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Using the examples of Google Wave and FourSquare, this RWW post by Audrey Watters cautions tech companies not to get to excited by “early adopters” – the throng that flock to the newest, coolest technology. What they like may be unlike the preferences of other users, so success with early adopters may not foretell broader market success.

True, and worth a closer look. Who are early adopters of technology, and how are they different from the mainstream? There is more than one difference. Early adopters tend to be young and male. They like technology because it is new and different. They are interested in the new thing because it is cool, and move on when it stops being cool. They are willing to put up with sharp edges for something that is cool, useful, or both. They are willing to experiment with new practices.

Let’s look at FourSquare and Wave and think about how the early adopters might be different from the mainstream.

Google Wave incorporated technology innovation – it was a collaboration tool based on a synchronous chat protocol; it was a brand new and mindbending blend between the synchronous aspects of chat, the stream aspect of a threaded discussion, and the text presentation of a document. It got attention because it was new and different. and yet using it required new and different practices. It’s not unusual for new tools to require new practices; forums require moderation, wikis often use discussion to complement final-form documents, and so on. In the end, those who experimented with Wave never did establish practices that made it understandable and useful to others.

Several commenters to the RWW post observed that Wave was hard to understand. This comment points to Geoffrey Moore’s classic “crossing the chasm” methodology which focuses on building use cases and social references to help more conservative later adopters, who lack the early adopters’ experimental bent.

FourSquare, as shown by recent research is mostly appealing to young men. The initial design of the service focuses on competition (becoming the mayor of your local hangout), and this may be one of the reasons that it hasn’t yet broken out of the early demographic. FourSquare and other location based services are seeking to appeal to segments with other motivations, by providing different sorts of badges (collecting, exploring), and different sorts of rewards (for example, the practical, financial rewards created by linking to marketing loyalty programs for discounts).

The FourSquare research shows that the service hasn’t spread beyond it’s initial population of urban hipsters. By contrast, Facebook spread far beyond its early niche of college students. What makes a trend spread beyond the initial group? This comment to the RWW post talks about trend spreaders, people with a broad network of friends, are open to try new things, and tell their friends and family about their positive experiences. It seems that Facebook was popular with trend spreaders, not just trend-setters.

Then there’s the tendency of the fashionable to move on. Another risk to FourSquare is that as a social service, it’s more compelling when one’s friends are participating and much less compelling when friends don’t use it anymore. It is vulnerable to the flock rising up and flying away. Restaurants and nightclubs have thrived and declined by this dynamic forever. In the case of trends in clothes, the dynamic is all about who’s cool and what’s in style.

In the case of trends in technology, fashion is part of the story. This commentor points out that it’s actually white teenage girls are who are trendsetters. Yes for some kinds of clothes, certainly not for bicycle styles or San Francisco restaurants. But whether it’s white girls, Robert Scoble, or uber-foodies, this point about the aspect of early-adopterism that is about fashionability and social status. The fashion ends when the cool kids move on.

Trends in technology are partly fashion, linked with other attributes. Once upon a time, Motorola and Nokia phones were fashionable (remember back then?) But Apple came out with the most beautiful and usable smart phone. The iPhone is elegant, but the Androids haven’t been tied to AT&T’s poor phone service; Android market share is growing because the thing works better.

So, the cases of Wave and FourSquare illustrate different properties of early adoption.
* Wave was hard to understand; the tools and the practices around it didn’t grow fast enough to make it useful before Google pulled the plug. It not impossible that in the open source afterlife of the dead commercial product, someone may figure out uses, practices, and interfaces that make it work and catch on.
* FourSquare appeals to a psychographic attribute of the early adopter community. For location-based services to catch on, it needs to appeal to a broader set of motivations, and to reach people who are good at reaching out.
* FourSquare is vulnerable to the cool kids going elsewhere, for reasons that are partly social and partly more appealing service

So, if your product or service appeals to early adopters, there are a variety of things to consider in order to break out of that niche:
* work on use cases, usage practices, and ease of use that work people who value familiarity over experiment
* consider the psychographic – is there some way your early population is different from the broader market, and what needs to make it appealing beyond the early community
* consider social adoption patterns – is your service not only easy to share, but appealing to people who like to share
* keep improving or your early adopters will move onto something better

Just thinking about “early adopters” isn’t precise enough – think about how your product or service are working for early adopters, and what may need to be different to break out.

