Commentary

Peter Burgess

- Comment - Share Robert Scoble Robert Scoble - 2:37 AM (edited) - Public

What is the role of web hosting companies in the new socially contextual world that both Google and Facebook are bringing us?

Yesterday I saw just what when a company named Flow Search http://www.flow.net visited me.

First, to get up to date on this world, you need to understand the contextual engines that Facebook and Google are building. I call this 'the game of games.'

Read and listen to me here: http://scobleizer.com/2011/09/11/the-game-of-all-games-content-and-context-why-mark-zuckerberg-marc-benioff-and-larry-page-are-carving-up-the-social-world/

I will update this when I debate with VC +Fred Wilson on stage Friday in New York at +Dave McClure's Smash Summit http://smashsummit.com/

But, in this game of games let's just talk about one of the five user interfaces we'll use to navigate this new world: Notification streams.

These real-time streams tell us 'what is happening right now.'

Today these streams are pretty damn lame, which is why everyone is complaining about Facebook's ticker.

Tomorrow these streams will get a bit smarter.

But next year these streams will start to really get some smarts.

RIght now the Facebook ticker, or the red box up to the right on Google+ is pretty lame. They tell you what is going on right now, but they really don't tell you that much. They are NOT contextual right now.

They are like having a box of straws, only one of the straws has a $20 bill inside. You can't see it, and you have to work to find the value.

In the future that $20 straw will stand out like a sore thumb as we add more data about ourselves here and as Google and Facebook and Apple and Salesforce get smarter about how to do machine learning on these feeds.

Today it says 'four people just +1 'd your post.' In the future they will say 'your best friend just +1 'd your post' or 'two people from your church +1 'd your post.'

But that's just the start. Imagine that your favorite sports team could put stuff into these notifications? 'The San Francisco 49ers just traded your favorite player.'

Today my boss +Rob La Gesse told me he's buying a new car. 'I wish I knew when my car was being built,' he told me. That's a notification 'Rob, Audi just started building your car.' Then he wants to watch it being built on the factory floor. 'Rob, your car just entered the paint shop, a new photo was just posted to your private circle.' Then he wants to know when it is getting packed into the shipping container. 'Rob, your car just was packed up for transit, watch its GPS location here as it comes to your dealer.' Then he wants to know when his dealer will be ready to greet him and hand over the keys. 'Rob, Austin Audi has added a meeting to your calendar for December 23, 2011 at 2 p.m.'

All of this requires a web hosting company, but not one like you would recognize.

The old world required a cloud hosting partner to hold photos, videos, databases, and such. The new world will require flow systems. Systems that will be triggered by NFC chips stuck onto the car itself. Systems that will be triggered by shipping companies, by paint companies, by parts suppliers, by customer support professionals, etc.

Every company will need flow systems. This is a big opportunity, which is why I'm writing this publicly instead of posting it to Salesforce Chatter to just Rackspace employees.

It will need open systems. More open than even OpenStack, which Rackspace sponsored along with NASA.

It will need +Chris Messina of Google and +David Recordon of Facebook and +Steve Gillmor of Salesforce and THOUSANDS of others to show us this new world.

It will need a bunch of new companies to build the tools and infrastructure. That's why I was so excited to see Flow Search Corporation, which will compete with +Nick Halstead's DataSift and many others in the coming years.

It will need Rackspace and other hosting companies to build flow systems that can talk to Facebook and Google+ and Salesforce Chatter's contextual engines, which will help us filter noise out of these flows and show us the contextual signal.

It will need deep innovation across the entire stack.

So, am I excited about working at a hosting company? Damn straight I am.

+Lew Moorman (one of Rackspace's strategy folks) can't wait to see what you do and I can't wait to help. I'll be taking notes at Facebook's F8 to see what opportunities are here for a new kind of hosting company.

Every company, from the San Francisco 49ers, to Audi, to Rackspace itself will need to build such systems.

The revolution is indeed afoot. It is the Game of Games. Or, maybe, the contextual flow revolution.

The Flow // The App Revolution

Data super friends : can social media and enterprise applications team up? Everywhere I go in Silicon Valley, people are talking about social media and big data, but rarely do I hear real-world succes... //////////////// The Flow // The App Revolution

Data super friends : can social media and enterprise applications team up? Everywhere I go in Silicon Valley, people are talking about social media and big data, but rarely do I hear real-world succes... - Comment - Share +58 28 shares - Akram Javed, Andoni de Quadra, Arief Bayu Purwanto, Christian Boutin, Daniel Berner, Daniel Doherty, David Carse, Deanna McNeil, Devendra Rathod, Irvan Putra, István Maczkó, James Ketchell, James Morgan, Julian Waters, Margie D Casados, Maria Mery, Melvin Tan, Michael Copeland, Michael Crawford, Mylinda Montroy, Nabil Jezawi, Nancy Deschênes, Ramer Alegre Ramos, Roy Walter, Steven Witt, Tom Cumpsty, Tom Roberts and Yasushi Ito 54 comments

