There are no local battles any more; Not when it comes to the Internet. Public policy is changing around the world and I am afraid that those changes will affect the way you socialize, communicate and take action on the Internet. SOPA and PIPA are (or were) being touted as ways to fight piracy and copyright infringement. Both of these are worthy goals I personally support… to the extent that privacy and rights of netizens are not trampled upon.

Okay, so you might have read that SOPA and PIPA would effectively allow authorities to ask ISPs to turn off access to sites that hosted piracy and other copyright infringement. Well, take a close look at that statement. Indeed an ISP is allowed to make the decision on its lonesome, as long as the ISP is working in “good faith”. There is no recourse to the ISP. The question you should ask is “who is the ISP?” and “what are their other motives for such action?”.

I’m not a believer in conspiracy theories or that companies are blatantly evil. Remember companies are made up of people like you and me. I do, however, believe that ideology, politics and greed can make companies and governments do some weird crazy things. What if the government in some future day decides that a protest against it could be stopped by claiming that Twitter linked to piracy and hence could be disrupted under this law? You say, it can’t happen in a democratic America! Well, history is littered with governments, societies and states that went from democratic to less than democratic, and then abused the previous laws created in good faith.

I am worried about SOPA and PIPA not because of the acts themselves, but what they signify in a world where governments and organizations are starting to feel the power of the people, the power of open communication and the ability to stage protests and gather online leading to offline change (see “Arab Spring”). The Internet is not really all about you sharing your baby photos, the latest movie or the cereal you ate in the morning, it is about the movement of information and ideas at lightning fast speeds throughout a society and even the world. Collectivism has the potential to change the world. Imagine a world where we can finally learn from each other and realize that everyone is someone’s child, mother or father; that everyone wants to do good for their society; that ultimately, regardless of ideology, politics and economics, we could all be better than what we are. The Internet is one tool for doing just that.

Creating “islands”, preventing flow of information, giving centralized organizations the rights to block without recourse… well, all of those will end that dream.

To the Government of Canada, I implore you, look at the policies that have created the amazing innovations that you now have before you from Twitter, YouTube, Google Search and more. Look at the freedom that has allowed developers and entrepreneurs like me to realize such dreams. Do not squash that. Absolutely, make sure that public policy protects those of us who wish for free speech and free Internet but take to task those who abuse freedom at the expense and rights of others. Learn from the outcry and the reaction to SOPA and PIPA.

There is a great article by Sue Gardener of the Wikimedia Foundation about Wikipedia’s decision to black out English Wikipedia tomorrow. Please read.

However, this really is an interesting problem. Raising the debt ceiling is effectively the right of the United States government to print more dollar bills (loans will come from investors, other governments etc, but it is still money that didn’t exist in the economy in the first place). The point then is “what is the actual value of the US dollar?”

In any other economy, if a country decided to print more money or borrow such a large sum and inject it into the system, the currency would be devalued. However, smart money says that as soon as the debt ceiling is raised the US dollar will remain at its current levels relative to the Canadian dollar or the UK pound, maybe even increase. That seems to go against the reality of how we think of currency valuation… or does it? It all comes down to the fact that almost all currencies are now “virtual” and certainly subject to market sentiment and subjective and “perceived value”.

I think we all like to believe that there are rules for all things. After all we’d like to think that the economy is as solid as the fundamental laws of physics. But what if that is not the case? Let me give you an example of perceived value. If you bought a piece of art for a million dollars, the value is based on the subjective value that you and the rest of society puts into it and the value the seller is willing to part with it. There is no hard and fast rule for that piece of art to be worth a million dollars. In order for the art to be valued at a million dollars then enough of us have to believe that it is worth a million dollars. It is why an artist who is living fetches less value than an artist who is dead. The art hasn’t changed, just our perception of its value.

The same goes true for the house you likely own or mortgage. The value of the house is not the cost of materials, the piece of land or anything like that. The value of the house is based on what someone is willing to pay for it and the price at which the seller or builder is prepared to sell. It is entirely subjective and perceived value and can be applied to every object around you.

