In my experience, the team overview slide in the average entrepreneur’s presentation is often the least effective. There’s good reason for this – cramming a high-level overview of 2-4 backgrounds into a series of bullets nearly always results in a “word wall”. A “word wall” is a slide that has so many words on it that it looks more like a page of an essay than a slide. That format doesn’t work well for presentations – nobody wants to read an essay when they’re listening to a presentation.

So how do you show off your team’s accolades without overloading a slide with text? You show, not tell.

I recommend that you use the following format for your team slides. Next to each team member’s photo, put their name, title and tagline. The tagline should be a slightly fun 2-3 word description of that person’s story. Some examples:

• “Serial entrepreneur”
• “UX guru”
• “Machine learning thought leader”
• …You get the idea…

Below the tag for each person you should include a few academic or work related logos that represent the experience of the person. While the logos won’t explain everything that each person did at that institution, it will brand their experience with investors and queue up conversations about their experience. If your investors want more information about the team, they’ll ask and you can tell them or send them follow up information. In the meantime, by putting less on the page investors will digest more.

In my experience, the team overview slide in the average entrepreneur’s presentation is often the least effective. There’s good reason for this – cramming a high-level overview of 2-4 backgrounds into a series of bullets nearly always results in a “word wall”. A “word wall” is a slide that has so many words on it that it looks more like a page of an essay than a slide. That format doesn’t work well for presentations – nobody wants to read an essay when they’re listening to a presentation.

So how do you show off your team’s accolades without overloading a slide with text? You show, not tell.

I recommend that you use the following format for your team slides. Next to each team member’s photo, put their name, title and tagline. The tagline should be a slightly fun 2-3 word description of that person’s story. Some examples:

• “Serial entrepreneur”
• “UX guru”
• “Machine learning thought leader”
• …You get the idea…

Below the tag for each person you should include a few academic or work related logos that represent the experience of the person. While the logos won’t explain everything that each person did at that institution, it will brand their experience with investors and queue up conversations about their experience. If your investors want more information about the team, they’ll ask and you can tell them or send them follow up information. In the meantime, by putting less on the page investors will digest more.

In his presentation Mark starts with his long relationship with programming and finally moves on to describe his project Plexus, which will provide a new platform for social networks.

In his talk Mark says:

There are three components within Plexus. First and most important is the social graph, a database of connections known as the ‘Plex’. Each of these connections, like a business card, comes with a list of connection points. These connection points can be outgoing – ‘this is how I will speak to you’, or incoming – ‘this is how I will listen to you’. They can be unilateral or bilateral.

....


The Plex is only a database. To bring that database to life, two other components are required. The first of these is the ‘Sharer’. The Sharer, as the name implies, makes sure that something to be shared – be it a string of text, or a link, or a video, or a blog post, or whatever – ends up going out over the negotiated channels. The Sharer is built out of a set of Python modules, with each particular sharing service handled by its own module. This means that there is no limit or artificial constraint on what kinds of services Plexus can share with.


Conversely, the third component, the Listener, monitors all of the negotiated channels for any activity by any of the connections in the Plex. When the Listener hears something, it sends that to the user – to be displayed or saved or ignored according to the needs of the moment. Like the Sharer, the Listener is also a set of Python modules, with each monitored service handled by its own module. The Listener should be able to listen to anything that has a clearly defined interface.


When Plexus starts up, it reads through the Plex, instancing the appropriate Sharer and Listener objects on a connection-by-connection basis. Everything after initialization is event-driven: the Plexus user shares something, or the Listener hears something and offers that to the Plexus user.


In essence Plexus gives everyone control of their social graph. They own and control the database which contains their personal relationships and connections. They can run it on any of the devices they use to communicate, or they can entrust it to someone else to run it in the cloud, so they can access it how they please.

The idea of an open, distributed social network is something I’ve considered and hoped for for many years. A time when the discussion of open social networks was particularly prominent was just around three years ago, in mid-2007, the topic of open social networks was a hot point of discussion. I wrote about it and captured some of the conversation on open social networks on my blog at the time.

