twopointouch

(Or, for those enjoying the puns, Nashional Guard.)

Every social media destination has some sort of scoring mechanism:

• Twitter followers
• Linked-In contacts
• Facebook friends
• Blog subscribers/comments

Those are the four I personally use most consistently, though I dip in and out of all the others to see what’s happening. They all have an equivalent.

What’s the result of those scores? Bigger is better always seems to be the suggested case: something that’s very deliberately designed into the UI is your score. Other people’s scores are almost always a click away.

For the owners of those products, it’s absolutely the case that bigger scores are great. The more people you’re connected with, the more time you’ll spend on the site, the more likely you’ll eventually click an advert or buy into the premium features, and the more trouble it is to move. For me, moving from Linked-In to a rival business network like E-cademy or Xing or Ryze would be a major pain.

The quality of the product doesn’t really matter, either, when the score’s at stake. Why do we use Twitter? It’s flakey and restrictive. Jaiku was way better than Twitter; there are up-and-coming competitors like identi.ca that offer way better features. Not to mention already dead competitors like Plurk. But my people are on Twitter and that’s why I put up with it. I have X followers there and X/5 on its closest competitor.

The ludic (playful or game-like) element of social sites provide a massive incentive to stay and play. I was delighted to beat my high-score on Twitter yesterday. That’s pretty childish, in most people’s estimation. No, actually it is childish: I should be ashamed of myself. And so it’s something that sounds gauche when we admit to it. By-and-large, we don’t, unless we have no embarrassment reflex.

But let’s talk about it.

I want to beat you at Twitter, Facebook and the rest. If your score is higher than mine, then I am jealous. If it is lower, then I scorn you. Why? Ummm dunno. Because it’s there. Frankly, because it’s designed like a game and in the same way I want to win our chess game that we might have one day, I want to win our Linked-In/etc. game.

This is the secret dashboard on Linked-In/Twitter/&c:

So what would happen if I stopped playing? My rank on the killboard would decline rapidly.

What does stopping playing mean on these sites? Not visiting; not accepting any friend requests that simply boost the friend count; not joining in on discussions where I know – or suspect – there’s no real challenge to established points of view.

Would I have fewer friends? – possibly. Would the things I said and did be less right? No. [My job role as a publisher clearly means that reach is a KPI. That kind of taints what I might do as a real human being. ]

The other consequence of the ludic nature of social sites is the effect of that on people’s behaviour, as I’ve talked about over the last couple of posts. If it looks like a game, and playing it like a game offers some rewards, then of course people will do that. If the game is approval, and it is in many cases, then that will lead to approved behaviour. Scoring systems on social media destinations are nearly always linked to approval in some way. The other part of the game is competition – you have to have a better comment than the other guy. That’s really great in some ways, because it makes people reach for ideas. Really terrible in other ways, because destroying the opposition becomes the focus. Thus the phenomenon of the Angry Internet Man – a great phrase possibly coined but definitely popularised by the awesome gaming site RockPaperShotgun.

This is a little way off from the Foucault post, in some ways, but it leads to the same conclusion. Social media may well be a force for good, creativity, innovation. But at the same time it is also exerting control and perverting behaviours.

PS. I think last.fm and similar taste-based networks have different dynamics, but that’s one for another day.

Some of my early hopes for social media, that it represented, like Kevin Kelly reckons, some kind of renaissance for socialism in the western world, are starting to run dry.

There’s a splendid series of articles over at O’Reilly Media concerning the dark side of social media by Joshua-Michéle Ross. The first of these, The Digital Panopticon, was drawn to my attention by Antony Mayfield today.

[This post is terribly unpolished – my books are in boxes for a couple of weeks, so only internet research here – and also, I am a critical theory dilettante at the best of times].

