Should we plunge headlong into the waves and hope to remain bouyant in the social media storm or head for maven haven on the mountain top?

The web is awash with water metaphors, from streaming video to bittorrent file-sharing protocols. And now we have Google Wave, Mozilla Raindrop and open access to the Twitter firehose.

Similar metaphors are often used to describe human emotional experience and the unconscious realm of memories, dreams and reflections. However, as always when venturing into Neptune’s watery domain, not everything is quite as it appears to be.

The internet is not a series of tubes directly interconnecting nodes to create communications channels but a packet-switching network in which content is divided into little data parcels sent via multiple momentarily-determined routes before being reassembled at its destination.

This engineering not only makes the internet very robust it also makes it neutral, as the data packets are carried without regard for their content. All data is thus equal online, notwithstanding the recent use of deep packet inspection by some Internet Service Providers to discriminate against certain kinds of traffic.

So data does not travel in hyperreality the same way as water flows through the real world. What does this have to do with the way we think about the web?

Being able to distinguish between fantasy and reality is always important, but never more so than when we are considering what we might be inclined to view as a techno-utopian fountain of knowledge.

Computer networks may operate according to the packet-switching protocols that govern them, but the humans that use them continue to behave in ways described by social psychology: in herds, influenced by status and impressed by cultural and political authority.

This is what results in an internet that resembles the image above, rather than the egalitarian interdependency that is often promoted as the brave new world wide web.

A research project plotting the topological structure of the internet in terms of the connections between nodes, while taking into account the roles the connections play, produced some arresting results.

It turns out that a dense core of a few critical highly-connected nodes are surrounded by an outer periphery of many sparsely-connected nodes which are heavily dependent on the core. Between the two lies a mantle of very many peer-connected and largely self-sufficient nodes. If the core is removed from the network, about 30 percent of the outer nodes become completely isolated.

This concentration of traffic in a few dense nodes supports the view that behemoths like Google, Facebook and Twitter excessively influence the web in the same way as key superpowers influence global politics and culture.

It also reflects the inequitable distribution of power, wealth and influence in our world.

An open web is an equal web. We must not mistakenly assume that the neutrality of computer networks is a metaphor, and guarantee, for equality in the human interactions they enable.

And there is no need for another metaphor to make the point that, like water, not all of us have equal access to the resources on which this new world order depends.

Chris Anderson is Editor-in-Chief of the US edition of Wired magazine, a post he has held since 2001, and is also author of 2006 best-seller The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand.

His latest foray into the lucrative non-fiction business book market relies on the same trusted formula as his first: entertain the reader with engaging, loosely-connected historical anecdotes wrapped in confident, well-turned prose to present a modish and more or less plausible concept sure to set the twittering classes a-chatter. Then cash in with a series of speaking gigs at upscale digerati gatherings to guarantee media mindshare for your new idea.

However, second time around the zeitgeist has been shaken by financial dissolution and reality has reasserted itself in place of neoliberal abundance economics. The claims The Long Tail made about distributed markets have been largely discredited and people are rightly remembering that there is no such thing as a free lunch after all.

Nevertheless, Anderson’s thesis is of interest, especially in the new media markets which are his native environment and are currently in a turmoil apparently caused by the collapse of business models based on charging for content.

He makes two main proposals, both of which have indisputable premises. The first is that inexorably falling digital processing, storage and bandwidth costs have steadily brought the production and distribution costs of digital goods and services closer to zero. No-one could deny that, nor the key point that the internet powerfully combines all three.

However, tending towards zero and reaching it are not the same thing. And someone still has to pay the remaining marginal costs, which can be considerable at scale. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will cost Google half a billion dollars this year in bandwidth and content licensing fees.

The second is that there is a significant psychological difference between low price and no price: research shows that the “mental transaction costs” involved in thinking about a purchasing decision inhibit participation even in otherwise attractive propositions. Sweep away charges and the lure of free creates extraordinary demand, not to mention unprecedented competitive advantage.

However, as Anderson says, “advertisers will pay as much as five times more” for readers who are committed enough to subscribe “than they’ll pay for a free magazine that may be treated as junk mail”. So reducing mental transaction costs to zero by giving your product or service away will mean you are neither able to demonstrate commitment to advertisers nor bring in money by charging. Who would invest in a business like that?