A book review in the age of the internet is very different from its pre-net predecessors, though it may look superficially the same. A conversation with science blogger Bora Zivkovic, as he wrestled with deciding about books to review, prompted me to write these thoughts down.

Back in the day, before it was easy to trivially easy to search for reviews, a reader depended on their local paper or favorite magazine. So each each newspaper or magazine would cover the same books and movies. Each review would summarize the book for the reader. Readers relied on their reviewer, and the reviewer in turn strove to be an authoritative voice and “tastemaker”, helping readers choose and shaping the criteria for choice.

The old constraints that shaped the genre are gone. In the age of the internet, it is trivially easy to search for reviews. So there is less need for an basic summary of popular books – the reader can find it on Amazon. When a reader can find multiple reviews from multiple perspectives with an easy search, the old authoritative tone of voice sounds pretentious.

So, to review books in the age of the internet you need to consider: what in particular do you have to add to the reviews the reader can already find. Why do you think the work is good, based on your own expertise or perspective, what did you learn from it, why do you think your readers might or might not like it, based on your knowledge and assumptions of your audience.

Now, a book review that includes too much of the perspective of the reviewer can turn into a personal essay that takes a book as its starting point, or a meditation on the subject that says more about the book the reviewer would prefer to be written than the book that she read. These essays may be worth writing, but an essay that tells the reader more about the reviewer than the book is not a book review. The challenge is to include enough of one’s own perspective to make the review interesting and distinctive, while keeping it mostly about the book.

Another difference is timeliness – reviews on the internet don’t need to be about new things. Before good search engines, reviewers focused on things that were new, and there’s still value in timely discussion of current topics. The internet makes it easy to find discussion of books that aren’t new, and so rewards writing about them also. A review of an older book can add context since the book was written, and reevaluate what it sounds like now than earlier. Summary and recommendations are more important for older books than newer books, since the information is harder to find, and a reader needs reasons other than currency to read the book.

BoraZ, in fact, uses these principles in a review of Bonobo Handshake, a book by Vanessa Woods, about the differences between bonobos and chimpanzees, the two closest primate cousins to humans. The summary neatly analyzes the multi-threaded structure of the book, links to related sources on competition and cooperation, and puts the genetic kinship of humans, chimps, and bonobos in the context of an argument against genetic determinism. The review also touches on the reviewer’s friendship with the writer, and personal background to describe the joy of reading books that teach you about the world and get you engaged in subjects you didn’t know before. The review tells the reader about the book, what’s good about it, why they might like it, from the professional and personal point of view of the writer. It’s a strong example of a good book review in the age of the internet.

Andrew Hoppin tweeted from a session at foo camp: “software products instantiate philosophies; developers need to consider philosophy so software can have a conscience.” This is a good start but an incomplete conclusion. It is true that software embeds a lot of assumptions about the world and about people. People who practice software development often take the assumptions for granted. It is a big step forward to think about those assumptions deliberately and question those assumptions.

Considering these assumptions is particularly relevant with social software whose affordances affect the way people act with each other – consider the impact of Facebook’s poke feature or privacy policies. Exposing assumptions is good. danah boyd does this when she explains that online transparency is easier for the privileged. O’Reilly’s Designing Social Interfaces section on section on Reputation does this when it talks about the way that the use of reputation features relates to and affects the cooperative and competitive dynamics of an online community.

