::.. Timing ..::

:: 2003/04/19 ::

Stewart Butterfield re: Jabber

Stewart has clarified what he meant re: Jabber vis-a-vis scaling, and points out (correctly) that I twisted his exact words:

Stewart Butterfield (http://sylloge.com/personal/) @ 04/18/2003 19:44:

Stowe: I said "for services handling less than 1,000 concurrant users it is probably an excellent choice" not "it can't scale about 1,000".

Though I did not make this clear at all, I was talking about JabberD, the server -- not the Jabber protocol. There is nothing wrong with the protocol in terms of scaling, but at the time we looked at JabberD (last summer and fall) it would not support much more than 1,000 users without a lot of work. (Like I said in my response on the Wiki, I think this has changed in the meantime.)

My bad, Stewart.


:: Stowe Boyd 4/19/2003 08:17:40 AM [link] ::
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Jabber and Social Software Alliance

I may have kicked over an anthill (the very best kind of anthill) today when I introduced Peter Saint-Andre of the Jabber Foundation to the Social Software Alliance wiki. He responded fairly strenuously to comments made about Jabber not being able to scale up beyond 1,000 users. My experience has been that the Jabber protocol is very mature, and the number of users supported is a function fo many factors -- machine horsepower, numner of concurrent users, network capacity, etc. Still, I am aware of systems of hundreds of thousands of users supported. So, the claims made by Stewart Butterfield of Ludicorp about Jabber seem unfounded.

:: Stowe Boyd 4/18/2003 06:31:09 PM [link] ::
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Social Software Alliance Forms

First "happening" of the newly formed Social Software Alliance (notice the shiny new logo in the left margin) took place today. Attendees from a broad range of interests and backgorund, including Peter Kaminsky, Clay Shirky, Marc Canter, Ross Mayfield, and about 15 others. Will be having a BoF at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference next week -- I will be unable to attend, but it promises to be very interesting.

Topics of interest (the ones that interest me the most) include these:

• open standards
• digital identity management
• cross blogging tools
• digital reputation and karma

Could be interesting. Get involved!

:: Stowe Boyd 4/18/2003 04:48:15 PM [link] ::
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Cognitive Limits: the Magic Number 150

In several settings recently, including Joho, I have stumbled against the magic number 150 vis-a-vis the ceiling for social groups. (This has become nearly as well known as George Miller's treatise on seven plus or minus two as a boundary value for human cognition.)

I suggested at a recent Joho comment that Steven Pinker talked about the magic number 150 in The Way The Mind Works, but the text I was (mis)remembering was Robin Dunbar's Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Dunbar is a primatologist and anthropologist, and he collates a tremendous body of research to frame his hypothesis: close-knit human groups don't grow beyond 150 because there are psycho-social limits that mean that groups beyond this size won't work. The traditional tribal clans -- found all over the world in tribal cultures -- tend to be about 150 people, or the "neocortex" size.

"They are the largest groupings in which everyone knows everyone else, in which they know not only who is who but exactly how each one is related to the others."

He goes on to suggest that groups larger that 150 become hierarchical in structure, while those below the limit can remain egalitarian. He goes on to enumerate examples form the world of business and government: fighting forces structure groups in less than 200, business divisions or departments seldom group beyond this limit without imposing formal structures, religious organizations, and so on.

Note that these limitations are cognitive, not intrinsic to communication media or language. Groupness derives from this sense of knowing all the people in a group and their relationships to each other. Once you exceed the limits its not a group anymore, and it morphs into being a super group. Factions fall out and people start dissassociating.

This all holds in the on-line setting. You can't keep closely involved with thousands of people. But the groups you are associated with can be global, and you can -- in principle -- belong more than one group.

Are we intrinsically limited to relations with 150 people in total? Clearly not. We can be involved in at least a handful of groups, and keep it all clear in our heads. Social tools can help us keep track of who is related to who and how, and catch up with folks that we don't interact with hourly or daily. But the fundamental cognitive limits can't be broken, no matter how fast or slick our tools are.

:: Stowe Boyd 4/18/2003 02:57:24 PM [link] ::
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Re: Social Disutility and Competition in Network Ecosystems

Tim Oren writes about Ross Mayfields thoughts on ecosystems of networks.

First of all, this seems to all have grown from David Reed's "Sneaky Exponential" piece, where he introduces Reed's Law, and contrasts the various stages of value as the network grows. I wrote about this at some length in a recent tissue of Message.

Finding the Value of the Network: Communities

The conventional wisdom about the value of a communication network is embodied in Metcalfe’s Law, named after one of the founders of the Internet. He said that the value of a communications network grows as the square of the number of people using it, or 2 to the Nth. Metcalfe’s Law is focused on the point-to-point, pair-wise communications between individuals. It is a linear model of growth.

But this model seems wrong, and does not account for the non-linear effects of social groups. David Reed is a well-known exponent of the observation that the value of a communication network grows with the number of groups it supports.

“Reed's law is the assertion of David P. Reed that the utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.
The reason for this is that the number of possible sub-groups of network participants is 2N, where N is the number of participants.

This grows much more rapidly than either

• the number of participants, N, or


• the number of possible pair connections, N(N+1)/2 (which follows Metcalfe's law)

so that even if the utility of groups being available to be joined is very small on a per-group basis, eventually the network effect of potential group membership can dominate the overall economics of the system.” (Wikipedia, www.wikipedia.org)

Stated another way, any communication network’s value is best estimated by the number of groups that exist in the population of users. The value of a network like the Internet, Reed is telling us, can not be effectively measured by the number of financial transactions it can support, or the number of messages being sent through its millions of routers, or even the number of people using it at any time. The only reasonable way to measure its value is to count the number of groups that it supports.

