From Videotex to Facebook: 22 Years Online. So What's Changed?

Thanks to Nancy White and Jo Murray, editor of The Knowledge Tree, the Australian e-journal of learning innovation, with colleagues Victoria Axelrod and Kiki Mulliner I've had the opportunity to co-author a piece on "Learning through participation and connecting intelligence: experimenting with a wiki to co-create". 

The article documents some of our lessons learned through the process but remarkable for me was the excuse to look back at my 22 years online, beginning at the Australian Caption Centre in 1985. Thanks to farseeing Caption Center founders Adam Salzer and Alexandra Hynes I helped create "Edutel", an educational content service for the launch of Viatel, a U.K. Prestel standard videotex service. As this was pre-Web there are few remnants to tell the story. Peter Hosie's reflections on the potential of videotex for education capture the times.

Coming to the U.S. I was fortunate to find my way to the Trintex offices in White Plains, NY where a group of smart, dedicated people were working hard at pioneering the NAPLPS based online consumer service launched as "PRODIGY" in 1988. 6 years later, December 1994, with AOL nipping at our heels, PRODIGY became the first online service to integrate a Web browser. 

In 2007, creating a Facebook 21st Century Organization Group with minimal effort and functionality I never imagined 20 plus years ago, I asked myself the question J. C. Spender uses to provoke discussion at New York Knowledge Cafe gatherings:

"So what's changed?".

Here are some reflections.

1. Today's Invisible Servers, Cables, Programmers and Code

I've heard Cliff Figallo tell wonderful stories about The WELL's early days and heroic efforts to keep the service up as new members joined, including tending the server dressed in formal attire. As PRODIGY grew each morning attention turned to the previous day's peformance levels.  There was a scheduled downtime during pre-dawn hours for maintenance. 

Today we just expect to be always connected wherever we are, and on the move without cable tethers. Failure to do so, like Skype's recent outage, becomes a news event. How many people ever consider the server network Google has around the world ensuring 24x7 access? Wikipedia cites 450,000 servers in data centers worldwide.

Similarly, where are the programmers?  No doubt behind the sites I log into every day ranging from Earthlink, through Facebook, Google,Typepad, Technorati, etc are hundreds of programmers working to add functionality and service stability. But I don't know them, the programming languages they use, or where in the world they are.  At PRODIGY programmers were highly visible, essential and valued colleagues with names, people whom I'm delighted to see when PRODIGY alum gather to mark another year.

And where is the CODE?  I created our Facebook 21st Century Organization Group without seeing a line of code. I considered this while applying John Pederson's rule for making del.icio.us tags display in a Wikispace, to our ConnectedIntelligence wiki. 

2. From Information Sparsity to Overload and Abundant Connections

Did anyone else notice the number of people admitting they were taking time away from being connected to reflect this summer? I sympathize with Stuart Henshall's frustration expressed in a Facebook wall post that as he contributes "to more and more "Streams" with twitter, facebook, social bookmarking, blog posts, wiki pages etc and I'd like to capture that all in one place." In 2007 with the exponential power of network laws at work, our skills are constantly being stretched to learn new tools and manage through this abundance.

3. TIME and ENERGY Become Increasingly Precious Resouces. Knowing when to say NO to Connectedness

Anders Hemre first focused me on the importance of allowing TIME for THINKING during a 2002 article interview.  With "REFLECTION" the topic of article co-author Kiki Mulliner's dissertation, we spent time during our article writing considering the importance.  In a highly connected world, as TIME becomes an increasingly precious resource, knowing when to say "NO" to connectedness to devote hours and ENERGY to creating value from available information and connections seems to me an essential skill.

4. The Technology is Catching Up to Support People Networking, Where the Real Value of Connectedness Lies

As PRODIGY yielded to AOL's mid 90's ascendancy on my office wall was a quote in a Jupiter Report citing Bob Smith from AOL saying:

"AOL understood people come for the content and stay when they get connected."

AOL's focus on chat and IM revealed that understanding.  Reports from the recent Always On Stanford Summit point to what's ahead online.  At minimum, as Facebook is revealing, the technology is catching up to support people connecting where early online services, from The WELL forward, suggested the real value of connectedness lies.

This post has grown long. I also pondered what HASN'T changed.  Grist for another time. 

Thank you for reading if you've persevered this far.  Your reflections and experiences about the evolution of online, and implications of connectedness, invited and welcomed as comments.

~ Jenny Ambrozek

Comments

[Bill Anderson]

Jenny, I was reflecting on Stuart's comments. And on this very interesting, idealistic, and scary post by Brad Fitz about "The Social Graph" http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/

Speaking, perhaps, anti-socially, I'm thinkin' that once all this info is aggregated I'll be lookin' for (or building) a splitter for my online data. On the face (sic) of it, it does sound attractive to me that once I to get into a network like Facebook, or Twitter, for example, it would be great to immediately have available all my connections from other networks.

Then again, maybe it won't be so great. I don't know about you, but I keep various aspects (not all aspects) of my life separate. And I like it that way.

What do you think?

[Victoria G. Axelrod]

Bill, a wonderful concern about our profiles and the link to Brad Fitz's social graph solution.
In Jenny's link to the Always on Stanford Summit a panel ( Katz-MySpace,Moskovitz-Facebook,Rosenblatt-Demand Media, Bianchini-Ning,and Jacob-Wallop) lead by Charlene Li, sr. analyst at Forester, addressed some of the issues of Social Networking 3.0.
http://alwayson.goingon.com/page/display/15568?param=session/118
They proposed a single profile which may have a domain name or url, however only the portion of your identity as "gardener", "guitar player", etc. is revealed to a community of interest.
Inside the corporation such a profile would certainly aid the knowledge markeplace in finding the the right talent.
We do have separate identities, although not revealed, they make us who we are.

[RennyBA]

This was a great and very readable post! You see I'm giving a speech bout this subject for a software company's user forum next month and this gave me a lot of good examples. It's late in the evening in Norway now so I have an appointment with Mr. Sandman, but I'll get back and read more carefully.

Wishing you a great end to your week:-)

[Edward]

Thanks Jenny for the 20 year perspective. My internet history goes back the same number of years (first post in 1985) and I think you've captured a lot of the essential parts of how things have been transformed.

Unlike you I do know a bunch of the people involved in day to day network and systems operations - a piece of my legacy working in the 1990s in network and systems administration. It's really remarkable now that you can bootstrap a 100 person organization now with no code and no cash outlay (as long as you are will to tolerate a few advertisements sprinkled throughout).

[Michael Clarke]

Hi Jenny - I've also been following the posts by Brad Fitz and many others on this area. Increasingly Facebook and its ilk are starting to feel like AOL - our way or the highway. Now with AOL, effective search and more usable websites undermined their market dominance. With Facebook, the requirements are a little steeper - not better social networking but the necessary social underpinnings for a social web.

[Jenny Ambrozek]

Indeed. Agree industry experience has already shown how building connections between site members is a key to making the business sustain. I believe AOL benefitted from people who paid to keep their AOL email addresses way beyond using AOL walled content and sometimes the addresses themselves. It's no secret AOL was aggressive on recurring monthly payments via credit card. However, I'm also seeing that with growing experience online people are becoming savvier about reliance on any particular platform. There's been such a rapid roll out of interesting new applications that there's an expectation maybe another new more highly functioned and usable tool is just around the corner so let me not get too committed. Wonder if you're seeing this phenomenom?