Stop Me before I’m Stupid in Public Again

On Thursday I’m supposed to give a keynote to an instant messaging conference in Boston. Why, you ask? I don’t know, I reply. Presumably they expect something Cluetrain-y from me. (By the way, Andrew Orlowski has one of the best commentaries on Dvorak’s “critique” of Cluetrain. Orlowski’s comments both make a lot of sense and make me intensely uncomfortable. I still like Halley’s spirited defense, though, not to mention that she’s been pushing the blog envelope with short sexual reminiscences. Wait, wasn’t there a track I was supposed to be on here?)

So, here’s roughly and telegraphically what I’m going to say. Please pass it through the fire of your criticism so that it may come out as pure and and brilliant as a diamond. I.e., kick the shit out of it now so I won’t look like a total fucking moron on Thursday.

Instant Messaging and the New Conversation

How IM will affect business?

We are in a new age of conversation. We can differentiate different types of conversation &#8212 IM, chat, email, Usenet, Web pages, etc.&#8212 by how interruptive they are and how interactive they are. But this leaves out a crucial dimension: groups. The Internet is about groups. (Metcalfe’s Law vs. Reed’s Law.) While the persistence of IM messages is quite low, the persistence of IM groups is quite high. In other words: buddy lists rule.

We need to make more of buddy lists. First, we need a way to move threads among all the different conversation forms: see the threadsML initiative.

Second, research (e.g. Albert-László Barabási shows the self-organizing networks naturally create “super nodes.” These are invisible in buddy lists. There ought to be some way of developing them.

The importance of groups goes beyond their mathematics, of course. In the real world, there’s a Paradox of the Masses. We are each individuals but as we join a crowd, we become more and more faceless. There’s a positive and a negative to this (being just one more member of the voting public vs. being just one more consumer in marketing’s crosshairs). But the Web resolves the paradox: We are members of the Web masses only through our individual voices. IM and buddy lists are an important way of being individual within a mass.

But Web conversations are different than the ones we’re used to having, particularly in the real world of business. Business has been about control, which is itself part of a larger cultural neurosis. Let’s look at that briefly. Then let’s look at some examples of Web conversations to see their characteristics: funny, passionate, admitting of fallibility, etc.

If voice, passion and connection drive the Web then, IM is not just creating a new network of groups but is also (almost necessarily): Messy (the clean line between personal and business is smudged), subversive (IM as passing notes in the back of the classroom), hyperlinked (driven by interest) and entertaining (multiple persona, exaggeration, humor). IM at work is not much different than IM at home. IM is part of the permanent, pervasive adolescence enabled by the Web ,, and part of the rebirth of play.

Categories: Uncategorized dw