In fact, Anderson is apparently quite happy to propose an idea only to refute it himself a few lines later. His introductory claim that we are looking at “an entirely new economic model” which is not just a variation on well-worn strategies is soon contradicted by his admission that “all forms of free boil down to variations of the same thing: shifting money around from product to product, person to person, between now and later, or into nonmonetary markets and back out again”. All of which he identifies as tried and tested marketing methods.

But there are the beginnings of an interesting discussion in this book, a more thorough exploration of which might have made a welcome contribution to the ongoing Great Paywall of News debate. The freemium (free plus premium) approach, giving away a basic version or limited sample of a product or service, offers to combine the benefits of lower barriers to participation without undermining the commitment of paying customers who are also attractive to advertisers.

There’s nothing new about this business model, but it is a key strategy for content producers challenged by the web. It certainly works for The Economist, three-quarters of whose 1.3 million readers are subscribers. And both The Wall Street Journal, with a million subscribers, and the Financial Times, which has been charging for access to its website since 2002, are succeeding behind the paywalls that many pundits said would signal their demise.

Some would protest that these publications are unrepresentative as they offer specialist information which conveys commercial advantage, are aimed at high earners and are often paid for on company accounts. But quality, scarcity and value remain relevant whatever the context and delivery platform. Although cost has become less connected to price on the web, businesses are still not so much built at a price point but according to the value they deliver and the cost of delivering it.

Developing this angle might have encouraged Anderson to admit that some income remains necessary to meet lower but still real production and distribution costs. He might also have attempted a more nuanced assessment of the perceived value involved in paying for a product whose quality, authority or reliability is implied and may even be guaranteed by the cover price.

However, none of this amounts to anything approaching the new market law that Anderson is aspiring to spell out. Many business and marketing models exist, some of which will fade and some grow, but free is not the single determining concept in any of them.

This is essential reading for anyone involved with the online world. It takes a refreshingly honest look at the first generation of web applications and the way the web has evolved. Check out the talk below then buy the book and delve deeper into his arguments.

Even if you disagree with his perspective, your understanding will be enhanced by having to work out why. And you get treated to a unique musical introduction, too.

It can tell you what’s happening in real time in a way no other platform can beat, as well as offering bite-sized insight into the minds of movers and shakers in every field.

Of course, it’s also a vast echo chamber for the chattering classes and is often awash with internet memes, so here’s a quick start guide to help you hit the ground running and cut to the twitter universe chase.

Get started

Sign up at twitter.com and complete all the profile information to make you easier for other people to find.

Add your mobile number and try using the service from your phone as well. Once you get going you will find you never need to use the twitter website again.

You might also like to edit your background image or change it to a custom design of your own to further promote your credentials.

Find and follow people

Target influencers in your subject area(s) and search for them by name then see who they are following. Beware of hoaxers!

Tools to use:

• tweepz offers advanced search options that improve on twitter’s own people search
• twellow is a directory of users by topic
• wefollow organises users by hashtag
• twitterholic is the definitive toplist by number of followers
• whoshouldifollow finds people similar to those you already follow.

There are also twitter lists, grouped around topic areas. Check out listorious for lists organised by subject. If you can’t find a list that fits your interests then create one and share your expertise with other people.

Learn tweetspeak

Essential terminology includes:

• @username: counted as a reply if at the beginning of a message or as a mention if elsewhere
• #topic aka hashtag: for flagging and filtering by keyword
• DM: private direct message, will not appear in the public timeline
• RT: retweet (similar to forwarding an email), include author/originator (via @username).

Don’t be daunted! Just dive in and you’ll be surfing the firehose with the best in no time.

Keep it short and sweet

URL shortening service bit.ly has become the de facto standard on twitter. Sign up for an API key to allow remote access calls from your twitter client.

And no rambling! There’s no need to use all 140 characters if you don’t need to.

Be human

Avoid over-using automatically generated tweets from RSS feeds. At the very least intersperse them with messages you have originated or retweeted yourself.

