Disruptive Conversations

If any of you reading this are in the Vermont area, next Monday (May 7th) here in Burlington, the Publicity Club of New England is hosting : "Green Mountain Media: Panel Discussion and Networking Event" featuring six writers and editors talking about trends in today's media.  The panelists are:

• Mike Townsend, editor, Burlington Free Press
• Shay Totten, editor, Vermont Guardian
• Joe Healy, editor, Vermont Magazine
• Peter Oliver, editor, Ski Vermont Magazine
• Peggy Shinn, ski and travel freelance writer
• Sarah Tuff, freelance writer for National Geographic Adventure, Men's Journal, New York Times

Sounds like it should be a great event and if you are interested, you can still register.  Sadly, I'm otherwise committed that night, but I look forward to future events in our area.

"Email? I only use that when I have to contact old people!"
      - frequent quote these days from teenagers

When I started using "the Net" back in mid-1980s, the world of "e-mail" was an incredibly fractured place.  There were the big services of CompuServe, GEnie, The Source, The Well... there were the thousands of small BBS's... there were "corporate services" like MCI Mail and IBM PROFS... and there were all sorts of others services in the middle (my particular focus in those days was EcoNet, given my involvement then in environmental activism).  They all shared one thing in common:

They were all walled gardens.

Users on the system could only e-mail other users on the same system.  CompuServe users with their (then) numeric accounts could only talk to other CS users.  GEnie users to GEnie users, MCI Mail to MCI Mail... and so on.

But a funny thing happened along the garden path... the walls started to slowly break down.  UUCP started interconnecting UNIX systems.  FidoNet started linking together BBS systems.  X.400 came out and had corporate interest.  And then along came SMTP, which ultimately became the "one email protocol to rule them all" (paralleling the emergence of TCP/IP and the "Internet" as the dominant network in the midst of all the network walled gardens). 

While the fight against the interconnection continued for quite a long time, especially with some of the largest services continuing to try to go it alone, eventually all the services succumbed to the inevitable and provided SMTP gateways that allowed their members to send messages to everyone else. 

All was good - and everyone could send messages to everyone else.

However... a curious thing seems to be happening more and more on this thing we call the Internet.  Increasingly, our messages are NOT moving over what is traditionally known as "email" but instead are migrating to other services.

You could argue that this started some time ago with the walled gardens of instant messaging.  Users of AIM, Yahoo!Messenger, MSN/WLM, Jabber, Skype, IRC, etc. all can have really nice conversations with each other... but no one else.   As IM has continued to grow in usage and replace "traditional" email (which we could argue about why but I personally think it has a lot to do with "presence", but let's save that for another post another day), we've moved to a different messaging paradigm where we write shorter, quicker messages.  And we've also become quite comfortable with our IM walled gardens.  It's routine for people to run several different IM clients (or use something like GAIM that works with multiple services).  Looking down at my task bar, I count 4 IM clients, and I know there are 3 more on my laptop that I could be running.  Now, the walls of IM are slowly breaking down... there's "federation" now between MSN/WLM and Yahoo.  GoogleTalk can work with Jabber.  Other interconnection services are appearing.

But looking beyond IM, so many conversations now are moving to "social networking services".  The quote I started this article with did not come from any particular place, but it's the kind of thing that I've seen repeated again and again in any interview with teenagers (or even those in their 20s).  The service we know as "email" is today just a "communication mode of last resort" or "least common denominator" to communicate with those too old or clueless. All meaningful communication occurs within the worlds of MySpace, Facebook or any one of a zillion other websites that seem to be popping up on a daily basis. 

And all those sites are chasing each other.  Facebook started out as something of a "college/university version of MySpace"... now it's added "professional" settings like LinkedIn.  LinkedIn has gone the other way in adding "college" features to attract the college/university crowd.   Orkut started out as more of a dating site and then added other fields and settings. MySpace continues adding new features.  Not a day goes by when there isn't some notice about a new service that has been launched.

Even Twitter, which I personally use more as a micro-blogging platform, is used as a messaging platform by many.  And the "status" format of Twitter can be found in Facebook as well as newer services like Jaiku.

What do they all have in common?  Simple:

They are all walled gardens.

Each one is a messaging world unto itself.  Facebook users can only see messages from other Facebook users - and only generally when logged into the site.  Ditto LinkedIn.... Xing... MySpace... and others.  Twitter allows the public viewing of messages, but you can also change it to give only updates to friends.  (To "reply" in Twitter, of course, one would need to be a member... and also be "followed" by the person you are replying to.)  Sites like YouTube and Frappr blur the lines by providing messaging as well.

The result, of course, is that like running multiple IM clients, we all have multiple social networking accounts.

How many do you have?

