Where next for space?

Posted on February 5, 2010 by Joe

I have to admit to being quite saddened by President Obama’s announcement cancelling the NASA project to carry out manned missions to the moon. Perhaps it’s something to do with my age; I can remember the Apollo moon missions as a schoolboy, along with the feeling that by 2001 we might actually have a world something like that portrayed in the movie 2001. And then Star trek couldn’t possibly be too far behind.

Well, to paraphrase the old Apple advert ‘2001 wasn’t like 2001′. The public lost interest, the 70s happened and the money ran out. Governments felt that there were more politically and economically pressing concerns, and space flight became very much a science-driven, unmanned affair with the exception of the Shuttle. And now we have Ares / Orion being cancelled for being over-budget, late and reliant on old technology, and one wonders whether we’re going through the same sort of thing again.

For a President who is supposed to have vision, I’m afraid that Obama is currently looking pretty short sighted on this one. I totally appreciate that the US (like the rest of us) has some significant budgetary issues to deal with. But the ongoing silliness of bailing out banks and large businesses does nothing for national confidence or vision. It benefits bankers, stockholders and the wealthy. It reminds the rest of us across the world that we’re regarded as the ‘bank of last resort’ – you can always whip the public purse for a bit more money. Sure, we can look up to the skies, but all we’ll be seeing are the towering office blocks of the unacceptable face of capitalism that got us in to this mess.

Now, more than any other time in the last 30 years, we need a lead from the US in terms of something with vision and the potential for achievement for all mankind. The human race enters the 21st Century full of fear – of terrorism, economic crash, ecological disaster. Whilst it’s definite that renewed and invigorted investment in space exploration won’t do anything immediate to resolve any of these problems, it offers the possibility of enhanced technical fixes for the future, the possibility of a unified global approach the universe beyond our atmosphere and, probably most important of all, a sense of hope.

We have no heroes today; we have no explorers of world renown that show that the human race is indeed made of ‘the right stuff’. We’re expected to pay our taxes which currently go to pay for bailing out banks and repaying national debt foisted on us by feckless governments who’re trying to Govern the world of today with the attitudes of the mid-20th Century. We have Governments mired in control-freakery, who look towards ‘wars on terror’ and ‘wars on drugs’ as means of burying large amounts of economic production that might otherwise be used in more ambitious and adventurous ways – like space exploration.

Mars is the obvious next destination; I hope that the cancellation of Moon based projects is regarded as a facilitating move to allow more resources to be spent on Mars missions. But my gut feel tells me that sooner or later that too will be dumped. I understand that there are issues to deal with here on earth, but given the ability of the Governments of the world to bail out banks, develop massive and never ending weapons programmes and generally attempt to support the any number of flawed and expensive policy programmes that fail to deliver year on year, the resources are available.

It’s just that Governments choose not to support programmes and policies that give their people hope – and not just in space. And that is saddening and infuriating in equal measure.

Engagement, pandering, patronising or exploitation?

Posted on February 4, 2010 by Joe

education There is nothing new in the efforts to engage pupils at school by combining what is taught in lessons with what interests them in the outside world. In many respects it’s a good way forward – some years ago there were efforts to encourage reading in boys by basically getting them to read anything – comics, football reports, whatever – on the off-chance that they would then start reading books and improving their reading skills and general literacy. This project was geared around encouraging children to read material that interested them, in the hope of that material being a gateway to reading other things. It wasn’t focused on particular comics or films or ‘tie ins’ for example.

So far so good, but when does engagement become pandering? When does it become patronising – and, in some cases, is there an argument to be made for some aspects of this sort of outside world / education crossover actually being exploitative of children and teenagers? For example, developing lesson material like the one mentioned here might work very well with pupils for whom the ‘Twilight’ series is a major interest but would do absolutely nothing for others for whom it means nothing. I have to say that I’d also be concerned about the longevity of such material in terms of it maintaining it’s interest and relevance for future years of students. The last thing that a teacher will want is to either develop material that goes out of ‘favour’ with pupils so quickly that it needs to be revised each year. Maintaining ‘relevance’ is about keeping educational material valid and relevant in the wider world, not in the world of this month’s media hype.

