[FoRK] insights on Angstro blog

[Lucas Gonze]

Through provoking stuff from Rohit on the Angstro blog at
http://www.angstro.com/node/61 .  The Marc Davis quote is the one that
really gets me thinking.

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Yesterday, we had the opportunity to particpate in the 3rd installment
of GigaOm's thought-provoking symposiums they dub “Bunker Sessions.”
This one,“The Next Web,” started with an insight typical of Om Malik
and his team: while everyone is zigging towards the “real-time”
buzzword (almost for its own sake!), they're asking pointed questions
about new sources of context, from geospatial to geopolitical.

The most insightful meme I took away from this conversation was from
Marc Davis, former Yahoo! research scientist and current partner at
Invention Arts: ”context exists beyond the data center.”

Or, to paraphrase Steve Blank’s ”inside the building, there are only
opinions,” it might be more pointed to say that “data centers only
house data”: a mere map of restaurants can't hold a candle to one
that's remixed with your friends have eaten at, enjoyed, and may be
heading to next.

Knowing that the context of the data being uploaded is from a real
person, at a real place, at a real-time is what Davis got at with his
“Web 4” set: Who, What, Where, and When.

In fact, this led Tom Coates to suggest a seeming paradox: “the only
way to address information overload is with more information: To
determine what’s most relevant, algorithms need even better knowledge
of your geographical and social context.”

When the conversation turned to privacy, Joseph Smarr pointed at the
difference between announcing ”I am here,” and bugging each of your
friends individually to tell them. Sometimes, privacy comes from good
filtering, not simply preventing the information from being shared at
all (egress rather than ingress, so to speak).

The weak link in a centralized aggregation service is sharing or
syndicating over its own APIs. If I report my position to Twitter,
that location is stuffed into the hidden “resource fork” of a Tweet in
their API. If I report that I'm attending this symposium to LinkedIn,
that fact is stuck in a “roach motel,” because they have no API access
to event data, as Dave McClure mentioned. Davis concurred that “large
companies have not create identifiers to make this easier at scale,”
along the lines of Yahoo! Placemaker WOEIDs.

Ångströ’s own Salim Ismail identified a particularly trenchant problem
with social network interoperability: “Our identities are locked in
walled gardens. It's impossible for me to comment about or contact
someone without going through those gatekeepers. And even if I want to
refer to someone I know on another social network, which of 18
different contexts do I want to refer to him as?”

Ultimately, the people in your community define what’s salient for
you, because that’s the shared context that marks your membership in
that community. Adam Hertz, a founder of TuneIn based their product on
that insight: “We believe people are the best filter, the people you
pay attention to. We pull out all the media in your (inbox), and order
it by popularity within your graph and, more and more, based on how
you respond to it (your engagement).”