The Panopticon, as you probably know, was a scarily-perfect model of perpetual surveillance in a prison, first mooted by Jeremy Bentham, one of the great philosophers of The Enlightenment. Prisoners in such an institution may be observed at any time and they’re unable to tell whether or not they’re being watched. Thus, they’re kept in continual paranoia. Many prisons, including current-day institutions like London’s Pentonville and Pelicon Bay in California, are believed to be inspired by the Panopticon model.

Josh suggests, and I am bound to agree somewhat, that social media technologies have a strong panoptical element:

In the age of social networks we find ourselves coming under a vast grid of surveillance – of permanent visibility. The routine self-reporting of what we are doing, reading, thinking via status updates makes our every action and location visible to the crowd. This visibility has a normative effect on behavior (in other words we conform our behavior and/or our speech about that behavior when we know we are being observed).

Josh’s point is that we somehow accept social media networks as empowering, democratic and all about spreading fresh ideas. The reverse may be the case: any given information about ourselves donates some portion of control to another party.

Let’s take this across to one model of critical theory. Post-structuralist modernist (I get my posts mixed up) philosopher Michel Foucault back in the 70s picked up and ran with the idea of the Panopticon, especially in his best-known work Discipline and Punish. His idea was that Bentham’s model wasn’t just an idea for a prison; but for a society.

He argued that prisons are a really new idea. Back in the past, we simply thrashed/burned/drowned/stabbed transgressors. That all changed in the C18th with the Enlightenment . The idea of law-enforcement was ‘enlightened’ with the  understanding that resources [people] didn’t need to be wasted and that better social control is exercised through freely-given compliance, rather than co-option.

People could be turned into machines, a consequence of political thinking in the emergence of industrial society and the rush to efficiency and cost-allocation. Once properly mechanised, they could be ‘trusted’ – the scare quotes, because the trusted prisoner is no longer human. A big part of that process is surveillance: once people know that they are always (potentially) watched, they’re a bit more compliant to the rules, and a bit more like machines.

The genius of the current model is that we are self-surveillant, of course. We willingly offer our identity, friends, thoughts and so-forth, to the all-seeing eyes of anyone who can be bothered to set up an appropriate search alert. We’re consequently a bit less likely to say or do things that fall outside the accepted models of political and corporate behaviour.

Foucault saw this coming in what was happening back in the C18th. Foucault observed that over the period of that century, the exercise of power changed from explicitly keeping people down to encouraging people to express themselves (and then governing that), rather than repressing expression as in the earlier model. Foucault’s ideas of power produced knowledge, produced information, produced pleasure – in the right directions. Creating knowledge, creating information is a form of surrender in this model.

It produced (arguably) blog-conversations, for example. They are a discourse, in his terminology – conversations that follow an agreed etiquette, language and code – creating implicitly agreed audience-identities and scope. If you cannot submit to that discourse, you cannot be a part of it. I can’t explore that fully right now, but blog conversation as discourse is a rich course of enquiry, I promise.

One small part of this to pick out: Foucault remarked on the way people could now be disciplined by:

tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical

How perfect a description is that of the unfollow, unfriend, forum-ban, IP-ban?

For dozens of contemporary examples, check out this issue of Surveillance and Society, though it is very academic.

And where is transgression in social media?

It is simply not allowed to exist in many cases. No, wacky viral videos and satire along the lines of the Daily Show do no not count – the former often serve Capitalism, the remainder and all of the latter are our current carnivalesque release-valve on norms that really couldn’t care less about political change. Porn doesn’t count either, because it’s so fully and perfectly Capitalist in the first place.

Blogs you don’t like: don’t subscribe/unsubscribe – you get the Daily Me; Facebook people get unfriended if they say the wrong thing; unsavoury Twitter followers are not followed or blocked. Bland self-approval of the group takes over. There are no racists on my spectrum right now. As far as I am concerned, they don’t exist. But that’s not the real story, clearly. Racists are poised to take Stoke in the next by-election. They don’t appear on my spectrum because I have deliberately blinded myself to their existence on a day-to-day basis. Diversity of opinion is purely opt-in (with strong incentives to opt-out) in socialmediaworld.

