Technology Platforms Emerge from Information Floods

The arrival of a new technology brings with it a rising tide of benefits. These picks and shovels create step functions of platforms that enable new innovations:

• Google indexed the vast majority of information on the internet so that it is always easily accessible.
• Facebook organized the people we know in a graph that enables a new level of interpersonal interaction.
• Twitter enables a new delivery mechanism of information in real-time and on a mass scale.
• Amazon Web Services commoditized access to scalable tech infrastructure that enabled a whole generation of internet businesses.

Applications are built on top of these platforms with decreasing marginal innovation, until a new disruptive platform arrives and creates a new innovation curve.

However, there is always a concern that new technologies create more harm than good. For example, the “Slow Web” Movement is a reaction to the claim that the flood of information inundates us with transient, fleeting, and ultimately meaningless information.

This concern has parallels with the rise of the alphabet and writing, that we would become so reliant on this sudden new availability of information that we would ultimately lose the ability to remember things.

Plato, on writing:

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory… You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.

This sounds to me a lot like the criticism that we’re no longer “smart” anymore because we can Google everything.

We are dealing with a flood of information both on the creation and consumption standpoint. From a 40,000 foot perspective, writing created a flood of information from the creation side, as a medium for documenting information, and digitalization + the internet created a flood of information from the consumption side as a medium for the distribution of that information.

Because we now have unparalleled 1) access, 2) portability, and 3) persistence of data, I think the next level of innovation is being built on the parsing of that flood of information - what are the different ways you can slice and dice that information to be more valuable? This could be what people call “big data,” but I believe this is actually a higher level macro trend of how we organize the information to be more useful to us. This could be:

• size/selection-based: what are ways we can organize and segment the people we are connected to by limiting the number of people to a carefully selected group of people? (Twitter, Facebook (broadcast) vs. Path, App.net, Diaspora (narrowcast))
• vertical interest based: what are ways that we can organize based on our interests? (Pinterest, Fancy, Houzz, etc.)
• time-based: what are ways we can affect the delivery time of information (synchronous vs. asynchronous) as well as the duration of information availability? (SMS, Snapchat, etc.)
• context-based: what is going on at a certain point in time? examples are mobile and quantified self (Foursquare, Nike FuelBand, Jawbone Up, Fitbit, etc.)
• digitizing analog data (“smart dust”): how can we capture all the data thrown off by the world around us? where does the digital world intrude the analog world? (FuelBand, Up, FitBit, Hue Lightbulb, Nest, Sonos, mobile payments, etc.)

Where I’m looking for the next big disruption is in the emergence of new information floods, and the opportunity is in the parsing and application of that new data in interesting ways.

I believe that these new ways of parsing the flood of information will become the new platforms on which we understand the information available to us, and that will enable us to do things that we can’t yet imagine today.