Not Google the company, nor the stock, but the idea of Google as this unstoppable juggernaut of world internet domination.

Facebook opened up its platform to 3rd party developers- it moved from Facebook 1.0 to Facebook 2.0- and nothing has been quite the same since.
I am not sure if it’s the applications themselves, or just the fact that we have something new to share with eachother, but without a doubt we (the blogosphere?) have all adopted a new interface which is capturing more and more of our attention.

I like the way Pulver put it when he said that:

In LinkedIn, everything centers around establishing a connection. In Facebook, connecting is just the beginning. Facebook is all about community. And this can been seen by doing things like leaving messages on users’ walls, joining groups and having discussions, as well as some of the more social applications built for Facebook.

I tend to agree with this. While page views persist, and connections are being made in MySpace and LinkedIn and other networks, the only place where people are actually engaging socially in virtual real-time is within their Facebook feeds and profiles.

My friend Ted here in Mill Valley confided in me that “yeah, well I think I am now spending two hours a day on Facebook after having never used before a couple of months ago.”

I no longer Twitter.

Or Flickr so much.

Or del.icio.us anymore.

It gets harder and harder to maintain the heavy responsibility of a WordPress blog when I can communicate so quickly to specific social groups within Facebook.

My friend Pierre told he how much he enjoyed tracking my progress across the East Coast the past few weeks on Facebook, with status updates and pictures and video, even while I was feeling guilty about not properly blogging.

I still search with Google, and use it for email and docs and calendaring.

I wish that my Facebook inbox would talk with my buddy list and keep a record in my Gmail search, but I am willing to suffer through this lack of interoperability because the Facebook communication kit has become so vital to me (and so quickly for that matter).

A number of people have commented about how Facebook has enabled them to connect with long lost friends, who they are suddenly back in touch with in strangely, suddenly intimate ways.
It’s like StumbleUpon for people.

What if Web 3.0 is not about the “semantic web” or about any major revolution in natural language search?

What if, instead, Web 3.0 is really about moving from pagerank to peoplerank?

And what if the Facebook Newsfeed, opened up as it was in May to third party applications, marked the dawn of this next phase?

Netscape browsed the Web. Yahoo! organized it. Google searched it. And now Facebook has made it social.

What we actually want to do within this social platform is the big new question in Silicon Valley, where everybody is scurrying to figure out what are the Social OS equivalents of Word Processing and Spreadsheets.

Walls and pokes?

You can look at the fact that millions of people are turning their friends into zombies, spraying grafiti on others’ walls, getting super-poked, and sending “poop” at eachother as simply so much chatter.

Or you can look at these gestures as new forms of language, crude in their pronunciation but rich in meaning and intentionality.

I turned the page on Attention and the back of it reads: “Engagement.”

Focusing on banner CPMs and click-thru rates in this new medium is like focusing on the Television set as opposed to the shows.

Facebook users are more engaged with their media, in a truly social way, than anybody else. This is why my friend Rich Greenfield of Pali Research who is a *media* analyst on Wall Street is so f-ing excited about what is going on.

This is different than Google which is an accidental media company. Nancy Peretsman of Allen & Company told me how Google kept thinking they were a technology company until she (and no doubt others) revealed to them that they were in fact a media company.

I doubt Facebook needs this clarification.

The bear case on Facebook has become somewhat clear in recent weeks:

• Advertising does not work
• Few of the Applications that people are installing and spamming their friends with have any staying power
• Facebook is throttling back the viral coefficiency of applications and offers no clear path to monetization
• There are no barriers to exit for Facebook users, who will inevitably move to the next “cool” social network

Against this critique, the only legitimate responses are usage, engagement and responsiveness.

• How many people are using Facebook applications?
• How engaged are they in these activities?
• How responsive are they to interact with 3rd parties (friends, friends of friends, marketers, etc)

Some of these metrics are available (for example usage of apps via our Appsaholic service) but the critical metrics on engagement and responsiveness are still to be determined. The early indications across a few million users in our Social Media network, however, suggest that users are interacting far more often with applications and are more than willing to interact with marketers, than the Facebook bears would lead you to believe.

More on this in the days to come.

Tom Glocer,  CEO of Reuters, stands in front of  Media Futures at the Open Data Conference in NY

And so, what does exhibitionism have to do with Wall Street?

How does the voyueristic behavior of 20-somethings relate to the commission decisions of hedge fund masters of the universe?

Traditionally, very little.

Or at least we weren’t aware of these connections.  Now, however, the advent of personal surveillance technologies has begun to popularize processes that up until now have been unavailable to individuals.

This resonates with a comment that Reuters CEO Tom Glocer made at the Open Data Conference.  It was the night before the conference, over dinner, that Glocer gave his perspective on the evolution of "open data" in the context of financial services. 