There’s also an element of being patronising here – attempting to second guess what teenagers might be interested in is a dangerous occupation; it can easily fail and be regarded as patronising. Education is surely not about appearing ‘cool’ to the students; surely it’s more important to put ideas and concepts over in an understandable way, that is as far as possible relevant and contemporary so as to engage pupils, but not by jumping on to whatever bandwagon is passing?

As far as I can see, there are some topics taught that are, let’s say, eternal. They’re the basics; the stuff that’s been taught for as long as the subject has existed. In my experience this tends to be confined to the basics of reading, writing and numeracy. Things like the rules of grammar, basic arithmetic and counting, even, dare I say it, things like times-tables. The factual aspects of history and geography (without the interpretation) falls in to this category. Whether we like it or not, any attempt to ‘engage’ pupils with these topics is almost certainly going to be met with resignation or smirks from the class. Perhaps we need to actually get down to business here; the fact is that there are some things we need to learn to get on in life that are just hard work and need to be done. No point in trying to make it cool, or trendy; it just needs doing. best thing we can do is just get on with it.

Of course, it does benefit ‘content providers’ like film companies, computer games manufacturers, etc. to get in to the field of education in this way; it’s cheap marketing to a captive audience, after all. And it’s probably tax-deductible….

Twitter – voluntary spam?

Posted on February 2, 2010 by Joe

In a recent article, it’s been suggested that Twitter is becoming a major route for spammers to peddle their wares. This seems to be a feature emerging of all social networks right now, but in today’s piece I want to focus on Twitter. The view expressed in this article is pretty strong – probably an even more extreme position than I take with regard to spam on Twitter, but it’s worth looking at twitter from the perspective of whether we are participating in a network that is becoming more spam than good quality ham?

As is suggested in the article above, the relationship we have with the people we follow is rather different to the relationship we have with people who email us spam – on the whole the folks who send us wonderful offers of Viagra and millions of dollars on the Beserabian national lottery are unknown to us (and probably to any other human being on the planet). With Twitter, we’ve actually accepted the folks we follow as followers, and when one of those followers does transgress our own definition of ‘spam’ and send us a message we regard as inappropriate, as well as it being annoying there’s also a sense of betrayal of trust to a greater or lesser degree.

When we interact with people on twitter, there are two relationships involved; people follow us, and we may follow then. We only see their content if we choose to follow them. This is why I’m extremely careful in who i do follow. But even then, if someone who normally posts sensible stuff posts a couple of sales messages over a few days I’m not going to break my heart about it – I get more upset by people who ‘flood’ twitter with lots of posts one after each other or who repeat posts at frequent intervals. Such content is much more intrusive, in my opinion. They tend to be the ones who’re more likely to get put off my list of followed people than someone who sends me the odd sales message.

The other interaction is who follows us; until we also follow them, we don’t see any content that these people put up, but I’m equally protective of who I allow to follow me, based on the real world aphorism of being judged by the company that you keep. This is why I regularly screen people following me and block folks who’re obviously doing little else than selling, obvious ‘iffy’ accounts, etc. It’s important to do this as far as I’m concerned because I don’t want any of my other followers following someone based purely on the idea of ‘If they’re following Joe they must be OK!’ Just a quick look at the profile and Tweets of some some folks immediately indicates to me that they’re

The ‘silent spam’ we tolerate by allowing folks to follow us who’re ‘bad’ but whose posts we don’t notice is just as bad as the noisy spam that we’re aware of on a day to day basis. In my view I regard this sort of spam as the true voluntary spam, and as members of the Twitter community we should all be blocking and where appropriate reporting these folks, even if we are not following them ourselves.

The next, next, next thing!

Posted on February 1, 2010 by Joe

Hands up whoever has heard of the Red Queen’s Race? That was the athletic event in Wonderland where the participants had to run very hard to stay exactly where they were. I’m becoming convinced that we’re entering in to that sort of event in the online marketing and PR world – and probably beyond as well. And it worries me.

