Knowledge Society

Margarita Quihuis, from Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, presents the EPIC initiative at the Social Entrepreneurship panel of Relief 2.0 in Haiti @ Stanford.

This morning I started to write a short note on "realtime search, user sentiment, opinion trending and search trends" and their impact on the future of Information Technology markets, but quickly realized that before addressing those issues, I needed to provide some conceptual support to the many topics covered in my three paragraph note. So I started to write a little intro, which grew into this huge post which prevented me from finishing the original note. This is a first draft, which requires revision and fact checking, it is not based on any kind of research and simply tells the story of social networks as lived by a long time user, manager, developer and enabler of social spaces. There are some conscious omissions, in particular wikis and podcasts, which I plan to include later, as well as support links and references to data and services mentioned. All comments and criticism is welcome, in particular as this was written in one sitting, from 9am to 4pm, with a short break for lunch.

Has the Web ever been not Social?

Some claim that the web has officially gone social, as if it had not been a social environment since its birth. But the truth is that with the recent explosion of Facebook and Twitter and their continuous growth have made it even more social than ever, perhaps beyond value some would say, but I am always of the opinion that the more we do, the better and if we do it together, even better yet.

You see, in a "traditional" social network, your reputation lies in the number of friends you have, and these user relationships are often bidirectional and symmetric, which means that if you invite me as a friend and I accept, you are listed as my friend and I am listed as yours, which quickly gives way to users inviting or accepting as friends people they really don't know or are remotely related to, out of courtesy or out of "social" aspirations.

Twitter, a service launched in 2006, a micro-blogging service launched in 2006 combined both worlds, allowing mobile phone users to update their status by typing 140 character messages (known as "tweets") they could enter from their mobile phones or via web and have their friends informed of these updates.

As simple, straightforward and single-oriented as its service and features appear, Twitter managed to combine three worlds in one simple service:

Hi5

The ubiquity of digital photography mentioned in the previous segment was one of the key drivers for the skyrocketing popularity of, a simple web service where you could sign up for free, create a personal profile, upload as many pictures as you wanted, share them with friends, acquaintances (and even strangers you would accept for the sake of curiosity or vanity) and have them rate or comment your pictures just as you would rate and comment those of others.

Although, there are many elements and aspects as in every story, I believe that a major factor of change towards the current "on-line experience" was the ubiquity of digital photography. Once digital photography was cheap, available on most cell phones and easily uploaded to the web, we all wanted to show and share our pictures, our moments, our experiences with not others. And we I write "we all", I mean all of us, not just amateur photographers or enthusiastic users who had been uploading pictures to Flicker and a bunch of websites for years.

But another trend was evolving, the revolution of blogs, originally short for web logs. A homepage is of some use to show and share some stuff about you, but little fun once it's done and particularly when it is a pain to update. Some users realized they did not need or cared for a personal profile as much as they would value a tool to share with others what they thought or what they did and experience on a regular basis.

As far back as 1976 we can see the root of the open source vs. proprietary software arguments in Bill Gates "Open Letter to Hobbyists", included in Volume 2, Issue 1 of the newsletter published by the Homebrew Computer Club, a small Silicon Valley club of computer enthusiasts, which ranked among its members future founders of Apple Computer, Steve Job and Steve Wozniak.

En estos tiempos en los que el flujo de información e intercambio de documentos es esencial para el funcionamiento de las instituciones y su volumen se vuelve cada vez más denso, la gestión de documentos toma una relevancia que no se limita a la simple labor de archivar, clasificar, indexar y poder acceder en forma eficiente a los materiales e informaciones documentales intercambiadas.

A changing world.

We live in a Changing World with increased internal and external competition running after available resources and opportunities at local, regional and global levels. It is up to us to make the world change for better, not worse, by making sure our local and regional issues are addressed by the changes, are generating the changes and are being part of the changes.