My MoSoSo preso

Just gave this presentation on mobile social networking to the Mobile Social Networking Conference here in San Francisco.



The deck lists 6 big ideas that I think will shape the space:
- Intimacy not irrelevance
- Push not pull
- Filters
- 3D not 2D
- Marketing not advertising
- P2P = Pocket to pocket

Business Week on Nokia

A nice piece about Nokia in Biz Week:

[Nokia] seems to be doing everything right these days. Nokia's supply-chain management may be the best of any company in the world. It has a big head start in fast-growing markets such as China and India. And it has $9.5 billion in cash and practically no debt, so it can invest far more than rivals on developing new products or conquering new markets—and thus build even more intimidating economies of scale

The guys at HQ can savour this for approximately 2 seconds, and then get back to being paranoid. Things go down as well as up, and we're not likely to forget it. My $0.02:

- The story focuses only on the "phone as the product" market, and the 40% market share that we've been chasing for a decade (and seems to be tantalising close). But I wonder if when we reach it, the concept will be meaningless. What will the definition of a "phone" be in 2-3 years? Is it because one of the multiple wireless engines (wifi, bluetooth, wimax), happens to use government regulated cellular spectrum that it counts as a phone? Despite the current iPhone boost to the concept of a product business, in the long term, margins on all such products are declining, and the key test for our future competitiveness is the extent to which we can nail the services that build on top of, and extend, the devices.

- Let's bring some of that prodigous Indian innovation back to our markets. The pieces highlights a "$45 model [that] can go more than two weeks without a recharge and has a built-in flashlight" and "[a Nokia van that provides] instruction on how to use mobile phones. Two ideas we should implement in UK asap! :)

Stop the misguided visionaries in Westminster Council before they do real damage

I thought this story must have been a joke when I first heard it. Apparently some bright sparks in London's Westminster Council are going to remove parking meters and instead rely on mobile phones for payments. The arguments, such as they are, suggest that it will be cheaper not to have to send people round to empty the meters, and it will be so much more convenient for the motorist, because they can for example add more time on by phone without going back to their car.

Unless there have been major usability improvements since I last was unfortunate enough to encounter Westminster's mobile payment parking process, I think this will be an unmitigated disaster. Clearly, saving money by axing parking attendants will be one benefit, but the real revenue will come in from fines for cars whose owners have failed to master the technology to book their slot. The usability of the scheme is so far away from acceptable that I'd be surprised if it doesn't result in a minor revolution (or the English equivalent thereof - a letter writing campaing to the Times).

Looking at the guidance material, it is clear that nothing has changed. The instructions for setting up payment are painfully complicated:

Call 0870 428 4009 and follow the touchtone prompts.
Using your phone keypad you will need to enter the following:
Your credit or debit card number
Card expiry date (2 digit expiry month, followed by 2 digit expiry year)
Card start date or issue number (debit card users only)
Vehicle registration number (VRN)*
*In order to enter your VRN, you need to press the key on your phone which displays the first character of your VRN followed by the number which represents the order it appears on that key. For example, for the letter ‘C’ you will need to press 2, followed by the number 3.

Have you got that? I had the unfortunate experience of trying out this mobile payments misery a few weeks ago, and after 5minutes of pain, gave up and went off to find a new non-mobile bay. Westminster Council helpfully provides a log-in option on their website to allow people to create accounts, and this seems to me the greatest ever folly. People who know about, and have registered in advance for the Westminster Council online membership scheme are probably locals, whereas logic suggests that the majority of those needing to pay for parking are from outside the borough, and have not the faintest idea of any of this.

I do applaud the ambition, and mobiles are wonderful things, but forcing people to use them when the technology and usability is not there, is just plain wrong. (As is assuming that everyone has them, and they haven't run out of battery or credit.)

We laugh at the futurists who expected all of us to be zooming round in our jetpacks by now; just because the technology is in place, it does not mean the experience is ready for the mainstream, be it in personal jet propulsion or mobile payments.

I do suspect that the secret agenda here is to make parking so terrifically complicated and painful, that people will leave the car at home. But if that is not actually the case, my suggestion would be to do as Oyster have been doing and trial NFC which seems a logical answer for mobile payments, and allow that to be an alternative channel, perhaps with a discounted rate to encourage adoption. Killing off cash at this stage would be premature, will unfairly penalized those with less tech savvy (am putting myself in that category) and, I predict, lead to far higher levels of pavement-rage, resulting in huge hospital bills that dwarf any short-term savings.