And always try to be real: this is a twenty-first century bush telegraph which thrives on dynamic self-expression.

Be relevant

Tweet when you’ve got something interesting to say or pass on but never just for the sake of it. Remember: no-one cares what you had for breakfast

And stick to what’s happening now: twitter is for zeitgeist not ancient history.

Use a desktop client

You can see who is making the running on twitstat, but your shortlist should include:

• tweetdeck: still king
• tweetie: gorgeous, just like its iPhone app cousin
• seesmic: feature-rich challenger to the tweetdeck crown.

Of course, you could always use the twitter website itself. It is improving all the time and the new local trends feature is worth exploring.

Go mobile

Twitter iPhone apps abound, as you would expect: visit the iPhone app store for the latest offerings.

Twitterrific is probably the best of the free options but tweetie for iPhone looks so good and works so well you’ll almost certainly want to take it home with you.

You can also send and receive updates via SMS from any phone, and there is a purpose-built mobile version of the site that will run on most smartphones at m.twitter.com.

Add photos and videos

A no-brainer. Multimedia always adds interest, but including such content in a 140 character tweet requires a special approach:

• twitpic is the default twitter photo-sharing service for most users by now, and is built in to many of the desktop clients
• vidly is trying hard to become the default twitter video-sharing service (hence the change of name from twitvid)
• twiddeo is also in the fray and worth checking out.

You can also offer audio as a kind of micropodcast via iPhone app tweetmic or web application twaud.io. It’s apparently happening, but I’ve yet to see it.

Cross post

Automatically posting your updates across all the web services you use not only saves time it increases virtuous network effects too.

Brizzly is a good-looking web application that integrates twitter and facebook functionality in one simplified window, so you never need to log in to either website again.

Ping.fm is a web application that allows you to update just about every online social network service you can think of, critically including twitter, facebook, linkedin, flickr and delicious.

Twitterfeed is another web application that converts RSS feeds to twitter updates, so you can network your blog to the world with one click. However there are plenty of plugins that do the same thing for all the major blogging platforms and del.icio.us now has similar functionality built in.

Be sure to check out friendfeed too. It is another kind of social aggregation service that offers something altogether different to twitter, and deserves an article all of its own to tease out its unique benefits.

Scan, search and discover

For many people, twitter is the perfect real-time research tool. There are many services which can help you drill down through the data, but these are all tried and tested essentials:

• tweetscan search by hashtag
• tweetmeme offers up “the hottest links on twitter”, sortable by category and media type
• whatthetrend will tell you what the most inscrutable hashtag is all about, and why that topic is trending in the first place
• twitterlocal is a desktop client that searches for tweets coming from specific locations
• tweetgrid allows you to create a search dashboard that updates in real time
• backtweets delivers twitter search for links by URL.

Found any other useful tools? Like to add them to this list? Follow me @martinredfern and let me know what you think : )

Via Information Is Beautiful

How insidious is the slide towards ease of use inside walled gardens such as Facebook and the iPhone? And how many users truly take the red pill by running everything from the command line rather than relying on stable releases of operating systems with convenient graphical user interfaces?

Chris is correct to say that ‘the internet has won as the transport medium for all data’, even though it will take years for this to roll out in practice, but I am not convinced that there must be a one-size fits all ‘universal interface for interacting with the web’.

Some will want hobbled devices that restrict their destinations to a few corporate data silos, but it is still hard to imagine open web search being excluded from that list.

Meanwhile many will continue to relish the relative freedom they currently enjoy to create and contribute on the web by making use of whatever technology they understand and are comfortable with.

I would prefer everyone to own their identity online by publishing and communicating autonomously, making use of open software and systems, instead of depending on proprietary web applications designed to harvest personal data for private profit.

However, there are compromises to be made here as there are in all human endeavour.

I would still rather take part in the Twitter experiment, however profound or trivial it turns out to be, than insist on its open distribution before signing up.

In other words, surely pragmatism is the best solution to such ideological problems?

Useful interview. Shame about the lousy video player interface design (it’s ten minutes long and no, you can’t control the playhead).

Raindrop (another web technology water metaphor) promises to integrate and filter all your personal content streams, from email to twitter, into a single convenient browser window.