For example, Wired said:

While we've largely outgrown the limitations of closed platforms (take e-mail or the web itself), no one has stepped forward with an open solution to managing your friends on the internet at large. We would like to place an open call to the web-programming community to solve this problem. We need a new framework based on open standards.

Anshu Sharma wrote:

It will be a game changer - a new Facebook or Google that will challenge the closed networks by offering a good enough service that is as good as MySpace or Facebook but is entirely open.

The most prominent initiative in the space was Marc Canter’s PeopleAggregator, based on the long-standing Friend of a Friend (FOAF) protocol, which I first wrote about in 2004 in a survey of the social networking space. Unfortunately PeopleAggregator has not taken off.

Over the last few years the dominant feature of the social networking space has of course been the rise and rise of Facebook and Twitter. Calls for open social networks were barely heard in the frenzy.

Now the backlash is stronger against Facebook and the extraordinary power it has gained, as people are beginning to realize what they have given up by entering into the maw of the giant.

Diaspora* has gained massive attention by offering an open alternative to Facebook, famously raising $200,000 on crowdfunding site when they were looking for only $10,000. It is under development and hopefully will be running in the next months.

However while Diaspora* is open, it is not a truly distributed platform. Plexus is an example of a distributed social network in which its participants fully own their own data and social participation, and can connect with any platform they choose, including existing networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Plexus may prove to be a solution that many are hunting for, and take off rapidly as a protocol and platform. Perhaps others will offer alternative ways to give people back ownership of their social networks. Or possibly the vast majority will remain happy to live beholden to those who control their social data.

Certainly I hope the time for open distributed social networks is here.

In April, I was watching the twitterverse explode during the Facebook’s f8 conference, as a steady stream of links and gasps and applause and intentions to delete profiles poured out. My initial reaction to quickly-scanned third-hand reports was essentially: “Oh no.” The message I was getting was that personal information would be be made more public, and that more places would start sporting the little fb: “like” box you see on sites using Facebook Connect. I was concerned because there have been many conflicting messages around facebook and privacy, and this movement to include a wider presence online would essentially pull more people into a huge walled garden.

Facebook Links Data?

Watch the f8 video sessions, though, and some interesting things begin to emerge. The main announcement at f8 is an update to Facebook’s API. Indeed, it wasn’t so much an update as a rewrite, moving from an older and complicated SOAP architecture with Facebook Connect to a more RESTful approach, giving services a simpler and more straightforward way to interact with content within Facebook using http. OK, so this isn’t particularly ground-breaking, nor is it very exciting in itself. What is far more interesting, is that Facebook’s engineers are using this word graph to describe their ecosystem with the launch of the Open Graph API.

Firstly, their new Open Graph API is built to enable social plugins which let users on other sites pull content into facebook. So, little “like” boxes will let someone authenticated on facebook but viewing, for example, a movie site click to identify a film they, well… like. This information is recorded on their Facebook profile. But the interesting thing here is that the social plugin is identifying items and objects within pages, and the engineers who introduced the plugins are talking about linking to these individual things. They identify the fact that when someone indicates that they like a movie, that’s exactly what they’re doing. They’re not “liking” the page which contains the review, but the film itself. These social plugins tell Facebook that a person is expressing some kind of relationship with objects from the wider web. They talk about these people (Facebook users), and the things they’re interacting with (content, objects… things), as existing like points in a graph. There are people are objects, and there are relationships between these nodes. In essence, they’re talking about linking data.

To make this possible, they’ve written the Open Graph Protocol, based on RDFa. Site owners can begin marking-up their content, flagging their pages as Open Graph objects, that Facebookers can start to like. The Protocol contains a vocabulary of object types, and addresses physical location and contact information. So, I can now type in a few lines of metadata in my header, and start declaring the objects in my content. It’s all starting to sound very Linked Data, isn’t it? The Tetherless World blog even has a post showing a mapping between the Open Graph Protocol and RDF, exposing metadata to the wider Linked Open Data cloud. The long and short if this is that anyone who wants people to be able to join their content with the ecosystem of facebook users can do so using a very simple semantic markup process.

