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Future Imperfect

May 15th, 2009
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This post is going all geeky on you. There’s a mission and a method to my madness, and I mean madness in the most forward thinking way. After all, if we don’t have a vision or a dream, what makes up the color in our future?

First up is Fred Wilson’s presentation from a talk that he gave at Google. Note that even though these are just the slides, Wilson gives you a clear idea that there’s something disruptive going on.

Second up is a report from JD Lasica and the Aspen Institute entitled Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing (PDF, purchase). Lasica points out that the disruption is all about identity, personal empowerment, and benefits to society and commerce all around. From his report:

Excerpt: Why the Cloud Matters

According to Newsweek: “At the end of August [2008], as Hurricane Gustav threatened the coast of Texas, the Obama campaign called the Red Cross to say it would be routing donations to it via the Red Cross home page. Get your servers ready—our guys can be pretty nuts, Team Obama said. Sure, sure, whatever, the Red Cross responded. We’ve been through 9/11, Katrina, we can handle it. The surge of Obama dollars crashed the Red Cross website in less than 15 minutes.”

The New York-based tech start-up Animoto, which lets users create professional-quality, MTV-style videos using their own images and licensed music, was averaging 5,000 users a day until it suddenly received a burst of new users who discovered it through Facebook. Its traffic surged to 750,000 visitors over three days. The number of servers Animoto was running on jumped from 50 to 3,500 during that span of time. “It was just numbers we never imagined we would ever see,” chief technology officer Stevie Clifton told a Seattle newspaper. “It was fun and scary and pretty cool.” Thanks to AmazonWeb Services, Animoto’s servers did not crash, because Animoto does not have any servers. It outsources its computing power to Amazon.comand pays only for what it uses. The ten-employee company is now expanding. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos touts Animoto as the poster company for cloud computing.

The tales of the Red Cross and Animoto neatly sum up the contrast between the former economy and the emerging cloud economy. If the Internet economy is an apt descriptor of the changes taking place around us today, then the term cloud economy could justly be ascribed to the still larger global disruptions ahead. Google CEO Eric Schmidt has called this “the cloud computing age.”

Coaching moment: Sometimes people I talk with say that they feel like a lone wolf howling at the moon. Most of the time these people are visionaries or idealists that don’t have a common public voice. The crowd hasn’t discovered the conversation yet. Identity is one of those conversations. It’s a relatively small group talking about a subject that everyone will be impacted by, and that the future will be shaped by (one way or another).

If you’re one of the lone wolves, take heart. Keep up the good work. The more we tell the story, the better we get. The better the story becomes, the more people will want to hear it. The time is good to explore, discover, think, discuss, and practice telling the story. Not everyone is ready to hear it yet, which is ok. All things in time.

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Portable Identities

April 27th, 2009
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There’s a good chance that you’ve signed up for several online accounts, and now you have several different online identities (user names, passwords, and search and purchasing histories). If you use social media tools like LinkedIn or Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter (there are so many more!), you probably spend time socializing and sharing information online every day. One person, many identities. That can be a problem.

Jeremiah Owyang’s post (about a Forrester report) Future of the Social Web, in Five Eras states that:

Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience. Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems; eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of products.

I’m particularly interested in one of Owyang’s Five Eras of the Social Web:

4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content

There is a lot of work being done in this area, giving the power to centrally control and keep accurate information about ourselves. One name for it is “user-driven services.” I’ll be writing more on this very empowering concept in posts to come.

Coaching moment: if you were to collect all of your information in one place then selectively share some of it with various online services, what would that look like? Think about all of the data (searches, emails, tweets, posts, etc.) that you’ve generated this week. Which ones are you happy to share with the public forever? If not everything, what would you protect, for how long, and why?

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