Westminster: Relent, before it's too late!

Finally, the truth about 2.0

This was picked up in an internal mailing list:

dsully: please describe web 2.0 to me in 2 sentences or less.
jwb: you make all the content. they keep all the revenue.

Without a mobile, you're nobody

From Bruce Sterling's Wired piece (found on A VC):

Anyway, fact is, a passport is redundant — even if it's crammed full of RFID chips that howl your ID to every passing parking meter. The US should do what the Japanese do: track every foreigner's mobile. If he does anything freaky, jump on him.

"But Mr. Feldspar, suppose this international criminal doesn't carry a mobile?" demanded representative Chuck Kingston (R-Alabama). It would have been rude to point out the obvious. So I didn't. But look, just between you and me: Anybody without a mobile is not any kind of danger to society. He's a pitiful derelict. Because he's got no phone. Duh.

He also has no email, voicemail, pager, chat client, or gaming platform. And probably no maps, guidebooks, Web browser, video player, music player, or radio. No transit tickets, payment system, biometric ID, environmental safety sensor, or Breathalyzer. No alarm clock, camera, laser scanner, navigator, pedometer, flashlight, remote control, or hi-def projector. No house key, office key, car key... Are you still with me? If you don't have a mobile, the modern world is a seething jungle crisscrossed by electric fences crowned with barbed wire. A guy without a mobile is beyond derelict. He's a nonperson.

Meta me

Been trying out the mobile codes apps from Beta Labs - pretty interesting possibilities when the web merges with the real world, almost of which I haven't even begun to think about yet.

On stigmergy, ants and VRM

Joe Andrieu writes a savvy post on the VRM concept. My brain is tired from doing the requisite backflips, but happy for the workout. He relates vendor management to one of the "you know it's important but how" concepts - swarm intelligence.

This suggests that it may be easier to rearchitect supporting business systems around the user, just as we know we need to do for the consumer experiences themselves. Here the user is the local store of intelligence which vendors (and whomever else) can then interract with, and in so doing improve that user's intelligence. So, if we can get systems to learn that everytime the individual gets on a plane he takes the window seat, maybe we can infer something useful that we can use for picking seats on other modes of transport. Or maybe not - but it'd be fun to have the data to play with.

This is a natural extension for mobiles, and one that may be a counter signal to the "data is always and everywhere in the cloud" schtick. Guess what, sometimes the data can be local too.

"instead of a bunch of individuals running around leaving a disparate data trail which is hard to keep track of, the individual represents the digital environment where data is stored by vendors. When the next vendor comes along, the data is there, available for use, without the need for complex integration, processing, or systems maintenance, just like the environment is there for the next ant to come along, allowing that ant to do what they do without a complicated brain or sophisticated map of the territory.

It doesn’t matter that Doc was physically moving around in his example. From Doc’s perspective, he was always right there. “No matter where I go… there I am.” This is more than just a solipsistic view of the universe, it is perhaps the most critical insight of the VRM user-centric gestalt. When you put the user at the center, it makes it trivially easy to manage and integrate the entire digital experience of the user. Because it is all right there, all the time.

Two obvious messages here. First, we all need to do a helluva good job in getting vendors in many different industries and sectors to agree on protocols that speak consistently to their customers. And second, this is very much about the mobile industry - and we all know how good our industry is at quickly agreeing global standards. The upside here as far as I see it, is that this is more of a device story than a network story, so may be a little easier. Anyway, fun times ahead.

Internships two-point-oh

It's not been confirmed yet, but there might be a couple of internships going at Nokia this summer around the theme of Internet innovation and 2.0, to work on a few cool projects that we've got cooking and need some help. Location probably Helsinki (it's great during the summer).

It's rather late in the season for this, and I suspect most people have got their internships lined up, but if this strikes a chord, ping me at stephen dot johnston at nokia dot com, and let me know if you have any particular skills or interests that we could put to work in the spirit of transformation.

Real time transport mashup of Helsinki

This mashup - showing Finnish public transport system in REAL TIME on google maps is wonderful, and strangely addictive. (Did that bus break down? Ah, no, there it goes again.) As I am now living in London, I am painfully aware that such a transparent and technically advanced solution would be impossible here.

Learning to muzzle the legal attack dogs

Good to see that our legal department is fairly quick to move and apologize for a oversight. This incident saw one of our most passionate blog sites receive a legal threat to shut down for posting pics of a future phone (that escaped from a factory).