Crazily enough, the rest of our economies all work that way too, simply because, no matter what economists write, publish and espouse, money markets, like all markets are based on sentiment, emotions, reactions and, well, humans. In this sense, I could argue that the US dollar, and every currency that we put so much faith in is actually as much a virtual currency as Empire Avenue Eaves. The US dollar is worth X against another currency and buys you Y because enough people believe that it does, we have faith in the economic system backing up that green piece of paper with some deliverable good that we then personally see as having value.

Well, isn’t that similar to Empire Avenue Eaves? In Empire Avenue, the Eaves are backed by your online social value, your social networks, your online social activity. That currency then can be traded for other things in our economy which bring value to you, whether it is a connection with another person, a position on a leaderboard and more visibility or potentially buying traffic to what you do and say.

Now there’s an interesting phenomenon happening at the same time in this real-world crisis that has been brewing. If you take my fundamental assertion that value is subjective and perceived, and that currency and the money markets are just as subjective as all other markets, then let me argue that the greatest danger the US Government runs is not the danger of devaluing the US dollar and is not even the trillions in debt — after all, if the whole thing is virtual and perceived then you could argue that debt is also perceived, subjective and hence in turn virtual. If the US economy stays relatively strong then everyone believes that US going into more debt is not that big a deal, eventually the US will pay back or claw its way back from the debt. At least that *was* the sentiment.

The real danger that the US Government is running is that all this political posturing is shaking the world’s fundamental belief in the strength of the government, its military and its treasury. Once that belief goes then the social currency, the social capital and the social belief in and of the very US economic system is put at stake and we run the risk of a true devaluation of the US dollar. Most of us would like to think that our economies are not founded upon the idea of subjective valuations and emotional human assumptions, but I would argue, that unlike the laws of physics, the laws of economics are inherently, well, social. All currencies are in fact virtual, social and all very real.

Isaac Asimov

@ChrisPirillo challenged me on Twitter to write a blog post on how science fiction influenced Empire Avenue. I think he was joking, but he had no idea how a singular fictional creation of Isaac Asimov has influenced my personal thinking: Hari Seldon and Psycho-history.

For those that haven’t read the Foundation series, I’m probably going to ruin some of it with spoilers. The great galactic Empire is breaking apart, just like the once-mighty Roman Empire collapsed, into warring states and chaos: it is the start of an intergalactic “Dark Age”. One man uses the subjects of mathematics, economics, statistics, history and psychology to create a path for humans to keep a light on in the dark of the ensuing intergalactic chaos. He uses “Psycho-history” to create a colony called the Foundation and charts its course across 1000 years towards the birth of a new civilized galactic Empire. Order from chaos, based on science, history and economics.

Before Asimov decided to try and tie everything together into a sweeping arc of his own making (which I believe ultimately took away from what his younger self created), the Foundation series set the tone for analysis on how humans as a group acted. In Hari Seldon and Psychohistory is embodied my fundamental belief that human beings, as a whole and as individuals, are for the most part incapable of radical change, only stepwise evolution. We are predictable, not like machines and only in general terms: predictable in our base needs, in our base thinking, in our base reactions. We move from platform to platform, situation to situation and we carry a base set of predictable behaviours, somewhat based on genetics and upbringing, somewhat based on culture, definitely based on the “milieu” and affected by Zeitgeist. It’s not that mathematics can model our behaviour entirely, but more that our behaviour, especially as a group, is not as irrational as we’d like to believe.

Asimov realizes through the series, as do the people of the Foundation, that while mathematics and science could show a general path, humans were still needed to guide people to their end goals; randomness is the hallmark of the universe after all. But I don’t want to spoil the story!

Empire Avenue, I believe, embodies all of the above. Humans are social in similar ways no matter online or offline; the differences have to do with the platform, medium, overall culture as well as socio-economic backgrounds of the participants. Generally though, we don’t change our behaviour. Every time I meet people offline at an Empire Avenue event, it strikes me how much their behaviour offline is similar to how they behave online on Empire Avenue, or should that be the other way around

On Empire Avenue, our algorithms give you a general direction, just like Hari Seldon maps a general course, a starting point if you will. But it’s the humans, you, who are the “Second Foundation” of Empire Avenue. It is you, through your actions in investing your social capital, through the connections you make, through your social networking elsewhere, that charts each individual course.

