How “Social Media” Can Work

I have blogged quite extensively on Twitter since January of 2007. I have tried to reduce a “social media interaction” using Twitter down to basic essentials and simple analysis. This is how “one-to-one” communication can work with the Net helping those with shared interests, no matter how strange- connect.

Process:

Analysis:

If Blair had not had a blog, and had not been using Twitter (ditto for me) we would have never met, nor exchanged insights- which are critical and hard to come by. The opportunity to pick up the phone or Skype and create a more meaningful interaction simply could not have happened. Of course Blair did take the initiative and I am not sure what stimulated this. His “about me” page and tight quips helped me qualify why I might want to read further and spend my time- which is valuable. In this case our shared eclectic interests in persuasion, among other things, helped form a bridge.

Conclusion:

While I primarily blog on this site for my own interests (have fun) and “to think out loud” I really need to work on reducing my thoughts and words into more manageable chunks- even if I am pranking someone say- Scoble.

I don’t deliberately try to write in such a sprawling fashion, or talk over anyone’s head. It is a matter of Appalachian dialect and flat-out poor writing habits combined with an avid reader’s vocabulary. I tend to write exactly how I talk. This tells me my speaking can be greatly improved too. Probably by shutting up a bit more or soliciting more feedback.

I also tend to write “stream-of-consciousness style” and jump from A to Z all the while assuming the reader is well versed in security or e-commerce or virtual worlds, or whatever area I am exploring. I tend to explore wide and diverse areas and I do it fast. Just like I read.

That doesn’t mean I have to write the same ”echo-chamber” lists or follow the identical formulaic formats that I see and get bored with around the web. I should make use of list formats and short-form paragraphs, with careful work on reduction, before hitting “publish”. This will help me and assist readers, who might also be potential collaborators, in making a decision on whether to “sign on for something more”.

That simple. Blog, RSS, Micro-blog exchanges, VOIP, E-mails- Insight.

Next post I may tackle aesthetics, but for now I will settle for the ROI on Twitter & Blogs.

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Solipsis P2P 3D

Solipsis is a free and open source system for a massively multi-participant shared virtual world. It was designed by Joaquin Keller and Gwendal Simon at France Telecom Research and Development Labs. Its goal is to provide the infrastructure for a “Metaverse-like” public virtual territory. Once again taking scalability into account it relies on a (P2P) peer-to-peer architecture sothat the virtual space has the potential to be populated by an “unlimited” number of participants.

Solipsis is Funded By:

ANR - French National Agency for Research
The French National Agency for Research (ANR) is a public administrative institution. It was created on January 1st 2007 as a funding agency for research projects. It aims at increasing the number of research projects coming from the whole scientific community. The projects are assessed by peers and go through a selection process based on their competitiveness; the selected ones are then funded. ANR addresses both public research institutions and companies with two main goals: generating new knowledge and promoting interactions between public and corporate labs by developping partnerships.

I&R - Media and Networks
A “cluster of clusters”, “Media and Networks” brings together actors from higher education and academic research institutions, SMI/SMEs and large companies mainly from Bretagne and Pays de la Loire regions, who are leaders in the media and networks fields. Encompassing the three markets of audiovisual, telecommunications, and information technologies, the Media and Networks cluster helps its members develop tomorrow’s world-competitive innovative technologies.

Open Source Make-up

The Solipsis project includes the use of a number of open source projects that it supports, or that makes up its DNA. Currently the list of supporting tech include:

OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) -OGRE is a scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine written in C++.

Navi - Navi is a new library for Ogre3D developers. In this implementation think of making a GUI with HTML. Pretty simple.

Lua - Lua is a powerful, fast, light-weight, embeddable scripting language. It combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics.

Breplibrary - An implementation of a topological data structure similar to the WINGED EDGE data structure, representing the boundary of a polyhedral solid.

ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) - ODE is an open source, high performance library for simulating rigid body dynamics e.g. vehicles. It is a mature and platform independent that utilizes a C/C++ API.

TPG Tokamak Physics Engine - The TPG SDK is a high performance real-time physics library designed especially for gaming interaction.

XmlRpc++ - A C++ implementation of the XML-RPC protocol based on py-xmlrpc. The XmlRpc protocol was designed to make remote procedure calls simple: it encodes data in a simple XML format and uses ubiquitious HTTP for communication.