The article that sparked this off is here – nothing major, really, but it did get me thinking. Does anyone ever give any online or software technique any realistic time to show whether it can deliver the goods anymore? Or is it all a case of ‘MTV Attention Span’? Does everything have to prove itself within a 30 second elevator pitch? If something does the job, does it effectively and meets whatever targets are set for it, why do so many people jump ship as soon as the ‘next, next thing’ comes along?

There seems to be no scope today for a technique or technology to get time to prove itself. Of course, there are going to be some advances that are just so awesomely great that it’s obvious even to a relative techo-Luddite like me that they’re worth using immediately, but for other things, how can you know whether you can get more out of an upgrade when you probably haven’t even measured the value of your current process? If you’re using online tools like Facebook, Twitter, Search Engine Optimisation to market your business, then do you actually know how much business comes to your site via these various channels? Because if you don’t then simply changing techniques to fit with the current ‘fad’ is likely to be a waste of time; you simply don’t know whether the new tool is worse or better than the old one!

Impatience with results from all online marketing methods has always been an issue; people still seem to think that making quick money is posisble on the Internet; I’m afraid the only way to do that is probably to sell people on the Internet ‘Get Rich Quick’ schemes! But flicking from one technique to another and then to another without giving time for them to work or even knowing whether they ARE working is pointless.

So…my advice?

Well, bearing in mind that I am certainly NOT a marketing expert and not a millionaire, all I can say is apply good, sound, marketing techniques, such as:

Measure your traffic to your site or business before you start, using a metric that matters – whether that’s page impressions, money earned, downloads made, whatever suits your business.
Introduce new marketing channels in such a way that business from them is identifiable.
If your business is cyclical in any way, let new techniques run for at least a fair part of that cycle.
When you have your baseline, make changes to the channels one at a time and measure any effects based on those changes.

Just remember the old adage that you cannot manage what you can’t measure; just because the technology changes doesn’t mean that common sense approaches to marketing should change as well.

Innovative is not the same as useful

Posted on January 30, 2010 by Joe

I recently found this on my Twitterfeed: @jakebrewer: Yes! Note from newly devised Hippocratic oath for Gov 2.0 apps: “Don’t confuse novelty with usefulness.” It is so true – and that comes from someone who spent part of his MBA working on the management of creativity and innovation. There is a science fiction story by Arthur C Clarke in which two planetary empires are fighting a war. The story’s called ‘Superiority’ for anyone who wants to read it. In this tale, one side decides to win the war by making of use of it’s technological know-how, which is in advance of the opposing side. Unfortunately, each innovation has some unforeseen side effect which eventually, cumulatively, ends up with the technologically advanced empire innovating itself in to defeat.

First of all, a definition. For the purposes of this post, innovation is not the small improvements we all do to streamline and ‘finesse’ a process or product. That’s just maintenance and responding to feedback. Innovation is the equivalent of trading in the bike for a car. It’s a big shift.

Innovation is an important aspect of our personal and business lives; through it we have a vital tool for adaptation and survival, but it’s important to not get hooked on the idea that innovation is always a Good Thing, and fetishise it as being an all powerful tool for all problems. In fact:

Innovation is not always useful.
Innovation is not always indicative of progress.
Innovation does not always benefit all the stakeholders.
Failure to innovate can be expensive and risky; innovating for no reason can also be expensive and risky.
Innovating is not the same as being effective.
Innovation can deliver false confidence.

Innovation is not always useful

This usually equates to ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. If you have part of your life or business process that is chugging along well and is meeting the targets you set for it, then don’t bother innovating it yet. There is no purpose or use to massive change that meets no need. Such innovation is useless.

Innovation is not always indicative of progress

‘Progress’ is one of those words that falls in to the category of ‘hard to define but we all know what it is’. You may think that you have to innovate to stay cutting edge; but do you? Sure, we have to be aware of where our market is going, and risks to our future revenue streams. But innovating to stay on the bleeding edge of technical and social change is likely to expose you to risk. Progress for your business or life does not always reflect social or technological ‘progress’. Innovating purely to keep up with trends is ‘running the Red Queen’s Race’ – you will never finish.

