continuous partial attention

Notes on Anthropology and Social Media

Today was the first day of Fall semester, and the first day of an Anthropology course I'm taking! Ordinarily I'm not big on taking notes on my reading unless I my mind starts connecting the material with other things. (I think they call this kind of connectivity "learning"...)

Surprisingly (ok, not so much..) I looked back on the notes I took and found that most of it dealt with social media. So I've decided to publish the Google Doc and share it with you all!

Keep in mind that these are -supposed- to be notes on an introductory textbook on Anthropology. Instead, they're a great look into the way my mind works and perhaps may give many of you some idea as to why I have had problems with school in the past. ;)

If any of you are interested in my thoughts about the relationships between social media and Anthropology, definitely check out my notes!

Oh, and if any of you are curious, the (absurdly priced) textbook that we're using this semester and that my notes are derived from can be found here.

The Web 2.0 Arc

There have been a number of milestones these past few years in what we're calling Web 2.0. For the most part, they have been small incremental developments that have led to massive paradigm shifts (I've been using the phrase "paradigm shift" since before it was a buzzword, so leave me alone about it!) in the way we think about the web, and connecting, and cooperation, and all that good stuff. I can't even begin to cover what they all are, because it's been distributed throughout the industry, and realized in completely different orders by different people as ideas and practices have diffused outwards. It's been a huge learning curve that all of us have (and still are) experiencing differently. And so I can only discuss the developments that have caused shifts in my own personal thinking.

For me, it started with Livejournal. My first blog was a livejournal, and that is where I first experienced the power of the social network divorced from geography. When the dot-com crash happened, and all the hype turned into anti-hype, I was immersed in a community of friends nationwide engaged in all sorts of discussions that confirmed the idealism we all had about the web. Far from dying, I intuitively knew that some powerful ideas I couldn't yet articulate had survived the dotcom crash, and so I started paying attention. In 2003, while volunteering/hanging out with the Singularity Institute for AI, I encountered my first wiki.  At the time, wiki's were still hacked together bits of code that lacked polish. But their potential for collaboration was obvious to me.

I started noticing all these RSS symbols everywhere. The concept was kinda cool, but their potential unrealized until Bloglines came out with their web based RSS reader.

Then somwhere in there, Friendster showed up, as well as Orkut. Google's Orkut had closed membership, so we all felt special when someone invited us to join the network.

Google Maps sent the idea of Mashups into high gear.

Gmail seemed to institutionalize the private beta cycle.

I took my first look at del.icio.us and had no clue what it was so ignored it for four months until December of '04 when I finally figured it out. The understanding and the practices that came from del.icio.us changed my life.  I think it also changed the industry by creating the initial Web 2.0 echo chamber that led to the rapid adoption of AJAX, among many many other ideas.

At the same time I was learning all these things about what the web is -supposed- to look like, and how connected humans will be interacting with each other in the 21st century, thousands of other people were learning many related lessons in parallel. In October 2005, Tim O'reilly brought it all back together in this document that really clarified and drew lines between so many of the lessons we were learning. I think that was another milestone.

Around the middle of 2006, I noticed that I had stopped learning anything. There was nothing new, and money had already well begun to enter the equation again. For me, it seems that we had entered a time period where the incremental breakthroughs had stopped, and all the ideas and technology we had learned into existence were diffusing outwards from the Web 2.0 echo chamber.

Which brings us to the past few months. There's a new milestone, and it comes in the form of Facebook! By opening up their user data via their platform, social networking has become a utility that services can be built on. The idea of a service opening up in this way has yet again changed the landscape on the web, and I finally see movement beginning to move towards what I have long considered the holy grail of Web 2.0: a completely distributed and manageable identity system where ones social network exists as a cloud between any and all web applications with social functionality.

Brad Fitzpatrick, the man responsible for Livejournal (where it all began for me) and OpenID, is at it again by starting conversation on what he's calling the "social graph problem". This conversation has started a few times in the past, but the pieces to move it forward haven't really been in place until now, and it looks like Brad is trying to bring a number of the big players  to the table to solve the problem of disconnected networks.

I'm super excited, because this is the direction I think the people part of Web 2.0 has been moving all along!

Facebook Rocks Firefox!

I've been spending quite a bit of time recently (a little too much for my comfort) trying to keep up with all the new Facebook apps. Believe it or not, I think I've stumbled upon what could potentially become a killer app: Firefox!

Stay with me here.

Two years ago I was a bit struck by the fact that the Mozilla Add-ons community wasn't all that Web 2.0. This was supposed to be a revolution, and Mozilla was supposed to be spearheading it, right?! I had the realization then that Mozilla was missing a huge opportunity in not using the power of the network to spur adoption of third-party add-ons and increase awareness. And so it's remained until this past week.

Mozilla has created a new Facebook app called "Rock Your Firefox" that essentially takes advantage of the Facebook platform to give Firefox Add-ons the same viral effect of Facebook apps. This is great news for Firefox developers, and it's also great for the entire web ecosystem!

This application is basically a mirror of the Mozilla Add-ons Directory that let's users browse/search through Firefox Add-ons and save them as favorites to share with their Facebook friends. After you have your favorites selected, they show up in a widget on your Facebook profile, they also show up on your Mini-Feed and consequentially the News Feed of many of your friends (this is what makes it viral) and then you can also browse through the Firefox Add-ons that your friends have as Favorites.

Naturally my mind went towards where this app could go next. To put it simply, I see this Facebook app as a potentially significant piece in what I see as the next generation browser experience. (Or at least a really really really useful feature!) What's missing from the equation is a Firefox extension with the following functionality:

• It should autodetect installed add-ons and update the Facebook app accordingly.
• It should be able to download and install add-ons based on the information stored in the Facebook app
• It should be fully integrated with the Firefox Add-ons UI

Given a Firefox extension with this functionality, the "Rock your Firefox" Facebook app would need some additional functionality for solid integration:

• It would need to differentiate between "Installed Add-ons" and "Favorite Add-ons"
• It would enable you to select which Add-ons the extension should bulk install by default.
• It should have privacy settings that you could set per Add-on.

For the individual user, this would make it dead simple to install all of your favorite extensions on a clean install of Firefox. In fact, why not forgo this hypothetical Firefox extension entirely and just build this functionality into the browser itself? Imagine opening up a fresh install of Firefox, and instead of having to tediously install all your extensions, being prompted for your Facebook login. Firefox would do the rest. And if your Facebook account is tied to a Firefox user profile, imagine going to someone else's computer, logging them out of Firefox, and logging in with your Facebook account. At this point all the extensions you depend on are installed and you're back in action! And let's not forget the social component that helps you share the browser experience with your friends!

Naturally, this killer(well, for me at least) functionality doesn't have to be tied to Facebook. I imagine that "Rock Your Firefox" will be ported to other "Social Utilities" as soon as what makes the Facebook Platform successful is replicated via other services. (Anybody care to place bets?) In which case, when you first log into Firefox, you will be prompted for your username and Social Utility of choice.

Such is my vision for Firefox 3 (or 4 maybe?) Come to think of it, I wonder if this could be tied into something like the Mozilla Coop project that we heard about a few months ago... Anybody at Mozilla listening? :)