Hoppin’s quote says that philosophy will help software developers incorporate conscience in their work. Plato thought that philosophical reflection, if done right, would lead people to be good. But since Plato there have been a great many thinkers who come to differing conclusions about human nature and society, and there are many societies and subcultures that make differing choices. People who think through their assumptions will have different moral philosophies. Considering assumptions is a good thing to do, but it won’t lead to a single “conscience.”

And then, if tools reflect better thought-through assumptions, the “conscience” is still not in the software, but in the people who use the tools. A car can be designed to use less fossil fuels, but a driver can still use it to run over a pedestrian. Comments sections can be designed for better moderation, but people can still choose to be mean to each other – the use of “tummelling” to facilitate good conversation is a practice done by people, not software.

Thinking about the assumptions in software is a good start. It would be great to have more of it. It won’t make software “good.”

Earlier this week, I wrote about the opportunity to realize a vision of social experiences connecting people in the physical world, across application boundaries. Similar problems, and similar opportunities, are present in the business world.

As Eugene Lee described in his Enterprise 2.0 keynote the business benefits of enterprise 2.0 are realized when more people have access to information and are able to work together to solve problems across organizational silos. But if “social” is just a feature of each business application separately, the organization cannot make use of the social network for people to find information and solve problems.

Many of the standards and protocols to make this vision a reality also apply in the business world, connecting people across application silos. I describe the opportunity in the business world with more detail, on the Socialtext blog.

I went to a wedding last night. It was the first ceremony where I’d seen “you may now update your FaceBook status” as part of the ceremony. Someone mentioned that it has been done before, they’d seen videos on YouTube. Now, one might think this is a bit ironic, a nudge and wink about the omnipresence of social media in our daily social lives. But upon reflection, there’s something fitting about it. A wedding, in a world of diverse relationship choices, is (among other things) making a public statement to one’s friends and community to acknowledge that relationship. Updating Facebook status is a gesture that does exactly that, including people who are not present at the ceremony, and enabling well-wishers to chime in for public view, like the older traditions of toasts and video commentary at the wedding.

It’s when things get less public that things get more complicated in Facebook-land. Standing by the bar, a new acquaintance griped that his new girlfriend was insisting that he update his Facebook status to say he was dating her. In the world before social media, but after the cultures of arranged marriages and chaperones, there was a continuum of disclosure, where the first people to hear about a new beau/belle were one’s closest friends, and one selectively disclosed relationships in small social circles until the desire for acknowledgement and/or the power of gossip disclosed to a broader social circle. Decisions could be made ad hoc – should we go to xyz party together, and when to bring the belle/beau for the family renunion. Of course, slips in people’s desire to shape the informal information flow have long been material for comedy.

But Facebook doesn’t do a good job of that more informal disclosure. Instead of ad hoc, situational decisions, people are forced to make explicit decisions, with clumsy affordances to handle the distinctions. It’s mostly brute force – tell everyone you know about the relationship status. Which is awkward, as my reluctant conversationalist complained. Tools like LiveJournal/Dreamwidth, for example, have done a better job at facilitating selective disclosure, and their users take advantage of this capability.

The relationship between tools, and the customs and social norms people weave using the tools, is always complicated.

I’ve been writing a series of posts exploring connections between Rabbinic and contemporary thought. This page lists the posts in the series for convenience.

Socrates and the Fat Rabbis by Daniel Boyarin
Arguing with God by David Frank
The Burnt Book by Marc-Alain Ouaknin
The Mind of the Talmud by David Kraemer
Fragments of Redemption by Susan Handelman

Early conceptions of online social experience envisioned “cyberspace” as a separate world. John Perry Barlow imagined the residents of cyberspace as declaring independence from the physical world. As the use of the internet spread, it became clear that most people use the net in a way that is much more integrated to physical location. A recent study out of Hebrew University shows that most people’s Facebook friends physically closeby, among 100,000 Facebook users. Now, you might think that this is related to Facebook’s bidirectional model and reputation as a site for friends and family. But the study also found that most people also correspond by email with people in the same city (out of 4455 email messages). People’s actual social networks include many people close by.