Like Hari Seldon, the staff at Empire Avenue spend time doing predictive analysis and it isn’t based on pure numbers. We look at your social behaviour, we think about psychology, we look at cultural biases. When you look at our algorithms you are seeing more than just X retweets caused share price to go up, you are seeing the intersection of history, math, psychology, economics and statistics. We always said Empire Avenue is more than just a score, well, maybe it’s the beginnings of Psycho-history.

If you are a parent and say “I wonder what my 13 year old will take from those trashy science fiction/fantasy novels s/he reads?”, well hopefuylly I have now shown you how profound their impact has been on me — as much as Weiss and Hickman’s Dragonlance drove me directly to beg for work at BioWare, but that’s another story. Do note, that the other founders of Empire Avenue and Staff see everything differently, and this is my vision and my opinion only!

So, finally, I raise a glass and toast the memory of Isaac Asimov: a true visionary, scientist and ultimately, despite all the work on Robotics, one of the great humanists of the 20th century. I wouldn’t be here without you! I’m not entirely sure how he would feel that a social game and network like Empire Avenue owes him some thanks, but I suspect he would have chuckled and just composed a limerick.

This year Oracle asked me to join them in the opening keynote to talk from a customer and community perspective. Below is the text of what I said (this is what I wrote, what I gave in my usual speaking style was slightly abridged). Please hear my plea at the end, go MySQL, go MySQL Community!

“Thank you Tomas!

Hi folks, my name is Duleepa Wijayawardhana, better known as “Dups” and sometimes as Colin Charles’ twin!

Like a lot of you here, I am a developer who is passionate about data. I’m also passionate about games, economics and social media. So with that let me first introduce you to Empire Avenue.

At Empire Avenue we ask a simple question, if every connection you made cost money, who would you connect with and why? We are the world’s only Social Media Exchange where you can buy and sell anyone across the social web, all with virtual currency. We value your social engagement across platforms and create an economic paradigm for you to connect with people across 120+ countries. In return each of your “investments” will make money for you as they are active each day! So it’s part game, part social network and part tool where you can judge how you are doing in your social media prowess!

If you think about it, our data needs are somewhat distinct in that it combines a full on economy, social media analysis engine, game stuff and social network into one. It’s either data heaven or a data nightmare. Thankfully we have MySQL and you, the MySQL Community!

Now, part of me standing up here is that we in early December we ran into several issues with our databases which are hosted on the Rackspace Cloud. At the time we were at a loss as to what to do so we contacted a friend in Oracle/MySQL. And while we couldn’t immediately see the solution, and because we were down anyway, we said “hey look MySQL 5.5 is going to be GA in a few weeks, why don’t we upgrade to the latest RC”. So a little reluctantly we did just that, but we’re a company who likes to take risks (don’t do this at home folks).

I want to thank the engineers at InnoDB, MySQL, Oracle and also all the work that I know you folks in the MySQL community have done and given to Oracle to be included in MySQL 5.5

Overall almost instantaneously we saw a 25% improvement in our performance for our front end users. That’s not counting anything we do in the back end and our analysis stuff.

That’s huge for a small company that thought we’d need to start spending on more infrastructure at a time that we could not.

As Charlie Sheen would say #WINNING and #DOLPHINBLOOD

But our story isn’t just about MySQL Oracle. We’ve taken a concept that most people said was crazy and brought it to the world in less than a year, developed a community and an ecosystem and we’ve done it because of what you have all done. I could list 4 slides or more in small font with names from the MySQL community or Open Source Community. Our product would never have gotten to market, or we’d have had to spend the equivalent of one man year extra. This allows us to get to profitability faster and a loyal customer for all your services faster as well!

As with other companies that thought, say, 140 characters was enough for a service, we get to do insane cool things and create companies that change the world because of you and your hard work in the Open Source Community. I sincerely hope and encourage Oracle and the MySQL Community to continue to work together to create great products, great ideas and build out this ecosystem.

