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eriks

eriks

Erik is currently an Innovation Coach at the AT&T Foundry. Erik was the CTO of Spot.us, a global platform for community-funded local reporting (winner of the Knight News Challenge). Previously, Erik co-founded Allvoices.com, where he served as the VP of Social Media and User Interface. Allvoices.com is a global community that shares news, videos, images and opinions. At the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University between 2005-2006, he created the website inthefieldONLINE.net, which drew widespread recognition from major global media including PBS, CNN and BBC, and was featured on Discovery International’s Rewind 2006 as one of the 25 highlights of the Year.

Build for scale from the beginning not later…
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I have spoken to a lot of people here in the valley who claimed that didn’t need scaling solutions early on. I have consistently said that it is important to think about scale from the beginning, not count on that it get solved down the line. Twitter is a nice concept but it is ultimately killing your earned traffic when your site has downtimes and unaccessible API:s. The downtimes due to bad architectural choices such as choosing Ruby on Rails (with known database scaling issues) have been too many and people are migrating over to a competitor Jaiku, which is more stable with less features though.

I cannot understand anyone who doesn’t think about scale for a business proposal from the beginning, especially when it comes to community/social media sites. Whoever claims to build the community without any scale in the backend from the beginning knows very little about the impact poor scale – for instance slow page loads, frequent downtimes – can have on your community. You might actually end up destroying your community totally.

Lesson learnt: Build for scale from the beginning or at least with scale in mind from the beginning and you will not have the headache. Both entreprenurs and venture capitalists should start to realize that.

Did I mention I think Twitter is over-hyped?!

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Very, very low hit…
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I am watching the NHL game between Anaheim Ducks and Detroit Red Wings. Rob Niedermayer together with Chris Pronger just hit Tomas Holmstrom together with their arms smashing his head against the board. Very low, very intentionally and very much disgraceful… (Robs brother Scott Niedermayer in the same manner crosschecked Peter “Foppa” Forsberg in the back into the board in the final in the 2004 World Championship.) Personally I hope this Niedermayer gets thrown out of the game for a long time. I certainly would like Chris Pronger to face the same faith. Intentionally blows/hits with the only intention of hurting a player should be “rewarded” with a permanent leave from the game. Ishockey is about playing, not hurting your oppponents.

Update: Tomas Holmstrom is back!
Update 2: Even better, now he assisted on another goal.

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Is all technology socially disruptive in a bad way?
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Ken Banks, an old friend, send me a Skype message tonight that he had mentioned me in his blog. Thanks Ken! You can read his entry here.

It got my mind starting to think about technology and the impacts of technology on communities. Is all technology socially disruptive in a bad way?

The importance of interfaces between humans and technology has grown tremendously lately and, regardless how strange it might sound, in some ways too much. Everyone is talking about the user centric design. Companies are popping up all around the globe specializing in this very mysterious design. As with Web 2.0 I think this is hyped and the term is overused, but maybe there is a need for this hype. I don’t know. What I do know is that very few really fully grasp what it is all about. Drawing cool diagrams on a whiteboard and using hyped language don’t count, nor does only talking about it. It is simply to provide a solution that makes sense to a human being and not the technologist solely.

Yee, wiz. Not that chocking right?

Anyhow…

For me the more important aspect is that the (technology) society is starting to realize that the any technology introduction into any community is disruptive to the social pattern in whatever shape or form you introduce it. Here the community aspects of the social web has had good impact and accelerated this discussion. To make a very long story short: We should always try to foresee parts of the disruptive behavior or make the technology as adaptive as possible for the end user (community). The importance of this only becomes more important when talking about introducing technology in the less fortunate societies of this world.

I am always extremely chocked when I hear people talk about the mobile web in the developing world. Of many reasons of course but two main ones can be identified: first there is no mobile web (yet), and secondly people discussing the mobile web don’t talk nor invite people from those regions to seminars and conferences on the same. I have written about the first aspect before and please read my friend Ken Banks reflection on the absence of a whole continent in the discussions on the mobile web.

The people I have met so far who grasp the social disruptiveness of technology the best have all done something in the real world whether that is built houses in their spare time, taken care of real animals on there own 24/7 365 days per year, or lived in a developing country. Pick your flavor there. Just do something that is real. Be a farmer for one day and learn from the experience. The importance is that they have experienced the reality, not read about it in a book…

It shouldn’t be a surprise… It just shouldn’t. 

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Trolls, trolls, trolls…
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Today Linda Skugge decided to quit blogging. She got tired of all the negative and offensive comments. I decided to write a reflection on trolls.

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