Innovation does not always benefit all stakeholders

Innovation may be great for you, but not great for people whose incomes are affected, whose role is removed and whose job in the organisation is no longer needed. When you innovate, bear this in mind and don’t automatically expect everyone to be pleased they belong to an innovative organisation.

Failure to innovate can be expensive…as can innovating!

Innovation always costs time and perhaps money, especially if done properly. There is no such thing as free innovation, even if the cost is in terms of the time taken to make sure your innovation won’t break what’s already happening. It’s easier to keep existing customers than to create new ones. An innovative approach may scare existing customers away, and not get new replacements. Be prepared.

Innovating is not the same as being effective

I see a lot of people in software engineering spending inordinate amounts of time on new processes, new languages and techniques who don’t seem to always be hitting the market with product. Don’t mistake skilling up with the latest languages and software design techniques as being effective. It’s only effective if you put the techniques to use. I have several clients who make a good living, thank you very much, on maintaining and providing applications that are based on 10 year old technology.

Innovation can deliver false confidence

The German Enigma code machine in World War 2 was a highly advanced and innovative piece of kit for the time. If used correctly it would have been unbreakable. However, the operators tended to use slightly dodgy procedures in operating it and that gave the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park an ‘in’ to the machine that they were able to exploit and hence read German secret messages. Even when the Germans did suspect that someone had broken ‘Enigma’ they were so confident in their technologically advanced machine that they thought it impossible.

Enough said.

I’m not saying don’t innovate; that would be ridiculous. Just think about your innovations and don’t automatically follow the ‘innovate or die’ mantra. Take time out and read ‘Superiority’ and learn from it.

Is this a valid test of Social Media Newsgathering?

Posted on January 29, 2010 by Joe

A few days ago I came across this news story, in which a group of French journalists are to be holed up in a farmhouse somewhere with no access to normal news media but with access to Social Media – Twitter, Facebook, etc. The idea is to see whether news can be effectively and accurately reported via Social media.

It’s an interesting idea, but, just like Celebrity Big Brother, one has to ask Is there a point?’ To start with, as has been pointed out by some commentators, by announcing it in this way it’s quite possible that people will try and game the system and attempt to get some totally ludicrous story in to the news programme that these reporters will be creating in their isolated time. And there’s the lack of ability to follow up alternate sources who aren’t on Twitter, no way of getting a gut feel from the rest of the media, etc. In the last week there was a particularly persistent rumour on Twitter that Johnny Depp had died, which indicated the ‘life of it’s own’ aspect that many rumours have, only this time it was spread incredibly quickly and virally across Twitter, hence reaching, in the words of the beer adverts, parts other rumours in the past could not reach. I have a gut feel that the items that interest the vast majority of people on Social Networks are unlikely to be the content of conventional ‘serious news’ outlets. More National Enquirer than National Interest, more Geek than GATT. I can see some areas of overlap – the major big stories like Haiti, for example.

On the other hand, if by chance the news reported by these reporters reflects to a greater or lesser degree the output of the conventional media, then it has an awful lot to say about the efficacy of the ‘citizen journalist’ in pumping out on to social media outlets news that is editorially similar to that which is reported by the mainstream.

A further possibility is that ‘hard’ news stories that don’t get conventionally reported but that do appear on social networks and web sites such as Indymedia might be picked up and run with. To me, this is the most interesting outcome of all, and if the reporters and their parent stations play the game with a straight bat it could give us all an intriguing insight in to the editorial policies of conventional media and how this form of newsgathering of crowdsourced stories might start showing more sides of conventional news stories than typically gets reported.

One thing that does concern me about this sort of approach, apart from validation and verification, is analysis. Everything is a scoop; the fast nature of Social Media means that the time taken to interpret and analyse what’s happening is time in which any number of other stories will zoom by. This is a pattern we’ve already seen in 24 hour rolling news; everything is reported quickly; the facts (or rumours) are reported with no sense of context. It’s like trying to get a picture of the strategic and political importance of a military engagement from a soldier who spent the whole battle in a foxhole pinned down by enemy fire. It’s a valid viewpoint in one way, but is not a method of reporting that produces truly informed citizens.