Go MySQL, Go MySQL Community!

Oh go and buy shares in me at EmpireAvenue.com”

So far this has been a year of remarkable political change in the Middle East, and all indications show that the region will continue along unpredictable paths over the coming months. At the end of the year we will likely look back and remark on how people took power into their own hands in almost every country, mobilized across political divides, natural catastrophes and made those in power listen. We will likely focus, as we have done in the past, on companies and services such as Google, Facebook and Twitter. But we’re missing the true story behind how dramatic the landscape of technology has changed in the past 12 years.

The true story lies in the very fabric of the technologies that power these services: Open Source Software. It is the idea that anyone can generally use and deploy such software for free with modifications and improvements being shared for everyone else to use. That very fabric of open code-sharing seems to have been built into the very companies that sprouted from the liberal use of such software. Twitter’s API openness (despite their recent change of tune) sparked their success, Facebook’s openness and its platform sparked its success, and Google might be the epitome of an Open Source mega-giant. Just look at where we have come…

As MySQL’s Community Manager for North America (then owned by Sun Microsystems) I toured campuses in North America talking to students about the amazing change that has been wrought by Open Source database software called MySQL. I asked the students to consider a day in their life and then showed them how often MySQL turned up. But now, looking back on the past dozen years, it’s even more fundamental, even more incredible. A dozen years ago, what we thought of as “the Web” was a collection of web sites, brochure sites, eBay, fledgling Amazon and “social media” centered around instant messaging and “forums.” We were seeing companies start to advertise “dot com” addresses and one could even visualize the size of Google’s database.

I’m pretty sure Google’s number of indexed web pages these days is a figure that defies the ability for most brains to wrap themselves around. Today we’re seeing a shift as people are constantly online on mobile devices, and Facebook pages and Twitter handles are taking over our airwaves as the places companies promote themselves. In that same time, people have mobilized locally and internationally using the same technologies and services on which we spend time commenting on cute cat videos.

Governments who seemed to be at strength, like in Tunisia and Egypt, have suddenly found themselves at the mercy of their citizens. Companies are now listening to their customers with the knowledge that a misstep in customer relations does not just spread to a few people, but to millions by the amplification possible through Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. When a natural disaster hits, such as what is happening in Japan and what recently occurred in New Zealand, instead of using phones or being glued to the television, we first turn to Facebook and Twitter to reach out and touch family and friends.

As I said, at the heart of all this change and disruption is Open Source. You see, companies like mine, Empire Avenue, a crazy idea about allowing people to list themselves on a social stock market, or another crazy idea like sending 140 character messages would not have been possible had its creators had to pay for the initial underlying technology that powers our services. The very freedom to innovate is what has driven our creation of these technologies!

I focus at times on MySQL, partly because of my past affiliations, but also because MySQL is a piece of software that bridges the gap between all major operating systems, forms the core data store of popular web applications, and most importantly, because from the first day it was supported by an organization dedicated to promoting and popularizing the idea of MySQL and Open Source generally. Over a decade, MySQL AB made the idea of data storage “cool.” They allowed developers like me to experiment. Ultimately, as companies scale upward, the “free” cost of open source is not actually free, and MySQL AB, the company, created a supremely profitable business around it – so much so that Sun Microsystems bought MySQL AB for $1 billion. Finding commercial success for Open Source, it seems to now have bridged the divide into the political and public spheres.

Without MySQL, Red Hat, Apache, PHP, Perl, Python and so much other Open Source, many of the services and sites that we know today may not exist today. I’ll name a few: Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, WordPress, Skype and, of course, Facebook. I describe MySQL and Open Source generally as the real-world equivalent of utility companies. Imagine if the costs of providing roads and energy were minimal or next to nothing; instead of focusing on these things, the citizens of the real world could focus on innovation and new ideas. In the world of the Internet, MySQL and others provide the basic building blocks of the infrastructure that allow entrepreneurs, developers and innovators to create new (and sometimes crazy) worlds for you to play in. These worlds have changed how you perceive and use technology and have gone further to change the very way we connect to each other as a human race.

