One of the advantages of being almost 30 is that people less than a decade younger than you tend to think of you as being “wise”. Some of the staff in my local bar will ask me about everything from US politics, the Renaissance, Alan Turing, 1980s TV commercials and arcane facts about the early forms of Parliament. Cultured bunch, the staff in my local.

Last night however, it was my turn to learn. One of them had asked me last week about the phrase “Jumping the Shark” and where it had come from. Last night she told me the very next day after I’d explained it to her, she watched an episode of Scooby Doo (OK, maybe they’re not that cultured) where Scooby jumps a shark and that it had made more sense to her knowing what it was a reference to - it is one of the classic insider jokes within TV comedy. I then had to re-explain it all to the other people assembled. The conversation that followed was… interesting:

It went on in a similar vein for a few more minutes. More examples of the futility of the network, the silliness of the apps. Admittedly, none of them had left Facebook yet, but that might be that it’s rather hard to leave, as GeekUp and Co-working day regular Alan Burlison found out

These are people the social networks need. In their early 20s. University students. Bright, intelligent, aspirational. I have no doubt that within a decade most of them will be in the upper 25% of earners in the UK. Malcolm Gladwell would call them “sneezers” or something - they spread their likes and dislikes around their friends quickly. They set trends.

And in the last couple of months they have come to hate Facebook and MySpace.

Specifically, they hate that these networks have been opened up to people engaging in what is effectively a developed and sophisticated form of spam. They hate that they are being hassled via the social graph into doing “fun” things that are actually about as fun as receiving a hoax virus e-mail. They understand that their time and attention is important and its being wasted by sites that don’t respect that.

I have ideas for applications that will actually add value to the social graph and be of use to people in this group, but by the time I get to roll them out it could be too late - the people that make the platform interesting to me as a recruitment base for customers may have moved onto something else.

Facebook are adding features to improve the user experience as they learn how developers are gaming the system. They might win the battle in time, but ultimately they might have to give more control to users to block invites from apps that are not even remotely in their realm of interest.

This isn’t over yet. 2008 could easily be the year the social networks died.

Let’s imagine you are a toymaker. No, not some carpenter in a little workshop deep in Old Europe - a multinational that commissions studies on “pester-power” and are only slightly embarrassed by the fact some of your toys contain lead paint.

You have a trademark over a game, that quite frankly went out of fashion in the 1980s. Nobody wants to play it any more because it’s seen as dull, boring and just a little bit “fuddy”.

Then, one day, you notice sales are starting to rise. People are buying the game again. You can’t understand why, so you commission another report (hey, that’s your job) to find out where this new interest is coming from. A few months later, you have an answer - somebody has created an electronic copy of your game and made it available as an application in a social networking site. People are so crazy for it as a result, your brand is now gaining value and you’re going to have to think about how to cater for this new generation of players.

What do you do?

Well, if you’re Mattel or Hasbro and your games is Scrabble and the online app is Scrabulous on Facebook, you naturally send out cease & desist letters and hack off your new fan base.

The idiocy of this decision is monumental. Yes, you need to protect your trademark. Yes, you need to show that you’ve acted to protect it otherwise you can end up losing it anyway. Do they really think this is the way forward though?

I have to admit I’m a tad biased here. Here’s my Scrabulous stats screen:

As you can see, I’m one of those people who plays daily, and plays a lot. I’d hate to see it go. But that’s not why I’m writing about it here.

There is something new about the economy that is spreading around us. In the past ideas, trademarks, patents all were treated as if they had some inherent power that should not be discussed. People say they won’t discuss things because they need to be secret, that they fear the legal consequences. People don’t give up ideas until they’re “protected”. People guard words they invented as if they alone are the secret sauce to great riches.

Here’s the thing: that’s all bullshit now.

You want people to talk about your product, your ideas. You want them to talk, talk, talk, talk all day long. You want people to stand up and shout from the rooftops about your products, your patents, your trademarks. You want them to share their ideas of how your products could be made better. When they start doing that, especially when other people are providing them the tools to do it, you should think very carefully about whether you want to tell them to shut up.

On the back of my business cards I have 10 quotes which on discovering them the first time, I found to be something that resonated with me, and that I hope might resonate with potential clients, business partners and friends.

The first of those is a famous quote by E.W. Dijkstra that for me sums up the reason I got into the industry in the first place:

“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes”

I also recall Ted Nelson’s talk about Transliterature at OpenTech 2005, where he also summed up why computers fascinated me as an 11-year old learning to program the first time:

“I studied Computer Science to help change the World, not to automate trivial crap”

There is something bigger here in our industry we refuse to acknowledge. There is something deeper beneath the surface that all the talk of social networks, long tails and user-generated content doesn’t get anywhere near.