TinyXml - Very simple, and light weight C++ XML parser designed for easy integration. It reads XML and creates C++ objects representing the XML document. The objects can be manipulated, changed, and saved again as XML.

Note: So I don’t get too acronym happy–

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a standard for creating markup languages which describe the structure of data.

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) isthe protocol used to transfer web pages written in HTML. The protocol is used to follow links from one web page to another.

SDK (Software Development Kit) A set of programming instructions, points of access and guidelines for plugin developers.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) A markup language designed for the creation of web pages with hypertext and other information to be displayed in a web page. Not an actual programming language.

GUI (Graphical User Interface) The use of pictures rather than just words to represent the input and output of a program. Hails from the days of mice, windows, and icons invented at Xerox PARC (not by Apple or Microsoft- they looted it.) in the 1970’s. DOS, if you are old enough to recall it, used a CLI (command line interface)

From Wikipedia on Solipsis

Strolling through a magnificent virtual world can now be casually experienced in massively multi-player games. It somehow corroborates the concept of a massively shared public virtual world depicted by Neal Stephenson in his science fiction novel Snow Crash. In these worlds, users’ interactions are not only allowed but empowered, so, in some ways, they outperform the current Web and appear as a possible evolution of our networking experience. However, some issues still need to be addressed.

In a virtual world, every object — avatar of a player or a virtual object — should be aware of all objects within its virtual surroundings. Yet, objects are dynamic: their virtual position can change. Therefore the system should ensure that an entity is aware of all events occurring nearby. The simplest way to implement such a system is to centralize the management of the virtual world. If a “god” knows, at any time, the positions of all entities, it can easily alert entities about important events happening nearby.

However, this architecture relies on costly server(s), mostly owned by some private companies. These virtual worlds are not public at all! They just are some private worlds having some rules that are unilaterally decided by a company. The behaviours of inhabitants are strictly monitored and some non-expected tendencies could result in banishments.

Moreover, a centralized virtual world adopts a common graphical appearance that is initially designed by owners. Even the most customizable systems where users can build their home will impose limits on the creativity of users. There is no clear consensus on the graphical shape of a virtual world and there will probably never be.

Furthermore, these systems fail in creating a complete ecosystem for the virtual world. The presence of an unsustainable owner prevents the raise of business opportunities.

Some recent initiatives attempt to implement a peer-to-peer virtual world. Algorithms based on collaboration between participants ensure the consistency of the virtual world that is a public place because nobody owns it, except its inhabitants.

The Open Source Metaverse Project builds a world seen as the union of several separate worlds, each one being managed by one user which could be potentially anybody. This edonkey-like architecture supports some 3d graphical routines. Solipsis is a one-layer peer-to-peer system in which there is definitely no manager, nor a precise implementation yet. Briefly speaking, Solipsis seems to have a greater potential because of its pretty open design, but it is far less enjoyable by now. Both approaches suffer from a bootstrapping issue. A world becomes attractive when it is crowded although they currently are quite empty.

No Escaping Snowcrash

Seems one cannot escape the Snowcrash metaphor these days. At any rate while researching Solipsis I came across some interesting documents- one in particular that readers might find worthy of study- The P2P Manifesto and I quote again because it ties directly into some recent and somewhat abstract exhibits to highlight our notions of economy, genetics, memetics, scarcity, abundance and perhaps even authenticity.

From the P2P Manifesto this opening piece.

Our current political economy is based on a fundamental mistake. It is based on the assumption that natural resources are unlimited, and that it is an endless sink. This false assumption creates artificial scarcity for potentially abundant cultural resources. This combination of quasi-abundance and quasi-scarcity destroys the biosphere and hampers the expansion of social innovation and a free culture.

In a P2P-based society, this situation is reversed: the limits of natural resources are recognized, and the abundance of immaterial resources becomes the core operating principle. The vision of P2P theory is the following:

1 ) the core intellectual, cultural and spiritual value will be produced through non-reciprocal peer production;

2) it is surrounded by a reformed, peer-inspired, sphere of material exchange;

3) it is globally managed by a peer-inspired and reformed state and governance system.