So, 12 years later, we have a world where crowds can chat instantly around the globe, learn from each other, help each other and ultimately come together to change the planet through devolution, revolution and evolution. Simply put, dictators should tremble the world over for something as fundamental as a database could be at the heart of bringing true change eventually. Finally, the ability to create innovative technology for sharing, helping and communicating will also see us overcome great disasters and ultimately make this world a truly amazing place. Open Source in all incarnations is not done yet; we’re just getting started!

A couple of years back, two friends of mine from Memorial University and I started thinking about the idea of what value we bring to what people call ‘Social Media’. The idea came from a deep philosophical discussion between Niall Brown and I on a passage in Das Kapital where Marx talks about the idea that everything we create has value and is in effect a tradeable good. I’m sure that Marx had no idea years later it would lead to Empire Avenue. It took a third friend, Dr. Michael Mannion, to bring some semblance of the idea to fruition. We decided to create a virtual stock market where your online actions were the tradeable commodity. Woah. How science-fictiony. But it really comes down to the idea of “Social Capital”. When we discovered that Bond Street was taken, we settled on Empire Avenue and we went forth.

Through many trials and tribulations we launched to the friends and family a year ago, to the world 6 months ago and we move on forward. Our goals are not small, and regardless of success or failure the three of us are driven to challenge established networks and to establish Empire Avenue as a household name. We are also not shy of our Newfoundland roots.

Last week we launched the Empire Avenue on Facebook which will bring Empire Avenue’s addictive network building and fun to the Facebook platform.

At Empire Avenue, we ask you to connect each of your primary social networks. We examine the data and then we throw it back at you as scores against which people buy shares, connect with you and otherwise have fun with what you write and produce on Empire Avenue or on Twitter or Facebook.

In creating Empire Avenue, what had for the most part been somewhat of a lark, we were propelled headlong into the worlds of Social Media and Social Gaming. We are on the forefront of Gaming something that is real. We are on the forefront of discovering a method to value your online Social Capital. We talk about building “value-based relationships”

So what is this talk about?

I’m going to have a look at Social Networks and Social Media, but always bring it back to some of the numbers and interesting things that we have discovered in doing Empire Avenue. I doubt you will walk away from this and say, wow, I understand Social Media or Networks, instead I hope we will have a great discussion on Social Media, its uses and perhaps with a bit of philosophical discussion thrown in there, we’ll all walk away from a truly inclusive Social Lecture, one that benefits the subject at hand. If I had to describe this talk in 140 characters:

“How social media is changing our world, our own personal brand and how the value of your network is an asset to cultivate.”

Another one could be “I tweet therefore I am”

Ultimately just like Empire Avenue itself, this talk brings together so many fields that I will immediately tell you that I am no expert in any of them and my conclusions are based on our data, our inferences and our analysis. Even the rest of Empire Avenue may not agree with my conclusions!

But first let me ask you as an audience with a raise of your hands, how many of you are on Facebook? How many of you are on Twitter? How many on LinkedIn? How many are on Empire Avenue? Great, how many of you have no clue as to why you are on Facebook, hate it, but have a strange fascination and can’t help but being on it and can’t quite bring yourself to quit?

Today we produce an incredible amount of content. In the past 24 hours, it is not inconceivable of me to say that we have written equivalent of the Encyclopaedia of Britannica several times over if we combined all the messages passed along through Twitter and Facebook alone. Unfortunately, you are probably sitting there thinking that the consistency of one’s breakfast isn’t exactly something to get academically excited about. However, you ignore Social Media at your own risk. Ask Hosni Mubarak and Charlie Sheen.

Social Media is different from regular media in several senses, but I stress at every talk I do that human beings are fundamentally opposed to change. We don’t change our human behaviour, we simply move them to new platforms.

Twitter for example, is the equivalent of turn of the century newspaper boy yelling out headlines from the evening papers. Hopefully you will hear and spread it to the next person.

