The next time you use Phweet I’d like you to consider how it improves communications in a world that is rapidly fragmenting.
- We want Multiple Identities: Our directory listings are increasingly fragmented, outdated and dispersed. Where once a white pages or yellow pages listing was enough we now have profiles on social networks, corporate profiles, personal websites and more. Each serves a different purpose, each a different share and a different way of revealing ourselves. No one wants one identity for all communications anymore!
- We use Multiple Channels: Communications channels are often not synchronized or updated. It’s a guessing game where you will find me. This results in lost opportunities and failures. The fact is you don’t know my number anymore anyways. You click on a name in your address book or an IM handle and we talk. The end point doesn’t matter. What matters is that the communication channel is a good connection and that it costs nothing or almost nothing. More importantly why should you have to judge or guess where to send the message or make the call.
- We want privacy without Interruptions: Sharing your mobile number may result in unwanted interruptions. Routing all calls to your mobile is the future. The problem is interruptions. If I give you my mobile number and you share it there is no way for me to ‘expire’ that connection and I may suffer further breaches of privacy. As a result, we are often highly protective of our mobile numbers. When it gets really bad people get a new mobile number. That’s not a solution.
- Desire control over access: Callers dictate when the calls happen without context and often without identification. It’s even worse as I wrote yesterday when it is an unknown number calling. We send those to voice mail and then may later have to listen to it or clear it. Let’s face it SMS is more and more popular for setting up calls and the “Available”, “Away” etc. that we have seen on IM accounts has become almost irrelevant.
- Broadcast and escalate conversations: It is hard to spontaneously escalate calls to conferences particularly if people are on different networks. This is one of the things that has always impressed me most about Skype and moving Skype multichats to conference calls with three to five people. We’ve enabled this with Phweet without number exchanges in multiple formats. You can even broadcast what you are talking about in real time. The future where you control the bridge and determine the services on the bridge is here. It’s a key differentiator. There’s more controls and power we will be offering to users.
- Communications on-the-move: Location based services are limited by access to numbers and concerns about sharing proximity info. The future is not going to be limited by the cost of the call or the need to know the communications channel. It should be about whether or not I want to allow access to me and under what circumstances and context I am willing to share. I feel I will share different profiles / directory listings and broadcast them to different destinations. The status update is key and so are my public profiles. At the end of the day it is my directory listing that will put you in touch with me. My listings on the move may be many and varied. They may or may not relate to each other. That’s fine by me.
I beleive Phweet addresses communications in a fragmenting world. We still have a way to go. Let me know which of these items are important to you. Which one’s you think really make a difference. If you were Phweet how would you use these attributes to move forward? Look forward to your comments.
Tags: communications, directories, phweet, socialnetworks
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I actually don’t buy anything you’re saying, and I think far from getting fragmented, some groups and super-groups on the Internet are becoming more consolidated, and exchange and reinforce memes, for example all the political ideas associated with the Geek Agenda:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/five-questions.html (you and many other readers will likely agree with the point of view framing these questions; I find some of them loaded, and disagree with others, like net neutrality).
The other phenomenon that is happening is that you are merely uncovering the fragmentation that already exists, because you can see more connections more explicitly, and you can comment more using social media. Look at something like elections.twitter.com and you will see tremendous divisions and people sure they are right and reinforcing each other despite “the facts” — which no one can agree on.
Now, to take on your technical points, I don’t think that the plethora of services that many of us sign up for, the Twitters and the Flickrs, actually fragment us. The profiles are pretty much the same. No one *really* complains about the inability to port their friend lists except Scoble. Usually it’s the same name or handle very easily reproduced. The proliferation of these services may make a seeming fragmentation, but they will settle down and winnow out and there will only be a few left — nothing sustained only by VC capital can last forever, a few will have to become ad- or subscription-supported and will force the others out of business to stay alive themselves.
People do want multiple identities — say a Second Life avatar and their real name and then perhaps only a handle. But it’s not THAT different. The networks of friends overlap significantly.
You are also exaggerating the “channel” problem. I have thousands of “friends” on twitter or Second Life or Facebook. But…those services exist as much to keep people at a distance as to “connect”. I can think of only one person who seems to elude me whether I try him on Skype, Twitter, or Facebook — but then I simply learn that he’s reliably found on email. The different channels tend to track different uses. I don’t need the mobile phones of my “twitter” friends or Facebook connections who are merely part of that social media effluvia and ephemera. Real friends or work colleagues give you their phones. So what if you have to change your cell number now and then? Chances are you are buying a new phone and switching services anyway! Changing your cell number is easily accomplished, and people don’t need to remember your number because they put you in the phone when you call them, or press call back. All of these functions are so automated, that they are easy, and can’t be overstated.
Many people just keep landlines on voice mail and don’t pick up a cell phone call if the see a number through tracking they don’t want to hear from. This is “management” and not “fragmentation”.
Seriously, making the case for “fragmentation” not to be about atomization in the sense of actual culture or education or class or nation in the world’s increasing Balkanization or tribalization in places, and making it a function of “too many social media channels” seems facile. The fact is, those affluent people with the problem of “too many information channels” increasingly think alike, and spread the same memes among their proliferation of communications outlets, and that’s a problem all to itself.
People duplicate and create redundancies because of the SMS problems you indicate. They drop an email and a voicemail. They say high publicly on Twitter and tell someone to pick up their phone!
Is this column some sort of shill for Phweet? Why? Your claims of the hardships of Skype conferencing don’t seem warranted. You just press the buttons and conference people. How hard can it be? Conferencing in is excessive anyway, as most of the time, the same few do all the talking, and the rest could have had an email or even a hard copy memo in their inbox in real work, and not suffered the consequences.
Proximity concerns are HUGE. People who scraped data and publicized it about “friending” or even 96 m2 proximity randomly in Second Life found they stepped on a hornet’s nest. “Friending” is so fake and so casual and sometimes so accidental, that the “proximity” knowledge drawn from it can be terribly misleading — sometimes people merely “keep their enemies close” as it were.
All in all, the dilemmas you are describing aren’t “the future” or “the problem of modernity for us all” but merely a geek’s particular plethora of choices with too many toys he’s playing with — and is overstated even so (and is now being memed everywhere). The average person will never face all these forks. They will use only a tenth of the capacity of these devices. And the services will be winnowed down in number.