For me, I can remember at least:  LinkedIn, Xing, Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Twitter, ecademy...  There's probably a dozen others where I signed up to try it out and then forgot about it.  In each one, I can send and receive messages to and from the other members.  I can post updates and see messages from my "friends".

Interestingly, most all of these sites fall back on that "least common denominator" of good old e-mail to let me know that I have messages waiting for me.  I have to go back to those sites, of course, to read the messages.  Yes, some sites do updates via SMS and some let you subscribe via RSS, but generally you have to go back into the site.

The other intriguing difference is that within those sites, you can generally only see messages from the people you choose to see.  Within Facebook or Twitter, you only see updates from people who you have added as a friend.  Your friends or contacts can send you messages in many services, but others can't until they are your friend.

We've gone from the closed communities of email services to the complete openness of Internet e-mail and now seem to be returning back to those gated communities, with email/SMS helping keep us aware of updates.  Given the amount of spam plaguing email, this may in part a reaction and a desire for purer message flow.

So how do you communicate with others within this space?   Or stay up on what someone is doing?

It's not enough even to follow someone's blog anymore, because they may be posting more updates to their Twitter, Facebook or other account.

Given that email may not be the best way, how do you best reach someone?  Which IM service?  Which social networking site?  Which ones do they use?  Which ones do they monitor the most?

In which walled garden do they spend most of their time?

Registration for Podcamp Europe (June 12-14, Stockholm, Sweden) seems to be going well... 78 people currently registered, with what looks to be quite an interesting range of people there.   Of course, there still need to be more sessions, but those will come as the time gets closer I am sure.

My primary purpose of travelling to Stockholm, of course, is Spring VON Europe where I will be speaking on VoIP security on a panel moderated by my good friend and colleague Martyn Davies. I'm looking forward to meeting a good number of folks there and hearing some of the sessions.

As my schedule and meetings allow, I'm also looking forward to visiting Podcamp Europe (as I know, is Martyn).  In the spirit of things I naturally put myself down for a session or two and will fit those in somewhere around my VON schedule.   Should definitely be a interesting time.

If you are in Stockholm (or can easily get there), do check out Podcamp Europe.  Registration is free and based on recent Podcamp events will no doubt be a very useful and enjoyable experience.

The news in the VoIP part of the blogosphere over the weekend was that Jan Geirnaert was shutting down www.skype-watch.com and www.skype-gadgets.com blogs.  Well, to be more precise, he was stopping the use of those two domains.  His weblog continues, just at his original domain name.

Blog reaction was quick, especially after Techmeme pointed to Phil Wolff's article.   I intended to write on the issue, but just didn't have the time, so let me point you to those who did write on it:

• Phil Wolff, Skype Journal: "Skype silences Alpha-blogger"
• Alec Saunders: "Alpha blogger silenced himself"
• Robert Scoble: "Lawyers at Skype bring negative PR to Skype"
• Andy Abramson: "The Right Hand and the Left Hand"
• Russell Shaw "Skype legal eagle puts the slam down on a Skype ally" (includes text of letter from Skype attorney to Jan)
• VoIP Now: "Skype censors blogger?"
• Barlow Kreener, WHYDOM: "Skype Trademark Squabble with an Analyst"

Jan, naturally, continues to write on the issue.

My own take - and I should note that I've been a regular reader of Jan's and have valued many of the links he has provided over the past while:

• It was very appropriate for Jan to contact Skype asking about use of their brand on a promotional product (chopsticks) for his websites.
• It was very appropriate (and predictable) for Skype to indicate that they could NOT allow the use of their brand on promotional products for web sites that they don't control.  They have to protect their brand.
• It's not entirely clear to me that Jan had to stop using his domains, but that was his choice and I can certainly understand why he did so given the full text of Skype's letter.
• Regardless, it certainly wasn't the smoothest of PR moves by Skype.  Their letter could have been a bit less harsh.
• It's a good lesson that companies need to remember that they are in an "always on the record" world where bloggers may just go off and write about them.
• It's another good lesson in why you should never register domains that have someone else's brand in them!

Will Skype's lawyers send out more such letters?   Certainly.  They have to defend their brand and mark.  It's understandable or else someone out there will say or do things that reflect negatively on their brand.  Protection of the brand is part of their job.   Could this have been handled differently?  Certainly.  

It's interesting, too, to think of the impact of electronic communication on this case.  In the "old days", a company's legal firm or dept. would send out a snail-mail "cease-and-desist" letter.  Many such letters have turned into PR issues in newspapers or other media, but usually not verbatim.  Perhaps someone might scan or OCR it and post it online, but probably not.  However, in this case the "letter" was sent out via email and could immediately be posted to a weblog in its entirety.   Making that communication now visible to the entire global internet.  And so a letter out of Legal rapidly becomes a PR issue...  ah, the "fun" of the online world.

