Battle for the
Planet of The Apes
A perspective on
Social Software and
Social Networks
Matt Jones / MX08
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Hi, Iʼm Matt Jones - Iʼm the co-founder and lead designer of a
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social tool called Dopplr; and Iʼm going to talk a little about it in
relation to some thoughts Iʼve been having regards the current
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trends in ʻsocial technologiesʼ.
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Iʼve called my talk ʻBattle for the Planet of the Apesʼ for a few
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reasons.
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1. To make AP wonder why they ever invited me to speak.
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Thisʼll learn ʻem.
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RIP
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2. out of respect for the departed
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3. as an excuse to show some awesome images
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But mainly - as a reference to our innate sociality as great
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apes.
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Crows are
the new
monkeys!DOPPLR
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BTW - as an aside (there will be lots of these) if you want
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to be seen as ultra-hot and modish in your discussion of
social animals, then crows are the new monkeys...
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Dr. Robin Dunbar
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But Iʼm not so Iʼll concentrate on us Apes.
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This is Dr. Robin Dunbar.
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He wrote a book called “Grooming, gossip and the
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evolution of language” which often gets cited by those
involved in building social technologies. Usually people
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state his finding that we appear to be hardwired for
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handling relationships with groups of around 150 or so.

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It also points out, in an associated factoid not so often
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quoted, that the time we spend ʻgroomingʼ those social
relationships - or keeping our social ties in good shape is
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on a hockey-stick curve.
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We all know weʼre now in an age where we have a deluge
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of tools to indulge our grooming instincts.
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Another aside: Found while googling for images... I love
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this... “the only blog that makes you more handsome
when your read it”
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www.dieselsweeties.com
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But I guess I find myself increasing asking: is social
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networking and grooming the only game in town for social
technologies?
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This is an entry on my blog from five years ago, when I
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guess I was first serious involved in designing what was
more popularly called “Social Software” back then.
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My own definition - very broad, but very useful to me in
understanding where I thought things were/should go was
“software that gets better because thereʼs people there”

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Iʼd contend weʼve gone from mainframe - where we all
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had to use a little bit of the same computer.
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To personal computing, where we all get to use powerful
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tools in isolation
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Back to the mainframe in a way - where we all share the
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same ʻcomputerʼ - but we all share the same tools and
data to an extent.
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This is the landscape as designers and developers that
weʼre exploring now.

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As I said, Iʼm a cofounder and lead designer on Dopplr,
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which is a social tool for optimising travel. [How many of
your are using it?]
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“Serendipity is
looking in a haystack
for a needle and
discovering a
farmer's daughter.”
Julius Comroe Jr.
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Our starting point was could we create a system that
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increased the happy little coincidences in your life as your
travel through the world? This is my favourite definition of
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Serendipity!
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Hereʼs the main view I see once Iʼm logged in - itʼs a very
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simple report of my upcoming trips
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Each trip is the central ʻsocial objectʼ of Dopplr... Hereʼs
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my trip page for IxDA08 in Savannah, Georgia -
aggregated here are nice things like the flickr pictures Iʼd
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taken that trip, notes by me and friends of mine and stats
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about travel here. But the main thing to look at is the
ʻCoincidencesʼ block - showing me the other people I
share information with on Dopplr who were going to be
there.

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I wonʼt dwell too much - best way to understand
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something is to play with it, so if youʼre not an active
member of Dopplr already, if you join using this URL it will
connectnext?group here together on Dopplr - more about
Where our
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this later.

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Dopplr was conceived of a social tool working between
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those you have strong ties with - close friends, family or
colleagues that you already have a high degree of context
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and trust with; whereas many other social networking
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sites are about creating or increasing context perhaps.