He told a story about the transformation of individual data points into market data.  Surprisingly, he didn’t start with a traditional financial services firm, like Reuters, but rather with an individual Schwab customer.

This retail trader, by virtue of her decision as to what to buy or sell and at what price, is the most granular actor in the price discovery machine.  As Glocer told the story, the online retail investor was the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in Hawaii causing hurricanes in China.  Her only action was to trade a stock in her 401K account online; but unbeknownst to her, Schwab took this trading data, along with that of all of the other individual retail investors, and established a higher level trend.  This process reverberated up through larger institutional brokers like Goldman Sachs and ultimately exchanges like the NYSE.   At each step up in aggregation and abstraction, significant economic value was extracted.  Although this individual’s behavior is too volatile in and of itself to offer much in the way of trend analysis, this does not mean that her behavior is worthless.

This is the foundation of Wall Street 2.0:  the individual data producer is beginning to wake up to the economic value she is creating.

This economic value had in the past been appropriated by those aggregating up the data from above.   Our electronic behavior, whether it be querying a search engine, clicking on an ad, checking out a stock, or trading a share, is generating value for other people that are in a position to aggregate and sell this information to institutions, who in turn transform it into some other form that ends up getting sold back to individuals.   Alchemy… to… Arbitrage.  This is nothing new.  What is new, however, is the extent to which our behavioral trails are no longer hidden, but are instead now available to us via various modes of personal Attention services, also known as myware.   This is the window that Open Data flows through:

Open data is to media what open source is to technology. Open data is an approach to content creation that explicitly recognizes the value of implicit user data. The internet is the first medium to give a voice to the attention that people pay to it. Successful open data companies listen for and amplify the rich data that their audiences produce.

Web Alchemy

Exactly two years ago, in April 2005, I wrote the first chapter on Alchemy in the Media Futures series.  Over the course of history, Alchemy always promised more than it could deliver.  But it was this promise that captured the imagination of people and drew their Attention to the very impossibility of turning “base metal into gold.”

As it relates to the contemporary Web landscape, Alchemy represents the promise of automatic personalized media creation.  It is the nuclear fission of intersecting Web 2.0 services.  "Maybe, just maybe, if I go to Web 2.0 Expo I will find that one service that that connects me most fully?"  This is the process of extreme triangulation that we- maybe without even knowing- are trying to achieve every moment that we use the Internet to express ourselves.

The process is not new.  But its reception is.

When Josh Harris broadcast his life in real-time on weliveinpublic.org in 2000, it was received as strange exhibitionism in SoHo.  He and his girlfriend Tanya Corin went online in a Warhol art-house kind of way.  It wasn’t clear what exactly Josh was trying to prove, but like many I was fascinated by the embedded cameras he installed in the Turkish-style bath.

On Day 93, long after Tanya walked out and Josh had left it to brokers to sell the 4000 sf+ loft on lower Broadway, a recently arrived journalist who needed a place to crash ended up minding after the apt while it was being shown to potential buyers.  All the surveillance gear was very much in place and there was a working live control room where all the cameras flowed into, as well as the external chatter from those across the community grabbing these streams.  This writer describes what it was like to be there during these last days:

I am doing laundry all the next day, sitting alone, and I learn how to take advantage of the chatters. After all, I am a visitor in the house of a man I do not know. But they, they’ve lived here for a while… I ask them if Harris allows people to smoke in the loft. I ask if they know where an iron is. In one particularly surreal moment, I realize I have lost my keys. I enter the chat room and ask if anybody happens to see where I might have left them. One guy tells me to check my pockets. And there they were.
From The Cyber House Rules By Will Leitch, Jan  1, 1999

Eight years ago when he wrote this, we had a different attitude towards pervasive surveillance than we have today.   Now, as American Idol, YouTube, Twitter and countless other social media phenomena would attest, the quickest road to celebrity is via one’s willingness to become-  physically or behaviorally- naked.

And so, how then to describe the performance of Justin.TV?  His omnipresent camera cylinder to the left of his perspective is like the pen-above-the-ear of a great investigative journalist- Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein in All the Presidents Men.

Despite his camera, Justin doesn’t care about coming off as a disinterested reporter.  There is no longer even a pretense that the subject drives the interview.  Maybe it’s wrong to think of it as an interview at all.  The  recording instruments are so integrated and obvious that everybody Justin comes into contact with gets their own live studio audience.  This shifts the lens of narcissism from Justin to his audience, making him seem almost, well, selfless.