In socialmediaworld, there’s consequently no-one who wants to topple our social democracy. Almost everything that I see, and almost anything I am likely to see, is already ranked (Google) and focused (Twitter) through the twin lenses of liberal democracy. Minority views are excluded by the machine – only the recommended and personalised is allowed through. The stuff that dulls and comforts the political imagination. Foucault talked about a ‘new economics of power’ with regard to the French media of the 70s – he would have so relished and reviled our current political abstinence and lack of ideas.

Transgression has almost ceased to exist. Almost. Look to the unchampioned uninnovative for that: IRC, usenet, forums, web-sites.

Terribly unpopular post on ‘innovation and politics’ to follow…

Twitter is about the real-time web; being in the flow. Once you’re following more than 100 people, it becomes an entirely different experience to instant messaging or Facebook. It feels like one of those adverts for the Information Superhighway in the 1990s: people and objects and destinations rush by. Sometimes you’ll stop and check in, by clicking on a mystery link, or catch up on a relationship by clicking on a username to see their last dozen updates. In the time you’ve spent doing that, though, a whole new page of updates has magically appeared.

The user experience changes radically depending on the client you use:

• The twitter web page doesn’t automatically poll its source and change. Yet every time you hit Refresh, it’s different. It’s always a reminder that the world keeps turning no-matter what’s happening in your own little portion. As much as it lets you see into the world of the people in your network, it’s a reminder of your anonymity. At the same time, the prominence of the edit box at the top of the page is an invitation to poke the world; to let people know.
• ‘Pro’ clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl change the proposition substantially. You won’t miss that @ message or the mentions of your brand or interests. For this reason, they’ve become favourites among egocentrics and those with marketing or PR interests in the network. In these client applications, the edit box has less prominence. It’s dipping your head into a rushing river, but also checking to see if any of your fishing nets have reeled in a catch; and resetting the bait with another update. These clients automatically update every few seconds, you see the real time web rush past; but the nets into search terms and messages mean that the feeling of control is not so lost.
• The mobile experience is different again. You’re less likely to participate in some respects, because data entry on a phone is trickier than from a keyboard. You’re less likely to click a link because you know that your device has a 50% chance of timing-out or failing to render the resulting page properly. The mobile experience is thus likely to be more about observation: checking in on your network – the ambient intimacy of it all.

Where am I going with this? A couple of places.

1. Leaving Las Twitteros

First, it turns out that, contrary to the propaganda, Twitter is an enormous, blue FAIL WHALE when it comes to retention, Mashable reported yesterday. Most people leave after a month, it seems:

…growth from February 2008 to February 2009 was reportedly 1382%, with the incline increasing yet further in recent months.

But like many social networks, it seems many people lose steam with the service. Stat tracking firm Nielsen reports today that a full 60% of users who sign up fail to return the following month. And in the 12 months “pre-Oprah”, retention rates were even lower: only 30% returned the next month.

There is more than one explanation for the massive drop-off in the last paragraph. The statistics given only track web page usage. It’s reasonable to suppose that a substantial number of users graduate from using the web page to using a different client, like Tweetdeck. In the discussion of the article, author Pete Cashmore links to another showing that only 30% of updates come via. the page – the rest using other clients.

I don’t think that this explanation explains the Nielsen figures entirely, though. I know a lot of very articulate and intelligent people to whom Twitter simply does not appeal. They gave it a go and didn’t see the point. That’s OK. Saying that this is because they haven’t given it enough time and effort, as I’ve heard before, is an odd argument. It’s a bit like saying I could come to love self-flagellation if I put my back into it, and my nether regions.

The recent celebrity endorsements of Twitter which have led to such rapid growth won’t help matters. Listening to the prattle from @stephenfry & co is a less engaging experience than being in touch with people you really know and sharing with them, I would suggest. If you use Twitter in order to keep up with certain celebrities, it must be very frustrating when they’re getting on with their jobs rather than providing updates. I’m not saying there are right and wrong ways to use Twitter – there aren’t – but there are ways that are likely to lead to more engagement than others.