So, Facebook’s nearly half-a-billion users will soon start to make use of semantic links, and millions of sites will begin to mark-up their content using Linked Data. Indeed, they had a reported 50,000 sites implement social plugins within the first week! This is properly exciting, because it will dump billions of triples out there on the web, and give more developers a boost in dealing with machine-readable information. It hasn’t, however, completely negated my initial feeling about Facebook and the sprinkling of the web with thousands and thousands of likes.

But…

Many people have renewed their concerns of Facebook’s stance on privacy. Some of the Open Graph API-accessible fields are now defaulted to be public until a user opts-out. Marshall Kirkpatrick talks about the vulnerability of this centralisation. Despite the more “open” direction in which the Open Graph points, it’s very clear that all this data—users’ own graphs of likes and relationships—will be a valuable asset, and facebook holds the keys to this personal data. They’ve already begun partnership deals with Microsoft, Yelp and Pandora; so users’ data will start to flow more freely between Facebook-selected organisations.

Liz Gannes over on gigaom points out that facebook is making itself a single point of failure for the web, and illustrates in another post that a facebook outage on 23rd April also took down partner-site plugins. Robert Scoble, while admiring their ambition also points out that the move requires a lot of trust in Facebook. We need to trust facebook with our own personal information, and trust it to look after the information we’re feeding it about our interests, relationships and tastes. It also raises questions about security: the stakes are higher if an account is hacked, or (as happened to the Scobleizer himself) disabled.

My Thoughts:

So, the main impetus for using the Open Graph Protocol is to tie in with the Facebook ecosystem. This is not a Linked Data evangelism project, or the combined efforts of thousands of Semantic Web developers, but the logical move of a huge company to better manage their data. They’ll be creating billions of nodes on a huge, social graph; and for developers the initial purpose will be to join a group, and cash in on a quick win (if you happen to have use for social networking in your app/service/site.) We’ll see that little “like” button appear all over the place, even on sites which seem a bit odd (Share your next auto check-up on Facebook!) as the bandwagon sets off.

This means we’ll start seeing a lot of RDFa-like semantic metadata on pages all over the web, and this increase will be almost exclusively using JUST the Open Graph. But it will mean more folks will be asking for RDFa, and more developers will begin learning it as a strings to their bows. I wonder how long it’ll take before they start asking what else they can do with all this graph-data? Teaching people the value of machine-readable data (through a popular, specific application like Facebook) has the benefit of increasing developer knowledge and inquisitiveness.

This could be catalytic: allowing a rapid change in the direction of the Semantic Web. From a Linked Data perspective, though, I think a lot of this RDFa will be “wasted” as it’s implemented only for the purpose of joining in with the FB sphere, and is under-utilised. But, I think the interesting stuff will emerge as more innovators quickly find the limitations of Facebook’s controlled vocabulary and data-hoarding ambition and begin to see the potential the bigger Graph brings to their repertoires. What happens when thousands of developers are taught something that’s by definition boundless?

So, we’re left with a question of what we’ll build, and what the Linked Data community does in reaction. For my part, I think the most important message to raise is to mix your data freely. When people begin to see the existing ecosystem of Linked Data, and that it’s not just Facebook’s own-branded metadata, we’ll start to see innovative mashing, and thousands of new services. What will you build?

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The Wall Street Journal has a long article about this today, noting “The End of the Email Era.” But most of that article is spent focusing on how Twitter and Facebook, which is to say, status updates and the streams, are replacing our need for much of what email has provided in the past. Only very briefly do they mention Wave. And I think that overlooks something.

For many of us, email is simply not cutting it the way that it used to. It’s a sedentary beast in a fast-moving web. It uses old principles for management, and this is leading to overload. I think the key statement in the WSJ is this:

We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone.

