Innovation in Software

The above cartoon is by Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com – warning, these days he talks about a particular brand of wine a lot, but his cartoons are often cool. I’d quite like this one on my business card. Thanks to his nice licensing terms, I might be able to do that.

When he published this, he pointed to a story by Scoble about the bubble people are now seeing. There are some important things to note about this bubble:

1. It’s only being seen by those of us inside the industry. If I talk to most people outside of the industry about social sites, Web 2.0, Ajax, whatever, they haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about.
2. There is a long, long way to go before this one bursts, but I don’t think the web in 12 months time will look close to what we have right now – it won’t burst, it’ll just look more sensible.

Let me give some background to where I’m thinking here, and start by making a controversial point: Technorati sucks from a social software perspective. So does Google.

I think they suck because to be part of the network, to add to the community, you have to be a publisher. Most people don’t have the time, energy or inclination to become a one-person publishing band, or the money to become a 10-person publishing house. Nor do they want to make videos to put on YouTube or podcast their thoughts. Some people think publishing is something attention-seekers do, and they don’t want to be called attention-seekers. They’re not going to participate.

Of course blogging is attention-seeking, but it’s not a given that this is a bad thing. I want to draw attention to all sorts of things, and I’d rather get your attention by talking and educating you about Ruby on Rails or new technology, or innovation, rather than just put up a big billboard and take out radio ads saying “We Rock the Kazbar – Vagueware Ltd”, because I respect your attention way more than that.

So am I an attention seeker? Sure, of course I am. But I’m seeking attention for something I’m passionate about: my business, technology, innovation. I want to share it. You might not give two hoots about my business, technology or innovation, but you’ll be passionate about something else. People who realise that become bloggers.

However, as a result of a relatively small set of attention-seekers having all the kung fu right now, looking at the A-list of blogs – the ultimate list of passionate attention-seekers – is a pointless exercise. The only thing that is being used as a metric is how many attention-seekers like this group a bit more than a different group by way of the number of linked articles. This is a terrible metric to use.

Ultimately, it could be Google’s downfall as well. PageRank – whilst better than previous systems for ranking content on the Web – uses the worst metric possible: what publishers think is relevant, as opposed to what searchers and readers think is relevant (although they have taken measures to improve this).

What could be more useful is to find out what people of all persuasions – non-publishers included – like across the board. That’s why social bookmarking sites have got traction – it doesn’t take much to digg, reddit or del.icio.us something, you’re not some being publisher, you’re just some dude who clicked on ‘digg this’. That metric – people who were prepared to go ‘Yo! This guy has funk!’ – is a lot more useful. It means that people who are only a bit passionate get to play with less effort.

Except it’s still not great.

For starters, game theory gets all over this model, and sites like Alexa’s Top 500 can so easily be manipulated, all you end up doing is creating a whole new form of spam. As the social bookmark sites get attention from other niches outside tech – particularly porn – they’re going to have to deal with this problem.

The other problem is that it’s still not frictionless. Alexa tracks people who bother to install their toolbar, which most people really can’t be bothered to do. Digg and Reddit are contributed to only by people who can be bothered to click on a little button they remembered to save to their bookmarks bar, write up a few words and some tags and hit submit. It’s not as bad as publishing a blog, but it’s still effort.

All the Web 2.0/community sites are going to face this problem: social communities take work to build and you can’t build them, they have to build themselves. And once people realise they’re there, they are going to start spamming the heck out of them and game theory becomes game-on.

The potential though is huge. Reddit is doing something very interesting with niche sites – joel.reddit.com and so on – which has the potential not to just change the way we think about publishing, but how we think about search.

I’m not interested in what the Internet at large as a group of publishers thinks is the best result for ‘Ruby on Rails’, I’m interested in what a community I respect thinks is the best hit. It’s a better metric for me. If they get the sweetspot just right, the social bookmark sites can take market share away from mainstream search. Right now Joel has his own bookmarking site, but what if every community, every blog, what if they all had social bookmarking communities? Every blog becomes a search engine built by people you share a passion with – a niche community with value.

Even better, because this is so niche, you don’t care about scaling, you don’t care about game theory, you just care about trying to reduce the traction of participation. It needs no money, just passion. Passion is the steam engine of the next industrial revolution.

That’s where the Web 2.0 crowd need to head. This bubble is wrong because we think it’s about Ajax and Rails and reflecing logos. Technology and shiny buttons aren’t what is making the net different in the next 10 years. It’s the people, stupid!