Posts filed under ‘technology’
The future of social networks #2
#2: The social life of social networks
Alex Steer writes: To understand some of the ways in which online social networking may change as it evolves, we also need to understand what will remain constant. This has been difficult, because much of the development of social networking over the past decade – and much of the media commentary and advice to businesses, brands, and marketers – has been led by technology and has privileged novelty. Over the past few years, the hot topics in social networking have included photo and video sharing, in-network apps and games, mobile social networks, social commerce, geo-location, barcode scanning, and of course real-time search. It can seem like a never-ending game of catch-up.
But interactions between people are a constant, and they can be captured simply through “Four Cs”. People use online channels to communicate (stay in touch), to create/curate (originate and pass on content with their stamp of approval), to collaborate (work towards shared objectives), and to consult (give and receive information, advice and opinion). These four activities are the heart of the user value in the online space. And by way of a brief diversion, this model also makes it easier to see some of the social origins of social networking in older platforms and systems such as email, Usenet, instant messaging and blogging.
Social networks are social phenomena, after all, and much of the best work on their dynamics has been done by anthropologists and sociologists, not technologists or marketers. As social entities, networks are understood as clusters of shared relationships and interactions between individuals. These interactions can be brief or persistent, light-hearted or serious, and so on. Our social interactions are not lined up like dominoes – I know you, and you know Jim, and he knows Kim, and she knows Tim – but tend to be mutual and interconnected. Whenever several of your friends forward you the same email, you’ve been hit by a network effect.
This is why networks are powerful social forces: they transmit and reinforce ideas. Social scientists sometimes use the word meme to describe these ideas transmitted through social networks. Anything from a religious or political belief to a running joke can be considered a meme. Though there’s been a tendency to ascribe the success of ideas in networks to the influence of certain highly-connected individuals (the “influencer theory” popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point), research by sociologists including Duncan Watts of Yahoo! suggests that there are no specific influencers, and that a trend can start anywhere. Ideas spread because they are worth spreading, and they spread through social networks.
So there are some constants to why people choose to interact online. What changes more rapidly is how they choose to interact. In the next two posts we outline the six Pivot Points – today’s interaction decisions that will shape the future of online social networking.
This is the second of four posts this week by Alex Steer, introducing our latest analysis of the future of social networks. Post number three will run tomorrow. The first post can be found here.
The future of social networks #1
Over the course of this week we are running a new blog post every day to launch our latest analysis of the future of social networks. The project has been led by Alex Steer in our New York office. In the next four days he will be outlining our findings here – Andrew Curry
#1: Seeing through uncertainty
Alex Steer writes: Thinking back a decade, you have to pinch yourself. In 2001, when internet penetration ran at 10% or less even in advanced markets, online social networks barely existed. Today, they are the most widely-used online services, with membership of the largest networks reaching well into the hundreds of millions. Today Facebook has around 720 million members, and China’s Tencent QQ instant messaging network over 600 million – figures that are likely to be out of date if you read this more than a few weeks in the future. In the US, Facebook alone accounted for almost 9% of all website use in 2010, overtaking Google as the most-visited site.
If it’s been a dynamic decade for online social networking, it’s also been a disruptive one. The rise of networking giants such as Facebook and Twitter can seem inevitable in hindsight, but in practice there’s been a rapid turnover of winners and losers. MySpace, which at its peak claimed membership by one in four Americans, was sold by News Corporation in June 2011 for a fraction of the price it paid, its active user base collapsing. For those who look at Facebook in the 2010s and see nothing but runaway growth, MySpace should be a reminder that present scale is no guarantee of future success.
For businesses, brands, and marketers, this can feel like unstable ground. How do we know which networks will be around and thriving in a couple of year’s time, let alone ten? How do we decide how best to design services or communications in an unpredictable environment? And, in trying to back the right horse, how do we know whose advice to take?
There’s no shortage of advice on ‘doing social’, even if much of it is contradictory. But it’s wrong to think that the social networking category is defined only by Facebook or Twitter. The category is broad and often ill-defined even by experts – but at its heart a social network is any online service that lets users interact and form social connections. The choices which users make when they are online are a better guide to how usage and behaviour might change than the technology.
For this reason, to help think about social online behaviour, we have identified six Pivot Points – points of tension based on the choices people make when they engage online, and the conflicts they experience – that will shape the future of social networks. These decision points – around scale, privacy, specificity, pervasiveness, utility and worldview – can help businesses and brands anticipate the future in a category they cannot predict. On this blog, over the course of this week, we will be exploring these.