This ember of a notion has been inside me for a while now, and it’s starting to turn into a small fire. I don’t know where it’s going, but what I do know is that I’m now getting more and more passionate for “big picture” stuff. The kind of things that need investment and great people.

I’m rather pleased then, with all this “big picture stuff” going on in my head, that this year’s Turing Lecture is being held again at Manchester University and that it has just been announced as being given by James Martin, producer of the film Target Earth - note, not the 1950s B-Movie, alas! However, it’s big in its approach, and I’m looking forward to watching it just before Dr Martin gives his talk.

I still haven’t decided what 2008 is going to be about for me professionally, but I do know it’s going to be less about me and finding ways to reconnect to that Dijkstra quote in my work. The Turing lecture will be a timely reminder of some of the issues facing us - and maybe sometime this year those of us in Manchester can start thinking about how to work out some of the solutions. Maybe.

I’ve just decided “Maybe” is my new favourite word.

Happy New Year.

This afternoon, I’ve been playing around with Facebook’s ad platform. Partly for Vagueware, partly for other businesses, I’ve been looking at what Facebook says about its user base to advertisers.

The level of targeting is just outright astonishing. It allows for ads not only to be targeted on demographics such as age range and city, but even on interests and relationship status.

For example, I now know there are approximately (all figures given are approximate to the nearest 20 or so), 120 people in Manchester interested in Programming.

Out of the 2,017,440 UK citizens who describe themselves on Facebook as ‘single’, 998,900 are male, 904,960 are female. The numbers don’t add up because some people don’t define a gender which makes the point that if you don’t fill info in, you can’t be targeted via that info.

There are 1,180 females in the UK who declare an interest in ‘Computers’. The figure for males is around 8,540.

580 UK men say they’re really into shoes, with 14,300 British women aspiring to be Imelda Marcos.

There are around 5,680 people working for BT in the UK on Facebook. In the US, there are around 40 people working for O’Reilly Media who mention it in their profile. I could target either with an advert - handy if you have a product or idea you want to pitch.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Advertisers don’t need to know who your friends are (the social graph), to target you this tightly. If a member of GeekUp wanted to put up a singles ad for all single women between the ages of 24 and 32 who are into computers resident in Manchester (approx. 100 of them), they now theoretically could. Lucky ladies.

The question is, is this really a bad thing? Doesn’t it mean we’re not all going to see advertising that really has no relevance to us? Or does this kind of marketing mean that we are the perfect willing victims for advertisers to go deep into our psyche? I knew this day was coming, but I thought it was still some way off.

I just left a comment on this post of Hugh Macleod’s:

I think you have to remember that a lot of people are still working Facebook out. We didn’t witness people learning the web for the first time, but with FB we kind of have to. I think it’ll go like this:

1. For a while people will entertain themselves with zombie stuff

2. Then they’ll start looking for more interesting uses of the social graph and a few apps (think sharing useful data with friends, dating, etc.) will start to get traction

3. There on out, app developers will stop cutting their teeth on toy apps and start innovating

It’s going to be painful to get there, but it will happen, and it won’t just be Facebook: it’ll be cross-site so you might be in FB whilst I’m in MySpace or whatever (thanks to the open API efforts of several players, that FB will have to sign up to eventually).

Think back to how bad the web was in the early days. Think how it matured and we started getting useful things out of it eventually.

We’re very early on in the arch of developing social networking applications, but it won’t take 1/10th the time it took for the web to mature.

I think many people who have seen the web develop since the mid-1990’s will understand this and ‘get it’. We’re able to see it from a bigger picture, the arch that the web has taken over the last decade.

Many people new to the web are seeing it (from our point of view) almost at a macro level: they can’t imagine a World before blogs, before wikis, before UGC. I’m not saying Hugh is one of these macro-viewers who doesn’t get the big picture - heck, he gets things most people hadn’t even begun to think about, and he certainly understands the web - but I think he’s wrong on this one.

I’m almost human again after last week’s ‘grand tour’. I am however a little behind on blog articles. As promised though, some notes from Thursday’s mashup* event:

Sun Microsystems were providing space for this event at their office in Sale. It’s a great venue, but the trip out of central Manchester during rush hour left your correspondent a little frazzled. All trips out of Manchester leave this correspondent frazzled though, and it may have just been the task of crossing 8 lanes of heavy traffic that did it.

We opened with David Terrar from Blognation giving us a run down on where he’s seeing ‘Web 2.0’ technology in the enterprise. He touched on the BBC using blogs and wikis extensively, and discussed Pfizer’s use of the same. A lot of people seem to be trying to lock into consumer-orientated applications because the current success stories - Facebook, Flickr, MySpace - are in that arena. I think David is onto something in that the real money is bringing this style of social technology into the enterprise.

