Tuesday, November 25, 2003

A third morality?. crw from #joiito pointed me to Chris Phoenix's extension to three of Jane Jacob's two moralities: According to Jane Jacobs, the Commercial and Guardian systems each have developed a distinct and identifiable set of ethics. You will be able to identify these ethics in governments, police departments, and a variety of commercial organizations. The Information ethics, and this table, are a synthesis of the work of several authors. If you are not familiar with any organizations that operate by creating information and then giving it away, think of your friends who are avid hobbyists - chances are that they have written articles or put up web sites without being paid. Information - Spread Innovation Commercial - Improve the Status Quo Guardian - Maintain the Status Quo Imagine a programmer working at 2 AM to add a feature to an Open Source program he didn't write. The programmer is not paid for this work; he does it because he wants the program to be more usable and more popular; he has been working for ten hours without a break.  At 2:30 AM he adds his name to the list of authors, uploads the improved program to a web site for free distribution, then spends the next hour reading free articles on-line. Imagine a small neighborhood shop. The employees should be ready to do business with anyone who walks in, and must maintain a reputation of honesty with both suppliers and customers. The store must continually improve, or the other stores will lure away its customers. A small business owner does not have a lot of free time and must work efficiently. Imagine a fortress guarding a frontier. The soldiers must always be prepared to fight, but most of the time they are training or relaxing. Strict discipline is necessary to make them a unified fighting force. One traitor, or paid spy, can get them all killed. Visiting merchants are a distraction and a security problem; too much money floating around can weaken their dedication to the task. Shun force Shun force [Rely on force] Shun trading [Rely on trading] Shun trading Use intelligence  Use initiative and enterprise Exert prowess Publish all information Be honest Deceive for the sake of the task  Be idealistic Be optimistic Be fatalistic Ignore comfort Promote comfort and convenience Make rich use of leisure Respect authorship; Ignore ownership Respect contracts [Defend your territory] Demonstrate the superiority of your own ideal Dissent for the sake of the task Be obedient and disciplined Invent and create Be open to inventiveness and novelty Adhere to tradition Shun authority [Adapt to the system] Respect hierarchy Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens Be exclusive Accept largesse Be thrifty Dispense largesse Be unique; Develop a reputation Be industrious Be ostentatious Be productive Invest for productive purposes Take vengeance Cooperate Compete [Fight, when necessary] Be skillful Be efficient Be loyal Gain mindshare Come to voluntary agreements  Show fortitude Treasure reputation [Treasure financial success]  Treasure honor [Epeus' epigone] 2:42:07 PM     Caught this blog entry on LinkedIn!  Still growing! ================================= 200 Of Reid Hoffman's Closest Friends. Tonight was yet another sold out social networking event -- it was IBD Network's Under The Radar. The CEOs of LinkedIn, Spoke, ZeroDegrees and VisiblePath all presented their businesses. Esther Dyson of Release 1.0, Pradeep Tagare from Intel Capital and I were on a panel to discuss their respective business models. Based upon what I heard this evening, here is how I would sum up the different companies' business models. LinkedIn -- subscription (eventually) service to input and manage one's own contacts to search for connections. Spoke -- deeply integrated enterprise solution extracting contact data from enterprise applications (e.g. Outlook, Notes, etc.) to establish and leverage connections. ZeroDegrees -- Outlook plugin and related service to input, manage, prioritize and search connections. VisiblePath -- social networking software engine for prioritizing and understanding connections for integration into traditional enterprise software applications (SFA, CRM, etc.). If you're thinking that they all sound pretty similar, I'm with you. These companies have way more in common than not. After the companies presented, the panel and audience voted on what they believed was the most interesting business. The audience preferred the model described by Ben Smith of Spoke, while the panel collectively preferred the business described by Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn. Interestingly, both Spoke and LinkedIn announced at the event that they had recently come to terms on financings -- Spoke wouldn't yet say from whom they were raising money, LinkedIn announced that it will be funded by Sequoia -- whereas ZeroDegrees and VisiblePath remain angel funded. One thing that did surprise me tonight was the percentage of the audience who were users of LinkedIn. By show of hands, the LinkedIn members outnumbered the Friendster members by over 2 to 1. It looked like two-thirds or more of the audience had signed up to LinkedIn. Those are pretty surprising numbers. Of course I don't think there is another audience in the country that could replicate those statistics, but it tells you that the Bay Area entrepreneur community has bought into social networking on some level (either that or Reid had packed the audience with a couple hundred of his closest friends). It will be interesting to see how that scales beyond the Bay Area. [VentureBlog] 2:33:03 PM

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