Michael Goldhaber recently defined a "star" as:

(When an attent typically has many audients, thus taking in more net attention than paying out, that person is of course a STAR.  )

On the Internet, this is based in large part on one’s ability to express oneself openly, across multiple networks.  For example, in addition to the live video feed and community chat, Justin makes it easy for us to connect to him via shared social networks:

Justin wants people to pay close Attention to his stream and comment on his blog. This is exactly how stars enrapture their fans:  engaging them in production of the very stardom they wish to worship.  There is a significant difference between celebrity in the first Internet cycle and now.  It is not the tools that matter, since many of them have not changed dramatically, but a growing responsibility that more and more of us feel to express our unique, authentic selves online.

Justin.TV, like Tia Tequila of MySpace, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Mark Zukerberg of Facebook and Fred Wilson of Typepad, inspire us to be all that we can be online- to open up our API and let the data flow.   

This is the Summer of Love, 40 years later transposed onto the Web.

While this doesn’t belong up there with Soros’ "Real Time Experiment" in the Alchemy of Finance as an example of market manipulation, it  show how one can etch oneself into the way that Google resolves your queries- by using a popular blog to link to you in a certain context, and by routing many of its readers along for the collective experience of you.  Soros explains the reflexivity of markets: the way one perceives a market can in fact impact the behavior of the market.  He made billions off of this insight.  The reflexivity of Attention markets is similarly based on the premise that one’s perception of Attention influences its supply.

Before dismissing the sethbrecht as a random blog divet, maybe theater is a useful metaphor for understanding the evolution from API to Alchemy.  As you know, I have been trying to negotiate the transition for a number of months.  I was focused on tracing the pure conversion of our automatic data algorithms into Attention streams, but I was having a difficult time describing how our unique streams collide- other than simply calling it Alchemy.

A few months ago I asked Goldhaber how his book on Attention was coming along.  He perked up and said that he had a new title for it, All the world’s a stage: the emerging attention economy and how it distinctly differs from the economies of industry, markets and money that we are used to. Maybe this meant that understanding electronic Attention had something more fundamental to do with theater.  Since I studied dramatic literature in college, this was not so foreign to me.  The hallmark of modern theatre’s avant garde (Meyerhold, Pirandello, Brecht, et al) was the participation of the viewer in the mode of theatrical production. Take, for example, Brecht’s Lehrstucke (learning plays) from the 1920′s. According to Wikipedia,

Brecht described them (Lehrstucke) as "a collective political meeting" in which the audience is to participate actively. One sees in this model a rejection of the concept of the bureaucratic elite party where the politicians are to issue directives and control the behaviour of the masses…

We can look at this audience as active participant model as an early prototype for contemporary social media. In the theater of the avant garde, the writer, director and actors all attempted to directly engage the behavior of the audience.  Brecht’s infamous alienation effect was simply a feature set and interface that reminded the audience (aka user) that he was not to get lost in the experience of the media but instead needed to participate in changing it:

For this purpose, Brecht employed the use of techniques that remind the spectator that the play is a representation of reality and not reality itself, which he called the Verfremdungseffekt (translated as distancing effect, estrangement effect, or alienation effect). Such techniques included the direct address by actors to the audience, transposition of text to third person or past tense, speaking the stage direction out loud, exaggerated, unnatural stage lighting, the use of song, and explanatory placards. By highlighting the constructed nature of the theatrical event, Brecht hoped to communicate that the audience’s reality was, in fact a construction and, as such, was changeable.  from Wikipedia Entry on Brecht

This experience of being on stage, and using the stage as a means of changing user behavior, is something that is personal to me.  I remember when I was 14 years old performing on the stage at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.

It was a bitter February evening during the week and I was standing on the stage dressed like an Italian kid fresh off of Ellis Island, with stiff-heeled shoes, an annoying beret and lots of make-up.  The play was Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, adapted by Robert Brustein. I was standing on stage behind my mother, played by sitcom Alice’s Linda Lavin, looking out at the audience, watching them watch me. On the stage behind me was most of the actual ART resident acting group, behaving as if they were in the midst of rehearsals for Gozzi’s King Stag, which was in fact being directed then by Andrei Serban. They started the performance all smiles and inside jokes until the door at the back of the theatre opened up and so appeared a family of actors, including me as the youngest son, searching for our author ("any author will do…") who might finish our play.

One of the best descriptions of pure theater that I have come across is by the famous Polish experimental director Jerzy Grotowski. More than anybody, Grotowski was the prototypical green, organic metaphysician of the stage.  He fled communist Poland after WWII, invigorated the downtown NY avant garde scene in the late 60′s, taught theory at UC Irvine in the 80′s, and ended up practicing what he preached on a remote Italian island before he died a few years ago.  In his classic text, Towards a Poor Theatre, from 1968, Grotowski writes:

By gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we found that theatre can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without lighting and sound effects, etc. It cannot exist without the spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, communion….