This is the first of four posts by Alex Steer introducing our latest analysis of the future of social networks. The second post, on ‘the social life of social networks’, will run tomorrow. The word cloud at the top of this post was generated by Talent Genius and is used with thanks.
Coming shortly – the future of social networks
Andrew Curry writes:
Our thought leadership series, Future Perspectives, is designed to share new thinking about a whole range of issues which we think could be of interest and concern, either to organisations or individuals. So far, we’ve tended to publish these in fairly conventional formats – The World in 2020 and The Future of Global Brands were both published as reports.
The latest piece, though, is about the future of social networks. The work’s been led by Alex Steer in our New York office, and it seemed to make sense to publish it online first. So, from Monday through Thursday next week, we’ll be running a series of posts written by Alex which outline this new thinking. There will be tweets as well. The work identifies a series of tensions, or ‘pivot points’, which will shape the evolution of the social networking space. What are they? Check back here next week to find out.
The full ‘Future of Social Networks series involves five blog posts: Posts One and Two discuss where we are today, and what underpins online behaviour. Posts Three and Four look at user tensions which create different behaviour online, and Post Five looks ahead to some of the implications for the shape of the social networking space and for innovation. The image at the top of this post comes from Place It Local, and is used here with thanks.
The programmable store
Andy Stubbings writes: We were recently asked to present at a retail conference, (“Digital Retailing 4.0”) organized by The Store and WPP, on how mobile devices will change shopping.
On the surface, this already seems to be quite a familiar future, with a familiar set of litanies (“shopping will be freed from the confines of physical space”; “all shopping becomes social”; “mobile will be the ultimate disintermediation device” etc). That’s not to say they’re not true, but there are plenty of other blogs where you can find this sort of thing.
We wanted to understand the patterns, to identify a coherent theory to explain the effect of technology on the evolution of retail (this would also help make sense of some of the more familiar visions of the future in a more systematic way). To do this, we went back to first principles about how the system of retail works and how it might change, basing some of our thinking on the TRIZ model of the evolution of technical systems. The theory and evidence on the TRIZ model is complicated – engineers and inventors have spent whole careers understanding it and applying it – but in essence it can be used as a way to understand how systems and their components evolve over time, from rigid, to modular, to programmable through to autonomous states (you can read more here). One simple analogy might be the evolution from a single toy brick (rigid), Lego (modular – can be combined and moved around in the system, albeit not dynamically), to Lego Mindstorms (programmable – components in the system can communicate with each other dynamically), to an automated artificial intelligence Lego system (autonomous – components respond themselves to changes in the environment).
This theory of the evolution of systems works quite well for retail. Simplistically, we can identify the components in the ‘system’ of a store as four Ps:
- People (staff, customers, suppliers and others, e.g. passers by)
- Products (inventory, display products, customizable products)
- Places (displays, exterior, payment points, ambient environment)
- Prices and information (product information, advertising, service information)
When you look at it this way, shopping really hasn’t changed that much over the last 2,000 years or so. We have gone from a ‘rigid’ state (fixed stalls dispensing one type of product), to a ‘modular’ state (department stores and big box retail with movable concessions, changeable in-store environments and more control over inventory), and we are now moving to a ‘programmable’ state.
The main technology in enabling the transition from rigid to modular was electrification. For the shift to the programmable store, the key technology will be mobile devices and a whole host of information and communication technologies (ICT) that allow data to be stored, transmitted, analysed and displayed between people and things.
What will happen when a store becomes programmable? In essence it allows different elements in the system of retail (our new 4 Ps) to communicate and interact with each other in a dynamic way. So we night see:
- data (including prices) dynamically linked to products, meaning that prices can be changed on the fly more easily (or different prices will be visible to different consumers)
- products linked to other products (meaning that you will be able to create associative tags between products to form shopping lists or unique categories like ‘Scottish’, ‘ethically sourced’ or ‘related to the life of Robert Burns’)
- places – the distributed store continues to ‘talk’ to its products about their maintenance status throughout their working life
- people (not just staff), controlling the retail environment (e.g. changing the lighting or wallpaper in store, or looking through the walls of a store from outside)
These are just some first thoughts, and I’m sure there are more. We plan to return to this subject, to develop our thinking on the idea of ‘the programmable store’, so we’d be interested to know what you think.