This research is interesting, but it doesn’t capture other relevant relationships between online and face to face interactions. The email data captured location only within a city, and modern metro areas have sprawl. Among people in the same city further than walking distance or a quick drive, how often do they meet f2f, and what is the correlation between correspondence and meeting? Among a person’s overall social network, how many of the people, far AND near, are visited f2f some of the time? Is there a positive correlation between staying in touch online and getting together offline?

One of the hottest trends in social software is location services such as FourSquare and Gowalla, which tell users where their friends are. Less flashy but similar tools like PlanCast and TripIt tell people where their friends and business associates are going to be. Do these sorts of tools affect how often people connect in person? Do people meet more often? Might these tools provide vicarious experiences that displace meeting, and do people who use them actually meet less?

My anecdotal experience is that online and offline connections go together. With people who live more than, say, 10 minutes away in the same metro area, and people who live in different cities, I’m more likely to meet up face to face with the people who I see and correspond with online, and more likely to be out of touch with people I don’t see online, and meet up with them more rarely. Mark “Cheeky Geeky” Drapeau expands on this observation in Social media is useless in isolation. Drapeau observes that the set of people he corresponds with in social media extends the number of people he stays in touch with at a distance, and some of these become contacts he will periodically see in person.

I would argue that while there is such a thing as a “social media relationship,” those relationships have three main classes: (1) thin relationships, (2) thin relationships with potential, (3) relationships reinforced by real-life interactions (however infrequent). This third class is where most of the value is generated – One can generate “leads” through social media, take some relationships to the next level, create meaningful real life interaction in some form, and then strengthen the real-life relationship through interim social media use. This positive feedback loop is critical; IRL reinforces social media, and vice versa.

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The Israeli researchers study showing that people have the most frequent interaction between friends and family who live nearby is not so surprising. It would be very interesting to see if the correlations that Mark Drapeau and I observe anecdotally are quantitative trends, or is the opposite true. Are there segments and psychographic patterns for the ways that people connect online and offline use – people who are clan-centric, spending most of the time with kin, network builders like Drapeau who have many online/offline relationships, and digital hermits, whose social life consists mostly of online correspondence? The evidence shows that online and offline sociality is connected – it will be interesting to learn even more about the connections. Links to other research would be most welcome.

Not long ago, I went to hear Malian guitarist Habib Koite at Yoshi’s Oakland, at the recommendation of a friend who’s been a fan of Koite since the 90s when he first toured and had recordings available in the US. In addition to enjoying the skilled and charismatic performance, I wondered about the instrumentation – guitar bass and kora, drumset, talking drums and calabash, the way the group played – what traditions did this come from, and how closely was it tuned for US audience. So I picked up In Griot Time by Banning Eyre, a journalist and guitarist who works for Afro-pop worldwide, NPR, and elsewhere. The book addressed those questions and much more.

In the 90s, Banning Eyre travelled to Mali to study for six months with guitarist Djelimadi Tounkara, one of the masters in a living griot musical and cultural tradition. As an advanced student, Eyre lived in the Tounkara household, getting to know the network of musicians and experiencing the culture. Eyre describes how he negotiated his role as a visiting outsider, learning and figuring out how to participate in the complex give and take of Mande culture, where exchanges of money and goods are part of social interactions along with favors and confidences. His ability to interact musically helps provide entre to the society of musicians. Early on, he learns to play accompaniment to Sunjata, the central epic of the griot tradition; this and other elements of the repertoire earn him a quick welcome. As a musician, he was good enough to be asked to play a part in Tounkara’s famous Rail Band, and to play weddings and other events.

Eyre writes richly descriptive travel journalism, portraying weddings, baby-namings, funerals; upscale performance halls and a bar scene that is extra-sketchy because alcohol is quasi-underground in a Muslim society, and especially the comings and goings, errands and hanging out, economic stresses and family conflicts that make up the texture of life. Eyre mitigates the dubious confidence of the traveling reporter by showing multiple voices in disputes and disagreements.