This "relationship of perceptual, direct, communion" is very close to what I am trying to express with the notion of the readerverse- a place or moment where the reader and writer are both fully engaged in the cooperative process of creating something original (ie Alchemy) by virtue of the  unique, real-time data streams that they surface to eachother.  For a while I struggled to come up with a real-world object that best emblematized the readerverse: a mirror? a shadow? a trail we leave behind? But now I am fairly sure that the readerverse is best expressed as a stage, where we create social media with a sequence of clicks and tags and queries.

And so here we are, beginning to realize that by virtue of paying Attention in the same electronic theatre, that we are creating some strange performance for eachother, by eachother, with eachother.  This is the primal social media expression, one that despite its rough amateur mechanics nevertheless promises a profound shift in the way media is created.  I defer to Steve Gillmor, whose silence about the imminent integration of the Gesture Bank and the AttentionTrust Extension, belies a remarkably prescient insight he had almost two years ago:

What does matter is a pool of attention metadata owned by the users. This open cloud of reputational presence and authority can be mined by each group of constituents. Users can barter their attention in return for access to full content, membership priviliges, and incentives for strategic content… And the media, which now includes publishers, analysts, researches, rating services, advertisers, sponsors, and underwriters, can use the data as a giant inference engine… With so much going for it, how and where is attention vulnerable? It’s vulnerable to being pigeonholed as an automated artificially intelligent approach to personalization. In my view… attention metadata is useful in service of the reputational filter of the people and ideas I and the people I track are interested in. This is not about merely reorganizing my feed data based on my patterns of acquisition, but the cumulative weighting of the minds and interests represented by those feeds and items.  Steve Gillmor, Waiting for Attention, March 2005

I always loved you

You always had a lot of style

I’d hate to see you on the pile
Of ‘nearly-made-it’ s

You’ve got the essence, dear

If I could have a second skin

I’d probably dress up in you

Belle & Sebastian, The Life Pursuit

Welcome to the readerverse. Just as pages and sites have their community in Ted Nelson’s concept of the docuverse, so users and visitors have theirs in the readerverse. It is a place where responses are generated as the primary activity. This occurs when we are reading, browsing, searching, scanning, tuning into, subscribing and, generally, using the Internet passively, automatically. The readerverse shadows the more explicit actions of writing, commenting, rating, taging and coding.

Via my various widget logs, I have been trying to illuminate my own readerverse.  I write things and then listen for the barely audible click steps that you make when you visit; the slight pinging sound you make when your reader checks my RSS feed.  With some of the emerging blog statistics and Attention tracking services that are emerging, the web is increasingly rendering as visible what we have come to think of as invisible.

One way of thinking about this in the real-world would be imagine what it would be like if your gaze left a mark? What if when you looked at somebody, instead of that being your private experience, that the person  immediately felt that she was being watched by you? How would that change the way we behave?

We feel free to watch certain things, listen to certain conversations, tune in to certain channels, without worrying about these Attention choices being exposed to others.

This is a fundamental media right: the preference we enjoy in knowing that our media choices (ie our decisions about what we choose to pay Attention to) are not only under our control but are private to us.

Bishop Berkeley asked whether the tree really falls if nobody is there to observe it.  This applies to the physics of Attention. If my gaze is imperceptible to those I am paying Attention to, then I remain the  sole source of information on my media consumption habits.

However, if my gaze has material properties that impact others, then there are by definition other sources of authority on my Attention data. 

Almost seventy years ago, Alan Turing,   the brilliant British computer scientist and war-time cryptographer, suggested that:

The behaviour of the computer at any moment is determined by the symbols which he is observing, and his "state of mind" at that moment.
Turing, On Computable Numbers, 1938

Now isn’t that interesting? A conception of computing, from 1938 no less, in which the computer’s behavior is driven by the Attention it is paying.  Putting this in the context of Goldhaber’s theory of the physics of Attention will lead us to important laws on how influence is created:

There is only so much attention (available from other humans), and many or most of us want more than we have.

In order to get attention one needs to express or do something — let us say, perform in some way. (This can be putting forth information, but that is not particularly what, e.g., a trapeze artist does.)

The more attention we get in comparison with the attention we pay in putting together our total performance, the greater our attention productivity.

The more attention we have, period, the more influential we are.

The more attention you get now, or have gotten in the past, the more attention you can get in the future. (Attention wealth is stored in the minds of the attention payers.)

Having others’ attention means you can rely on some attentiveness from them as well. Attentiveness is a willingness to satisfy your desires whatever they may be — as long as these desires do not go too much against what the attention payers (audients) would otherwise want.