And the autonomus store? That might have to wait.
A future made of screens
Alex Steer writes:
There was a lot of discussion in our London and New York offices last week about a short video called A Day Made of Glass. It’s produced by Corning, which makes specialized glass products, including mobile and tablet touchscreens, and the video explores a day in the life of a family in a not-too-distant future in which (surprise) there are screens, especially touchscreens, in just about everything.
The first thing that struck us was Corning’s imaginative approach to the dry task of selling high-tech glass. It’s a great illustration of what can happen when you apply a bit of futures thinking to your brand. It’s also smart as a piece of brand planning, focusing on the consumers at the end of the supply chain, not Corning’s B2B customers. Creatively, it’s well executed.
But it’s the futures aspect which has provoked the debate. The video is cheerfully optimistic about the screenification of the entire world, as you’d expect from a sales tool, and cheery optimism runs through the creative work too, presenting a perfect upper-middle-class family – mum, dad, kids, all so happy and healthy-looking – that feels more like a nod to the heyday of Madison Avenue than a look to the future.
Some of the futures thinking isn’t bad. Consumerism is one of the strongest forces defining technology innovation, and this trend is everywhere in A Day Made of Glass. Glassland is about user experience, good design and straightforward, seamless interaction. All the devices assume a world of rich information and always-on connectivity.
Which is what also makes this an extreme scenario.It assumes there are no limits to our attention, or our wish to interact with everything in the way we currently interact with our phones or tablets. The prevalence of touchscreens led one of our Senior Consultants to compare it to another video, for Microsoft’s Future of Work scenarios. In both, ‘the future looks very much like the waiting room at Heathrow Terminal 5’.
In information-rich markets like the US or the UK, the desire to stay updated is already clashing with the recognition that there’s too much information, and we’re looking for more efficient filters. There’s also an emerging awareness of the importance of continuous partial attention in our interaction with media, and the need for interfaces that are useful even when they don’t have our full attention (such as radio or TV).
The continuous interested multitasking imagined in Corning’s world seems, frankly, exhausting. Said one of our SVPs: ‘The woman emailing from her bathroom? I can pretty much guarantee that if you email me anything before I’ve washed my face and brushed my teeth in the morning you’re not going to get a “yes”.’
So in the end we were a bit sceptical. We also worried about the sheer energy cost of all those screens. But hats off to Corning for producing a thought-provoking piece of work that got us talking about the future of media and technology.
Build it? They might come
Tom Richardson writes:
What people need is still more important for business than what businesses happen to be able to create – even though the gap between these two sometimes seems quite large.
Without research, and the freedom to pursue ideas that might never be profitable, some of the world’s most successful companies might never have become so. But this is different to throwing money at services that people haven’t told you they want, simply because these services seem to offer something “innovative”.
Innovation is the monkey to our organ grinder. It exists to find new ways of approaching age-old needs, such as reassurance, simplicity and community.
IBM, for example, has been working on a supercomputer called ‘Watson’ that can understand a question posed in colloquial language and respond vocally with an accurate, factual answer. The company says it’s designed for trawling through piles of papers such as legal documents to find an elusive fact.
Poor old Watson; destined to infuriate. It may respond to one of our needs (more time to do things) but even 99% accuracy isn’t good enough for a lawyer. Education helps us develop the ability to evaluate competing claims and make judgments about the information we really need. Understanding the use of language is only one part of that.
Why are we so bad at identifying tools that respond to human needs? They’re our needs, after all. Take Wolfram Alpha – again, an incredible product – that will make a lot of money through an expensive premium subscription that offers complex mathematical modelling. But at its launch in May 2009, it was seized upon by sensationalists at ‘the next Google’.
What Google has done, brilliantly, is to work hard in private on their sterile algorithms, while presenting a likeable human face to its users, with a visual identity that is colourful and simple. Google, like the iPod, is a human technology.
Wolfram Alpha, meanwhile, is a technology for technologists. It arrogantly (there I go again with the irresistible urge to anthropomorphise) tells you the answer, rather than humbly fetching information for you to interpret, like Google. If it gets the answer wrong, there’s no way to click back, think and discriminate.
The same delusion applies to social media. We know that no-one wants to be friends with washing powder. The company knows that plonking its washing powder down on Facebook makes it look awkwardly like the try-hard kid at school.
And, sadly, you can imagine the conversation around the water cooler in the Marketing Department:
“But have you seen the numbers?
