Maschmeyer: October 2010

10/25/10

Ladder of Interactivity

1. Conversation (Creation of consciousness)
2. Collaboration (Emergence [of meaning])
3. Collective Action (Autopoiesis)

10/21/10

The importance of what phase your social platform is in

Really great point about building social platforms:

"What’s important to realize when comparing Facebook Places to Foursquare is that both services are at very different stages in the adoption life cycle. Facebook Places is in it’s infancy and Foursquare is starting to mature. Foursquare’s been around long enough to develop an active user base and to collect a heap of check in and user data. Without that data, the functionality that can be presented to users out of the gate is very limited, so the focus for the first stage of building the service is VERY different from the later stages. The first real challenge for a team at the beginning is to make the service fun and compelling enough for users to check in and build a habit without having to give them much information about other users (remember, if no one else has checked in, there’s no information for it to tell you where your friends are and to make it interactive). The adoption stage is about creating a fun experience where people actually want to add data points to the system when there’s not much interpersonal feedback between them and other users. There’s a long period at the beginning (especially in sparsely populated areas) where gathering geo-specific data is a lonely, single-user focused affair.

After lots of people use the system for a while, though, the focus for the team building the system shifts. Rich data gives you options. Now you can give users all kinds of cool feedback and information when they interact with the system because now the system knows more about you, where you go and what your friends do. This is the phase Foursquare is in – they’ve got lots of people who use the system regularly. Now they have to decide how to use and surface the data to make the system increasingly fun, useful and interactive. This is where Facebook wants to be, but they’ve got a long way to go. They’ve got a huge advantage because they already know lots about their users and their friends, but they don’t know squat about where people go, and how much they’ll contribute. The video ads Facebook put up to launch the service (see the second video in the next section) show us what Facebook wants us to share, but without any data, they’ll never be able to deliver – let’s see if they can get people to use the service first."

Good read here about why Google can't make social Apps

"For a decade, Google has trained us to optimize our pandic selves..."

"Facebook is a lobster trap and your friends are the bait...."

"Quora is restaurant that serves huge quantities of bacn and toast..."

"Foursquare exists in a dozen dimensions..."

"Twitter is a giant blue ball machine..."

"So, to summarize: Google is responsible for Orkut, Wave, and Buzz. Ex-Googlers are responsible for Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter. Discuss."

10/10/10

Everything is Amazing and No one is Happy

10/6/10

The Game of Life

Game of Life: Play here

[F]ive helpful criteria for emergence drawn from Jaegwon Kim:

1. Systems with a higher level of complexity emerge from the coming together of lower-level entities in new structural configurations.
2. Higher-level systems exhibit higher-level emergent properties arising from the lower-level properties and relations of its constituent parts.
3. Emergent properties are not predictable from information about lower-level conditions.
4. Emergent properties are not explainable or reducible to the lower-level conditions.
5. Emergent properties have novel causal powers of their own.

These “physical laws” place constraints on what can take place..., but do not tell us what will take place... In order to get that, we need two other structures of possibility or constraint. On the one hand, we need historical possibility. Historical possibility will consist of the initial conditions with which the Game of Life begins. Note that the physical structure of the game of life tells us nothing about these initial conditions, but only the constraints on whatever conditions happen to obtain. Initial conditions, in contrast to the structure of physical possibility, are instead randomly selected by the player at the beginning of the game. Historical conditions are thus constrained by the structure of physical possibility, but are not determined by this structure. The manner in which the game evolves will depend on these initial conditions. You will get entirely different patterns depending on these initial conditions. In evolutionary biology it is often said that were we to completely rewind the emergence of life on earth, it would turn out entirely different. This is because, under this scenario, historical conditions would differ. For example, had the asteroid not hit the Earth, the world might still very well be dominated by dinosaurs.

Finally...we have biological constraints. The Game of Life develops through the instantiations of the rules constraining physical possibility from moment to moment. The arrangement of ON and OFF blocks at any particular moment defines what is “biologically possible” for the patterns at any given point in time. You can’t simply leap from one form of organization to another within the game, but must pass through a series of intermediaries defined by the physical constraints of the system. Similarly, while I no doubt have plenty of bonobo monkey genes in my genotype, it is biologically impossible for me or my offspring to leap to bonobo monkey phenotypes in a single bound as a whole series of transitional states would have to first occur in order for this to take place.

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