Sheffield Sevenstones – Public funding for private gain?

Posted on January 28, 2010 by Joe

What a surprise – Sheffield City Council and Yorkshire Forward are planning to chip in £20 millions towards helping kick start the stalled £600 million ‘Sevenstone’ retail quarter in Sheffield City Centre. Don’t get me wrong – this area of the city centre could do with some redevelopment. Whether this project is right and whether it was timely is another matter and not one for discussion here, but throwing public funds in to the development at this time is in my opinion not a good move.

The developer, Hammersons, claim they can’t support it at this time. Now, I acknowledge that it’s been a hard time for property developers (mind you, the good times were brilliant for you guys, so don’t bitch and whine too much) but gentlemen, planning ahead and possibly losing money is all part of the game of free-market capitalism. Whether the improvement to Sheffield really needed a £600 million project that would further draw shoppers away from the existing suburban shopping areas like Ecclesall Road, etc. is another question. After all, Meadowhall showed the impact of an out of town shopping centre on city centre shops, so I guess this development will have the same effect on shopping areas outside the city centre, but what ho.

Hammersons develop these places to make money from. Look at their portfolio – some massive developments – places like Brent Cross, the Birmingham Bullring, prestige developments in Europe. All impacted by the recession, but that’s the game.

It appears that the developers of Sevenstones have concluded that a £20 millions input from public funds will kick start the compulsory purchase process that will in turn (somehow) facilitate further development. Hold on, if the £20 millions for CP can’t be found without going to the public purse, where the Devil is the remaining £580 million going to come from? I’m not a financial whizz kid, and would truly welcome someone coming to me and saying ‘This is why, it’s OK, there’s a logical reason…’

So…first of all, any property developers reading this….please tell me how this works.

Now, here’s where I put my tinfoil hat on and enter conspiracy theory territory. At the moment, that part of Sheffield is half demolished, half still (barely) operational. But as it stands it’s possible that the Council and property developers could, for example, put a much smaller amount of money in to the area and build a much less grand and less joined up development but that would be affordable in the current financial situation and re-activate retail activity in that area. This might well have to happen in 6 months time when existing CP orders run out and issues about land acquisition for the project can potentially become major stumbling blocks. Now…if the CP orders are all followed through and the land acquired, and existing properties demolished, it becomes much easier for the Council to turn around in a year’s time and say ‘Ooopps…we need MORE money, but we must rebuild this area, so…..’

Hammersons have put £60 millions in so far. The Council will be borrowing £10 millions of the £20 millions required to carry the project on.

Sheffield has some thriving out of town shopping areas despite the best efforts of current and previous Council administrations. I am proud to be associated with Hillsborough, and often visit places like Darnall on business. A fraction of the money being spent here could make a massive difference to local, community-based retail and other economic activity in this city. The shops that will be in the new development are not going to be small stores with local connections; they will be the usual suspects in terms of High Street homogenisation.

The public sector is once more bailing out large private sector concerns because ‘not to do so would be disatrous’. Sounds familiar? Think banks. Same argument, and I think we all know that the beneficiaries are unlikely to be the people of this city.

iPad – third way or solution looking for a problem?

Posted on January 27, 2010 by Joe

jobsandipad Well, I guess that as someone with technical credentials I should comment on the unveiling of Apple’s new tablet machine, the iPad. The first thing I will say is that I’m not an Apple fanboi, and so am probably a hard audience to impress. Anyway, here’s what Apple have to say – I like that price tag, although I expect the usual dollar / pound sterling equivalence will work giving a price range of £500 for the lowest memory / WiFi option through to about £850 for the 3G / 64Gb unit. But, I have to say, that at first glance it looks beautiful. Take a look at this from the engadget site (the start of the presentation is at the end of the page, ad the images run in chronological order up the page).