Raindrop is open-source and extensible via an API, but the project has only reached version 0.1 prototype stage, so don’t go losing sleep waiting for the beta release

First of all, despite the way it was pitched on initial launch, Wave is not simply a replacement for instant messaging or email, although it does incorporate features that look very similar to those communication modes. Nor is it a new form of social media along the lines of Facebook or Twitter.

What makes it different to these is that instead of propagating or exchanging discrete chunks of content across the web, it supports the collaborative creation of self-contained documents in a specific, single location.

What is so revolutionary about that? In a way, making a self-contained document the canonical content source, without copies elsewhere, is a return to the early days of the web, when individual pages authored in HTML were served as read-only content in response to individual requests, and only further networked via hyperlinks.

A Wave differs from a page of HTML in a very important way, however. As its name suggests, it contains fluid, rather than static, content. Not (necessarily) animated CGI graphics of waterfalls but a collaboratively created and edited real-time stream of text, audio and video coalescing into a single constantly updated content element.

Imagine the future of news, as Jeff Jarvis does: three journalists, four witnesses and two editors together create a story using text, audio and video using laptops and mobile phones which they format at the scene of an event and then publish everywhere, to all kinds of devices, instantly. Think then of others responding to this news story by contributing their own perspectives and unique content, not just in the form of comments and feedback, but by directly inserting new material into the document. That would be a Wave, changing form as it rolled out in all directions at once.

So is a Wave like a wiki? Wikis and Waves are certainly both collaborative creation and editing tools, but as those who have edited a Wikipedia article know, there are two faces to every page on the site. Each article not only has a public-facing content page, it also incorporates revisions and discussion pages which are only visible to its editors.

Waves, by contrast, are about simultaneously editing a document and having those edits fuse into a single piece of content, with discussion and edited summary both visible. And when I say simultaneous, I mean exactly that: the operational transform protocol that powers a Wave is very nearly synchronous, even across federated servers, meaning that as you add new text on your screen I see your keystrokes included in the Wave on mine.

So will Google Wave roll out and absorb everything in its path? It certainly represents a completely new kind of web platform, and promises to become at least as ubiquitous as RSS, even if also mostly invisible to the end consumer. But is most of the noise around it because, as Gina Trapani remarked, ‘Wave is to developer’s egos as complex jazz is to musicians’? It is true that one of its strengths is that developing gadgets and bots to extend its core functionality resembles the familiar web development process that has allowed so many coders to profit from the enormous success of Facebook, Twitter et al.

On the other hand, there are a couple of as yet unresolved technical issues which prompt criticism, despite the project’s alpha development stage. One problem is that there is currently no whitelisting or permissions system to control the accessibility of identifying contact information which not only makes privacy an issue but also makes spam control impossible. This must be a priority for the beta release.

The other, perhaps more intractable, issue is that the Wave operational transform protocol does not output simple HTML, which would facilitate universal one-step publishing, instead preferring a custom Wave document format written in XML which has made developers’ eyes roll. Whether the Wave team choose to move on from this position remains to be seen.

And there are some questions about the ways we might use Wave in the real world. At the moment, Wave’s federal core means that while all participants in a particular Wave remain on a single server, others cannot see what they are up to: it is only when others are invited to join in that the wave federates across servers, propagating changes as they are made. While this looks ideal for private document management inside organisations, it doesn’t support the new media publishing vision outlined above.

Another issue is the missing consensus process that makes Wikipedia function so well. Waves, like wikis, need shared goals (in the case of Wikipedia, a neutral point of view) to guide their creation. Without such consensus, the deletion that content editing requires could be perceived as a hostile, or at least censorious, act. The social psychology that accounts for the way many are motivated to contribute to some of the web’s greatest successes may need careful consideration before the Wave user experience design team settles on such unmediated interaction modes.

For now, in the absence of public Waves (you still need an invite to see what’s going on first hand), here’s an entertaining glimpse into the flavour of the platform, courtesy of Whirled Interactive:

If you want to know more about what you currently can and cannot do with Wave and its gadgets and bots, you would do well to check out Gina Trapani’s Complete Guide to Google Wave.

Via This Week in Google Episode 10.