Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

When Dave Winer says the hard part is getting enough adoption to achieve a critical mass, you should listen. If anything has achieved a critical mass, it's RSS. When Doc Searls talks about Vendor Management Systems, or intentions, or whatever, you should listen. If anything has achieved a critical mass, it's the Cluetrainism that markets are conversations.

Why would Dave say that getting adoption is the hard part? Just an observation? A way of rolling up the conversation that's breaking out around what I call gestures, Doc calls VRM or VMS, Dave calls RSS/OPML, Dave says Marc calls PeopleAggregator, etc.? He's talking about fragmentation here, the Invented Here syndrome, the leverage that can translate into market power. Interestingly, Dave identifies that power as being in the hands of the user. For me, that begs the question: If the user is in control, then why is getting adoption hard?

I disagree with Dave. I don't think getting adoption is hard. I think it's easy, is happening, is unstoppable. Perhaps where I disagree with Dave, and Ray Ozzie, and many others, is in defining what is the metric of critical mass. Ray Ozzie described it as optimization, and then placed Microsoft's chips on the notion that more data means more precision, more relevance, more value, more power. The weakness of that strategy is the sulphorous odor that Dave defines as the silo. No matter how much Windows-encircled data is captured, or misappropriated from the unknowing user, it is still defined by the characteristics of the container that envelops the experience.

By definition, the Windows data represents behavior under the terms and conditions of the Windows/Office/DRM/PlaysForSure contract with the user–managed via IT, structured around the corporate hierarchical notions of enterprise ownership of user data and behavior, and so on. And in turn, the same can be said of the Google/Skype/Yahoo/Salesforce contract–different in that users can navigate across corporate domains but remain subtly constrained by, as Doc suggests, the tyranny of inference derived but not related from the user's behavior. Both clouds are captured, prisoners of war in the battle for access to the intentions of the user/creator of these signals.

The critical mass Dave looks for, Ray speaks for, and Doc labors for, can be seen every day in the TechMeme headlines, in congressional hearing rooms, in board rooms, and finally, in our living rooms. It's what my friend calls AttentionGate, and you only have to look into his hurt eyes to understand that the leap of faith in trusting someone–anyone–is often rewarded with treachery. No matter how inured we have become to what Scott McNealy long ago told us to get over, that we are tracked, recorded, sliced and diced within an inch of our souls, by corporations, governments, school boards, the HallMark Card corporation, WalMart, Netflix, General Mills, General Motors, the Little League, the Girl Scouts, the Democrats, RiteAid, and Beck's puppets. I'm sure I've left someone out.

Last night I stood with a thousand hackers in the Yahoo courtyard and enjoyed Beck and his band and his puppets for an hour. I shot some HD video with the camera John Furrier loaned me for the Attention film I'm working on. I was invited by Yahoo's PR company via email. I heard from an unnamed source that Beck was the performer, and received an IM from another person confirming the identity. I've bought a number of Beck records, most happily the first, not so much the next few, and have created little metadata in iTunes about my usage patterns. Two turntables and a microphone I heard on CD for the most part, as it predated the iPod.

I could go on, about taking the TrailBlazer even though the left low beam was out, because it had a full tank of gas, rather than the Chrysler MiniVan because it would take ten minutes more to gas up. Or how my wife fell asleep as I droned on about business shit and we missed the 92 exit and had to cut across Palo Alto on Sand Hill and couldn't get over to the left lane in time and had to double back at Churchill, and even then still got to Yahoo in time to see Chad Dickerson step up to the microphone and tell everybody how he and his team got the idea to get Beck three weeks ago and now, somehow, by hook and by by crook, he was here.

And you could take all that metadata and gas receipts and empty Protein Bar wrappers and bar codes and SD drives and extra batteries and Amazon upsells and proprietary Newsgator synchronization APIs and long tails and short walks of long piers, and still not come up with the simplicity of the gesture Chad and Yahoo and Beck and Doc and Dave and we all give when we wave our hands in the air and thank whoever we damn please for the life we are breathing. That's the critical mass I'm saying.

Saturday, September 30th, 2006 at 1:51 pm.
Filed under Uncategorized.
Subscribe to RSS 2.0.
Leave a comment or trackback.