Though all this has always been true, new attention technologies, and particularly the Internet, make all this work much more directly. They make it easy for more of us to seek attention, and if and when we get it, to have other desires satisfied as well.

Michael Goldhaber, February 2007

I have not written anything on this blog in over a month. It bothers
me not to write for such long periods of time, since I know that my
influence expands and contracts based on on how often I post.
Relationships require frequency of contact to flourish, whether they be
personal or business oriented; and the relationship between me as the
author and you as the reader is no different.

I am usually mindful of this. Like perhaps many bloggers, I start my
own web browsing experience with a number of tabs tuned into my stats
from Typepad, Feedburner, Measure Map and others. It is a form of self
identification, trying to understand who is paying Attention to me in
terms of how many people end up on my page and how they get here- was
it a reference to me from somebody else’s blog or was it a search
engine query that surfaced one of my prior posts above the algorithmic
fold?

In fact, I know relatively little about you. Maybe you subscribe to
me through my feedburner API, or else you might show a little cookie to
one of my widgets, but I still don’t really get a clear sense of who
you are in any personal, dynamic, emotional way. Email introductions
are more connected since you reveal yourself as an individual with your
own voice. Once in a while I might even run into you at a meeting in
person and you will tell me that you are a long-time reader of my blog.
These are some but not all of the various ways that you express your
presence to me as an active reader. By active I simply mean that you are
telling me directly that you are paying Attention to the information I
am producing.

The combination of ways that I experience your Attention has created a new upper register of consciousness.  It is filled with audients:
people like yourself who are tuning into my output and for whom I feel
a certain sense of responsibility. It is exceedingly hard to talk of
you as a coherent group. What do you who landed here from a Wikipedia article on Wall Street soft dollars have in common with you who saw a reference to me
in Fred Wilson’s blog, other than the fact that you are both reading
this page? So instead of thinking of you as a single figure in the
foreground, it is as if you are a constant murmer of feedback behind
me- watching me, no matter what I might be doing, but unavailable to me
no matter how much I might want to pay Attention to you.

The opportunity to understand the behavior of readers and feed this
back to publishers is driving significant product innovation. The most
recent example is MyBlogLog which was purchased by Yahoo! before it had
a chance to demonstrate its viability as a stand-alone product, much
less as a independent business. Lately, tools like this for
understanding the (implicit) Attention of readers are improving
even faster than those for expressing (explicit) personal information of publishers
such as blogging, tagging and rating services.

As I am able to access increasingly fine-grained information about
the nature of my audience, the way in which I express myself here on
these pages begins to reflect that understanding.  It is no longer
so simple as writing about something and then waiting for people to
show up who are interested in the subject of the post.  Now, many of you
often show up in advance, announcing your interests immediately.  If I
dont satisfy your expectations for certain insights while I have your
Attention, then I will lose it to others sources.  Without your Attention,
the writing likely stops.  And without the writing, so goes this blog
which is a big part of my online identity.

One way of putting it, then, is that the stability of my identity is tied to having access to your Attention statistics.

APIs are the printing presses of social media. Like Gutenberg’s machines, APIs are uninteresting in and of themselves, but absolutely essential for the transmission of important ideas between people. We learn about APIs by paying attention to what exists on either side of them: Who is the sender? Who is the receiver? What is being communicated? As we answer these questions, we endow the API with meaning.

Over time, some APIs become more than just generic transport mechanisms; some become destinations in their own right. For example, the Flickr API is one such case, where its proximity to interesting data streams seems to have emboldened its management to claim interestingness as their own invention .

My original goal for introducing the API as one of the five elements of Media Futures was to emphasize its function as the natural transport mechanism through which human data streams turn into money.

… establish the API as a key component of media futures, specifically as the hinge between the algorithm that processes raw human meta data and the moment of alchemy that occurs when you discover something you didn’t even know you were looking for, courtesy of some people that you didn’t even know that you knew. Media Futures 2005: API

It is difficult to talk directly about APIs since their value is based on their role as vessels for the movement of data between people. Perhaps in order to describe an API, therefore, one needs to use language similar to that used in describing global currencies or financial instruments- price, liquidity and volatility. We want to know the value of the data moving across boundaries, how robust the stream is, and how frequently it changes in any significant way.

And so as I license access to an API, what I am really doing is entering into a contract to take delivery of information in the future. I call the server, with the expectation of receiving a certain type of information in a certain format. My hunch is that this information, so delivered, is going to attract the attention of others more so than I might have with my own internal data.