The rushing passage of stuff is fine in a 30-second commercial, but hardly everyone’s cup-of-tea when they actually come to use the Internet. Point One is that Twitter is quite important but is not and will never be the next generation of the web, etc. etc.

2. Whispers in the Wind

The second matter I wanted to briefly explore was the viability of Twitter as a publishing or attention mechanism for media owners and institutions. Nearly every publisher does this (including NMK and its Lords and Masters at the University of Westminster). Maybe you hand-craft your tweets or automate them – it’s easy, using twitterfeed from your RSS, but err… it’s not very good, is it?

Your institution or organisation will not produce that many updates a day. That’s good in some ways – people will quickly unsubscribe from feeds that talk too much – especially if they have a corporate or robotic feel. At the same time, because you don’t update so often, your reach is tiny compared to almost any other medium. It’s a nudge, a poke, a pebble tossed into the river, a piece of flotsam that people might nudge into from time to time. It’s worth doing only because it’s easy. But because the social media marketing experts are using Tweetdeck or something, then they get an illusionary experience of the impact of their posts – their net full of retweets and @s at the end of the day looks full even for a tiny organisation like the one for which I work. At the same time, when I dip my head into the live stream, I see scarcely any interaction with tweets from ‘official’ media or institutional feeds. And there’s another problem that augments this…

If you open up a new channel of communication in the social media space, then there needs to be an ear on the other end listening and responding to the feedback. Social media, by definition, is not about broadcasting, but is two-way. You start a blog, you need a comments person. You send an email; you need a reply-address that works. Carefully writing your Blog T&Cs or Twitter bio or Email newsletter subscript can allow you to redirect responses somewhere else, but by entering into a communications arena that is entirely two-way with a one-way methodology, you’re asking for problems. (Skittles and The Telegraph’s brave – you may have other words – experiments with posting unmoderated twitter feeds illustrate this handsomely). Point Two is that Twitter is for people, not things.

You’ve probably already seen this, even though it was published just a week ago.

It’s had nearly two million views in the last week, over 6,000 comments on YouTube itself, and been plugged into 826 blog posts. Among its honours, it’s the #2 – Top Favourited (All Time) – Sport. If it weren’t for Susan Boyle, it would be top video global of the month. It’s almost perfect in its spreadability:

• expertly filmed and edited
• great soundtrack
• the guy totally rides a bicycle up a frickin’ tree! a tree!

There are two schools of stunt videos: ones that go horribly wrong and paens to skill. This definitely falls into the latter camp. If you read through the comments on YouTube, you’ll find the general tenor is:

I’m not going to hold myself back..
WHAT THE FUCK WAS THIS???
OMFG I HAVE NEVER SEEN THAT GOOD HANDLING OF BIKE EVER.
Dude you fuckin rock, hold it up!

Like the spate of parkour videos that appeared a couple of years ago, it’s not just about skill: it’s transgressive – this is not the sort of thing your mum would want you to do. The police would give you a good talking to, as well. Actually, I don’t want you to do it, either – the tree will win. It’s not robbery or beating people up, though. This is peaceful – but definitely not passive – resistance. It’s all about ignoring the boundaries society wants to put on you. Jumping over the fence rather than going round it.

It’s also a film about being solitary: generally there’s no-one around but Danny, and where there are people they don’t get close, or even appear to notice. When they do notice – as with the closing shot, where he jumps off the bridge – by the time they’ve reacted, he’s gone. Especially interesting since one of the commentators says that he’s fairly well-known around Edinburgh and “always draws a big crowd”.

I suspect these latter two points speak very directly to the people who are spreading the film. This is a rebellion articulated through actions, not words.