One of the complex issues he explores is the role of the griot, which is seen ambivalently by musicians in Mali. As some reader will know already; a griot is a hereditary role as musician and transmitter of oral history in West African cultures. Griot or jeli as they are called in Mali, are part of a class that is lower in rank than the noble class. The nobles provide patronage to the griots, who in return compose elaborate praise for their patrons. Griots also play social roles of confidant and mediator to the powerful. On the one hand, griot culture preserves legendary history and provides a structure for economic patronage of music. But the customs of praising leaders to gain financial support entrenches musicians in support of the power structure.

Also, the hereditary transmission of griot status makes musical meritocracy and tradition mixing harder. Some of the most notable musicians in Mali have crossed hereditary and ethnic lines. Salif Keita came from a noble family, but because he was an albino facing social marginality, he had little to lose by pursuing music. Habib Koite came from a griot family in Western Mali but went to music school, and his music combines elements of multiple ethnic groups in Mali.

The book also explores questions about the origins of the blues in West African music. Based on Eyre’s research and experience, he believes that the scale and tonality of blues derives from Bambara music. But the 12-bar blues structure is foreign to Malian musicians, and difficult for his mentors to pick up. Blues is American music, not African.

As usual, intercultural influence is more complex than one might guess on the surface. Modibo Keita, the first President of Mali in the post-colonial era in the 60s, encouraged a revival of traditional styles, bringing musicians to the capital from various traditions, and cultivating a national identity that embraced the different strands of Mali’s cultural heritage. Meanwhile, state-sponsored dance bands, including Djelimadi Tounkara’s Rail Band, incorporated traditional Malian elements, Cuban rhythms, horns, and Cuban-influenced guitar (although acoustic guitars had been integrated into griot music since the 20s and 30s. The Cuban influence was bolstered by Castro-sponsored cultural exchange. The instrumentation and folk roots of musicians including Tounkara and Koite incorporate these influences of urban modernization, ethnic revival, and Cuban styles.

The strangest Cuban connection in the book was a missed connection. During the writing of the book Djelimady Tounkara and young ngoni player Basekou Kouyate were planning to travel to Cuba to record with Ry Cooder, but because of the presence of a wealthy griot patron in Mali, they missed the date, and Cooder’s recording focused instead on elderly son musicians he brought back from retirement, creating the Buena Vista Social Club.

During the 90s at the time of Banning Eyre’s visit, Malian musicians often replaced live drumming with drum tracks, and added synth keyboards. Eyre doesn’t like this at all, but admits that his esthetic taste bears no relevance to the decisions made by Malian musicians appealing to their local audiences. Not only that, Eyre reflects that his orientation to music as primarily an artistic/esthetic experience is different from his hosts, who create music to make a living economically; within sets of cultural rituals and social/economic obligations.

Other than the role of the griot, the book covers political topics fairly lightly. Eyre writes about the conflicts between Djelimady Tounkara and his wife Adama Kouyate, as Djelimady attempts to assert traditional male command of his wife’s coming and going. The author also writes about prominent female singers (jelimusow), who play a musically leading role, whose husbands typically play backing musician and business manager roles. Eyre seems less interested in vocal music generally, and more interested in instrumental music, and one can’t fault a guitarist this preference. The book also profiles vocalist Oumou Sangare, a champion of women’s rights who speaks out against polygamy and arranged marriage. The most shocking moment of the book is when Djelimady strikes his wife once, causing turmoil as the household defends Adama. With the mix of stories showing women with different levels of power and society changing, Eyre is trying to convey that “it’s complicated”, but his continued friendship and respect for his mentor after that moment makes me less sympathetic.