The quick investment math I do, therefore, as a Web Services trader, is to gauge whether the cost (mostly technical and opportunity, sometimes financial) of accessing a particular stream is less than the incremental value it will add to my social media application on a go-forward basis. The instruments that I am trading are, of course, people. And the way that I am able to distinguish one meta data belly from another is based on the richness and authenticity of the human data stream. Just as there are different grades of Gold, or Corn, or Bonds for that matter, there are different qualities of “natural” human API streams.

We need to go back a bit, 50 years in fact, to trace back the history of social media computing (aka cybernetics) to a genuine concern for the natural expressivity of human beings. In his 1954 book, the Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Weiner prefigures the radical support of user in control that we see today in the work of Steve Gillmor at AttentionTrust and Mitchell Baker at Mozilla.

It is my thesis that the operation of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases, these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. …our view of society differs from the ideal of society which is held by many Fascists, Strong Men in Business, and Government. Similar men of ambition for power are not entirely unknown in scientific and educational institutions. Such people prefer an organization in which all orders come from above, and none return. The human beings under them have been reduced to the level of effectors for a supposedly higher nervous organism. I wish to devote this book to a protest against this inhuman use of human beings; for in my mind, any use of a human being in which less is attributed to him than his full status is a degradation and a waste.
Norbert Weiner, 1954, The Human Use of Human Beings

Herein lies the key to creating meaningful APIs: attributing full status to the Internet user. What does this status mean exactly for media companies in November 2006? Mitchell Baker captures this particularly well when she writes that

Each individual is not just an exporter of raw data that others process to gain value out of and sell back to her, her place on the value chain is much higher. She should be able to weave the data into a fabric that represents her value, and she should benefit from that value.

The act of weaving that Baker refers to is a classical gesture. It invokes the same Greek Sieve that I referred to a few months back in the discussion of Algorithm. The gestures of social media, however, want to be consumed electronically so that they can spread without the usual gravity that keeps local physical gestures in their place. The evolution from physical gestures to electronic gestures as it relates to the future history of APIs is the subject of the next and final essay on API, before we move on to Alchemy.

API stands for Application Programming Interface.  In the context of Media Futures, an API routes the output from one’s own unique Attention-processing Algorithm  into an Alchemical reaction triggered by the convergence of other human-driven APIs.

I wrote my first post about APIs in the Spring of 05, at a moment when APIs such as those of Flickr and del.icio.us were just starting to become becoming popular targets of developers.  Since then, the subject of APIs has become commonplace in any discussion of the future of media.  In fact AOL- that stalwart of old new media- is now obsessed with open APIs.  Tina calls it the “the liberation of egosystems.”  Open data transport has suddenly become de riguer among the even the most traditional media companies.  In less than two weeks, legions of their corporate development executives will descend upon SF to walk down the red carpet of the O’Reilly ceremony, ready to sign the top Web 2.0 talent to long-term studio deals.

But while we all fall over ourselves to proclaim our “openness,” we introduce a far heavier burden of trust into the mix.  Is one company’s “open” the same as another’s?  While I may be able to avoid data lock-in in that silo, how do i know for sure the next “open data” silo will be equally amenable to the mobility of my data?  These questions beg a deeper investigation into the history of APIs and their evolution both physically and electronically.

History

In a memorandum dated July 15, 1949, Warren Weaver, who held the position of director of the division of natural sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation from 1932 – 1955, wrote about the possibility of language translation by an electronic computer.  It was the first suggestion most had seen that such a thing might be possible, and as he draws the memorandum to a close, his words preview the emergence of the API:

Think, by analogy, of individuals living in a series of tall closed towers, all erected over a common foundation.  When they try to communicate with one another, they shout back and forth, each from his own closed tower.  It is difficult to make the sound penetrate even the nearest towers, and communication proceeds very poorly indeed.  But, when an individual goes down his tower, he finds himself in a great open basement, common to all the towers.  Here he establishes easy and useful communication with the persons who have also descended from their towers.

Thus may it be true that the way to translate from Chinese to Arabic, or from Russian to Portuguese, is not to attempt the direct route, shouting from tower to tower.  Perhaps the way is to descend, from each language, down to the common base of human communication – the real but as yet undiscovered universal language – and then re-emerge by whatever particular route is convenient.  Such a program involves a presumably tremendous amount of work in the logical structure of languages before one would be ready for any mechanization.

The key to examining the evolution of the role of the API in context of Media Futures lies, in fact, in the multiple resonances of its last term, Interface:  as a surface lying between two portions of matter or space, thus forming their common boundary; as a means or location of interaction between two systems or organizations; as an apparatus designed to connect two scientific instruments so that they can be operated jointly, the abstract concept of an interface contains in it the possibility of a very literal connection between two beings, two faces.  As a physical interface connects two pieces of hardware, a user interface connects a human and a computer and a software interface connects separate software components so that they may communicate with one another.  To interface is to come into interaction with a thing or being, to communicate, in manners both figurative and literal.