Fausto Garcia - Nice. 2:39 AM

Marco Meerman - +Robert Scoble Maybe your company Rackspace should jump into this new oppertunity. 2:39 AM

Dirk Talamasca - This is where it gets tricky. But, it always does, and then we think of something else. 2:39 AM

Robert Scoble - +Marco Meerman why do you think I posted such an important observation in public? 2:40 AM +1

Michael Grace - AMEN!!! Events and context are the name of the game. That is what I loved so much about working for Kynetx. I look forward to lots of innovation in this space and lots of loose coupling. 2:43 AM

Jaana Nyström - Really interesting, thanks for posting this in public. Wow, what the future will bring... The mind boggles! 2:46 AM

Logan Guinaugh - I was just talking about the current news ticker Facebook has and how it feeds us useless information, so it's imperative that these real-time streams get more intelligent and customize-able. 2:46 AM

Adi Rabinovich - Car being built notifications - Mini Cooper does that for long time now. Intelligent streams - there have been many attempts, hopefully they will get better next year. In my mind - we are creatures of shifting interests, and that is what makes such a big problem to create stream matching our (shifting) expectations. Other risks? This will make us further into a Herd - something we collectively will start getting tired off and disliking, I predict. 2:47 AM +1

KellyAnne Tearney - Thanks for explaining it so well. :) 2:47 AM

Eshetie Liku - That sound like a panel I would like input from... Mr. scoble could you find out what are the chances of being a successful nfc business... to a consumer traveling over 200mph past your place of business. This seems more practice then spam pop-up-type of alerting potential clients.. 2:48 AM

Robert Scoble - Adi: Facebook knows when you change your interests. Think about it. And tomorrow they are gonna know more about you. Google is studying this too. I could signal that right here, like this 'I am buying a +Ford Motor Company for my next car. Right now I have a Toyota Prius. You don't think there's code studying what we're saying about brands in these comments? Riiiiighhhhhtttttt.' 2:49 AM

Jon McLaren - what you were saying sounds a lot like email. 'blah just traded your favorite player' that's what sports sites do, they send you an email telling you things like that, and similar. I will however be interested in seeing notifications like that, I also am excited for what's being released tomorrow 2:51 AM +1

Sandeep Deshpande - lets hope all this new stuff brings down poverty and solves climate change issue and get us away from the peak OIL threat issue to boot. 2:53 AM

Adi Rabinovich - +Robert Scoble Good point - the question is, by the time you really pull out your wallet, will Ford have the right model you want? Will there be another brand/model that captures your attention by then? Car is actually a good example - after months of research I came to Honda with checkbook to purchase a car. They didn't have the color I wanted, and told me to come back in two weeks. Well, a week later I discovered better Nissan and purchased it... 2:56 AM

Lauren Massa-Lochridge - +Adi Rabinovich You are right - analogous to what Eli Pariser has been talking about, the filter bubble http://www.thefilterbubble.com/ But fortunes will be made until the bubble pops, that's always how it happens. Those with fortune to be made don't care whether something new (or something re-branded or re-marketed as if it is new) endures or not, they have an exit strategy. 2:59 AM

Dante Cabrera - That all sounds great, but it all comes down to money/expenses and Roi. With so many companies involved in the chain, its either put up or shut up. 2:59 AM

Adi Rabinovich - Don't get me wrong - there's clearly a value in this. It reminds me of a Sci-Fi story, where there are legally people going around shooting you with darts of 'cravings', to make you want things, like McDonalds fries, etc. 2:59 AM +1

Robert Scoble - +Jon McLaren email sucks. It isn't real time and it isn't on my screen all the time. It also isn't optimized for short little messages that flow over and over to you like notifications do. Finally, emails don't generally work all that well on mobile. 3:02 AM

Sandeep Deshpande - I think it also depends on how much users are willing to share, I think there is huge over estimation on facebook and every other company that people will share anything and everything they do. 3:04 AM

Dirk Talamasca - +Robert Scoble Careful. You're gonna put the USPS back in business. 3:04 AM

Robert Scoble - +Dirk Talamasca if the USPS knows what the heck I'm talking about here maybe they are worth saving! 3:06 AM +1

Sandeep Deshpande - +Robert Scoble email is part of the notification stream atleast on android phones. When I get a mail, I get notified. Email is going to be a part of the notification revolution. It is not going away anywhere. Infact google can add gmail notifications to the black bar(for the important mails only) 3:07 AM (edited)