Because of these characteristics, peer to peer can be said to be the core logic of the successor civilization, and is a answer and solution to the structural crisis of contemporary capitalism.

Plenty more interesting points in the P2P Manifesto…

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While playing another round of the obnoxious, yet horribly addictive pirate game at Facebook I noted an advertisement for The Facebook Lending Community. (According to the intra-house inventory these are served at a measly 0.50 CPM. It has to be low when they are using incentives for installs of Mywebsearch or Zwinky or “free screen savers”. Yes you can get the value added software in exchange for a load of 1000 in-game gold coins to firm up your pirate armada. Better yet the de facto “complete a questionnaire and subscribe to a bunch of CPA priced offers to get a free case of soda pop or a shopping card” and 1000 gold kind of deals abound.

The Facebook Lending Community
Where you can borrow and lend money,
bypass the banks, and get better rates.
Need Money?
Easy online application.
Rates start at:
7.62% APR

Got Money?
Invest in trusted borrowers.
Average portfolio performance:
11.84%

Average portfolio of 11.84%? Not a bad return.

What is This All About?
According to the site “We are not a bank: with rates like these, we’d be out of business Lending Club is a lending community where you borrow and lend money to fellow Facebook members. We operate as cheaply as we can, providing better rates on both sides of the loan.

All members’ identities and bank accounts are verified. Borrowers are credit-checked. We report payments to credit bureaus just like banks do, so this can help build up your credit.”

And they go on to extol the benefits of social lending:

Better Rates for All of Us
“While banks typically pay 5% interests on savings accounts and charge a 12.32%* interest rate for personal loans, Lending Club offers an alternative: members lend and borrow money directly among each other online, bypass the banks and get better rates.”

Peer-to-Peer lending, or social lending, is not a new concept. I recently covered philanthropic micro-financing. Much earlier I covered true P2P lending sites, again perhaps better termed “social lending”, like the Prosper service. Prosper operates as an online auction site where people with dough can lend money directly to people without any.

Borrowers set the maximum rate they wish to pay and lenders set the minimum rate they want. Prosper matches borrowers with lenders and manages the loan repayment. You can even earn referral money to the tune of a $25 kill fee for bringing in a lender and the lender also receives $25 as soon as as they fund their first loan (subject to a 30 day cookie and 90 day start-up period after a successful conversion to a lender).If you refer a borrower you receive 0.5% of your friend’s loan amount as soon as the friends first monthly payment clears. Get it while you can the referral program ends on December 31, 2007.

At Revenews I also covered several different services and/or financial peer driven networks well over a year ago while talking about “whuffie”.

Fries with my Whuffie?

From the cyberpunk novel Down and Out… the usual economic incentives have disappeared from the book’s world. Whuffie has replaced money, providing a motivation for people to do useful and creative things. A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions. The question is, who determines which actions are favorable or unfavorable? In Down and Out, the answer is public opinion. Rudely pushing past someone on the sidewalk will definitely earn you negative points from them (and possibly bystanders who saw you), while composing a much-beloved symphony will earn you positive Whuffie from everyone who enjoyed it…

Second Life could use a Whuffie system, and they sort of had one- the problem was it was based on the Linden, but I digress…from the Revenews’ post I’ll draw a couple of examples:

Snip…

ZOPA: UK equivalent of Prosper. The name, ZOPA, stands for Zone of Possible Agreement, a negotiating term identifying the bounds within which agreement can be reached between two parties. Coined concept of “FreeFormers”. Freeformers were identified as displaying different attitudes towards many aspects of life, including their money, and Zopa has developed a credit referencing process that goes beyond credit bureau information in order to establish consumers’ attitudes towards money, as well as their credit-worthiness.

BillMonk: New start-up engaged around “Social money”- the informal currency between friends and they have a blog. (Yeah guys I’m blogging about you at your request.)

Again, nothing new although at the time I blogged the piece at Revenews I spoke to BillMonk and they were not quite out of the gates. Over a year and a half later all the services I referenced seem to be operating fine. If it were 2001 it might be a different Phillip Kaplanesque kind of story. ZOPA and Prosper seem to be very much like Lending Club. However, I ran into Lending Club on Facebook via a banner advertisement. “F8″ they call it internally. Perhaps just “Fate”? I wonder why Prosper didn’t get their first?