At the same time, it’s very Scottish – or British. There’s a tone of grace, understatement and humility. The setting is the nice part of Edinburgh, not the ‘hood. There aren’t the fast edits and flash effects you’re used to in a stunts video. You aren’t listening to aggressive hip-hop or grindcore; you’re listening to a slow ballad called The Funeral. The guy doesn’t even speak, let alone brag or give us some nonsense about dedication and spirituality. And the video starts with him falling off the fence – twice, rather than a parade of victories. At 4:10, notice as he goes back and closes the gate he’s just jumped over – that’s a British stuntman for you.

Like most interesting things, it’s a mass of contradictions.

Anyway, well-done to Danny MacAskill and Dave Sowerby and also to Inspired Bicycles who sponsored them.

I spent the day today at the Wealth of Networks II conference, the agenda of which was set out as the next-generation of the Internet.

It was a good event and the organisers managed to bring together some top-rate speakers in a great venue with rock-solid internet, for once. And it was free – yay for the ESPRC which created the funding.

The slight oddness was that all three of the three panel events at the conference, and one keynote, despite their ostensible themes, turned out to be about trust and identity online. I rather suspect that might have been in reaction to the top-down research model described in the first keynote which admitted that E70mn of EU research funding into the next ‘net was being spent without investigating users’ concerns or agendas.

We’re becoming increasingly aware that there’s an issue with the identity and trust thing. What are the headlines? Backlash against StreetView; Facebook’s T’s & C’s; stalking, bullying, frauds and impositions.

There are two poles in this debate that need to recognised and reconciled in whatever the Next Web brings.

Authentication is a good thing. Being able to prove that it’s you buying that DVD and accessing the details of your bank account; you (if you’re a 12-year-old-girl) joining that social network designed for 12-year-old girls; you registering your general election vote, should that come to pass. Tracking down cyberbullies, slanderers and child-porn disseminators also sounds good.

On the other hand, anonymity is also extremely valuable. If you’re in a repressive regime and blogging about that, then it ought to be possible. It should be possible here in the UK, if you stay lawful (I’m already inviting some big questions, to which we have no answer).

You might want to have separate professional and personal online personae – if you join a dating site, for example, you probably don’t want your colleagues finding that profile. Avoiding stalkers without retiring from online would be a good thing. Teens frequently maintain multiple personae to explore different social scenarios and make mistakes without (real) consequences, I understand, and that certainly sounds like a very good thing compared to the horror of my own teenage years.

So we need a way for people to prove their identity if they need to; to protect their identity if they need to. And about a million shades of privacy and open-ness in between.

The internet safety / government services agenda would sway towards everyone having a registered identity with some third-party, let’s say the BBC, who would act as a trust broker.

But how much are you going to trust anyone to be that broker? A panel late in the day highlighted several elements of grey in the word ‘trust’. For example, sometimes, a better word would be ‘confidence’:

• I trust that my bank won’t run off with my salary next month.
• I do not trust my bank to offer me the best financial advice for my individual situation.

So do I trust my bank or not? You see? The first example is better described as confidence. You know that NatWest would probably not be better-off running away to southern Spain with your month’s wages. It’s an informed gamble. But you don’t think they could be trusted with your finances full stop – you don’t think they’re all beautiful people who only care about your interests.

Trust (real trust) depends enormously on context and implies a belief in the moral character of a person/organisation/business. Most likely, a lot of the services we might be described as trusting (Banks, Amazon, eBay) would be better described as things we have confidence in.

Added to that, sometimes we have no choice but to sort-of trust. Helen Keegan pointed out that oftentimes we click through acceptance of a service’s terms and conditions, because there’s no real alternative. We either want to do banking online or we don’t – we can’t disagree with point 5 in the t’s & c’s and have them changed. It’s like it or lump it.