At half an inch thick and about 9.5″ by 7.5″ it has a slightly odd page aspect ratio – it basically looks like an iPod Touch or an iPhone for giants. 🙂 It will run existing apps from the Apple App store, and will also talk to iTunes to get media. There is a 30 pin connector to charge through and connect to other devices – including PCs. The unit comes with up to 64Gb memory, has a 1GHz bespoke processor from Apple, called A4, WiFi as standard an 3G as an extra, touch keyboard a-la-iPhone, GPS, accelerometer for motion sensitive UI, etc. Ah, what the heck – here’s the technical specs. No point in regurgitating what’s elsewhere!! Like I said, think about a wider, longer iPhone.

It looks good – the processor looks pretty capable, and if one were to appear in my birthday bag or Christmas stocking I wouldn’t say no.

I have to admit that I’m old enough to remember Apple’s first pass at pad computing donkey’s years ago – the Apple Newton. It was a concept ahead of it’s time. This machine looks like it really hits the spot on so many levels, but I’m always a believer in ‘Never buy Version 1.0 of anything’, and I do have a few reservations in terms of both business and technology.

No SD Slot– I appreciate that this seems a small thing when you’re looking at something that can handle 64Gb, but it seems to be a problem with Apple gear that they always ship it with less memory than you want. I can see lots of applications where media could be distributed on an SD card for plugging in to a gadget like this.

Battery life / replacement– not the life time of the battery in normal use – that 10hrs is pretty cool – but the problems about replacing the unit when it fails. Are we looking at a similar situation to that experienced with iPods, or have Apple learnt?

Software Development– The Software Development Kit that is available is still unsurprisingly Mac centric – based as it is on the iPhone / iPod SDK and looks at first glance to be more of a conversion kit for existing iPhone / iPod apps than a new development environment. It’s not available for any other platform than Mac, and Apple also charge for the privilege of belonging to the developer programme. All in all, seems a little short sighted in terms of application development. Whilst there are thousands upon thousands of available applications, the question is just how many are genuinely useful on a platform closer to a Netbook than a pocket phone.

Lack of ‘open’ connectivity– I would have liked to have seen a bog standard micro-USB port rather than just the Apple Docking port.

Having said all that – it’s a nice piece of kit and one step closer to Star Trek. I could see myself buying one and using it as ‘player / reader’ for media, rather than as a portable work tool. I could imagine it being given out at high-end conferences packed with stuff for delegates. I could imagine it as a brilliant teaching tool. I can see lots of uses, but whether it succeeds or not must surely depend upon bringing the price point down, opening it up a little and finding the killer application.

It has the potential to be a ‘third way’ between phone and Netbook, or a solution looking for a problem. And I’m not yet 100% convinced which way it will go. Ask me when we finally see the UK pricing.

ACTA – Why is the Government not informing MPs about this Agreement?

Posted on January 27, 2010 by Joe

Have you heard of ACTA? How about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement? No? Well, you’re probably not alone. After all, here in the UK the Government won’t even put documents regarding the Agreement in to the House of Commons Library. Of course, our New Labour defenders of freedom have lots of reasons for not doing this, most of them playing the ‘National Interest’ card, but one has to wonder whether that’s all there is to it.

To give you a little background, take a look at this brief outline of the provisions and process of ACTA. Like most things that trans-national bodies come up with, they sound bland and almost useful to start with but the Devil is, as always, buried in the details. And not buried deeply here. The Horns and the tip of Old Nick’s tail are definitely visible! Nominally, ACTA was put together to prevent counterfeiting and piracy of branded goods; immediately you can see that it’s beneficiaries are likely to be big corporations. Whilst you might immediately think of dodgy Guffi handbags on the flea-market, or pirated DVDs, it also extends to less obvious things like machine parts, electronic components, drugs, etc. In fact any copyrighted goods. So far, sort of so good – but it also throws in sections dealing with piracy across the Internet and other aspects related to what might loosely be described as ‘means of piracy’, which is where the fun starts.