Facebook is the equivalent of bingo parlour. A giant bingo parlour on steroids, but we’re there addictively playing bejeweled or solitaire and gossiping about our friends and passing photos around. I’m still not sure what value LinkedIn is to me, but then I’m on there along with 90 million other people.

The difference from their offline counterparts is that with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn you are not reaching 100 people at a time, you are reaching millions and you participate in an accelerated Network Effect. More, the message is not controlled by a single organization but instead by you; by us. While that lends itself to umpteen messages on bowel movements, it also lends itself to an amazing ability to look at networks, society and impact across the world at an instant.

Someone from here sent me a couple of questions related to my talk before I showed up and they were very insightful. Why are we creating and consuming so much content? I would personally describe human beings as insatiably curious and insatiably social. We want to know what’s happening with everyone else. We want to know what’s happening in other countries, towns, families and so on.

How many of you would classify yourself as “Lurkers”. In essence we like to gossip. Furthermore, Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene describes most species as being in the camp of Altruism. Altruistic passage of information is the equivalent of sitting at the Pub and saying “So did you hear about Ellen, she’s you know, started a new job and Bob has bought this awesome snowblower”.

Given the ability for you to share a piece of information, we humans are almost trained from birth to pass along that message. Our action of whether to pass along a message is really the part that drives social media. If all of us broadcast their thoughts, no one listened and no one shared, Facebook would be a set of profile pages that I might go along and read once in a while but otherwise would be quite boring.

In fact, what I just described is the static web that we started off with 18 years ago. What drives Social Media is commenting and sharing. It’s because we have an opinion, we have a comment and given the opportunity, for no cost other than to be social or altruistic, we share and repost. Essentially, and this would please the university me: the mindset is often, “hey, if I’m going to procrastinate, then let’s see how many of you I can drag along with me”.

How many times after you share something or see something of yours shared do you go back and see who has commented? I remember as a staffer on the Muse (Memorial University’s Student Newspaper) we used to keep saying: “if we weren’t pissing someone off then we weren’t doing our job as student journalists.“ Even in traditional journalism, you work to elicit a reaction. I’m sure CBC journalists have fun checking the comments out to their articles once posted on line.

So at Empire Avenue we look at your network and match it against two things: Your Audience and the Engagement. For us, a social conversation starts with you creating a piece of content. It gets broadcast to your audience. Its success within your audience is when you see engagement. We’re basically looking at the feedback loop to content.

When we first started this journey, we thought that all this equated to online Influence, in fact there are people and services that are making money talking about reaching out to Influencers and using scores such as what we provide to identify those who are likely to get a message passed to another person, i.e. Influence. Fundamentally it seems like a great hypothesis, until you look at it a little more closely. Let’s say you have 6000 Twitter followers. You post a tweet today on Charlie Sheen… what is the liklihood of that tweet getting passed around? The answer is that it depends very much on a number of factors. The Content of your Tweet, The Context of the network you are passing it along to (I’ll get into this) and the true Audience that witnesses that piece of content. I personally do not believe our scores measure influence but instead network value, i.e. how engaged a network is with you. If your network is more or less engaged with you, you will get more “retweets” and more sharing. Whether that leads to a measurable action from your content is something else entirely. Marketers, businesses and individuals should not use these scores as gospel on how influential someone is, but merely as a starting point. We haven’t quite cracked the algorithmic analysis puzzle for understanding, measuring and replicating viral memes. Not yet. (though yes we have some ideas).

The true power of using Social Media is in understanding the Context of the network you are in. If a Folklorist got up and spoke to an audience of Mathematicians, the context of the audience would be completely against the content of the talk. Similarly we participate in social networks all the time and they are all of different contexts. Mixing contexts is not necessarily advisable.

So what do I mean by social network contexts?

Facebook is about your friends. People you know generally well, probably on a personal relationship, your family and so on. LinkedIn, generally speaking you are more aligned towards business relationships. You connect based on potential business relationships. Twitter, well, anything goes on Twitter. I would imagine people follow based on much looser criteria. At Empire Avenue, your scores are matched against everyone else in the world. Generally, we see smaller network groupings in Facebook than Twitter. In Empire Avenue, the context is based on value. You need to have virtual currency to create a relationship based on buying shares which is limiting, but puts a premium on “value”. That value is a judgment for you, can be content, can be gaming, can be friendship.