That’s absolutely true. But that also implies that we want some sort of always-on communication connection. I don’t think that’s the case. I think we want the option to communicate in real-time at will, but also the ability to communicate at our leisure at times. I would consider this to be a desire for a “passive-agressive” method of communication. Perhaps it would be better stated as a “passive/active” method of communication, but passive-aggressive sounds better, so we’ll go with that.

I would consider email to be a passive form of communication. I don’t mean that you don’t respond to it, I mean that you don’t have to respond to it right away. Instant messaging is at the other end of the spectrum. If used correctly, it’s supposed to be an “aggressive” or “active” form of communication in which you respond immediately. Twitter is very passive because the use of it is such that people don’t even necessarily expect a response of any kind, even if they point a message at you. Facebook is a mixture of all of those things (more on that below).

Google Wave is attempting to be a passive-agressive form of communication. You can actively (aggressively) engage in threads in real-time, or you can sit back and let messages come to you at your leisure (passively). Having used the product for a few months now, and after using it quite a bit more actively with my friends these past few days, I really think that Wave is onto something with this method of communication. I would argue that Google Wave’s new message alert system needs to be somewhat reworked or re-imagined, but I do think the desire to blend passive and agressive methods of communicating is there.

We’ve been slowly building up to a system like this. Gmail has for a while offered users a nice blend of email and instant messaging on the same page. And while it is nice that there is also the option to archive all your chats for searching purposes later, there is no good way to say, see that you missed an IM if you have a computer with Gmail open at home while you’re away and checking it remotely. You also can’t check these easily via IMAP on your phone, and the like.

And while there is the option to reply to emails by chat if that person is online, there’s no real integration between the email message and the IM message, they exist as two totally separate things. It seems like we’re at the point now where that shouldn’t have be the case.

Others, like Yahoo Mail, are now trying to tack-on status updates and the stream to email services too. The result is a Frankenstein-like service.

Facebook is another interesting example in that, as I mentioned, it combines all of these elements: Email, IM, status updates, and a stream. But the connection between all of these things in that system is loose at best. From a unified communications standpoint, Facebook is really kind of a mess. There are whispers of changes, and I hope that’s true, but I’m not holding my breath for a service with 300 million users to do something new and drastic that will alienate a certain (probably large) percentage of its base.

That’s why Wave is interesting. It’s backed by a huge company, Google, but it’s not trying to shove this upon all of its Gmail users. Instead, they’re going to slowly roll this out and see how users end up using it. And maybe more importantly, they want to see how developers start using it.

And that’s really a key that a lot of early users are overlooking. Right now, when people hear “Google Wave,” everyone seems to want to place emphasis on the “Google” part of it. But the truth is that the grand goal of the team behind the project is to emphasize “Wave” as both a platform and a new communication standard.

Whether Google Wave succeeds is really irrelevant. More important is if the idea of Wave does. Again, the idea of passive-aggressive communication.

Wave, the Google web-based client, will only ever appeal to a certain number of users. Does anyone really think that Twitter would be where it is today if they only had twitter.com? No. Wave desktop apps, and mobile apps, internal company Waves, and public Waves; it’s the platform, not the product, that’s interesting. Or, more to the point, it’s the key communication idea behind it.

[photo: flickr/matheus sanchez]

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Since Google Wave’s unveiling in May, it was quite interesting to try to figure out heads or tails of how the application will be received once it’s released. And now, we are inching closer and closer to when it opens for the general public. Closed Beta testing has been open for a few chosen developers who have been actively providing feedback on Google products. Will Wave be able to create a tsunami upon its release?

So what is Wave?

Wave, in the word of its co-creator, Lars Rasmussen:

Google Wave

“Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.”

Wave’s Engulfing The Islands of  Sharepoint & Lotus

Given that we trust Google to provide us with intuitive user interfaces within a very low learning curve, its entry into the corporate world will be quite smooth and exponential - if we only consider those two facets - more about that later on.

The threat it poses is probably the greatest to IBM and Microsoft’s collaborative Business software. Combined with the other Google services and its source nature, it promises to take cloud computing and social networking to the next level.