Some in the company have remarked that this new found agility and humbleness (we're not known for that, apparently) is proof that some of the "2.0" messages have been getting through. Either way, good to see. Cluetrain, come on in, your time is up...

Get the service right first, and figure out the techology later

Am going out for dinner tonight in London, and two savoury tastes have been swirling round my palate, competing for primacy. First was Indian (our national dish), exemplified by the excellent Bombay Bicycle Club. Second was Italian, and my sister recommended Numero Uno.

So, as a good considerate brother, I naturally prefer my own idea, and try and book a table at Bombay Bicyle Club. No such luck. Their website (kicking off with a flash movie, yuck), talks a lot about their "story", but when you go to "contact us" you get a web form. Forgedaboudit. I do find the phone number of the Balham branch under their restaurants section, but get a recorded message saying they're closed til 6:30pm. Nobody around to take orders by phone, really? Must be because they have such a sophisticated and effective online system then.

So, I try and use their whizzo online ordering capability. This is provided by Livebookings and creates a java popup to identify the slot you want which is quite cute. Unfortunately, it then requires you to register your name, ADDRESS and phone number. I already have far too many social networks requiring me to register with them, now I have to register at some obscure service (ok, used by other restaurants too) with username and password etc. They then reject my proposal because my password suggestion is not 7 characters long. Look!, I cry, this is a bloody restaurant booking service, not my bank.

After cursing and muttering about the excess of information, I get to the final submit screen, only to decide that I need to have the table half an hour earlier. OK, my bad, but these things happen. I click on Back, and everything is wiped out. As my blood pressure rockets I throw my long suffering Nokia across the room (it survives, always does) and curse loudly at the screen. And at Bombay Bicycle Club. Do they realize that they've just turned me, a long time fan of their product, into an annoyed non-customer, through the use of too much technology.

I then Google the Italian, find its phone number, call them up and book a slot. That takes me 15 seconds, and has delivered my evening's business to them, whereas all that Bombay Bicycle Club have got from me is frustration. If I had wanted to change the time, I could have done it verbally, and he'd have said - perfecto.

Underlying this is the fact that still have a long way to go before we can provide a "very human technology" experience for the management of customer service, with a big sticking point being identity and authentication. The reality is that the phone still does that job far easier and quicker than overly complicated web services. There is tremendous scope to get both of these working better by working together, and we've got some ideas for how this could happen, but if any of them involve sacrificing the experience in favour of some misguided technology vision, they deserve to fail.

The evolution of the web, according to Fido

So, according to my cerebral canine companion, my tinpot evolution of the web theory can be equally applied to dogs as well as people.

Pets.com came - and went - first. This iconic dot.bomb went from IPO to liquidition in nine months. Here your PC-savvy pooch could find information about petfood - information ruled the day.

Second, came online social networking for dogs: dogster. Here Fido can start yapping enthusiastically at other gorgeous german shepherds or touch nose to screen to nose with a winsome wippet. His vocal chords and floppy ears are given full reign, even though he may need a little help from his friends to press the buttons on the video camera to record his chat up lines.

And so now, proof of the arrival of three point oh, we have SNIFLabs - Social Networking in Fur - (no joke). This company makes cute collar attachments (and has an inspired logo) that the dogs can use as digital scent - marking their territory and people they amble into. MIT Tech Review picked them up again recently since they're launching soon (doggy cliches have been flying for the past couple of years.

It's fitting that the perenially walkie-obsessed dogs are able to break free from the tyranny of the wired PC and take social networking out to the real world before us (though don't forget Imity is already there). Perhaps it's not surprising - it's easier to be an overt networker about somebody or something else (dogs, music, hamster fanciers) rather than just yourself.

I was asked by a relative last week when are we bringing out a tracking system for people, so that she can check up where her kids are, or so people can find her if she is kidnapped while out horseriding (Hampshire being the new Gaza). This system does not use GPS, but sounds sophisticated enough to do most of what she wants. I wonder if they'll be used as kid trackers?

It used to be that on the Internet, no one would know if you were a dog. Now that the third generation of the web is cutting the chord, the dogs can prove that they are indeed dogs, and no longer need to hide behind the mice.

The obligatory 3.0 post: this time with added You-nicorn

Does it strike anyone else as odd, that just a few months after Time celebrates a new era of the empowered You, most of the chatter about the next great leap - that some are calling Web3.0 - is a paradigm shift for technology (namely the arrival of the semantic web), not the end user?

