Reflections on the early days of social networking as LinkedIn reaches 100 million users

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Last week LinkedIn reached a significant milestone: 100 million users. On the occasion LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman sent out an email to the first 100,000 users thanking them for being early adopters.

The email included the recipient’s member number, which are given in order of signing up. You can look it up yourself in your LinkedIn profile URL; it is the number after “id=”. I had no idea, but it turned out I am member 9,822, in the first 0.01% of users.

While I closely followed the social networking space at the time, I didn’t join many. LinkedIn seemed to me to be one of the most promising newcomers.

When I was writing Living Networks in 2002 there were no true social networking applications in existence. I had eagerly joined SixDegrees.com, the very first social networking application, not long after it was founded in 1997, highly excited by its potential. The basic principle was inviting friends to connect, and using that to find the quickest social path to people you wanted to meet. As it happens this model closer to LinkedIn than any of the other major social networking platforms of today.
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Five awesome music videos

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Of a Saturday morning I feel like watching some nice videos and music as I work. So, as we go along, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite music videos:

Bjork – All is full of love

One of the best videos ever, exploring the future of sexuality amid humans merging with machines. If you like this kind of stuff, check out our new media site: Future of Sex.
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Breakfast keynote on Building Business in a Connected World in Melbourne next Wednesday

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The majority of my keynote speaking engagements are to executives or managers within organizations, or at large conferences, so there are relatively few opportunities for people to come see me speak (aside from on our collection of keynote speaking videos (which we will be adding to shortly)).

However next Wednesday the City of Port Phillip in Melbourne has engaged me to give the keynote at the first of their business breakfast series, intended for businesses in the region. The topic of my keynote is:

Building Your Business in a Connected World
The spectacular rise of our hyper-connected world offers fabulous opportunities for those businesses ready to seize them. As bandwidth grows, smartphones and tablets take off, and social media such as Facebook become commonplace, the way customers find suppliers and successful businesses operate are rapidly changing. In this compelling keynote Ross Dawson will provide specific advice on how to tap three vital aspects of business in a connected world: the valuable tools of cloud computing, the power of personal branding, and the extraordinary resources available through crowdsourcing.
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5 recommendations for successfully implementing distributed innovation and shared value

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Chapter 5 from Living Networks, on Distributed Innovation – Intellectual Property in a Collaborative World, is still immensely relevant today. We are still relatively early on in working out the implications for innovation of distributed value creation.

Here is a section towards the end of the chapter which provides 5 recommendations on managing innovation in a networked world. While some of the tools have changed since this was written, the principles haven’t.

IMPLEMENTED DISTRIBUTED INNOVATION AND SHARED VALUE

At a scientific convention in Hawaii in 1972, Stanley Cohen from Stanford University and Herbert Boyer of the University of California met for the first time in what proved to be the beginning of a long friendship and collaborative partnership. Their joint work on a process for cloning genes in microorganisms resulted in three patents that formed the foundation of the nascent biotechnology industry. Stanford University ended up as the sole owner of the patents, reaping over $150 million in royalties as a result.
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The REAL transformative package: iPad plus wireless keyboard

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The iPad has changed my life. It feels like I have been waiting for it since I became conscious.

However the iPad alone doesn’t do the job. It is the iPad together with a wireless keyboard that has transformed my life.

Two years ago tomorrow I wrote a blog post saying It is totally INSANE that you cannot use an external keyboard on an iPhone. For some completely inane reason Apple crippled the Bluetooth on the iPhone so it couldn’t be used for external keyboards.
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Japan’s nuclear crisis could be foreseen – a view from 19 years ago

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In the early 1990s I worked for several years in Japan as a financial and business journalist. The first article I ever wrote beyond the world of business was on an issue that I felt was very important: the dangers of Japan’s nuclear program.

I have been searching for the article for the last week, and eventually found it last night. The article (embedded and full text below) was published on June 30, 1992 in The Bulletin, at the time Australia’s leading newsweekly magazine.

The letters to the editor from senior nuclear industry figures in response to my article scoffed at what they said was an alarmist and inaccurate portrayal. The facts are:

* The Monju reactor I described went operational in April 1994, and was shut down in December 1995 after a sodium leak caused a major fire, with a major scandal emerging on the attempted cover-up by the government. It took 14 years before it was operational again, in May 2010.
* In 1999 fuel reprocessing workers didn’t follow safety procedures, leading to 2 deaths and hundreds being exposed to radiation.
* A multitude of other problems and cover-ups have led to the continuing post-earthquake nuclear crisis.
* Rokkasho, which I also wrote about in the article, is still not fully operational, and was forced onto back-up generators after the earthquake. There are reportedly 3,000 tons of radioactive spent nuclear fuel at the facility. Two years ago officials said that earthquakes weren’t a problem even thought the plant is built on a fault line, as the facility could withstand a 6.9 shock (the recent earthquake was 8.9).

In working as a futurist, I and others check what I have said in the past against what actually happens. In this case I wish I had been wrong.


Japan’s dream, the world’s nightmare –
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4 reasons why an increased pace of change means greater unpredictability

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I am writing this in the air over the Rockies, flying back from a scenario planning workshop I ran for a client yesterday.

Over the last dozen years that I have been running scenario planning projects I have observed that corporate interest in scenario planning is cyclical. The time horizons that executives think in tend to be driven by the health of their business, the recency of prominent unanticipated events such as the global financial crisis or Middle East upheaval, and visibility of challenges to their business model.

In my experience interest in scenario planning is picking up strongly, reflecting a variety of recent surprises of various kinds, as well as a general feeling of prosperity that permits budgets for the like of scenario projects.
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Notes on the future of distributed work and organizations

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I am sitting in the lounge at Sydney airport, about to fly to San Francisco. It is the ease of the iPad that allows me to put up this post on the fly.

I came straight to the airport from a media panel organized by Cisco to follow up on their Connected World research study. Below are the notes I managed to catch on my iPad as we spoke..

The panellists were:
Senator Kate Lundy, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister
Jacob Murray-White, Head of Salmat’s Customer Solutions at Home Programme
Fernanda Afonso, National Chair of Australian Psychological Society and Specialist, Freehills.
Ross Dawson, Futurist

Les Williamson, Managing Director of Cisco Australia, told the story of how Cisco was born from love. Two academics at Stanford University were in a relationship, but worked on opposite sides of the campus. They created a multi-protocol router to communicate, started building them commercially in a garage, got funded, and grown spectacularly since then.

Below are live notes from the panel. I haven’t attributed them as they sometimes bring together comments from several people or my interpretation. It was a fascinating discussion.
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How do you become a futurist?

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The current edition of Fast Thinking magazine has a feature article titled ‘Know Future’ on “the future of futurists”. It looks at the history and background of the profession and goes on to interview a number of prominent futurists. It quotes me:

Ross Dawson says becoming a futurist is pretty straightforward. “You can claim you are a futurist and people either believe you or they don’t.”

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The latest robots are virtually indistinguishable from people

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Almost five years ago now I wrote a post titled Being in two places at the same time which described how Professor Ishiguro, a Japanese roboticist, had created a robot replica of himself so he could give lectures at his university without enduring the commute from his home.

The robot, named Geminoid HI-1 to emphasize that it was his twin, mimicked his expressions and movements. Having this doppelganger meant that he could send it (or indeed multiple versions) out to represent him in the world.

After a sequence of other Geminoids, the state of the art has become startlingly good. The following videos show Geminoid DK, which is the twin of Associate Professor Henrik Scharfe of Denmark’s Aalborg University, designed in collaboration with Professor Ishiguro. Check out the videos.


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