Robert Scoble - I'm not saying email goes away, but it is hardly contextual. I have written more than 1,200 Gmail filters to try to make it useful. Still isn't, really. Not compared to what Facebook, Salesforce, or Google+ are gonna be able to give me. 3:08 AM

Dante Cabrera - Email has its place, texting is faster but limited in form. 3:10 AM +2

Ramer Alegre Ramos - +Robert Scoble All this data are useless if Facebook and Google don't change the way they improve their products, and that is 'as if they have no long-term plan'. Both of them are focused on what users like today (i.e., photos), not on how they can improve the lives of their users by finding the best way to consume their user content, and that is of course, being 'contextual' or 'making sense of these things together'. There's nothing wrong with focusing on user trends, but let's not stop there. Let's also work on a bigger picture, that is 'global and open and *real-world problem-solving*'. So I hope Facebook and Google knows what is the best thing to do with our content someday. Expand this comment » 3:16 AM (edited) +2

Adi Rabinovich - For all those mentioning email here - I am afraid you missing the point. When you start getting (like many of us), hundreds and thousands of emails a day (Non-spam), you start ignoring email 'notification', and in fact you turn it Off. The holy grail is to bubble to the top what is important - and what's important to you (your sister getting married), most likely doesn't interest me or others. Hence the big challenge 3:17 AM (edited)

Adi Rabinovich - Scary - we are already somehow collectively having same thoughts?! What's up with today's Dilbert being so close to the topic? http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-09-21/ 3:43 AM (edited)

Sandeep Deshpande - yep that is why I mentioned I would like to be notified of only the important mails(something like priority inbox). But the thing is there is no way for algorithms to correctly deduce what is important to me without my explicit training of the algorithms.That's what made aardvark so nice, it was learning about our topics and what all we liked to answer and it was kinda fun. 3:26 AM

Andy Cameron - I think the proof the world is going the way +Robert Scoble mentions in this post is easy to see. Next time you're reading your favourite news website, check out the Google AdSense ads that appear. Are they related to the content you're reading, or something else that interests you? My bet is that flow systems are already pretty advanced and maybe the reason we haven't noticed it so much is because it is so good at appealing to us that our mind isn't annoyed by it. 3:31 AM +1

Robert Scoble - +Ramer Alegre Ramos I think that tomorrow everyone will see that Facebook does have a vision for this stuff. 3:33 AM +2

chandana Liyanagamage - Register with http://www.blackpointforum.com/ 3:49 AM

Paul Cushworth - I've been thinking in similar ways. A public middleware infrastructure, federated social networks, federated identity, further service oriented architecture, and event driven processing.

Lots to do, and it's all fun stuff. 3:51 AM

Emmett Lollis - In my opinion the filtering on Facebook, at least in my case is very poor. They didn't help lead me to the right contacts which has left me with friends who I have nothing in common with at all. That makes my interactions more generic and less telling of who I am. I need to edit the subscription settings or group everyone to make my feed more manageable like it is here yet the posts in my feed are too generic to figure out where I would group them. Here on G+ I've found it a LOT easier to identify interests and what they are about.

Also Facebook is actively dropping the ranking of fan pages in the hopes we will pay them to show up higher in the filters. I've been getting about a 10% viewership on my fan page posts over the last couple months just because there was a period I didn't post. If Facebook is more concerned with manipulating what the user 'should' be interested in rather than letting their interests rise to the top they are going to lose the identity game. Expand this comment » 3:54 AM

Robert Scoble - +Emmett Lollis Facebook got dramatically better in the past week, though. Lists are bringing people into my view that ARE contextually relevant. Tomorrow we'll see how it all fits together. 3:55 AM

Emmett Lollis - +Robert Scoble I really enjoy the smart list that shows who is in my area. My main reason for getting fed up with Facebook was the way I vanished from people's news feed (compared to before). I've been seeing dramatic improvements in that area. I got an influx of subscribers the first day or two they enabled it but it's dropped way off. If Facebook is able to start bringing people to me in a similar manner to G+ I'll be happy. They managed to bring me from totally giving up on them to getting excited a couple times so time will tell. 4:03 AM

Maria Mery - great post +Robert Scoble ! :) 4:40 AM +1

Joshua Davidson - I guess the big cost of such a system is the loss of privacy. As more companies have recently been hacked, the inherent insecurity of large organisations databases has been brought home. This kind of data is power, and power can be wielded for good or ill. It is up to the service providers to use their power for good, and protect the data from ill. 5:09 AM +1

Brian H. Logan - Such a pity they haven't integrated g+ buttons to their website.. they aren't very up to date :) 5:21 AM +2

Salman Khan - I totally agree, plus it makes me happy that datamining is just getting started. There is already so much data to play with, its the identification and references (along with all the technology on the delivery side) thats going to be huge.