The what is web3.0? question has been stewing in my mind for a bit, and like many jargon-weary commentators I thought it best to ignore it and hope the urge would pass, since fluff to the power of fluff is just more fluff. But then the excellent and deeply credible R/WW kicked off this (tongue in cheek?) competition, so I might as well dump the contents of my 3.0 cache here for the record.

Basically, if I had to assign a numerical framework for the evolution of the web, what I'd do would be something like this:

Web1.0: Brain & Eyes (=Information)

Web2.0: Brain, Eyes, Ears, Voice & Heart (=Passion)

Web3.0: Brain, Eyes, Ears, Voice, Heart, Arms & Legs (=Freedom)

I would try and map the evolution of the web to the increasing benefits to the individual. The first breakthrough paradigm enabled by the web was information, the second was passion, the third - I would like to suggest, is freedom in the physical sense - aka mobility. In Maslowian terms, throw in a bit of food and sex, and you're basically done.

1.0 was about accessing information

From the individual's perspective, the web has progressively been about genuinely empowering them to do more and more with the things they care about. 1.0 provided the web as a disintermediater - where information was the novelty, and most of it happened to be in static text and graphic form. 1.0 was about knowing that a price is cheaper on Expedia than on the BA site, or reading about human rights abuses in China. The 1.0 poster children (eBay, Google, Amazon, Expedia and Wikipedia) allowed people to connect them with what they were interested in - such as cheap stuff and tough questions.

2.0 was about finding your passion

The arrival of You on the scene is not a passing fad. The web has always been about You, the only thing was that the You in 1.0 was deaf, mute and immobile. In 2.0 the gag came off. We started to sing, shout, dance and generally make a mockery of How Things Should Be Done. 2.0 represented another leap forward in terms of making our lives better. Bandwidths increased, allowing music then video to flow (with copyright spinning in the wind). Software and services became easier to use and companies such as mine made it easier to create and distribute content. Social networking sites allowed niche passions to connect with each other. The result is the individuals themselves started to have more fun, more sex, more life. They could perform for millions - anybody who's ever had the buzz of being on stage and adored by thousands knows how good that feels. (Apparently an Oscar nomination adds four years to your life.) YouTube has made people stars - made them sing dance, cavort, laugh, cry. Colour arrived to the binary, command-line network of networks. My simple suggestion for world peace is to play the Kiwi and Mocha videos on a big screen at the beginning of every UN security council meeting.

So, with the added emotion in our lives from the second version of the web we're really starting to be convinced that these tech guys actually are good news. Just when we're working ourselves up into a frenzy of excitement about what could be even bigger, even better for us and indeed be the Next Big Thing, along comes an old fashioned committee and tells us that the future is about resource description frameworks, web ontology language and, of course, XML.

Semantics is to Web 3.0 what horseshoes are to a unicorn
Sure, getting data to talk to data is an important step but to me it is plumbing. "WOW, you've got a flying horse, that's absolutely freaking, bloody amazing, I love it!!" is the refrain I'd like to hear as I tell people what I'm working on. Not, "A-ha, look at these nicely roughly circular, sturdy iron protective elements on the feet of the horse, I bet they're useful when it lands".

To be asked to imagine a future vision of where the web is going, and then be told that any vision is fine as long as it is semantic is rather claustrophobic. There is nobody on the planet that I think more deserving of unlimited wealth, chocolate and a permanent serenade by a chorus of angels than Tim Berners-Lee (despite him turning down our invitation to the Nokia Speaker Series when he collected his $1m cheque). However this necessary plumbing is not a sexy vision that will sell to our respective parents and kids. And as we know, sex sells.

We in the tech industry seem to be slipping back, like incurable alcoholics, to the bad habits of focusing on the technology and not the benefits of what is coming next. Of course, we know that it'd be great if microformats actually worked, and people could get more joined up services, but frankly, most of the benefits seem rather marginal compared to what we're able to do now. It's hard to package and sell it to Average Joe. For example, Wikipedia suggests as a use case that "a computer might be instructed to list the prices of flat screen HDTVs larger than 40 inches with 1080p resolution at shops in the nearest town that are open until 8pm on Tuesday evenings". Hmmm, anybody spot a geek in the vicinity? This would probably be to Joe just an incremental improvement in Google's already fabulous problem-solving offering. And also, it neglects that fact that people would probably still trust the recommendation of their friend over any semantic goodness. Digitizing relationships and reputations has proven to be particularly challenging.