I don’t really trust anyone to be the trust-broker of my online identities – or yours, dear reader. Let’s look at the possibilities, currently:

• The Government. Obvious non-starter. I might be a dissident of some sort. (and *what!* 25% of government databases are already illegal)
• Government Organisation: e.g. BBC. Similarly flawed.
• Private Corporate: e.g. Google. Already massively failed in China.
• Private small company: might turn evil; vulnerable to hackers, potentially, eh monster.com. And who the hell are you, anyway?
• The UN: this is a possibility, but once the UN is hacked, then how do I recover my ID?

So this probably leaves the least neat, least integrated, least semantic possibility:

Lots of stuff. Regular password for stuff you don’t care about; unique passwords for stuff you do; OpenID and Facebook Connect and MyBlogLog and Google for social apps; NI number and PIN for government apps; Account Number and PIN for commercial stuff.

Messy. And I think it may be the case that ‘messy’ is the best solution to online identity, trust and anonymity for a long time to come. I can’t really imagine that computer scientists are going to be the people that manage to overcome that.

That is probably not what the ESPRC, or Southampton & Imperial Universities wanted me to walk away thinking today. But thanks again for the thinking.

Twitter has been going mad today on the subject of Qwitter (There’s also Twitter Karma, much the same thing, but I became aware of it earlier than Qwitter thanks to @ssethi).

The basic function of these sites is to show people you follow (receive updates from) who aren’t receiving your own updates.

So what’s the point of that, you ask?

Well, like a lot of social networks, on Twitter:

(a) the number and quality of followers you have is an indication of status in this rather insular social media world. (Let’s forget about the recent arrival of the UK’s current Stately Homo Stephen Fry onto the scene).

(b) following someone is an indication of like and respect. I care enough to hear what you’re up to.

So if you follow someone, and they don’t follow you back (you get sent an email to say X is following you), then it appears, sort of, that they don’t like or respect you very much.

You could do this quite easily before by clicking on the ‘followers’ link on your twitter home page, but these new sites make that information a lot easier to take in. A bit like in sites such as Facebook – you can see if someone hasn’t responded to your friendship request. But the thing is that Twitter itself has – historically – never shown any of that information in a way people could really take in and analyse. So it might come as a bit of a shock to some people that prominent twitizens (oh, yes) aren’t hanging on their every word.

People might get upset when they discover they are following people they thought had become friends (and probably are) but that those ‘friends’ are not following them.

However, there are a few other possibilities:

• they are already following 200 other people and the noise from that is enough, thank you very much.
• Dunbar’s Number – more than 150 people is more people than they can maintain stable relationships with. There are already 150 or more people they are paying attention to. It’s a psychological impossibility to take on someone else, no matter who.
• they like you very much, but going in and following you and dropping someone else is too much trouble.
• they auto-delete ‘new follower’ emails. A strong temptation if you get more than one a day.
• they forgot.
• they don’t care nearly as much about Twitter as you.
• they have already linked to you on Linked-In, friended you on Facebook and subscribed to your RSS. That is enough.
• they have a million far more important things to do that affect their ability to carry on working.

Elsewhere: Paul Walsh on the damaging effect of this and Charles Arthur on (slightly disputed) best practice.

Sue me now: I have used BitTorrent to sample stuff I was not in a position to buy or was not sure whether I wanted to buy. It’s been piracy, legally, but my defences, which I am sure wouldn’t see me win in court, but which might help here are:

(a) I buy more music and games than most people. Check out my iTunes, gamers gate, direct2download and metaboli accounts (you can’t because they are private, but I assure you they are burgeoning).

(b) I feel ripped off by a lot of MSM releases. I buy a music album and I only like two tracks. I buy a game and every level is the same as the first, or normally, worse. That’s not fair, and internet sharing gives me a means to test properly before I buy. I don’t want to give cases in point right here, but it’s certainly true. OK – found Neil Finn through Blip.FM (an internet radio malarkey, like a mix between Twitter and Last.fm). Then I bought two of his CDs. Fair deal? I think so.