“We have to be a part of this. Let’s ride this wave, let’s jump on board, let’s join the conversation!”
No. Go away. Really. No-one wants you here. You’re the wasp in my garden. And by the way, I resent your digital cold call.
The image at the top of the post is from the Museum of Mid-Century Illustration, and is used with thanks. http://www.plan59.com/main.htm
5 November 2010 at 12:31 pm thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Looking for the answers
Walker Smith writes:
There’s something about building a new website – as we have just done for The Futures Company – which takes you back, deep, into the history of the internet.
The unexamined assumption of the original Information Superhighway idea was that people wanted to dive into a sea of data. This assumption was mistaken, which is why, today, we don’t have an Internet Information Superhighway in which individuals rummage through every bit and byte of everything ever captured, created or learned about every topic of interest or importance. Instead, we are headed towards a networked world in which we prefer the answers we get from those we trust most. At The Futures Company, we saw this coming.
As early as 1999, both Yankelovich and the Henley Centre – subsequently merged to form The Futures Company – anticipated today’s shift from deluge to direction. Yankelovich referred to this as the “pinpointing” trend, which would see search replaced by ‘smart search,’ thus anticipating years in advance the search model Bing introduced recently to an ever-more sophisticated marketplace as the emerging alternative to the Google model.
Even if people wanted to swim in a sea of data, it’s just not possible. Human cognitive capacity is bounded by fixed upper limits, something that psychologists have known and shown for decades. This is all too obvious in every headline about the dangers of phoning or texting while driving. There is only so much attention to go around, far less than the information available to fill it. As a result, two competing concerns crash into one another.
On the one hand, people insist on seeing more information as a prerequisite for trust. Yet, on the other hand, people are simply unable to process all that they see or assess its accuracy or adequacy. In a world of more information than ever, the imperative is to make do with less. Hence, smart search.
So it is with The Futures Company as well. Our newly updated client gateway is built as a smart search engine that doesn’t just list data, it points to answers. The ambition is to put the future at clients’ fingertips by offering a smart foresight tool, one that not only gives future direction but that is itself an embodiment of where the future is headed.
The image at the top of the post is from RENCI, in North Carolina, and is used with thanks.
23 September 2010 at 9:30 am thenextwavefutures Leave a comment
Losing interest in Facebook
Andy Stubbings writes:
“If you want to know how people will use technology tomorrow” a popular saying goes, “look at what young people are doing today”.
To add to the bubbling anti-Facebook resentment that we have discussed here before, we’re seeing growing signs of disenchantment and dipping enthusiasm for Facebook amongst younger people. One survey of teens by gaming site Roiworld shows one in five are using Facebook less; the main reason for this is ‘lack of interest’. After the buzz around ‘defriending’, there seems to be more interest on ‘deactivating’ or leaving the site – apparently quite an exhilarating experience, at least according to this account of a ‘post-college calibration’. And there are earlier discussions of why young people leave social networks – there’s too much drama, it’s not their space anymore, and people prefer face to face interaction where possible.
Curiously, this also tallies with a general trend that we have picked up with our Global Monitor survey this year – when asked, people in almost every country overwhelmingly expressed a preference for a small number of quality connections they can rely on rather than a large quantity of connections they can call on (levels of agreement are practically the same across all age groups as well – which you might not necessarily expect from those gregarious Millennials). Facebook’s business model is built on the opposite assumption – that people want to continually add as many contacts as possible (and then lump them all together in the same group as their ‘friends’).
There has been attention given to the fact that the average age of Facebook users is increasing, often arguing that this is a sign that the site is broadening its appeal by going mainstream. However, I’d suggest, tentatively for the moment, that a fall in engagement amongst younger people – and in this context the leading edge – represents a decline that will eventually ripple out to a mainstream made up by mainly by over-30s, a decline that will accelerate as soon as a genuine alternative to Facebook emerges.
Facebook isn’t growing up; it’s growing old.
The image is from the site of the web designer Sharath G, and is used with thanks.
Facing off about privacy
Andrew Curry writes:
The current row over Facebook’s successive changes to its privacy settings has several strategic implications for the way that businesses – not just in the digital sector – relate to their customers. In case you’ve missed the story: Facebook has radically reduced the default privacy settings for its users since the autumn of last year, meaning that users are likely to be sharing far more details across the internet than they previously did. (I’ve written about this at length elsewhere, but a visit to ouropenbook.org gives a sense of the scale of it.)