I still appreciate the book for its portrayal of the place and culture as Eyre observed it, and especially for the musical background. The book includes portraits of musicians who had already established a global presence by the time the book was written (Habib Koite, Salif Keita), as well musicians who were less well-known globally at the time but have since established more of an international presence, including Eyre’s mentor Djelimadi Tounkara, kora master Toumani Diabate, singer Oumou Sangare and many others. The musicians covered in the book are well-represented in YouTube and other digital services, so it is not hard to get started exploring. It was YouTube searching that reminded me of the connection that prompted a friend to recommend the book to me in the first place – this favorite recording of Djelimady Tounkara playing with a Bill Frisell ensemble, along with Malian master percussionist Sidiki Camara, Greg Leisz, and Jenny Schienman. The book comes with a CD, which is not yet available online, so I haven’t listened to it yet.

A North American musician has challenges and risks in writing about African musicians and culture. Of course as a reader and listener more removed from the people and places, my role in writing about it is even more potentially problematic. That said, I really liked the book and thought he did a very good job of portraying a complex culture in a rich and un-romanticized way. The book has enough color and drama to make it fun to read; information that is fascinating to a Westerner interested in African music, with strong references for plenty of further listening and learning.

Google announce that it is seeking to hire a “Head of Social” to drive the company’s social strategy. The way for Google to come from behind and take the lead in social platforms is to do a better job at supporting users and partners than Facebook. There is a growing backlash against Facebook amongusers and partner sites for constantly, progressively putting its own interests ahead of others.

A successful platform provider needs to balance three interests: its own interest, the interests of users whose loyalty and flocking create the market lead, and the interest of partners that leverage the platform. A mostly selfish strategy works for a platform provider only if users are locked in. If there are other good choices, users and partners flee and the lead evaporates. Facebook’s selfishness gives Google an opportunity.

How can Google take the lead with a less selfish network?

• Focus on social experience.

This may be the toughest thing for Google to grok. Google’s technology strategy focuses on developing clever algorithms to solve tough problems, but social experience is a lot more about letting people do subtle human things and less about automating social behavior and social choices.

Google’s development culture thrives on “scratching its own itches” – on making cool tools that serve young engineers in a culturally homogenous environment. This focus led to the early privacy failures of Google Buzz. Six months of internal beta testing didn’t shake out the flaws in the Buzz design, which made one’s email correspondents public, because Google’s engineers had less diverse social needs than their customers – consultants whose client lists were confidential, or victims of domestic abuse whose exes could now harrass their correspondents.

• Serve users desires to manage sharing

People aren’t just mad at Facebook for making it easier to share. People are mad at Facebook because their privacy policy changes and feature changes seem deceptive. Facebook has so much to gain from mining users’ information that changes that make it hard or impossible to control information sharing are best interpreted as bad faith. Google also has a tremendous amount to gain by making public information searchable. But in the long run, people will share information by choosing to share, rather than by being tricked into it.

• Serve the desires of sites and apps to serve communities

Facebook’s tools for sites and apps, from Facebook Connect to the recent Like and “Instant Personalization”, serve Facebook’s interests at the expense of their partners. For example, the new “Like” feature consolidates data about user preferences through a proprietary API, rather than providing it in a way that can be crawled and recombined using the ActivityStreams format. Sites want to connect to Facebook, because that’s what enables their users to share with others. But sites and apps need to cede to Facebook control over communicating with users, how users communicate with each other, and policy over sharing customer data. Tools that gave sites more control and better revenue share would win loyalty.

Frustration with facebook is catalyzing a lot of articles by people writing about their ideal social network. For example, Neil Gorenflo has an interesting blog post about the requirements for powerful community networks. A social network platform player doesn’t need to make every feature for every need. They need to provide a core service that provides basic needs, and the infrastructure that lets third parties go deep.

There is a famous classical Rabbinic quote – “If I don’t act in my own interest, who will act for me, but if I act only in my own interest, what am I, and if not now, when.” Now is the time for Google to serve its own interest by serving customers, applications and sites.