrating idea capture and prioritization into a more robust and sophisticated system, companies can then evaluate the costs of ideas, put them through formal review processes, and track performance of ideas from conception to execution.

So go check out the post: Get Satisfaction Leads Among Idea Aggregators I’m pretty happy with the end result, enjoyed the process, and hope to write another post for RWW on the tool providers soon.

Guest Author Post on ReadWriteWeb: Get Satisfaction Leads Among Idea Aggregators is a post from: co>innovative

(Odd side-note: I spotted Clay Shirky (about half way down the page) among those who participated in a project my girlfriend ran as part of her art collective’s Windows Brooklyn project last summer.)

In a video and transcript from last April – yes, it takes me a while to process and write about things at times – Clay lays it out thus:

A British historian argued that the critical technology in the Industrial Revolution was Gin. The changes were so rapid and disruptive that the British went on a bender for a generation.

“And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today.”

The Sitcom was the US’ palliative after World War II. We suddenly found ourselves with free time and disposable income, and we started watching a lot of TV. A lot.

“And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.”

My favorite part of his thinking: He was talking to a TV journalist about the recent rash of conversation surrounding Pluto’s planetary classification on Wikipedia to which she responded: “Where do people find the time?” His response:

“No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

He estimates we expend

“About 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year … watching television… I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter. I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing.

Thus, the free time and brain time outside of work remains, the question is what percentage of it will be occupied by the completely unproductive versus the semi- and extremely productive? An example of a successful use of brain time, in this case for the common good, comes from InnoCentive where about 20% of their projects are non-profit. Uncompensated. Using people’s free time.

Going forward, the big thing will be experimenting and figuring out what works in collective work and production. As I have covered here, experiments abound, some successful, many not. There is a long way to go, but as Clay says, this is not something society will grow out of, but something society will grow into.

Cognitive Surplus. Love it.

Cognitive Surplus: What are you going to do with yours? Clay Shirky explains… is a post from: co>innovative