iPALS - Identity, Presence, Attention, Location, Status

Sam Sethi posts a fantastic post about Twitter, Attention and Information Overload.

He refers to Twitter as a great conversation tool to help reduce the friction and increase the pace of innovation by bringing participants closer together.

Some, however, have given Twitter credit for killing the aggregator and becoming the ultimate tool for incoming alerts and information.

Both Sam and I disagree.

He writes:

I think we are getting closer to the point in time where our social networks, search & discovery engines and the semantic web combine to provide us with said relevant timely information based on our current location, attention and status.

Sadly Twitter is not the answer, it is just another example of us trying to acquire better information faster from our trusted social network. In fact Twitter is just another disorganised stream of information for us to manage.

While Twitter helps to lower the barrier to getting a message out fast, it does not help you route incoming messages particularly effectively.

Think of Twitter as the outgoing pipeline. What's needed is an incoming pipleine. One into which we can put our Twitter stream, our friend's lifestreams, our favorite authors and the applications we track and through which we can route messages based on a number of criteria.

Sam describes these criteria as iPALS:

In the future to help us manage this vast array of data that has overloaded us with information, I envisage us trusting online services where we share our identity, presence, attention, location and status - i.e iPALS in exchange for timely relevant information

Well I’m Sam Sethi (identity) sat at my desk using my PC (Presence), whilst listening to Paul Weller, (Attention) writing this post, at home in sunny Cookham Dean (Location), but I’m busy so don’t disturb me (status). i.e iPALS

I love it. The pieces are emerging. It is now time to stitch them all together.

• Identity = OpenID + hCard
• Presence = Does anyone know a definitive Presence service?
• Attention = Jaiku (An aggregation of all your Attention data from Twitter and beyond)
• Location = Plazes
• Status = Anyone know a definitive status service?

So if we combine these services, we have what Sam calls an iPALS application. I call it Attention Management. Whatever it's called - it's the personalized incoming pipeline of your life.

We also like to call it Particls.

The Disintegration of Reality – no really….

For better or worse, there is an emerging trend that goes beyond the web or media – the very fabric of reality is changing.

Reality is disintegrating. No wait hear me out.

Granular parts of our established systems are being dislodged from their containers and only reforming via temporary, loosely coupled connections.

Content is being disintegrated from the Page, TV and Radio via RSS and Microformats.
Functionality is being disintegrated from applications (loosely coupled smashups are starting to overshadow complete applications).

People are being disintegrated from families. Divorce is now common place and starting to lose its taboo. As a result families are forming all sorts of strange and lopsided combinations where ex’s and steps come together for special occasions and in support of ‘the children’. At all times, however, the individual seems to be achieving more freedom and importance than the ‘family unit’.

And finally (at least in my list of examples) people are being disintegrated from companies... People work from home or freelance more. They change jobs more. And most recently, via blogging and other online identity management tools, people are now building their own brands - their name.

They are establishing themselves as free agents of opinion, action and connections - they are forcing companies to treat them as valuable resources because they are, in fact, one of the scarcest.

Companies have always been about relationships first – who you know rather than what you know – however in an age of LinkedIn and blogging, a person’s individual worth (beyond their monetary compensation) is being measured, respected and leveraged like never before.

IAM responsible for this

As you could predict, Chris Anderson is a hero of mine. I almost had a chance to see him speak at Plug & Play while I was in the bay area last month but unfortunately we had a scheduling conflict. Thank heavens for blogging.

His latest post entitled 'I'm not responsible for this' , like many, strikes a chord for me personally and for Touchstone as a product.

He quotes:

The fact that you and I both watched American Idol last night probably doesn't define us, whereas our niche interests really do. We go deep and find people who share our affinities, which represent much tighter connections between us. So my suspicion is that we're going to have fewer loose connections with lots of people but tighter connections with fewer people.

I like this idea very much. It is an idea we have been discussing internally for quite some time. If Touchstone can calculate a highly granular and complete picture of your 'long-tail interests' and store it in APML, and if it can apply that model of your interests to filtering and finding content and people - have we not created both a finger-print of your identity (at least part of it) and a highly personalized world view of content and people like you (and that you like).

The whole post is put in context to Kevin Smith and his continuing popularity despite his recent box-office failures. Anderson writes:

Just like they did 10 years ago, lonely/nerdy/smart teenage boys see in Smith a humor they identify with and a personality they want to emulate. The movies are incidental: Something like Clerks II has the relationship to the Smith brand that a communion wafer has to Catholicism.

I love that :)

The reorganization around people

Over on Leafar's blog he has made a great post entitled 'Venture with Wit' that covers a number of topics including chasing VC/Angels who have the right understanding of the Attention Economy (we have found it is better to let them find us) and various factors that affect information flow.

These, according to Leafar, include: Content ("Hyperchoice Problem" - I love that name), Identity (An area where we have contributed APML) and Social (at which point he kindly mentions Touchstone as the best example of work being done in the area.)

I particularly like these quotes from his post:

From EquityKicker.

"As I’ve said before to me the web is re-organizing around people instead of sites"

I wrote about this in a recent post called "Aggregation is King"

Another great quote is from Umir

"Across consumer markets, attention is becoming the scarcest - and so most strategically vital - resource in the value chain. Attention scarcity is fundamentally reshaping the economics of most industries it touches; beginning with the media industry."

Ultimately though, users don't care about these market forces and factors of information flow. What they care about is a highly tailored experience that saves them time, delivers the right information on the right device and at the right 'Volume'.

If the web is reorganizing around people and Attention is the scarcest resource, then a tool that performs ultimate personalization by indexing, apply and managing user attention must be worth something to someone :)