This BBC item from last yearindicates some of the concerns. Some of the aggressive policies put forward last year against Internet pirates (or suspected pirates) here in the UK were almost certainly a product of ACTA, and the current Deep Packet Inspection trial by Virgin (whilst hitting a few legal issues) would no doubt warm the cockles of ACTA’s stony heart. ACTA will allow for a great deal more intrusive observation by ISPs, Governmental bodies and other interested parties of our Internet traffic, will support fairly swinging penalties and because it’s a very broad-based, international agreement will have the stench of globalisation about it. And it’s not just your Internet connection that’s of interest. If you take your computer across international borders – in principle, ANY form of digital storage – then ACTA would permit it to be searched. And this might easily include the SD cards in your camera, your Blackberry, your iPod.

Concerned yet? Lots of fuss has been made about the ‘three strikes and you’re off the Net’ laws being developed in a number of countries that are likely to be signatory to ACTA when it’s finally agreed and ratified. But that’s just the end of the process. ACTA is the issue of concern as it legalises nothing more than wholesale invasion of privacy by private companies in to our personal lives.

It’s not just the UK Government keeping this business sub-rosa. Here’s a Canadian take. Fortunately, some British MPs (bless ’em) are attempting to get an Early Day motion in place to raise the issue.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised; ACTA will benefit global business first and foremost – the acolytes of massive globalisation will love it. And such agreements are often used to bring in laws that individual Governments would probably lose power over if they tried to do it themselves. National sovereignty and local governance once more yields to the faceless centre.

Perhaps it’s time to act up on ACTA?

Facebook friends limited to 150 by the brain?

Posted on January 26, 2010 by Joe

As anyone who’s ever heard me rant about the ‘numbers game’ side of networking – especially on sites such as Ecademy, Linked in or Facebook – will testify, I’m a great believer in quality rather than quantity, and until the software on such sites can do more for me than it currently does in terms of augmenting my memory and the cognitive abilities I apply when trying to remember ‘Is Fred interested in Mousterian Variability or is that Jill?’ then I use these sites to more conveniently keep in touch with roughly the same number of people I would via non computer based means.

So I was pleased today to read this item, suggesting that the brain has a top limit on how many people we can keep track of. It’s called Dunbar’s Number and is suggested by anthropologist Robin Dunbar to be about 150. It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s been realised for years that there are optimum sizes for small teams of between 6 and 10 people, which fits with the old military idea of the ‘Brotherhood of the table’ – the ideal size of a small, self contained, fighting unit being a section of about a dozen men. In such small teams personal loyalties develop and the team bonds quickly. Larger groupings are employed in companies, but few large companies now look to any ‘business unit’ as having more than a couple of hundred people in them, as management becomes impersonal and the whole unit becomes less effective.

I’ve held for many years, even before the advent of Internet social networking sites, that the quantity over quality brand of personal networking is more to do with train spotting, stamp-collecting or the MI5 Registry than it is to do with maintaining close and friendly business or social relationships. The numbers approach reduces everything to the level of transactions -‘What can ‘x’ do for me today?’, or ‘I need to know ‘z’, who can help me?’ Whilst this is indeed part of social relationships, the more is beautiful version of social networking makes it all there is to having a network, which is painfully sad.

The natural extension to this approach is what we’re seeing now; many ‘numbers based’ networking sites end up as platforms for the exchange of low-value ‘opportunities’ between people, which are rarely of value to the recipient. Spam may be too harsh a word, but what else can you call it? If you have a network of 2,000 people, then you’re much more likely to feel OK about ‘cold calling’ them all than you would if you had a more tightly defined network of respected confidantes, friends and valuable professional associates. Same on Twitter – it’s easy to spam 20,000 people with marketing messages in 140 characters because you simply cannot know them all. You’re working as a publisher. there’s nothing wrong with that but don’t fool yourself in to believing that your relationships with those 2,000 or 20,000 people are anything other than, in most cases, opportunities for you to push your message to them.

Of course, true relationships do develop from these large numbers of what I call ‘transactional friends’, but they enter in to the 150. The vast majority of these thousands of friends and followers seem, therefore, to be just stamps in a collector’s album.

I for one don’t want to be a collector!

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