3.0 will be about finding your legs, and your wings

So, 3.0 to me is more about taking what we had so far and extending the reach - both physically in terms of another dimension, but also in terms of imagination. Letting you do what you do today on the web but when you're mobile is the first necessary step - table stakes - for this, and for that we have browsers, widg/sets and AJAX integration. But a lot of that is not new innovation, just necessary replication. What I'm looking for in 3.0 is the truly breakthrough user experiences that hit you in the stomach, the way that using Google did the first time you used it, or the way that Mocha's little legs wiggled in a furry flurry of happiness. That I can safely say is not shrinking today's internet service du jour and putting it on the small screen, but using the vast amounts of new data sources in innovative ways to create new and improved experiences. Mobile social networking, avatars, maps, mashups, music, marketing and The Man will all I suspect play a part in building this. We've got some pretty cool ideas but part of the fun is not knowing what services will prove to be the most successful.

This is in essence the point of this blog - it's ThreeDimensionalPeople, people. Add a third dimension (and a fourth, courtesy of RSS) and the possibilities for innovation multiply. Unfortunately, some parts of the telco industry seems unable to allow the speed and scope of innovation required, so it will be provided in due time by others many of whom are both willing and able.

So in summary, I think we need our politicians, business people, relatives, academics and shop floor workers to get behind our vision for where we're going next and get excited about the possibilities about what it can do for them. Sure, the €100bn orgy of excess of 3G was painful, but just because one entire industry collectively overpaid, overpromised and underdelivered on a set of mistaken assumptions has nothing to do with the reality of what an Internet set free of wires could become. The mobile device plus the Internet has the potential to revolutionize our lives in ways that we haven't begun to dream about, and I suggest, deserves significantly more attention from our entrepreneurs and thought leaders who are striving to build new new things, whether they come with a number attached or not.

Man, I wonder how much they'd be making without that pesky Internet?

The current issue of Booz Allen's Strategy & Business magazine contains some interesting data points - salutory reading for those who might think that the web has dismembered industry as we know it:

Companies are sitting on mountains of cash, much more than they need. Holdings
at NYSE- and Nasdaq-listed companies topped a record $2.7 trillion in 2005, and
they are growing at 24 percent annually. By industry, the largest cash increases
in the past decade were in media (1,700 percent), utilities (1,360 percent), and
telecommunications (1,300 percent).

Some principles for good data management

As companies around the world wake up to the new reality that the web flattens the playing field and offers more choices for people than they had before, there is realization that being customer-centric is probably a Good Thing. The next logical conclusion therefore it seems is the need to amass vast mounds of data about their customers, mine it every which way and that, in order to better understand people's behaviour. This has been fuelled by a Google paranoia, in which companies tremble if they don't have a data centre the size of Kansas tracking every possible thing that you, me, and them could, would, should, or might do sometime, yesterday or tomorrow.

My concern is that, as with the environement, the real costs of data collection and not externalized, and so business and governments have little incentive to act responsibly with this data. In addition to my suggestion that the provider is rarely compensated adequately for the potentially interesting uses of their data, the costs of storage continue to plummet, resulting in a simple equation for most managers - grab as much data as you can and hang on to it.

In Europe, data collection has been a hot-button issue for a while with more stringent safeguards on collecting and protecting user data than in the US. (I remember during my time working at Siebel an 'interesting' meeting between one of our more assertive West coast salesmen and an official from a French ministry. The concept of the CRM system that this hapless salesman was attempting to foist on the French government to better manage their citizenry was, we were told in no uncertain terms - illegal. It is against the law in France for this government department to share data on citizens with another department. Clearly, not great news for the efficiency levels and problem solving abilities of the French bureaucrats, and not great for the salesman.) Anyway, if there's money to be made, savvy business people will gravitate to the least cost option, so probably base their policies in the most amenable jurisdictions.

This to say that there should probably be some principles or code of conduct, to use a phrase du jour, for how companies manage their customer data. Kim Cameron's laws of identity seem to be the gold standard here, and are rather related, but not the same.

In conversation recently with a smart chap at one of the great British institutitions (didn't tell him I would blog it, so won't say which one), he outlined his principles about data collection that their organization uses. I noted them down rather quickly, and here is the list (a bit mangled as I'm taking a bit of translator's license here).