Some of the features that excite us the most:

1. Switch seamlessly between IM and email: There are many times in which you are faced by a worker who doesn’t want to reply immediately to you, by coupling IM and Email you will be able to catch those people online and have a record of the conversation in one application.
2. Play back a conversation: Business correspondence tends to evolve and involve new people all the time, what is sad is that certain parts of the conversation get lost or truncated. Having the ability to play back the entire conversation as it happened will definitely be a game changer.
3. Share a conversation across different platforms: Want to share it with your Gtalk buddies? Post it on Facebook or your blog? It will be so simplified and will include its own embedded API customizations that will make the ability to move from collaboration and creation to final product and presentation much more efficient.

Wave Interface

So Is It All Brisk And Blue?

Not Really. While the Google team is working hard to make Wave deliver on all of its promises, some of the biggest challenges facing them are issues of privacy and security. Security will specifically be a thorny issue when moving sensitive commercial data into the cloud. Historically, it’s in Google’s DNA to make everything searchable and by doing so circumvent some corporate security policies.

The other issue is that of privacy; am I going to be sharing everything by default? Is it easy to make my conversations private? Can I de-list someone from the conversation? The way Wave works raises a lot of questions when it comes to privacy that will hopefully be ironed out in time for its public release.

Another minor issue is that currently Wave doesn’t integrate with regular e-mail, which could problematic if they don’t figure out a way to fit in the final product.

So until Google manages to address these issues the Wave will not crash the Sharepoint dominance in the corporate world.

So When Can We Dip In?

Wave will not be open for the public until later on this year according to the Google Blog, but you can sign up now to be one of its first users (or testers) by going to http://wave.google.com/ and requesting an invitation.

What are your thoughts about Google Wave? How quickly do you think you will adopt it? and how do you think it will impact your Web usage?

What are the top Twitter apps on the iPhone? It’s hard to say because the iTunes store doesn’t have a Twitter category (Twitter apps are lumped in under “Social Networking). But AppsFire, the iPhone app sharing service, might have an answer—at least for the early adopter crowd who tend to use AppsFire (i.e. people like you, dear reader). AppsFire looks at apps actually downloaded and kept on people’s iPhones. Based on a sample of 1,500 AppsFire members, the top ten Twitter apps on the iPhone are:

1. TweetDeck
2. Tweetie
3. Twitterific
4. TwitterFon
5. IM+
6. Twitelator Pro
7. Twitterrific Premium
8. iTwitter
9. ShoZu
10. Boxcar

Notice that 7 of the top ten Twitter apps are paid apps. The only free apps are TweetDeck (No. 1), Titterific (No. 3), and TwitterFon (No. 4).

AppsFire also collected some data on what percentage of users download Twitter apps compared to Facebook apps (see slideshow below). While it found a total of 32 different Facebook apps on user’s iPhones, compared to a whopping 102 Twitter apps, more users had a Facebook App on their device.

The No. 1 Facebook app, of course, is the official Facebook app for the iPhone, whereas Twitter does not have any official iPhone app. A full 70 percent of users in the AppsFire sample had the Facebook iPhone app, while only 63 percent had a Twitter app. So much for diversity.

The one thing AppsFire does not know, however, is which apps are actually used more often. You can help answer that by answering the poll below:

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An MIT experiment dubbed, "Gaydar" by creators Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree has employed computational analysis to identify user traits based on information listed by their Facebook friends. Through friend profiles, the program predicts the likelihood of your religious affiliations, political leanings and even your sexual orientation. Essentially the idea is that friends are likely to share traits. So if you're in the closet, but you've got loads of vocal friends, a program of this nature could potentially out you.

Said Hal Abelson, a professor who co-taught the course, "[It] pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information - because you don't have control over your information."

With the service being used to catch tax evaders, in addition to a conspiracy theory citing CIA ties, it'll be interesting to see how the public reacts to this latest show of Facebook data mining capabilities. While it's unlikely that terrorist suspects are friending each other on Facebook, there are a number of associations that need not be publicized to corporate partners or governments.

Photo Credit: Steve Jurvetson