Gijs van Dam - Gijs's thoughts on the Social Web

Spare me yet another Quora clone

Gijs van Dam — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 09:48:21 +0000

While commenting on this Techcrunch article on yet another Quora clone nobody is waiting for, my comment turned out to be something of a blogpost, so why not suit the action to the word.

The problem I have with all those Quora type of services is that they are only useful for trivial bullshit questions I didn't want answered in the first place. Daft questions and even worse answers, you could probably have found within 10 seconds on Google, and you would have found better answers had you invested 30 seconds.

Useful questions, the type of questions people write blog posts or articles about to answer them insightfully, get answered by just using a "classic" search engine that takes you to the post/article.

I like social, but I don't see why a group of people that I accidentally follow would be better equipped to answer my questions, than a bazillion of scientists and experts that have their articles online, searchable by something we all thought was the best thing since sliced bread a few years ago, called Google.

By extension, Google's attempts to make the SERPs more social reduces the relevancy of their results.

So ASCII stupid questions, get stupid ANSI, and as a rule, the Social Web is perfect for that. But personally I like it better when that process takes place in my local pub. For intelligent answers I like to rely on Google classic.

What would you save from a burning internet?

Gijs van Dam — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 17:03:22 +0000

What would you snatch out of a burning house just before you ran out?

There was a time when whole tribes would have responded to that question that they would risk their lives to save the photo albums out off the conflagration. That was before digital photography, before all your photos were safe on Flickr.

@bindermichi probably thought he had his affairs in good order with more than 4,000 photos on Flickr, until the Flickr service desk accidentally deleted his account in a way that made it impossible to undo the mistake. There is no cure for immeasurable stupidity. Eventually it ended with a fizzle, when some thumbscrews were tightened on a number of programmers from Flickr as to prevent even worse damage to the reputation of Yahoo!, Flickr's parent company.

It's up for debate whether Yahoo! had done its best to restore the account, if @bindermichi had failed to mobilize the entire blogosphere. My guess is that he would have had to live with those 4 years pro-subscription, initially offered by Flickr. With that in mind, there is a lot to be said for requiring greater control and certainty over what you post online. How big and widely accepted a service like Flickr is, it stays, in a way, a single point of failure. Even if Flickr was designed well enough so that accounts are not directly completely removed, you remain at the mercy of the whims of a company that attaches, by definition, a different value to your profile and the data you store in it.

End of 2010 it was again Yahoo! that announced that the Delicious bookmarking site would be "sunsetted" in the near future. The pr machine of Yahoo came promptly to the rescue, issuing a statement in which it explained that this was to be interpreted as a search for a future outside of Yahoo! and that nobody needed to worry. The leaked slide and the bullshit-bingo press release were enough for me to look for a bookmark service that I currently have more confidence in.

You can not blame companies that evaluate their services in terms of profit and loss - and act accordingly - and not in terms of personal value that users attach to it. It would be naive to think otherwise. And because of this, users should demand that the service is designed in a way that protects your interests automatically without the operator of the service being the single point of failure.

For those with enough discipline, the ability to export a backup of your profile information regularly may be sufficient. An option that Delicious offers. For me that wouldn't be remotely sufficient, since I'm not one of this group of disciplined people. I want an opportunity where I do not have to think about making a backup. I want integration with Dropbox.

Dropbox is the more than brilliant service to synchronize files across multiple computers. Everything you put in your Dropbox folder, gets synchronized through the cloud (Dropbox uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) with all other computers you've installed Dropbox on. Dropbox has an API that allows integration. Dropbox would be ideally suited to integrate with services like Flickr and Delicious, but also with Facebook. Imagine that everything you liked and shared can be found in a simple feed one or more computers you have installed Dropbox on, regardless of whether you've found the time to make a backup.

The creators of Frenzy were probably on this line of thought. Frenzy is a social network based entirely on JSON feeds that exist within your Dropbox folder. Your network consists of the people with whom you share your Frenzy folder. Sharing a folder is a feature of Dropbox anyway, so besides the Frenzy app you need nothing more than a Dropbox account. Unfortunately the Frenzy app is only available for the Mac.

Frenzy clearly shows that more and more people are starting to worry about the mountain of information we publish online and where, apart from all the privacy issues, we have too little control over. Frenzy is designed from the onset to give that control, and more online services should follow their example. A profile that lives on your computer, can not be removed by a service desk employee who hasn't had its cup of coffee yet. If your computer crashes, you just have to install Dropbox on your new computer and all profile data is neatly synchronized. If you don't like where a company is going, nothing stands in your way to take your complete profile to another provider of the same type of service.

That last advantage is obviously also the catch, because the lack of portability of your profile is an important part of the business model of social networks. The cost of switching is so great in a social network like Facebook and those costs only increase as you use more of their services. Because of that the Facebooks of this world are not inclined to make portability intrinsic to their networks.

But there's a growing awareness among consumers that they are trapped in information silos in which they are at the mercy of the whims of the silo owner. In time there will be more alternatives, like Frenzy, where control over your own profile and your own data is rooted in their design. Dave Winer is one of the people engaged in building and writing about such alternatives. About his minimal blogging tool, Radio2, he writes: "The important thing is that you and your ideas live outside the silo and are ported into it at your pleasure." Perhaps he says it even better in his post on the topic of Dropbox: "There's a new kind of software coming online. Just beginning to see the outlines of it. [...] It feels like a new Internet is springing to life inside a corner of the Internet. It's like opening a jewel box and finding a universe in there. "

If anything, this new Internet ensures that if your house is on fire, you just have to get out as fast as possible.

