Blogs by Magic

Thoughts & ideas from a digital magician.

Valuing what matters

This report takes a new approach to looking at the value of work. We go beyond how much different professions are paid to look at what they contribute to society. We use some of the principles and valuation techniques of Social Return on Investment analysis to quantify the social, environmental and economic value that these roles produce – or in some cases undermine.
via neweconomics.org

The above snippet is taken from the a recent report put out by the London-based New Economics Foundation. I'd encourage anyone with a passing interest in inequality and discrimination to give it a read. It's pretty short and easy to read.

It's a little too antagonistic in tone for my taste, but interesting nonetheless. I'm also somewhat disappointed by the professions they looked at:

  • Investment banker
  • Advertising executive
  • Tax accountant
  • Hospital cleaner
  • Recycling plant worker
  • Childcare worker
I have a feeling they chose these specifically because they believed it would give them the desired outcome they wanted, which was this:
This report challenges a host of economically and socially damaging myths about pay and value. Chief among them – and the point of our research – is the idea that there is a straightforward relationship between high financial rewards and good societal outcomes. As we have seen, this simply is not the case.
And while that might be true, they hand picked professions that correspond to the top and bottom of an income distribution and left out most of the space in-between. Had they chosen a more progressive selection of jobs, it would have been a much more compelling piece. Personally, I've often wondered where someone like a barista fits into this kind of analysis. That is, how much social value is created by simply serving someone a cup of coffee with a smile? I'd venture a guess that it's more than an investment banker. The barista at the coffee shop on the corner adds more value to society than the investment banker across the street on the 50th floor – and that irks me just a little bit.

You can download the full report in PDF format here.

Facebook's biggest problem is Facebook

One of the biggest problems with Facebook is how much it keeps changing. Change is good, but Facebook is ridiculous. It seems like every six months there’s a new version. Billions of cumulative hours are lost every year as all 350 million users have to search around in order to figure out where things have moved to and what the new features actually do (which is usually nothing).

Facebook started so simply, and every iteration pushes it further from its roots. According to a recent blog post by Mark Zuckerberg, they are now getting rid of regional networks. With every iteration Facebook becomes more like Twitter. It becomes harder to segment your friends into groups. Instead of giving users control Facebook wants to put everything that happens into a single stream and have a magic algorithm tell you what’s important to you. Maybe this time next year Facebook can develop a new tagline, “The largest social network with no networks!”

And who knows what other fun changes they’ll make. The only good thing I’ve seen them do in a while is Facebook Lite. It’s fantastic. If tomorrow they decided to get rid of the current version and replace it with Facebook Lite, I could get behind that.

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It's not the size of the network, it's how you use it

Some believe that Facebook is now an integral part of our life. That it will only keep growing, and in a few years time it will be as ubiquous as email.

Those people are wrong. As more people use Facebook, it becomes less useful.

When you first sign up to Facebook, it's not that useful. You have to go out and make some friends. As you add friends, it becomes more useful and more interesting. Marginal utility derived, per user added, is increasing. It becomes addicting. But then it peaks. It peaks, and the trend reverses. The peak is different for each user, and depends largely on the kind of activities their friends engage in on the platform, but at some point the marginal utility per user added starts declining. Then it goes negative. It starts to get so noisy that you start wondering why you are checking it at all.

This problem is not uniqie to Facebook. This is what "killed" MySpace. And this is what is killing Twitter.

When I first started using Facebook I was still in school. Only people with access to a .edu email address could even request to join. It was a quiet platform with the occasional picture of drunken debauchery. You'd slowly add friends as more people came into the platform. I used it mainly for finding people in my classes and getting notes on days I skipped. At the time, there was an application built directly into the platform that let you enter your courses. Finding everyone in a specific class was incredibly simple. At some point this functionality was actually removed and then brought back later by a third party.

What's even more interesting is that those joining Facebook today have no concept of the kind of utility that Facebook was once able to provide. They have no frame of reference. They sign up and by the end of the week they could have 100+ friend requests. They assume that this is what Facebook is, and the way you use it is by saying as much stuff as you can. They are also going to be the first ones to move to a new platform that can provide them the same kind of benefits that Facebook originally provided.

The same thing is happening on Twitter right now. What started as an extremely useful communication tool, has become the noisiest broadcasting medium of all time. Everyone is scrambling around saying, "What's Twitter? Do I need to be on it? What's my Twitter strategy?" Do you need to be on it? No. No, you don't. Even more, there is a touch of hypocrisy in this post, since most people who read this will have found it through Twitter.

This problem with noise is what has me so interested in Google Wave. Direct messaging (email, IM, SMS) doesn't suffer from scale in the same way, and Google Wave functions more along the lines of email and instant messaging. The current model of Facebook, Twitter, et al. is one of broadcasting out everything, all the time, and hoping that the right people read it and respond. With individual "waves" you can create instances with only particular groups of people. You can fluidly add people and drop them. The network can be resized at any point, and one can create an entirely new network with the click of a button.

Help me Google Wave. You're my only hope.

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