And its the very concept of 'contextualization' that makes one realise that Google still has a lot of work for these Phds for writing the algo. 5:28 AM

Pravin Tailor - When companies start opening up API's to their data feed, then there will be lots of opportunities for 3rd parties to create custom/relevent information to end users. +Bradley Horowitz of Google+ is well aware this. He was the lead for Yahoo Pipes.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/

A new start-up is building on this with triggers:-
http://ifttt.com/

The market is only going to get bigger as you mention. Expand this comment » 6:41 AM

Steve Kirwin - It will need to filter contextually for each individual based on work & play. Which will mean companies hooking into your profile at FB & G+ and assigning access and feed rights to your profiles... You as an individual will want to see delivery of your car, in play mode. But the person at the car dealership will also want to track progress in work mode. Unless it's a company car in which case it's a work related context... Many integration points to follow. It also explains G+'s motivation for real identities. 6:42 AM

Ben Macdonald - Search results have been 'tailored' to an individual's history, location and contacts for a while now. It's unfortunate, in some ways, but extending it was always going to happen. This is just a little more 'in-your-face' than in the past. 7:02 AM

James Ketchell - Its all well and good having these tailored signals flying around to individuals but thats really no different that we already have. The problem is not the signals or the delivery of them, or even the storage of that information. The problem is the is in the consumption of them. Whether its email, text, tweets or G+ alerts, is nothing more than semantics. Improving them is only one element. The ultimate goal has to be improving the way they are consumed. In essence a unified inbox of a type we have yet to see. Google tried throwing buz into our email readers, and it failed. They have google talk and google voice sitting in the same email interface. And now we have G+ in the same window too. Yet none of that really brings us much closer to the ultimate goal. It merely clutters up a desktop with more and more noise. Expand this comment » 8:05 AM (edited) +1

Breno Pinheiro - Let's grow up the Google+ Campaign Go!ogle+ Like here: http://www.facebook.com/GoGoGoPlus 8:01 AM +1

Luiz Costa - Bin Laden is dead. Obviously he wakes up in hell where the devil is waiting impatiently, and said: - I do not know what to do with you, you are one of the first on my list but I have no positions available at this time. But it is clear that his place is here. He thinks a bit and says: - I know what I'm doing, I have some people here who are not as bad as you. I'll send a pro purgatory and you should take her place, as you belong to me I'll let you decide who you want to replace. Osama thinks that until hell is not so bad and accepts the proposal. The Devil opens the first door, they come inside Richard Nixon in a pool swimming vigorously, but as he approaches the edge is moving away and he has to continue to swim and swim and swim ... - No, says Bin Laden, I do not know how to swim and could not do this all day. The devil next door leads to: Tony Blair is there with a sledgehammer and a huge pile of rocks to break. - No, says Bin Laden, I have a big problem and break stones column would kill me again. The devil then opens the third door. Inside, Bill Clinton is lying in a bed. His hands and feet are tied to the bed. Leaning over him, Monica Lewinsky does what she does best ... Osama looks amazing scene for a moment and says: - Okay, I want this place! - Says he's drooling ... The Devil smiled and said: - Ok Monica, you can leave! Expand this comment » 8:17 AM

James Ketchell - The report spam button is located where???? 8:19 AM +1

Json Marruffo - +James Ketchell Next to the +1 button of a post. It's a subdued flag that appears when you mouse over. 8:57 AM (edited)

James Ketchell - +Json Marruffo Thx 9:09 AM

Fernando Medina - The more I read +Robert Scoble the more convinced i am about g+ becoming.'universal social/service bus' feeds come in, you have smart, ongoing filters to fish out feeds you are interested in. Human feeds and automated feeds flowing on the bus... 9:38 AM

J Harold Lowry - Real world success will come from the DBAs and DB programmers who are users themselves with a cutting edge background. 9:55 AM

Eric Gregg - +James Ketchell On a post it is at the top right corner. On a comment it's at the very bottom. If you hover your mouse near the time stamp you should see both the +1 and a little flag. Pick the flag to report abuse. 9:56 AM

James Ketchell - Thanks +Eric Gregg Got it! 9:57 AM

Alex Barnett - Enjoyed catching up yesterday...v.interesting conversation re: flows in the business context!! 10:13 AM

Peter Burgess - Thought provoking essay ... but how does the real world get improved. A global economic system that concentrates wealth more and more at one end works well for the rich, but poor people get stuck with famine (Somalia), floods (Pakistan) pestilence (AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria) and so on. The capitalist market economy works better than communism, but something better is needed like a value market economy. Google+ has the potential to do this! 10:22 AM - Edit