There's no such thing as a paradigm shift

Gijs van Dam — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 08:07:13 +0000

In the sixties the philosopher Thomas Kuhn came up with the idea that science doesn't progress gradually by a linear and continuous accumulation of bits of knowledge, but that regularly, scientific revolutions broke out that drastically threw over the dominant theories within a certain field of science. Kuhn coined the term "paradigm shifts" for these revolutions.

According to Kuhn these paradigm shifts took place when the dominant theory, or the central paradigm as he called it, was in crisis. A crisis consisted of a growing amount of observations that were irreconcilable with what the central paradigm dictated. Those anomalies made it necessary for a new central paradigm to be constructed that dealt with both the old observations and the anomalies.

When such a thing happened, science acted like a person who looks at one of those dual-aspect optical illusions, like the picture that is both an old woman and a young girl. The interpretation of such an image suddenly snaps from one way of viewing it to the other way of viewing it and it's impossible to see both interpretations at the same time.

Kuhn's ideas were really popular in the sixties, but soon encountered some problems. For starters, nobody had ever observed a paradigm shift. Even Galileo and Newton turned out to be revisionists rather than revolutionaries. Before soon every theory with the smallest of impacts on science was called a paradigm shift, which made the term meaningless. Kuhn's observations where interesting and of importance, but in the end his model had to be replaced by a model that emphasized the gradual development of science. Eventually even Kuhn had to admit that his original model was too limited.

But the damage was done, an empty term without meaning was born. Empty terms without meaning are the realm of marketing managers, and they dived into it like maggots into a carcass. This led Larry Trask to urge never to us the term again in his book "Mind the Gaffe". But if we search on the terms "social media" and "paradigm shift" we can easily assess that people didn't listen to Larry.

The news surrounding social media has stripped the term paradigm shift of any meaning as far as this was still possible, to the point were it physically hurts to see it used. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Social Media in general: It's not a revolution, it's not a paradigm shift. These are the last ones of a series of gradual and connected developments that originated from the construction of ARPANET. Undoubtedly even the engineers from which brains ARPANET sprouted, gradually built upon what they knew.

Labeling every development with any impact on the web as being a paradigm shift or a revolution, doesn't do justice to the context of those developments. The historian Robert Darnton wrote: "The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet." It's even worse: "The marvels of communication technology in the present follow each other in such a rapid pace that we already have seem to forget where we were 10 years ago. This can only lead to really bad decision making on the use of social media.

First things first. How do you pronounce Gijs van Dam

Gijs van Dam — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 08:37:58 +0000

If you're not Dutch, my name can be hard to pronounce, especially my first name. Let's explain first that weird i and j in my name. That's a digraph, a pair of letters used to write one distinct sound, and it's common in the Dutch language. The ij is often considered to be the 25th letter of the Dutch alphabet and in some fonts is represented by a separate character. So in a way my first name consists of three letters.

So far for the theory, now for the practice. My first name is pronounced a little bit like the English guys, only the g is pronounced as if you clear your throat. It sounds a little bit like the Spanish j in Juan or the Scottish ch in Loch Nes. It's that typical sound the Dutch make, that makes our language sound as if we're always quarreling with each other.

The second word in my name, van, isn't my second name, but it's part of my last name. It's an infix meaning of or from and should be ignored when sorting alphabetically on last name. So you would find me under the D. You see infixes often concatenated with the last name in American family names, like Vanderbilt. Immigrants in the New World often anglicized their names, and concatenating the infix with your last name was one way of doing that.

Van is pronounced like the English van (meaning truck) but with the a pronounced as the a in star but shorter.

My last name is Dam as in Hoover Dam and not only does it have the same meaning as the English word dam (not surprisingly many Dutch names have to do with sea or water and have meanings like dike, dam, dune or polder). It's also pronounced in the same way, but with the same adjustment we made previously for the infix. So the a should be pronounced as the a in star but shorter.

And there you go: Gijs van Dam

Gijs's brainfarts with regard to the Social Web

Gijs van Dam — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:22:35 +0000

This is a new blog and as of today, the 14th of March 2011, I will confide my thoughts on the Social Web to the internets. Not because someone is waiting for it, but because I would like to share them with people and because I was not able to do so anywhere else. Besides that, my ideas are highly likely to evolve and my opinions are work in progress, so I hope that the discussions on this blog with those who apparently were waiting just a little bit on what I had to report will compel me to review my ideas.

To a certain extent this blog also arose from dissatisfaction with the reporting on the Social Web in general. It's often too shallow for my taste. There's more to the Social Web than the number of members or the valuation of a Social Network. By saying that I'm creating high expectations and it remains to be seen if I can do any better.

I will try to be more profound in particular on the following three subjects:

The functionality of the current Social Networks
The privacy issues of the Social Web
The history of the Social Web

With those three subjects, and whatever comes in between, I will try to present the image that I currently have of the Social Web, namely not that it's bad, but that it could be so much better.