(we’re somewhere here...)
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This greatly informed our starting design assumptions
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Human
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We wanted to create a social network that respected and
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amplified real-life, rather than creating an alternate
second life.
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Are you really “Friending”?
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One assumption we wanted to challenge as a result
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was - what does that terrible neologism ʻfriendingʼ really
mean? BTW - can you believe there was a Friends
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videogame?
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Asymmetry
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We created a language and controls that were explicitly
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about sharing information, rather than ʻmaking friendsʼ
and we thought it was important you had complete control
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over how that happened.
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Plausible
deniability
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Often social tools donʼt have enough opportunities built in
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for the sort of plausible deniability that gets us out of all
sorts of embarrasing situations in real life...
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On the flip-side of this fuzziness is the opportunity for you
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to increase the usefulness of the tool by growing your
social network in what we hope is an easy and polite way.
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Clues
about
others
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We have clues about others you might know from your
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existing ʻsocial graphʼ as itʼs known. So for instance that
URL I gave you to join Dopplr is a clue for us to associate
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with you for others to pick-up on - youʼll show up in the
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ʻothers you might knowʼ tab to everyone else who comes
through our gathering here.

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This is a side-project of Tom Insam, my colleague at
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Dopplr, called “Shelf” - which is a small app that ʻsniffsʼ
everything it from the network, mostly enabled by
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ʻmicroformatsʼ: small, regularly formatted pieces of data
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that have an open-standard shared between many
websites. It;s a powerful technique weʼre working with in
Dopplr also.

‘Friend’ is not the only social role we play
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But as I say - “friend” is not the only social role we play,
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and itʼs not the only thing that social tools should focus
on IMHO.
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For example: this is part of Intel Research Berkeleyʼs
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“Familiar Strangers” work, looking at the patterns forming
from regular, casual contact in the urban environment. We
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all recognise familiar strangers as we visit our corner
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store, queue for the bus etc. We play that role for others
of course. They asked questions about how might this be
used/abused by social technologies in our urban
enviroments...

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Iʼm a bit of an optimist about this stuff.
Where Johnsonʼs “The Ghost Map”:
From Steven
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ʻJane Jacobs observed many years ago that one of the
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paradoxical effects of metropolitan life is that huge cities
create enviroments where small niches can flourish” - this
is our experience of the internet also I guess, so when the
two biggest technologies weʼve created: cities and the
internet combine, good things happen.

Another aside! One of the best factoids (if it is less-than-
true, can it be a fictionoid?) Iʼve ever heard was that Jane
Jacobs and Frank Serpico lived on the same city block.
I started to think that it would be fantastic to see them
both a brilliant but maverick crime-fighting duo, so I fired
up photoshop... Wouldnʼt it be great? “Donʼt go to hard on
the kid, Frank - the urban planning catastophes here
never gave him a chance.”

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Anyway, considering Jane Jacobsʼ view that many eyes
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on the street make the city better kind of leads me back
back to “software thatʼs better because thereʼs people
there” next?
Where
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How might we make tools that better respond to ALL our
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social roles?
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2.5 thoughts...
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Both follow the threads of the ʻcollective intelligenceʼ take
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on social tools.
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So... first thought:
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Whether itʼs dog-eared pages of books
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Our tools... (this is a picture of Bruce Sterlingʼs keyboard,
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BTW)
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Or even our adaptive paths... [ding!]
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“Wear and tear” is often how mental models get out into
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the world. Incidentally, the movie is of a machine my
friend Jack Schulze built to record the way that people
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draw maps to explain directions to other people. [Will Hill
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and other talked about “edit read” and “wear read” back in
1992. ]

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Bungie let players see ʻHeatmapsʼ online of where
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thousands and thousands of players of HALO3 died on
different levels - allowing them to visualise strategies for
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the game. E.g. “Kills with the Gravity Hammer in Ratʼs
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Nest”...