Accelerating Collaboration: Communities of Purpose

While its wonderful that Internet-enabled fans of the newest heavy metal band can swap gossip, MP3s and revealing photos, and this may enrich western civilization in some way, it may seem a long way from the factory floor or the pressing realities in the CEO’s suite. But it is exactly this sort of social interaction that forms all groups, even the most practical and purposeful, like those within the enterprise.

Turning Reed’s Law into a tool to enhance value for the enterprise may seem to some to be a bit out there, a bit too new age, like bringing in a Feng Shui geomancer to avoid building the new corporate headquarters in the wrong orientation to the Cosmos. But it is simply pragmatic. Obviously, work gets down by groups, Obviously, you want to harness the value of closer, more productive relationships with partners, suppliers, and customers. And, yes, it is becoming obvious that any significant enterprise performance improvements will require interactions with people – and applications – outside the enterprise."

Tim Oren's final observations -- that people generally contribute significantly to around 2.5 groups, and that groups hit size limits (the old 150 person max rule) -- return to the core theme of social groups and network value. Size does matter. People can only meaningfully be involved with a limited number of groups, and groups lose group cohesion after some ceiling is reached.

But the value of the network is a function of the number of groups supported, even if the membership of each group is bounded. The flexibility associated with group transience is an additional factor -- so it's not just a static equation, its a non-linear flow equation. All of the Laws that Reed compares -- Sarnoff, Metcalfe, and Reed -- are statically defined.

In a recent report I wrote for Cutter (now in production) I argue that real-time groups create value for companies as an extension or correllary of Reed's Law, which I humbly have dubbed Boyd's Law. Ahem.

". As companies seek to increase their individual responsiveness and decrease the impacts of volatility in their markets, they will increase their synchronous communications with partners, but the net effect will be an increase in asynchronous operations of the meta-enterprise.

This seeming paradox is simply explained. A real time enterprise will have more frequent communication with its partners – passing information from application to application, or conducting real time communication between members of real time communities – and as a result, the latency in information transfer decreases.

This means that companies in the meta-enterprise are free to act on this lower latency information earlier, increasing overall performance across the meta-enterprise. Or put another way, decreasing latency in the individual communication events translates into higher probabilities of increased parallelism in the overall network. This emergent property of increased real time communication in networks is exactly the value creation David Reed was getting at.

In human terms, and leaving the queuing theory aside, this value increase grows from the power of social groups. It’s not quasi-mystical chaos theory – it’s just practical.

So, you have to look at other factors, not just size, or even who is a member, but things like the tools being used to communicate in order to understand the components of value arising from social interaction.

:: Stowe Boyd 4/17/2003 06:23:35 PM [link] ::
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Get Real published at Darwin

Get Real posted at Darwin today.

"Real-time communication allows companies to do new things, not just the same old things faster. So what are we waiting for? "

:: Stowe Boyd 4/16/2003 10:57:11 AM [link] ::
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PingID and Jabber Partner on Liberty Alliance Digital Identity Management Approach

Andred Durand, the founder of PingID and earlier a founder of Jabber, today sent out a press release on Jabber Inc's integration with Ping's SourceID technology, which implements Liberty Alliance Phase 1 specifications for identity management and authentication. This means what?

"Well, for starters, it means that Jabber customers will now be able to single sign-on to Jabber (even between companies), or launch a Jabber client from a web page without having to re-authenticate one-self when the Jabber client is launched."

But these are really just proof points of Phase 1 aspects of the specification, which is now called Identity Federation Framework (ID-IFF) in the OASIS standards process. In the second phase, the goal is a broad spectrum of digital identity related capabilities, specifically Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF), which will allow federated trust networks. The contending model to Liberty Alliance -- supported by IBM and Microsoft -- is WS-Security, a web services standard they created and submitted to OASIS.

In a recent InfoWorld article, John Fontana wrote, "Liberty ’s Version 1.1 specification will become a foundation document to help create Version 2 of OASIS’s Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), according to sources. SAML 1.0 is a standard for exchanging authentication and authorization information and is incorporated into and extended by Liberty ’s Version 1.1. The hope is that ID-WSF and ID-SIS will eventually extend SAML 2.0 to create a single standards-based environment for federated identity and sharing of identity credentials."

At the same time, it may be that the two dueling standards have reached a fork in the road. Both groups are struggling to invent the future, in advance of real users, however the needs for trusted authentication across corporate boundaries -- for instant messaging and other applications -- is increasingly important.

I will keep watching this closely.

:: Stowe Boyd 4/15/2003 10:06:59 AM [link] ::
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AOL Introducing Video Support

The 9.0 AIM beta is apparently available -- under the code name Blue Hawaii -- supporting the ability to send video clips, but stopping short of full streaming video.

MSN and Yahoo support for video has been available for some time, and that feature may be one of the reasons their IM use is growing more quickly that AOL's.

Note that this feature has specifically been singled out by the FCC's 2001 agreement to the AOL/Time-Warner merger as something AOL should not implement. The firm is working to get such restrictions lifted, in light of the decreasing dominance of AIM. Personally, I think the FCC should force all three majors to support interoperability, and then lift all other anticompetitive restrictions: interoperability is clearly in the public interest, as is otherwise unfettered competition.

:: Stowe Boyd 4/14/2003 09:50:42 AM [link] ::
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