1. Ownership: The data about the user is owned by the individual, and companies are able to borrow it and use it to provide better services for the user, while they have a relationship with that user.
2. Minimum: Only collect the minimal data required to deliver certain functions: i.e. "just in time not just in case". So a vendor only needs to collect enough data to know that you have enough money to pay for the goods, and they don't need to hang on to it when you're gone.
3. Modular: The service doesn't need to have an all-or-nothing approach to data for it to work -- the data can be separated and functional with different uses.
4. Tradeable: Data can be used to interact with other services, if you have agreed that it can be shared with them to improve your service. Clearly, generic data such as location has multiple uses, whereas specific proprietary application data has more limited uses.
5. Tangible: It is clear what impact your data has on the system, and whether it's being used to impact the service level that you're receiving.
6. Extractable: You can remove all elements of your data from their system. This is something that Google is apparently doing, which I think is tremendous. Like their search engine, they are happy to send people away, not try and hang onto them if they don't want to be there.

I'd be interested to see other principles relating to good data management - this is now the time to shape people's opinions towards what is still a rather abstract issue, but which is increasingly becoming the cause for debate. And profits.

Three out of four kids would like targeted ads on their mobile

Tomi T. A. points to an interesting recent finding.

Q Research is reported in this week's issue of New Media Age (April 19, 2007)
with a survey of 1,500 UK youth aged 11 - 20. When asked simply - do you
accept ads to your mobile, the survey found 32% willing to
accept. Then when asked - would the youth be willing to accept ads that are
about their areas of interest, this jumps to 71%. Then, when
asked if the ads offer discounts and coupons, it goes up again, to 76%. And finally - this is the eye-opener - if the youth
is asked if the ads would give them top-ups to their prepaid phone accounts, 84% say yes, such ads would be welcome...

Good news, but the real innovators in this space are not waiting for validation before they take ideas that they think are good enough to the market. I think it's time for these discussions to move from the theoretical to the practical.

Nokia Beta Labs soft launch

Today is the soft launch of our very own Beta Labs - a place to test our new applications and services. Kind of strange that we've not had a place for betas in the past, but I guess it's further evidence of our gradual move from products ("Here you go, it works ok") to services ("How we can get this to be even better?").

Just a few apps to start with, but am happy to see that they're suitably "3dpeople compatible": for example mobile codes lets you create bar codes to build that real world - digital world overlay, and sports tracker is all about getting people up and active. The main thing is that we now have a place to go to test new internet services, get feedback and start a discussion. Plenty of improvement ideas are in the pipeline, and the key one for me will be to build up a sense of community of Nokia early adopters and use them as lead innovators to help us know what we should be working on next.

S60 introduces web widgets

S60 has just launched web widgets. The Web Run-Time which allows the use of web widgets using standard web technologies - e.g. AJAX on the mobile and no separate download. This is one of the ways that the web makes more sense on the mobile than just slavishly trying to shrink the PC web interface.

Peter Kim picks up on Lester Wunderman's comments at this week's Forrester Marketing Forum:

• We used to be in the business of direct marketing – now we’re in the
  business of relationship marketing.
• We will eventually move on to personal marketing, which will be facilitated
  by the use of data.
• Four goals for direct marketing: Relevance, relationship, repurchase,
  and retention.
  

Couldn't agree more, but how are the current marketing tools facilitating this? Email, SMS, MMS - not much of relationship there. Mobiles are of course deeply personal, are the broker of relationships, and throw off much more data (location, call history etc) than things with wires. So, an interesting question for me is "how to help companies use mobiles to improve their relationships with their customers?".

For society's sake, don't make those search engines too good

Dr. Helen picks up a profound quote: Men talk to their search engines more than their girlfriends, work colleagues or even their families. (And alas, this trend is set to continue - due to search engines being as smart as this, and as easy on the eye as this.) Search engines, like dogs, offer unquestioning loyalty, uncanny perception and an ability to sniff out the most obscure things. However when they move from the means to the ends, we've got a big problem.

On a related note, I had a good chat today with someone who must be one of the most networked people in the networking business (he has over 600 recommendations on LinkedIn, and comes 21st on this list): Thomas Power. (OK, so there's another Tom with as of today 170m 'friends', but they're just kids, damnit). One of the interesting things Tomas P. said, and something he's based his career on, is that the abundance of digital communications and networking is actually paradoxically making many people lonelier. There's a real need to help people get up, out of their chair, and into the real world. That I guess is one of the messages of this blog, and happily it fits nicely into Nokia's remit too.

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And so here's a free business idea for Google (as if they need my charity): Allow wives and girlfriends to buy the right hand column on their partners' screens. Maybe something like a flashing "Come to bed!!" would remind the unremitting Googlers what the phrase I'm feeling lucky used to mean.