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When we expose these previously invisible patterns in
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social software - what feedbacks happen? Are we as
good at flocking as grooming? (See! Crows, not monkeys!
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Well.. theyʼre not crows... um.)
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hogwarts staircases
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We can use the data we harvest on these ʻdesire pathsʼ to
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change our product to be shift like the stairs in Hogwarts
- so itʼs just right, just in time.
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Weʼre able to prototype and test new features quickly,
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both because weʼre so small and the way Matt and Tom
have built Dopplr - features are ʻtagsʼ that we can attach
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to testers in our user community
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These are highlighted to users in the UI and we then get
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their feedback and iterate on it.
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Celia is our ʻcommunity design managerʼ at Dopplr. She
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works with our user community improve the design of
their tools.
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Making the
invisible,visible
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Thought 1.5... One extension of this, is increasingly we
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are able to see previously invisible behaviours from ʻthe
real worldʼ and apply social tools to them. As someone
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earlier in the conference said: “Anything essential is
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invisible to the eye” - The Little Prince.
This is “Nuage Vert” - a project in Helsinki (where half of
Dopplr are based) wear a laser projects the energy usage
of the city onto the cloud coming from a power station.
Eerie, beautiful and perhaps, useful to the city...

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Somewhat related to this: weʼre really happy weʼve been
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able introduce this new feature for Earth Day
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Also - congrats to AP for making MX their first carbon-
neutral conference.

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Hereʼs my year so far. Must try harder... Though it seems
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to be trending down...
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Scales,
not diet...
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Weʼre not currently linking through to things like carbon
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offsets. We prefer to leave actions like that up to
individuals. Weʼre the weighing scale not the diet...
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FTW!
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Weʼd really like to design a ʻwin stateʼ that encouraged
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thoughtfulness about travel and resources. For instance
the default setting of the Toyota Prius dashboard showing
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MPG, not MPH encouraging the ʻgameʼs win stateʼ to be
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lowering the MPG...

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Weʼre starting small...
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Thought 2:
Whereitself gets smarter as it aggregates our
Our content
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thoughts about it.
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This is the Archimedes Palimpsest. I think the palimpsest
as a model for social tools is a powerful one.
Of course they originated from the scarcity of media,
something we donʼt exactly suffer. But thinking about the
medium as something that accretes messages in the way
they did helps me.
I also just like saying it. Palimpsest!

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This is a map from the collection of the National Maritime
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Museum, where successive explorers annotated new
opportunities, theories and obstacles on the same map
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over several expeditions over the course of several years.
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Layering of new information on information, metadata - is
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of course is nothing new.
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X
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But the participative nature of doing so is. As recent
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publications by Messrs Shirky and Weinberger point out -
everybody is annotating everything, with everything else.
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Yes, weʼre all eagerly constructing and re-constructing the
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greatest repository of knowledge the world has ever seen,
like millions and millions of Doozers.
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Remember Doozers from Fraggle Rock??

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The problem is that most of us, most of the time, are
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Fraggles - not Doozers.
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I.e. Dancing our cares away, worries for another day etc.
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If youʼve ever started a wiki or a forum youʼll know there
are a few doozers contributing a lot, and lots of lots of
fraggles...

The
Casual
Majority
The Other
Committed API
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Committed
Minority Minorities
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“Force
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The trick of connecting the doozers and the fraggles is
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probably the biggest challenge of creating successful
social tools.
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Thatʼs a whole other talk (whichʼll be doing at IXDA SF on
Wednesday...) But another tactic is connect doozers to
other doozers with an open API... and harvesting the
benefits for the majority of your users.

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Projects like Flickr Commons really do point to a new era
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of social technology and media to design with, where we
together increase our understanding of the world and our
place innext?
Where it instead of how many friends we have.
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Thanks!
DOPPLRmj@dopplr.com
http://www.blackbeltjones.com
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In conclusion, I donʼt think we can escape our planet of
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the social apes and our addiction to social networks, but I
do think a bit of broader focus on social technologies
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could be beneficial to us all, perhaps...?
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Thank you very much for your attention, and to Adaptive
Path for the invitation to speak to you all.