Simon Grice then did a more bi-directional talk on the premise that Web 2.0 doesn’t exist. I piped up and got agreement with Simon on the point that indeed the very first web browsers had “edit” capabilities and at some point, somebody decided it was too anarchic and turned the web into a broadcast medium. We’re now just getting back to where the web should have been more than a decade ago.

I also had to admit to the room that I have hired deviants in the past. Long story, I’ll fill you in some other time…

Simon discussed the disruptive nature of new media, and cited his own recently-launched testcard.tv - a site lawyers working on behalf of media companies will no doubt be particularly interested in.

UPDATE: Checking URLs, I notice that testcard.tv has been put into an “Under maintenance” mode, citing the takedown of a similar service and asking people to head over to their blog - it’s one way to get traffic I suppose. :-)

Next up, was Lee Strafford of Project Sahara. He’s trying to gauge interest on this side of the Pennines in what could be an interesting project. Talking to people after the meeting, the consensus was “wait and see where it goes”, which is unfortunate as it needs people to get involved now for it go anywhere. I’m going to do some talking around over the next few weeks and see what interest there is in getting stuck in at an early stage.

We then skipped the break - Ouch! Don’t do that again! My brain was hurting! - before moving onto case studies of NetVibes, edocr and Meecard. All interesting stuff, but I was already quite familiar with NetVibes and edocr - Meecard was a little food for thought though.

There then followed some discussions, some light networking, some pizza and a few beers before wandering off home.

All in all, this is a more polished and business-focused version of GeekUp. As a format it has a lot of potential, and providing the case studies and speakers can be lined up it could be a regularly anticipated event. Some people complained about the £25 entry fee (a sentiment I broadly agree with), but I know several people want to try and help out on that front.

I also find myself a little disappointed that I’m going to have to wait until February until the next one, so that has to be a reassuring thumbs-up for Manoj and Simon.

Tim O’Reilly is calling for Facebook to share social graph data so that systems can leverage all the data you’ve shoved into Facebook and use it within their own apps.

There are a couple of issues here.

Firstly, Facebook isn’t actually stopping 3rd-party API developers from knowing who your friends are, and if your friends agree to add an application, the app provider can see their graph too. What isn’t agreed yet is whether this should be made more open, or whether there needs to be a standard way of describing this data. There are all sorts of reasons why I might not want my “social graph” to be made available in an easily-manageable format, not least because it raises privacy concerns.

There is also the fact that Facebook’s business model relies on not making this data available. The “expose your data, and they will come” argument relies on a simple metric of conversion.

Within a company like Amazon, exposing the product catalogue by API is a no-brainer. The more places their stock list is available, the more chances they have of getting somebody into the system, the more likely they are to convert them into a sale. The porous membrane an API gives an app developer in this instance means 3rd-prty developers do the hard work of getting stock shifted in countless innovative ways the original company wouldn’t have thought of.

Facebook however, is different. The ‘conversion’ in their instance is getting somebody to look at pages with adverts on it. What they need is for their users to actively recruit more users - invite them inside the walled garden - and then try and keep them there. They’ve out-sourced the “retaining” part of the equation to developers (playing games, taking quizzes, sharing links, glorified e-mail), but by allowing their most valuable asset to be easily exported they are reducing their customer’s incentive to stay within the walled garden.

As always, it comes down to whether you have a right to that data, and whether you have a right to move it. I’d argue you do, but I’m suggesting it’s going to be hard for Facebook to allow you to take it wherever you want.

[UPDATE]: I realised there is a way to do this without Facebook’s permission. I’ve written it up on the site.

The most interesting observation from the last few months of Facebook usage for me, is how people manage their online identities: they don’t.

You can have multiple profiles and link them together in Facebook if you want. To my knowledge, nobody I know does this - everything they do just piles into one profile. In fact, I’m not even sure people know you can do this. Being completely open with one profile would traditionally be considered a high-risk strategy when mixing business contacts and personal contacts.

We’ve all heard stories about the graduate applying for a job at a top firm and being the perfect picture of potential leadership until somebody finds their MySpace page, complete with pictures of drug use, snippets from their starring role in a ‘Girls Gone Wild’ video and profanity-filled exchanges with friends. We are told that “They” don’t like this - “we” should be wary.

I think paranoia is more to blame for these warnings than reality.

We are no longer living in a parody of the 1950s. I don’t think that society was ever really as rigid as the films and documentaries make it look - where everybody calls each other by their surname and a tipple too many after dinner left you a social outcast, but even if it was real we’re leaving that mode of thinking about each other and quickly moving into an era where authenticity matters.

As a potential employer, I would rather know a new manager has an “interesting past”. It would help me understand his/her character more than pretending they were conceived a perfect model of professionalism.

I don’t know if the rest of the World is going to see things the way I do, but I know that Facebook and social network apps like it are making more people face up to the reality of dealing with people as they are, not how we’d like them to be.