The reason? Well, the company says that ‘radical transparency‘ is good for you, in a moral sense. Others say that it is part of a long campaign by Facebook (two steps forward, one step back, according to Nick Carr) to set itself up as the owner of its users’ online identity, which is a more lucrative proposition than being a mere social network, even one with several hundred million members.
So what are the implications of this for businesses?
#1: When the mental map which your customer has of your product or service becomes too divergent from their experience of it, the business suffers. (This is what happened when Gerald Ratner described one of his company’s products as ‘crap’). In the case of Facebook, the actual experience is no longer represented by the map. The researcher danah boyd has explained this well:
A while back, I was talking with a teenage girl about her privacy settings and noticed that she had made lots of content available to friends-of-friends. I asked her if she made her content available to her mother. She responded with, “of course not!” I had noticed that she had listed her aunt as a friend of hers and so I surfed with her to her aunt’s page and pointed out that her mother was a friend of her aunt, thus a friend-of-a-friend. She was horrified. It had never dawned on her that her mother might be included in that grouping. Over and over again, I find that people’s mental model of who can see what doesn’t match up with reality.
#2: Privacy isn’t dead, although it is fashionable for digerati to say so. People still expect organisations they do business with to maintain appropriate levels of privacy – and to be able to check these for themselves. We think that this expectation increases as the web becomes more ubiquitous and more portable, and there are more opportunities for breach. At least some users will engage reluctantly because of fear of theft, fraud, or inappropriate social exchanges. In the digital world, companies which take care of their users’ privacy will be less profitable in the short-term, but more sustainable in the long-term.
#3: Facebook is effectively polluting the “commons” represented by the internet – all of the public resources and protocols – through self-interested behaviour. It is possible that other suppliers which also depend on a trusted internet for their business will intervene; Google, its own privacy problems notwithstanding, has done a little of this recently. But usually what happens when public interest goods are polluted by commercial interests is that regulation follows. The cases brought against Facebook under trade and competition law, along with the initial responses from privacy regulators, are harbingers of this.
The cartoon at the top of the post is one of a string of acerbic strips about Facebook at the excellent Joy of Tech, and is used here with thanks. You may enjoy this one as well.
The future of payments
Andrew Curry writes:
I was invited earlier this month to speak on the future of payments at the Digital Money Forum in London, now in its thirteenth year and as provocative as ever. Of course, it’s a future that’s increasingly bound up with technology. My version is based on the work that’s been done by the historian of economics and technology, Carlota Perez (which I’ve blogged about elsewhere, at length) on long technology cycles.
We’ve seen five long technology surges, each of around 50-60 years, starting with steam, cotton and canals in 1771. The first half of the cycle, the installation phase, is driven by investment and finance capital. The second half, the deployment phase, is driven by production capital. And in between the two is a financial crash, when investment expectations get ahead of themselves.
In the current information and communications technology surge, we’re a few years into the deployment phase, when people start to do “new things in new ways” with technology. The smart phone and the tablet computer are archetypal deployment products, and digital payments will inevitably get caught up in the rush, as new applications emerge.
One of the likely effects is the fragmentation of devices, rather than convergence (we may use a digitally enabled key to get into our house, or a card or fob s a store of value, but we’re unlikely to leave them lying on a table during a meeting). We should expect fragmentation of currencies as well; local currencies such as the Lewes pound work much better when they don’t have to be printed. There are already viable currencies within every online multi-player game (and one of the things I learnt at the Forum was that Chinese workers employed to dig virtual gold in online games earn more than Chinese gold miners who dig the physical commodity, and in much better conditions). One of the other speakers talked about the emergence of currencies backed by units of energy consumption. This isn’t hypothetical.
This potentially represents that same sort of democratisation of production that we’ve seen in other sectors, ending the monopoly of the banks (mostly the commercial banks) on credit creation. This thought seemed to cause some nervousness in the audience at the Digital Money Forum, and the questions turned quite quickly to fraud and regulation, although potential fraudsters in an energy-backed currency would be doing very well to steal a fraction of the money that Bernie Madoff took from his investors.
What’s standing in the way? The banks, who aren’t trusted, and the mobile operators, who aren’t particularly interested in payments, at least not in the rich world. It seems likely that the market will need its own ‘iTunes’ moment, when an outsider steps in to create a decisive disruptive change.
The image above is courtesy of Flickr user Bohman, and is used under a Creative Commons licence with thanks.
