My last post was about personal behavior. This one is about personal and business relationships. —- There’s no such thing as normal. We all have our biases and neurosis. We obsess over ceremony, process, dogma and fear. Did he do the right thing on date number 3? Did she file form number 5? Did they ...

I’ve been thinking a lot about what compels people to behave a certain way. In business. In personal relationships. In life. I’m certain there are countless books espousing countless metaphors for thinking about the issue. For me it comes down to some common themes. Perspective Perspective is perhaps one of the most important human traits. ...

There’s a lot of fury on the web right now about ‘Real Names’. FB is trying to use it as a unique feature of their comments system claiming it reduces trolling and low value comments. Of course that isn’t really true. For one, any commenting system could force FB login. Two, users will troll with or ...

Real-time is no CDN or Cache latency. When there is new data in the database, it’s available to the end-user. Real-time is not needing to hit the refresh button to see new information. It’s when information folds into the page while you’re reading it. Real-time is a new volume and velocity of data. A lot ...

It’s certainly very slick, but it’s a few years behind Facebook. I mean that not just in timing and network effects, but in the much more strategic sense of platform ambition. Facebook.com was the strategy 4 years ago. Facebook is now going for the rest of the web. It’s reach and role as an identity ...

Over the last few days I have been debating the NYT pay wall on a private email thread of friends. I didn’t feel the need to post it on my blog because I thought that pay walls were so obviously a losing strategy that it was a waste of time to comment. But combined with ...

We’re living in a recycled generation. Think about it. Much of what we do in the 21st century is recycling what has gone before. Sure there are the obvious examples – positive examples – such as recycling paper and plastic. But I am talking about the recycling of ideas and culture. There is now far ...

Jeremiah and I wrote an analysis of the New Twitter vs. Current Facebook. Here’s a snippet: Situation: Twitter’s new redesign advances their user experience Twitter has announced a new redesign today, yet by looking at the news, there hasn’t been a detailed breakdown of these two leading social networks.  Overall, Twitters new features start to ...

For whatever reason, a new project called Diaspora is getting a lot of attention at the moment. They are four young guys who have managed to crowd source $100k+ to build an open, privacy respecting, peer-to-peer social network. A number of people have asked me what I think, so instead of repeating myself over and ...

On PaidContent today, they have shared our login data which reveals some suprising information about the state of delegated identity on the web:" Amid the rise of Facebook and Twitter, Yahoo seems in some ways like yesterday’s news. But does the portal have more sway than people think? New data from the commenting platform Echo ...