Lending Club does have a complex set of rules based on the licenses which are granted state-wide. Currently, at time of writing, they are not licensed in South Dakota, Rhode Island, Oregon, North Dakota, Nevada, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, Idaho, California. Don’t worry even if you cannot borrow, if you live there you can still lend. The rest of the states fall to a whole bunch of different Minimums, Maximum Interest Rates, Late Payment Fees (15-Day Grace Period), Unsuccessful Payment Fees, you can see the lending terms here.

I find it interesting that you could potentially, but absolutely, put the financial hammer down on someone residing in Alabama, Georgia, Montana, New Hampshire and Utah. Yes, now you too, the empowered consumer, could possibly dole out the bone-crushing misery that has long been reserved for credit cards, banks and the alley-HQ operations of loan sharks carrying clubs and brass knuckles. The max rates in Alabama, Georgia, Montana, New Hampshire and Utah reach an astounding thirty (30) percent state maximum.

Lending Club works closely with “industry leaders” to offer their own “comprehensive person-to-person lending platform”.

How do they do courier all that cash around?

BankServ. BankServ is the financial services processor handling the submission and receipt of ACH transactions. BankServ supports over 400 banks in 52 countries and operates a PCI-compliant data center.

For the curious what is PCI-compliance and why so many acronyms?

I believe being PCI compliant is a nice way of referring to the adherence to Payment Card Industry Data Security. In 2004, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard was created in a joint effort by the major credit card companies American Express, Visa, Discover and MasterCard . In the summer of 2005, the PCI DSS regulations were standardized and implemented. Naturally every credit card company has its own security policy.

- American Express: Data Security Operating Policy (DSOP)
- Visa: Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP)
- Discover: Discover Information Security and Compliance (DISC)
- MasterCard: MasterCard Site Data Protection (SDP)

To keep merchants marching to the tune of protecting our credit card data the PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) was birthed in the fall of 2006 with a goal of having everyone that should be PCI compliant on board with the program by the end of 2008. At the current rate Visa U.S.A is projecting that 65 percent of all merchants will be PCI compliant by the end of 2007. The over-arching requirements are building and maintaining a secure network, protecting card holder data, maintain a vulnerability management program, use of strong access controls and routinely monitoring and testing a network. It goes all the way down to basic and common stuff like don’t use default passwords, performing vendor audits to ensuring credit card information is encrypted when being sent over public networks. That’s the short of it. We should know when they are really successful when crackers finally make the switch to chop-shopping WoW accounts instead of carding.

As for the latter- acronyms are fun- that’s why.

Forget Whuffie…They use one of the Big Three

Credit information is obtained through TransUnion. TransUnion is a global leader in credit and information management with 50,000 customers on six continents, supporting more than 500 million people worldwide. I am not sure where TransUnion has ever “supported” me, but that is how the system is setup.

F8 (Sounds like a Top Secret Plan or a Function Key or maybe “Fate”)

According to the privacy policy , and I am sure many will sleep soundly knowing they are certified by TRUSTe…

About Our Facebook Application

Lending Club maintains an application on the Facebook application platform known as F8. Facebook users can register for a Lending Cub account by coming through Facebook. This entails adding the Lending Club “application” to your Facebook profile (also free). Once the Lending Club application is installed, users get to a “landing page” on Facebook governed by Facebook’s privacy policy. No personally identifiable information is collected while on the Facebook landing pages. By clicking on these links from the Facebook landing pages, you will be taken from Facebook to the Lending Club site.

It is good to know it is governed by Facebooks’ liberal and well tuned privacy policy- also bearing the TRUSTe seal. I do mean liberal. All sorts of things leap out at you…for example:

However, while we have undertaken contractual and technical steps to restrict possible misuse of such information by such Platform Developers, we of course cannot and do not guarantee that all Platform Developers will abide by such agreements. Please note that Facebook does not screen or approve Platform Developers and cannot control how such Platform Developers use any personal information that they may obtain in connection with Platform Applications. In addition, Platform Developers may require you to sign up to their own terms of service, privacy policies or other policies, which may give them additional rights or impose additional obligations on you, so please make sure to review these terms and policies carefully before using any Platform Application. You can report any suspected misuse of information through the Facebook Platform and we will investigate any such claim and take appropriate action against the Platform Developer up to and including terminating their participation in the Facebook Platform and/or other formal legal action.