But understanding this context is important. According to Business Insider these are what people spend most time clicking on inside Facebook. In advertising terms, putting an advert on entertainment on Facebook is more likely to generate hits than one about health care. The reason is simple, the context with which most people use Facebook is very specific. It is entertainment, it is friendship, it is passing along fun. Why would I be there to read about my knee replacement possibilities?

Exploiting that context is ultimately the most important thing about effective social media usage. The secret is to match the content of your message to the context of the network and most importantly, the context by which your audience sees you. This is ultimately incredibly important in understanding how to use Facebook or any of these services. If Memorial University were to advertise some function on Facebook then it should aim it towards the Entertainment/Tabloids portion of the demographic. If I started talking about jellyfish, other than commenting on my insanity, I doubt I’ll get much response. Understanding what my own personal audience is there for and how they will react to my message in the medium that it is given is crucial. There’s nothing new here really, it’s just that the urge to share without thinking is far greater than before when publishing a news article took far more effort and time.

Have you heard this talk before? It’s called targeted Television Channels and TV shows. Yes. Again human beings do not change.

You could also say in the case of social media the technology of the platform itself defines the message. The message on Twitter is 140 characters. By that definition itself, Twitter creates an urgency and a need to consume that message in a certain way. You might respond to it, you might retweet it or you might ignore it. The sheer volume of messages on that medium means that you might not even see it. The value of a single Tweet is far less than the value of a Facebook Post. The rich multimedia nature of Facebook with it’s increasing relevance of the word “like” and the action of comment means that you will react to content differently there as well. The very act of being bought as the medium for a connection on Empire Avenue drives a completely different user behaviour!

So coincidentally my studies here for my Masters revolved around grass roots revolution in South Africa. Today you are seeing these so called revolutions focusing on Twitter, Facebook. It’s not that Twitter says to people “Come join Twitter; we can topple governments” — though what a great tagline that would be. Examine the context and the reasons for a revolution. My personal academic leanings always stood behind the Marxist or economic theories behind history. In this context, a revolution occurs due to economic circumstances that lead a people to revolt. Now there’s a good reason why agrarian revolutions hardly ever work. You need to have good avenues for communications in order to get the message out to enough people. In the old days, that was by having the revolution in, or next to, big population centers that facilitated communication by word of mouth. Radio, Television and Mobile Phones certainly expanded upon the idea of communicating revolutionary ideas but the cost of phoning everyone in a country is, well, prohibitive, and Radio and Television are controlled by a single, usually state run, company or other organization. What Twitter, Facebook, Google and others have helped to do is create platforms and tools which allow for the dissemination of information in such a manner across multiple devices and for free that the man on the street has the knowledge in which to conduct that revolution.

It is interesting to note that because Empire Avenue pulls in data from all these sources we have been used by groups of people to read the data from Twitter and Facebook when Twitter and Facebook have been banned.

That is the power of social media and the networks that they have created. In true guerilla fashion, cut off the head and the limbs still survive. In effect the only true recourse for a government is to cut off total communications.

Now, revolutions don’t need to happen through Social Media in far off places like Egypt. About a month ago I had just arrived in Edmonton from San Francsisco from a long flight looked at my messages and there was a tweet from a user of ours by the name of JOSH that said, “Hey look at my share price, I think I broke Empire Avenue”. Now, these are not the kind of messages you want to receive at 1am especially in a start-up like ours. Panicked, I looked at his share price, which was fairly high to begin with, and sure enough he had climbed over 20 points. Obviously I freaked.

In reality nothing was wrong. You see, I had been out of the country. While I was gone in British Columbia an outdoors company had culled hundreds of huskies and it had come out in the press. JOSH had been asked to manage the Facebook Fan Page for the group that was leading the charge on whipping up a Social Media revolution in BC and the rest of Canada to get the company Boycotted. They were successful and as I arrived in Edmonton, they had whipped up a frenzy of 60,000+ people onto the fan page. JOSH’s value on Empire Avenue, well, rightfully skyrocketed.

