How We Know Us

Month: August 2008

  • Innovation Thrives Under Constraint

    This is not my usual topic, but I’ve done a lot of work looking at innovation, and the conditions under which it thrives. Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey, founders of Twitter, have talked often of the “constraints” that are built into the Twitter app. You can only post 140 characters in a single message, for…

  • 8 Requirements for a Perfect Contact Management System

    I read about some new organization software over at LifeHacker, which got me thinking about what would be my ideal organization software.  I am beginning to embrace the implications of the uneven levels of attention I can pay to people I know, and the definite limit to which I can keep everyone in my head. …

  • Predict Attention in Social Networks

    People distribute attention according to a power-law distribution. Power-laws have long been associated with distribution of quantity of links individuals in social networks have. My on-going research suggests that power-laws not only describe distributions at the network level, they also describe distribution at the individual level. We communicate in a power-law distribution with our contacts,…