Mainframes

As a platform that allows a computer system, library or application to open itself to use by other computer programs, or to allow for the exchange of data between them, the APIs of yesterday were IBM mainframes and Microsoft SDKs, arcane languages of translation between hardware and software.

From the late 1950s through the 1970s, a number of American, German and British manufacturers (Burroughs, Control Data Corporation, General Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA and UNIVAC; Siemens and Telefunken; and ICL, respectively), produced such mainframes, computers used in large part by companies and government institutions for the purposes of bulk data processing in the context of, for example, the census or financial transaction processing.  IBM secured itself a position of power in the industry with the development of its 700/7000 series, based on vacuum tubes and transistors, and with its 360 series mainframe.  Unveiled in 1964, the 360 series was to be an all-around computer system, a series of compatible models for purposes both scientific and commercial – a series which, moreover, brought together features which were once only available in scientific or commercial computers, such as floating point arithmetic in the former and decimal arithmetic and byte addressing in the latter.  The 360 series also included supervisor and application mode programs and instructions and built-in memory protection facilities, making it one of the first computers manufactured with provisions specific to the use of an operating system.

Console of an IBM 360/67 mainframe

PCs

As the demand for the older mainframe systems fell off, new installations were seen mainly in the realms of finance and the government.  Personal computer networks came to challenge the mainframe.  It was during the rise of personal computing networks, though, that the APIs with which we are most familiar came into being and, in the case of Windows, achieved dominance. 

In 1975, the Altair 8800 was introduced in Popular Electronics, a personal computer that was affordable, user-friendly, and, some argue, the spark that set Apple Computer and Microsoft ablaze in their development of personal computers. The Apple II, though less capable and versatile than some of the larger computers of the day, gave computer enthusiasts an environment in which to develop their own programming skills and to operate simple office and productivity applications. 

The IBM PC released in 1981 took the personal computer into the realm of business, giving individual users word processing programs, spreadsheet programs and database programs which would change the way businesses stored, sorted and used their data. Four years later in 1985, in order to compete with the graphical user interfaces made popular by Apple, Microsoft released an add-on to MS-DOS – an operating environment known as Windows.

Though that release of Windows was not an operating system in the full sense of the term, it had pushed beyond the characteristics of a typical desktop, adopting some functions of operating systems.  Windows achieved a leg up on competing systems due in large part to the fact that MS-DOS dominated the early landscape of personal computing.  But the dominance of Windows (up until Google that is) is the API.  The APIs which enabled professional programmers to develop desktop applications on top of platforms (perhaps most notably the Microsoft Windows API), have now given way to APIs which feed off of the platform of the Internet.  And while Microsoft and the desktop are controlled by physical bodies, the Internet, despite the fact that certain companies do, in fact, oversee enormous pools of user data and have the ability to direct traffic as they see fit, is not governed by a particular body or set of bodies.  If the power flow of yesterday’s APIs was a vertical one, headed at top by the executives of companies like Microsoft, which allowed programmers to work off of their platform to develop applications to be used by the users at the  bottom, we might see the power flow of today’s APIs as closer to a horizontal one.   

Next:  The Thrilling Poverty of Physical Gestures

Ever wonder how algorithms threaten our identities?

Tune into AttentionGate, the new series from the folks that brought you Identity Theft

In the Arrival, the first episode in 1967 of the British TV show The Prisoner, Number 6 says:

“I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.” 

If an algorithm is an operation that turns a certain input into an equally certain output, then it can be seen as expressing a unique and consistent identity.  The extent to which this algorithm, in trying to faithfully represent a pre-existing identity, in the process reduces that identity to something less than itself, then the algorithm no longer represents identity.  Instead, the algorithm disturbs, distorts and destroys the identity.  It becomes a new, different identity- maybe still disguised as the underlying, organic, authentic, original human identity but actually nothing more than a bionic simulation. 

When the input for an algorithm is the attention of the user, the success of the algorithm is based on its ability to record attention data at its original resolution, preserved in its original context.  For example, it’s not only the specific area of the page I was paying attention to, but who influenced me to go there in the first place.  The failure of attention algorithms to maintain this fidelity began with “My Tivo Thinks I am Gay”

In trying to correct the machine from thinking he was gay, Mr. Iwanyk “tried to tame TiVo’s gay fixation by recording war movies and other “guy stuff.”  His attempt to recalibrate the attention algorithm is too strong, and its starts to generate “documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann” as output.