It is best to just read it all so you are informed. That being said I think social lending is a good thing and Facebook is certainly here to stay and willing to introduce you and I to new concepts like social lending. This is perhaps one reason, out of many, Microsoft got a whopping 1.6% stake in Facebook for approximately $250 million.

It’s social…
It’s the future…
It’s our fate…f8

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At least episode I does…(I Worship his Shadow). The guys who brought you Skype now bring out Joost, and so far I am impressed…back to Lexx, a show I never thought I would catch again.

“I am Kai. Last of the Brunnen-G. Millenia ago the Brunnen-G led humanity to victory in the war against the insect civilization. The Time Prophet predicted that I would be the one to destroy the Divine Order and The League of 20,000 Planets. Someday that will happen, but not today, as today is the day of my death. The day our story begins…”

– Kai (I Worship His Shadow)

Those wanting a free Joost invite- just drop a note, I’ll get to it as I can, it appears to the tight caps are being lifted.

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Preparing for a long trip and time off….but to keep people stimulated…maybe I’ll have time to post.

A Joost Beta Review From FranticIndustries. There reaction was pretty much the same that I had- “Wow”. P2PTV, IPTV aregoing to change things.

In Second Life- virutalive.tv 2007 machinima contest : Apex High Studio is sponsoring a machinima contest for the virtualive.tv event happening May 10th. For more information or swing over to VirtualLiveTV Blog. Prize is 10k Lindens though. Hmmm I’d pay more than that for killer machinima.

Shout out to Bleys Chevalier for his clever TinySL widget. Shrink URLS so you don’t have too. Suggest he hads _top options among other things. Still pretty cool. Get the widget here although drop him an e-mail if you have a top level SL related domain to get on the “Safe” list…the whole idea to begin with.

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Get Joost

Joost (pronounced ‘juiced’) is an interactive software for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer tv technology, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis the same two that founded Skype and Kazaa.

Joost began development in 2006. Working under the code name “The Venice Project”. The program is based on P2PTV technology and promises near-TV resolution images. In short it turns your PC into on-demand Television without any need for hardware. News updates, discussion forums, show ratings, and multi-user chat sessions (often linked to the active stream/channel) are made possible through the use of semi-transparent widget overlays….

widgets…yes widgets…

Joost’s “Composition”

- Based on XULRunner
- Audio from ZAP Media Kit.
- P2P layer from the Joltid company, (they did Skype’s p2p layer)
-Video playback utilizes the CoreCodec, CoreAVC H.264 video decoder.

I think this one is going to be large. Still in closed beta, but I know a beta tester…hmmmm.

Then we have Zattoo

OK No bad Fantasy Island puns.

Zattoo is a proprietary P2PTV system (as I understand it) focused on the European market. As of December 2006, the product is in public beta testing. The player is based on H.264 (QuickTime and ffmpeg), and is Mac OS X and Windows XP compatible. It needs a minimum downstream bandwidth of 400kbps client side.

On to China and TVUnetworks and TVUPlayer

TVUnetworks is an Internet-based P2PTV company based in China. Interesting. The software they produce is called TVUPlayer, which uses peer-to-peer technology to distribute TV stations from a global selection.

Chew on some Babelgum

Babelgum is software developed by Babel Networks, from former Fastweb’s founder Silvio Scaglia started in 2005 with the aim to develop interactive software for distributing TV shows and other forms of video over the Web using peer-to-peer tv technology.

Go left with Zudeo

Zudeo is both a BitTorrent client and content service by Azureus, Inc. The website allows users to upload, download and share video content using this client. Unlike video sharing websites such as YouTube, Zudeo focuses on DVD-quality and high-definition video content

Why do I bring it up now? Because I don’t see many people talking about it…or maybe I am not listening to the right people. I know Joost is on some of my colleague’s radar…but what of the rest?

Bonus Points

- Revenue Sharing
- Interactive T.V.
- Web 2.0
- Social and Media

1000 Bonus Points if you can figure out what traditional affiliate network was way too early for the rise of P2PTV and related technology.

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