(c) I go on to buy or follow a lot of stuff I get this way. I might download your first album or game, but then I’ll go on to buy your second or third. I might come to your gig, tell my friends how great it is, etc., etc.

(d) The content producers very often haven’t created a way for me to sample the product – e.g. downloadable tracks, a streaming radio station or a lengthy games demo. Twenty pounds is (sadly) a lot to me, and I want a way to test the worth of new purchases.

(e) In the case of digital downloads, the producer’s marginal costs are zero, especially if it’s been bit-torrented. They aren’t losing money (because of b, c, and d, above).

Anyway, the main point of this post was supposed to be about the mechanism of these things. It is a file-sharing mechanisms, but it isn’t really about sharing at all. It is about getting.

No-one (hardly) goes to a bit-torrent site with the view of sharing something. They want to get something. “I want Crysis Warhead” or “I want the new Girls Aloud album” (really?)

These mechanisms and sites aren’t publicly-funded charities, so there has to be some way that users pay for that bandwidth/opportunity.

For many sites, like Rapidshare, for example, there’s a ‘freemium’ model – which is not a BitTorrent site. So there’s advertising on public pages and an upgrade to faster bandwidth, etc. There are a lot of variations on that theme.

But I am not very interested by that and its many variants. I am interested in BitTorrent.

BitTorrent is an internet protocol rather than a site (though it does have a site). The idea is decentralised traffic – a site, like PirateBay, most famously (though quite possibly hundreds of sites), posts a “map” – or torrent file – which shows how to link to other users who have the pieces of the treasure you’re seeking. And then you download from all of those sources, sharing them with other users at the same time. Ideally, you’ll go on to share them more with other users, once you’ve got the file you’re looking for, although there’s little compulsion to do that. Some sites that publish torrents (the little files that contain the ‘map’) enforce ratios. To download more that 20MB of a new file, for example, you need to have uploaded 10MB of another file.

BitTorrent has proven tricky for the Internet Police to close down because it is about user-to-user (they call it peer-to-peer). Closing down BitTorrent isn’t about shutting down a single site, like Napster, it’s about stopping millions of users doing what they want to do. There are also lots of perfectly legal uses for BitTorrent, such as sharing music, video, anything you’ve produced copyright-free or under a Creative Commons license.

It may be the case that under the new MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) between the BPI and the six major UK Internet Service Providers (ISPs), that web traffic that looks like a torrent (that’s the word for a file being transferred using BitTorrent) will be cut off by your ISP. The ISPs don’t really want to do that, for fear of losing customers, so they’ll need to be forced into it by legislation or (more likely) fear of legislation.

Back to BitTorrent and why it’s interesting.

BitTorrent is interesting to social media folk because it enforces sharing, to some extent. If you do not allow others to download the parts of a file you have already downloaded, then you’ll not be able to download any more. It’s wholly mathematical about the way it does that: the more you share, the faster you’ll be able to download. Many people have attempted to hack that system to get what they want instead of benefitting the swarm (the users attempting to get the file), but have been unsuccessful, to date.

To put that into more ’social’ terms: the more value you add, the more value you derive.

Isn’t that the ideal state for any social network? It’s already the case, in many ways, for many of these beasts, but think about how it could have a mathematical enforcement, the way BitTorrent has created:

1. No Spam
2. You receive only what you have requested
3. Effort == Rewards
4. Value == Rewards

I don’t see that state in any social networks of which I am currently a member, possibly barring LinkedIn. They all seem to be spammable, because there isn’t any real maths behind the contribution mechanism. I am no mathematian nor programmer, but have considerable respect for what both disciplines bring to the table.

So how to create that? I can see a few things looking sensible:

1. Private messages only, initially.
2. Public messages or message to your groups in return for recognised content.
3. Kudos of some kind being rewarded for sharing.
4. You can only share other people’s stuff.
5. But doing so raises kudos.

What else have I missed, or is this lala-cuckooland? Does social media need more Maths and less talk? I’d like to know.