The specter of the Holocaust casts its shadow once again.  Data costs merge into datacaust.  Before we had identity theft in the information world, we had
identity theft in the physical world.  This was not about stealing a
virtual identity, but about stealing physical bodies.  Removing human
expression (hairstyle, clothing, jewelry, social circle) and reducing
the individual to a single number was the best way to eliminate human identity without eliminating human productivity.

As the number of prisoners brought to the expanding Auschwitz
complex rose, so did the death rate. But if a corpse were separated
from its uniform, identification was rendered all but impossible. With
often hundreds of prisoners dying per day, other methods of
identification were needed… In May 1944, numbers in the "A" series
and the "B" series were first issued to  Jewish prisoners, beginning
with the men on May 13th and the women on May 16th. The "A" series was
to be completed with 20,000; however an error led to the women being
numbered to 25,378 before the "B" series was begun. The intention was
to work through the entire alphabet with 20,000 numbers being issued in
each letter series. In each series, men and women had their own
separate numerical series, ostensibly beginning with number 1…  from The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

 
Today, the seductiveness of Tivo has been eclipsed by the sensitive ears of search boxes.  Every interest is heard, every desire is remembered, every curiosity recorded on somebody else’s server.  In exchange for capturing all of this information, the search algorithm promises to return relevant links that deliver a profitable return on attention. 

When we wonder about the black box, and ask to see the wizard inside of an attention algorithm, invariably that black box opens up to reveal another one: at the same moment link-based algorithms are losing the battle against splogs and fraudulent clicks, personalized search emerges and seduces us effortlessly into a new attention algorithm; at least until people start wondering about the value of consuming their own personal attention residues and log out out from the platform.

Stay tuned for upcoming AttentionGate episodes on AOL search data and pretext surveillance at HP …

Ever wonder how algorithms threaten our identities?

Tune into AttentionGate, the new series from the folks that brought you Identity Theft

In the Arrival, the first episode in 1967 of the British TV show The Prisoner, Number 6 says:

“I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.” 

If an algorithm is an operation that turns a certain input into an equally certain output, then it can be seen as expressing a unique and consistent identity.  The extent to which this algorithm, in trying to faithfully represent a pre-existing identity, in the process reduces that identity to something less than itself, then the algorithm no longer represents identity.  Instead, the algorithm disturbs, distorts and destroys the identity.  It becomes a new, different identity- maybe still disguised as the underlying, organic, authentic, original human identity but actually nothing more than a bionic simulation. 

When the input for an algorithm is the attention of the user, the success of the algorithm is based on its ability to record attention data at its original resolution, preserved in its original context.  For example, it’s not only the specific area of the page I was paying attention to, but who influenced me to go there in the first place.  The failure of attention algorithms to maintain this fidelity began with “My Tivo Thinks I am Gay”

In trying to correct the machine from thinking he was gay, Mr. Iwanyk “tried to tame TiVo’s gay fixation by recording war movies and other “guy stuff.”  His attempt to recalibrate the attention algorithm is too strong, and its starts to generate “documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann” as output.

The specter of the Holocaust casts its shadow once again.  Data costs merge into datacaust.  Before we had identity theft in the information world, we had
identity theft in the physical world.  This was not about stealing a
virtual identity, but about stealing physical bodies.  Removing human
expression (hairstyle, clothing, jewelry, social circle) and reducing
the individual to a single number was the best way to eliminate human identity without eliminating human productivity.

As the number of prisoners brought to the expanding Auschwitz
complex rose, so did the death rate. But if a corpse were separated
from its uniform, identification was rendered all but impossible. With
often hundreds of prisoners dying per day, other methods of
identification were needed… In May 1944, numbers in the "A" series
and the "B" series were first issued to  Jewish prisoners, beginning
with the men on May 13th and the women on May 16th. The "A" series was
to be completed with 20,000; however an error led to the women being
numbered to 25,378 before the "B" series was begun. The intention was
to work through the entire alphabet with 20,000 numbers being issued in
each letter series. In each series, men and women had their own
separate numerical series, ostensibly beginning with number 1…  from The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

 
Today, the seductiveness of Tivo has been eclipsed by the sensitive ears of search boxes.  Every interest is heard, every desire is remembered, every curiosity recorded on somebody else’s server.  In exchange for capturing all of this information, the search algorithm promises to return relevant links that deliver a profitable return on attention. 

When we wonder about the black box, and ask to see the wizard inside of an attention algorithm, invariably that black box opens up to reveal another one: at the same moment link-based algorithms are losing the battle against splogs and fraudulent clicks, personalized search emerges and seduces us effortlessly into a new attention algorithm; at least until people start wondering about the value of consuming their own personal attention residues and log out out from the platform.

Stay tuned for upcoming AttentionGate episodes on AOL search data and pretext surveillance at HP …