UPDATE 4 May 07:It turns out there is now a setting in your LinkedIn account where you can return to requiring an email address.

So will we all now be spammed (more than before) by LinkedIn connection requests? 

I've been a LinkedIn user since about 2004 or so and have found it quite useful, primarily to stay in touch with friends and former colleagues as we all change and evolve over time.  But one of the things that I personally liked about LinkedIn was the fact that in order to add someone as a connection, you had to know that person's email address.  A simple thing, yet one way to increasing the level of trust within the LinkedIn network and preventing a degree of spam.  You couldn't just add anyone - you had to at least know their email address.

Now there were problems, naturally.  Those of us who publicly post an email address on blogs, websites, etc., have always been subject to people we don't know who would send LinkedIn connection invitations.  Also a certain class of LinkedIn users who really focused on estabilishing the most connections simply put their email address in their publicly visibile LinkedIn profile name, thus allowing anyone to defeat the email address requirement and request a connection.    And certainly I found myself frustrated by finding ex-colleagues in LinkedIn, but having no current email address to easily use to connect with them.

The more "pure" LinkedIn approach to the latter issue would simply be to send a connection request to the ex-colleague by way of one of your connections.  I actually did this in several cases and it generally worked fine.  But this really only worked if the person you were using as the relay was a frequent LinkedIn user and would pass along the request with some degree of speed. Otherwise, it might take some time - or never get there (as two of mine never did). 

LinkedIn also attempted to make this easier with their "Introductions" feature, where you could send an "Introduction" directly to someone without knowing their address or using someone as a relay.  As a (free) basic user you got 5 of these "Introductions" that you could use at any one time - or you could upgrade (as shown on right) to get more Introductions.  I also did use this service as a way to connect to an ex-colleague and it worked fine.

However, while LinkedIn had this requirement to establish a connection, competitor Xing (formerly OpenBC) did not... and then of course Facebook and MySpace do not, either.   With a zillion new social networking services seeming to be announced each week, I suppose it was inevitable that this email address requirement would come to be seen as a barrier and was perhaps impacting LinkedIn's take-up rate.

In any event, the email address requirement seems to be completely gone today.

Maybe it's a glitch, but just this morning I accepted a LinkedIn invitation and, as I often do, browsed the person's connections to see if I knew anyone.  I did, and so I viewed the profiles and clicked on the "add this person as a connection" link that appeared on screen after the text "Do you know this person?"  I did this three times.

It was only then that I realized that I had never provided any email addresses.  My invitations just went off.  Thinking it was an error, I looked up two ex-colleagues whose email addresses I no longer have and sent them invitations.  Same thing.  No email address required.

On the one hand, I don't mind the change since it does make it easier to connect with people - and all the other services don't impose that requirement.  But the other part of me says... uh, oh... now anyone inside of LinkedIn can send me a connection invite without doing any work to find my address - will I now be spammed by more people that I don't know?

We'll see... if you are a LinkedIn user, odds are that if this is true you'll probably be seeing more connection invitations!

It's a school vacation week here in my part of the USA and I'm planning to be offline for the remainder of the week.  Getting outside with my family... going on some day trips, doing some landscaping and otherwise enjoying the beautiful weather we are having right now.  I expect to be back posting here on Monday, April 30th.  See you then.

My Blue Box podcast on VoIP security hit a fun little milestone today... it crossed over 100,000 downloads this morning.

It still rather boggles my mind that for such a VERY niche subject (and running 45 minutes on average) we've got an overall average of 1,350 downloads per show (and more like 1,700 on recent shows) and according to Feedburner we're now up around 1,100 subscribers to the RSS feed.  It certainly demonstrates to me the power of the podcasting medium to reach niche audiences.

The stats geeks among you may be interested in the bottom half of my post where I talk a bit about the stats.  It's particularly interesting to me that while with recent shows the podcatcher vs direct download stat is about 60-70% podcatcher, the *overall* stats give a slight edge (52%) to direct downloads.  My thought is that this is primarily due to either or both:

1. Listeners going back and listening to older episodes (frightening, but very true!); and
2. People finding episodes through searching for various terms (the beauty of detailed show notes). 

In both cases, they are probably listening directly either via an actual download or through the flash player on the web site.

As I state there, I have to give a huge thanks to the community of listeners we've developed.  I also have to say thanks to Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson over at For Immediate Release who continue to let me play in their sandbox as a weekly correspondent and apply what I learn there to Blue Box and other projects.

Very early this morning, when I was awake but the rest of the household was not, I was reading an excellent book on a topic I'm very passionate about when all of a sudden I found myself drawn to a drop cap with the thought:

Wow!  What a beautiful "W"!

