Meta

As more and more people are now on various social applications(over 10 types of such Social Software), Micro-pipeline is also emerging to show how information can flow over different kinds of social application from people to people in a more efficient way than traditional media.  We can predict that "Micropipeline" as a new concept will be studied more in the coming years to see how this infrastructure can be applied to form a larger scale of social fabric to make the world more flat and equalized.

For different kinds of social application, we can now link them easily by importing/exporting their RSS/Atom feeds. In this way, they can be connected like a pipeline system(Do you still remember the classic fun game "Pipeline"?).  Meme with XML format can flow over different pipes to reach different users eventually . There are different kinds of pipeline building blocks in the system including pipes, Tee joints("T"), and elbow joints, etc. Since there are more and more such type of components can be chosen by users, the system becomes more complex than a traditional one-to-many system(like the urban waterworks). The many-to-many relationship between those building blocks can generate non-linear chain effect that maybe possible to amplify little voices into big bang. It's the new type of media, "Social Media".

I'm making an illustration on "Social Media" big picture  by putting some typical "Micropipeline" applications on one map to show how information could flow from one person to mass population by routing those pipelines and possibly generate impact. Of course, the value of the original meme should be recognized along the path.  Traditional media like "Reuters" is no more than a super node on such a big map. The picture is not finished yet, but I would love to share some draft works to get your comments to improve it.

Someday in near future, I think the connection between different pipeline application won't be just limited to RSS. They can eventually "talk" to each other in more flexible and semantic way.  Some new kinds of authentication methodologies like OpenID could be applied in such scenario to ensure that information are authentic enough. And I'm sure XML-based Microformats will play key roles in future picture.

Micropipeline will be more important to some totalitarian countries like China to confront it's censorship system("Great Firewall", or GFW in short). Those seems-redundant building blocks(like Google Reader v.s. Bloglines) just more helpful to build fault tolerant media pipelines to serve people in such countries.  E.g. It's found that Soup.io were blocked two weeks ago by GFW in China:

As feared, we've been blocked in China again.

Soup user kunshou has posted some new suggestions on how to circumvent the block (in Chinese). Should these fail, Tor remains your best bet.

This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs for our Chinese users – but as much as we'd like to, we can't just keep changing our IP address every day.Sorry! :(   ---[via  Censorship evades Soup, has stronger kung-fu]

Bloggers got very angry(Chinese) on such blockage with curses all the time. But they are now becoming smarter to build more complex personal pipelines to avoid of single point failure.  They switched to FriendFeed.com as the alternative solution to burn their social feeds as life stream.  And their subscribers can response as well to keep their information pipes flowing at normal level.  The same trick applys to Yahoo Pipes! when people found Feedburner was blocked in China half year ago.  If it's a mouse and cat game, the mouse seems faster and smarter now.

For the draft illustration shown above. I'm actually using Zooomr as the picture link here instead of Flickr since the later one has been blocked in China as well. However, I believe they can't block every picture sharing site around the world to kill themsevlves. So I think it's a great hack that we Chinese can survive in such a Social Media age.  We can even change the country in a longer extent for sure.

Labels: Computing, GFW, Sharism, Singularity, Social Media

Just finished my talking at Ci'Num conference, a event with very Frech context trying to predict the future of "our" society and response to the possible changes. The talk is very condensed due to time limitation. But I have shared my slide online for audience's future check-back.

What I want to share in the conference is telling people that the world is changing with many sutble and micro signals. We may feel them everyday, but we can't grasp them or control them in anyways. And if you are not experiencing those blogging, web 2.0 servies, you won't be able to feel those nano-sized changes happened everyday.

We can see more and more Chinese people started to involve in the emergence of "The World Think Together". Just a recent case as instance, there are already thousands of people gatherred on Facebook to support Burma people. And many Chinese people in this social networking service has been impacted. The interesting thing is that most of them are bloggers and I can predict that they will transfer the message to their audiences as relaying. That's the another emergence I talked "Social Media".

The format of the conference is good. They also invited some International people like me to join and try to expand the border and understanding. The problem is how can such a short period can really understand the complex world.

Labels: Future, Meme, ProAm, Sharism, Singularity, Social Media

(We are now in UBC Cafe to continue SBF meeting. As Ilya's talking on APAN conference in Xi'an, I backchannelled to write about the other parts of P2R computing. )

P2R computing is a new framework based on P2P computing. But the nodes becomes mixture of people and robots. And the interactions between people and robots become the new links of the new computing model. Thus it's totally different from P2P computing. The P2P computing was actually Peer to Peer, not people to people. So it's actually missing the link with social computing. Actually P2R is a really social+machine computing model which can transfer users micro-instruction into automatic computing.

Based on P2R base idea, we can see a big scenario that everyone has a robot hosted on some distributed server farms. Those robtos comsumes both computing power and storage of server machines. Thus the Internet can become real computing platform. However, those robots are not like crawlers from today's search engine because they are still machine insects without human interactions. The personal robots, however, serve only to their owners. In this way, the robot and the owner become a joint social identity of the real person. The relationship between People and Robot, can generate different scenarios: People2People, People2Robot, and Robot2Robot, etc. So P2R Computing actually can cover today's P2P computing range, also extend to future social computing realm.

I will try to follow the meme and discuss with more friends to generate more detailed architecture in a public way. I would appreciate your comments to see if we share the same ideas in any emergent angles.

Labels: Computing, P2P, P2R, Robot, Singularity

I was sleepless last night because of the meta memes and ideas of P2R(People to Robot) computing. I told my friend Ilay Eric Lee this morning that I'm afraid I can't drive fast enough because i was over exited the whole late half night. We are now in Zhujiajiao, a suburb town of Shanghai city with traditional China ancient water view. The Bum Cafe is very comfortable that we can enjoy the view and tea from the wooden frame window. So we can be more free talking about my memes last night.

The meme, is about People to Robot computing. I'm in long term addict to AI in last 10 years and followed the trace of some futurist like Ray Kurzweil about Singularity for a long time. The bridge between Singularity and today is machine computing. And more detailed, some intelligent agents running and serve people's requirements. The problem we are facing today is all the agent software(or generally termed as "robot") are not personalized for a specified individual. So I think there must be a new era for the interaction of People to Robot beyond today's P2P computing.

The idea is very simple: everyone of us will have a robot(or more) service running somewhere on Internet that helps you process any tasks with instant interactions. You can chat with the robot anytime and delegate tasks to robot to accomplish in a queue or get immediate responses for some questions. The concept won't be new to many people who ever played with IM robots. However, those robots are not for personalized missions, e.g. backup some files to server. The personlized missions will cover all human activities like Q&A, search, streaming entertainment and data backup, etc. If you delegate all those tasks to a robot, who can also represent you to communicate and collaborate with other people(or their robots as well), it will be very computing power consuming, for sure. So it can should be well designed on architecture to ensure both functionalities and privacy protections. (Now it's time to back Shanghai, the post is to be coninued...)

Labels: Computing, P2P, P2R, Singularity