You can topple governments, but given an avenue where people can share their thoughts, have it be rebroadcasted and reach a receptive network, you can truly change the world.

But all this comes at a price.

Twitter and Facebook are meme-related networks. We soar along the paths of a new Internet Meme, who will it be today? The worst American Idol, the toppling of a Government, a person with the golden Radio Voice, the sound bite of an overpaid basketball player who should know better, the fascination with a drug/alcohol addled man living with two women. These are memes. They capture our attention, they make us smile, cry, angry, happy, disgusted. We pass it along. The sad truth is that it’s just as quickly forgotten.

I want to bring it back to the huge amount of data that we are producing. If we say that the Library of Congress has the 20 Terabytes of data that people have estimated, I can tell you that each day 90 million tweets are sent on Twitter alone. That is the equivalent of 9 GB of data, admittedly just using Twitter at 140 characters it would take you 800,000 years or so to reach the same amount of data at current levels.

However, to put it in manageable sizes, I think we are all familiar with the Bible. The Bible has about 4MB of data. So the equivalent content of 2,000 bibles are being written and posted in a single day. Imagine reading the Bible 2,000 times in a single day every day?

That’s counting a service that puts out 140 character tweets out there. I’m not counting Blogs, Newspapers, Facebook with longer posts, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, Empire Avenue. The amount of data is staggering. The amount of data you must wade through is staggering. The secret to content CREATION and having it CONSUMED on the Internet therefore is about being consistent, understanding the context, creating great content, have a little bit of luck if you are the broadcaster and realize that you will only have 15 seconds of fame because that’s our current internet attention span.

So in the mid of last year we had an interesting occurrence which highlighted all of what I have talked about. It’s happened to us several times since then so none of us get really excited anymore, but this one was special in that we had yet to launch publicly and we ended up getting to know the people involved quite well.

The group of us had met in Edmonton and we were about to go our separate ways when someone realized that we were getting an inordinate amount of signups from Chile. The inordinate amount of signups ended up being an avalanche from Chile. At least for the size we were back then, that was huge for us. We couldn’t understand it.

A woman by the name of Carolina Millan had heard about Empire Avenue from a cousin in Edmonton. She had blogged about it in Chile and tweeted and facebooked it. Her audience which was primarily interested in games and social media in a culture where 50% of the population was on Facebook, this was received, well, with enthusiasm! Our system was in invite only and that exclusivity itself drove people to join in droves. This was the power of Carolina’s network. If you looked at her scores, as a marketer I might have said, she might have potential for our message, but never the attention she actually received. She soared on Empire Avenue as she joined as all the Chileans bought into her.

It also highlighted another factor of content consumption in the virtual and perhaps the real world. As much as we like to be altruistic and to share things, we also want to see behind the closed door, the thing behind the invites, the thing that we cannot easily get. Ultimately my advice to entrepreneurs and to anyone seeking to drive content adoption or consumer internet services, is to launch into closed networks and to launch with exclusivity built in. I said earlier that human beings are insatiably social but also insatiably curious. If you can exploit the second part in your content consumption strategy you will be successful.

If you don’t believe me, ask Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook succeeded due to the fascination of Facebook as a closed network. The irony shouldn’t escape you.

I said in an interview that the reason the Arts Degrees and Liberal Arts educations fascinate me is because Empire Avenue is so incredibly cross-disciplinary. In my talk you’ve probably seen hints of Computer Science, Communications Studies, History, Economics, Mathematics, English, Drama, Psychology, Biology and Philosophy. Our team in fact is as diverse as the subjects I just quoted and it makes for such incredibly fun conversations! I promised Erwin that I would somehow incorporate a bit of Folklore into this as well so…

… Specific folklorish stories from the last year of Social Media (you had to have been there

Ladies and Gentlemen, thanks for having me here, thanks for letting me talk on and on, I hope it was fun and insightful and got you thinking about what we communicate on the Internet.