Like the image accompanying this blog post (which comes from the Wikipedia entry about "W"), the capital W that was the drop cap looked like two "V" letters with their lines crossed. There was actually a bit more separation in the two middle ascenders. The upper serifs had a break in them such that it really looked like an "X" with branches on either side. It was quite beautifully done.

So much so that I lost track of what I was reading and started hunting around for other "W" characters in other font sizes and locations (including the front cover).  The uppercase ones all had the split serif while the lowercase one looked much more like a traditional "w" character.  I went on from there to look at the other characters to see if there were any other exemplary characters.  (There weren't, although it was a nice typeface - no colophon to know what the precise typeface was, unfortunately.)

A few minutes later I returned to the text trying to remember where I was and what I had been reading. 

While the distraction was really only for a few minutes and would probably be limited to an extreme few[1], it was a poignant reminder to me of the power that fonts/typefaces can have both to make our material beautiful... but also to distract from the message.  And why it is so incredibly important to choose the typeface(s) you use so very carefully.

[1] Now, granted, odds are that in this particular case, probably very, very, VERY few people would have been distracted.  It happens that I taught electronic publishing for about 5 years back in the 1990's and still continue to have a fascination with many aspects of typography, so I have an interest in and appreciation for well-done typefaces.

We've all undoubtedly seen the chain-letter email messages that circulate around telling you that by forwarding the email you will make money or receive gifts and most people with half a clue understand that this kind of thing is pretty much impossible.  So it was with a whole lot of skepticism that I first greeted Microsoft's "i'm" campaign because the premise is: for every IM conversation you have with Windows Live Messenger, we'll donate some money to the nonprofit of your choice (from among nine choices).  To me, it sounded just a wee bit fishy.   

Read more over on my Disruptive Telephony blog...  (well, it sort of fit on either blog, so I chose to post it there and link from over here) 

Yesterday I received the standard email that Twitter users get telling me that someone named "felch" had added me as a friend and indicating that I could follow the link http://twitter.com/felch (now dead but worked yesterday) to add the person back as a friend.  Not having a clue who it was, I naturally followed the link and, as I twittered, found that this person had added 7812 friends!  Huh?   Why would you do this?  How could you realistically follow updates from some 8000 people?

I became a bit more suspicious because there was no personal information there about whoever "felch" was and there were only 4 updates with one or two words that were basically trivial or meaningless. Unable to see any reason whatsoever to add this person as a "friend" so that I would wind up following their updates, I didn't add them...

But at least 929 people did!

That's the number of "followers" the account had when I noted it yesterday.  I have no idea how many followers the account ultimately had. I was hoping to catch a screenshot to include here, but that account is no longer there... either removed by Twitter admins or, I suppose, removed by the person who created it. (My bet is on the admins, but you never know.)  Why did someone do it?  Was it an experiment to test how many people would blindly add friends?  Was there some other SEO purpose?  Or was someone just bored and looking for something to play around with?

And what about those 900 people - why did they just add someone who: a) they did not know; b) provided no information about themself; and c) seemed to have nothing to offer so far?

Now I suppose I should put it in perspective... at the time I noticed, 6,883 Twitter users had not added "felch" to their friend list.  Of course some may not have yet seen the email and perhaps did later. But if we take those numbers as they were, it amounts to about 12% of the people "felch" added doing a reciprocal add of "felch".  So the vast majority did not (at the time I noticed)... but 12% did.

Why?

Is it because of the natural sense of reciprocity?  (i.e. if you are so kind as to be a follower of me then I should be a follower of you)   Is it because people are still experimenting with Twitter and so are just adding people who add them?  Is it because people saw no harm in adding someone else to the list of people they follow?  Is it perhaps because it was very obvious that "felch" was new to Twitter and so there was an assumption that he/she might soon start posting real information?  Is is because people just want to have more "friends"? Why?

For my part, I only have a limited amount of "attention" that I can give to things and with so may things clamoring for my attention I am very picky about the amount of "attention clutter" around me.  If you look at my twitter page, there is an assymetry of attention there...  I currently follow 59 people and (for whatever reason) have 93 followers.  For some reason, I didn't add 34  people.  Now it could be that the email telling me they added me is still in my queue.  It may be that I went to their page, found that I don't know them, and just didn't seen any updates of interest to merit adding them at that time.  It may be that when the email came I was just grumpy and not feeling like adding anyone. I don't know. 

What I do know is that I hardly have time to scan all the other information coming at me in so many ways.  If anything, I am constantly trying to reduce and streamline my information flows to make them more efficient and useful.  So before I do something that is going go take away some attention, such as adding a Twitter friend or adding a RSS feed to my reader, I do give it some thought.  Is it really going to help/amuse/inform me?  Or do I know the person?

But it would seem that some percentage of people just click "add" when offered Twitter friendship.  Why?