Tonight my roommate, who is British, turned to me and said,
The way I learned to think about problems in the U.K. is different than how Americans think about problems. When confronted with a task, I think first about the obstacles and how to overcome them. Americans seem to first identify the ideal solution and then consider what revisions may need to be made to make that solution realistic.
First: stop thinking about this from a technical perspective. The problem and solution are not about how we build new protocols. That's just implementation, and as fun as it is to talk about that, nobody cares about your implementation. It only matters that it works and makes people's lives a little less painful.
This is based on a comment I wrote on the Mashable post Why Instagram Was Worth $1 Billion to Facebook which has absolutely no explanation of why Instagram was worth $1 billion to Facebook.
How can you have a whole post about how Instagram was worth $1 Billion and have absolutely zero numbers in it? Yet that's what we're seeing all over the internet in the wake of Facebook's billion-dollar acquisition. Many people have explained why Facebook bought Instagram, but few have explained the valuation. Explanations for the purchase generally break down into these points:
I brought up something in my last post about friend/follow relationships that I think deserves more attention than I gave it: the social graph -- as it is currently constructed at least, where all relationships are equal and mean the same thing -- is not the same thing as an interest graph. The implication is that using a standard unweighted relationship network to predict what content should show up in my activity stream will result in me seeing a lot of content that I'm not really interested in. That's inconvenient at best. As Hunter Walk so charmingly put it, "I like you, but not everything about you."
This is a long overdue post about why Google+ and Facebook (and Twitter, and everyone else) get the "Friend" model wrong. I've mentioned before that I've thought a lot about this problem (and with good reason; many of the tools I'm best known for focus on communication in social networks).
