Author: Thaddeus Preston (Nick Waye)

Lately I’ve been looking at financial markets trying to see how deep the rabbit hole goes when it comes to where the current crisis began. All roads seem to point back to the Derivatives markets and the quants that ruined them. These markets are filled with all types of financial wizardry and chainarey that would make the Mortgage Back Security crisis seem ethical. Derivative derive (sorry) their notional value from an underlying entity, usually a stock, bond or commodity. But the current market can include such exotic methods as shorting, Hedging, swapping fixed for floating interest rates, bets on defaults of companies and even institutions. The market for these have grown so much over the last 25 years that the BIS (Bank for International Settlements) estimates notional values of OTC (Over-the-Counter) and exchange traded derivatives at some where between $684 to $1,028 Trillion dollars. Thats $1,028,000,000,000,000.01!!!!  Keep in mind that World GDP is only $61.1 Trillion dollars. Where the hell is the rest of that $967 Trillion in notional value come from? Well the key word is ‘notional value‘ where on any financial instrument there is the nominal or face amount used to calculate payments made on that instrument. This ‘notional value’ will never trade hands nor can it.  So in essence it’s NOTHING, but these instruments can cause great harm as most of the Globe can currently attest to.  Now you may be thinking I will go into the typical rant about evil bankers, financiers and rampant deregulation are the cause and that these ‘weapons of mass financial destruction‘ must be outlawed.  You should know me better than that.  First, while these instruments did get out of hand and should be more regulated (and they are with requirements for trading on regulated exchanges) they are necessary evils like wars, taxes and abortions.  Finally, there must be an arbitrage opportunity in this now that most of these things will be trading on regulated exchanges. I mean how do you dip your toes into a $1,028,000,000,000,000.01 ocean of wealth that is literally worth nothing?  Just .00001% of that market is more money than I’ll ever need.  Who with me? I am starting a algorithmic trading platform to take advantage of this. Any takers? Most importantly, any programmers? jk.

First thing first, the proposed Islamic Center in Lower-Manhattan is not at Ground-Zero, its several blocks away. That still doesn’t quell the anger that some see as a provocation on the part of Islamic radicals. This is over heated rhetoric at best and I feel is a big distraction from the true problems we face domestically. Where the hell did this controversy come from anyway? I assume this has been on the drawing board for years where it could have been halted. The real anger at the proposed Islamic Center in Lower-Manhattan (Mosque if you want to be inflammatory) is the fact that nearly a decade later this structure will go up and be open for business before the World Trade Center and subsequent memorial is ever decided on. Like it or not Islam is blamed (at least in this country) for the murder perpetrated on that date so it’s a little insensitive and down right confrontational to build the Islamic Center in Lower-Manhattan there of all places. There I said it so flame me. It’s rubbing salt in a raw wound to put it there (of all places) while the nearly 7-story holes remain from where the original WTC stood. But we have become too sensitive culture as is and that stands as one of the reasons nothing has been build there to date. Look at the things that have been built around the world this pass decade since 9/11 (see below). The Burj Khalifa in Dubai; the International Commerce Center in Hong Kong and Palm Jumeirah off the coast of Dubai(a freaking man-made island shaped like a desert palm). The sad fact is we (USA) used to build stuff like this. What happen? This is just a guess, but if we had at least started construction on the edifice of the WTC this ‘Mosque at Ground-Zero’ issue would not be one. Time to stop morbidly honoring the dead while feeling sorry for ourselves and build the goddamn towers.

Stuff Built Since 9/11

1. Burj Khalifa, Dubai United Arab Emirates
Began in 2004
Completed in 2010

2. International Commerce Center, Hong Kong HK China
Began in 2002
Completed in 2010

3. Palm Jumeirah, Dubai
Began in 2001
Partially completed 2008 (28 Hotels and resorts already occupy the island)

Diaspora

Some college kids out of NYU who rallied a movement for a more privacy-aware, federated social web to the tune of more than $200,000 in Kickstarter funding. Code drop is expected on September 15.

http://www.joindiaspora.com/

One Social Web

Was doing Open Social until the project was scuttled by Vodafone in July.

Appleseed Social Network

I’ve just heard of this one but from what I gather it is a Mozillia drumbeat project started by contributor Michael Chisari. Sounds promising, but I don’t know how much work is being done on it now.

Does anyone else out there know of any other projects moving us toward the social web we need?

Here is a diagram of the social web we need. Starting with a blog (or something similar) as the center of our universe.

There is a coming battle in social (I know some of you are tired of the war analogies) a it is centered around federation. Leo Laporte blog rant was right on many fronts. Social media in the micro-blogging space can be ephemeral if not often times specious. The web and the connections you have establish with it is the next web. “me” should be the center of this.  “me” as an entity in a mesh ER model map that is the science of modern social graphs. Your interactions should be a stream of record to be parsed for you by those very interactions in the graph. The social web we need is a n-dimensional space of your data, your dataspace. This should not be trapped in the silos of Facebook, Buzz, etc. These networks that are the defacto home of your interactions with the web should flow to you, not to them. This concept of dataspaces is something I have studied for nearly 2 years when I first read a paper on the concept. We have loosely couple pieces of ourselves everywhere around the web. Most of us have been doing social, web apps and services for years. Where is that stuff?  Sites/destinations go away and often times with it your data. I am using a very broad definition of “data” .  Any comment you’ve created or metadata expressing your approval for something can be defined as data.  We must claim this and I believe blogs are one the keys.

The technologies depicted in the very rough illustration are part of a growing movement for a more federated social web. This new federated web will rely on Open Social for interconnections as well as Activity Streams to capture and distribute activities like photo sharing, comments, blog post, location information, video, audio and sharing approval with our social graph based on social network aggregation information.  Protocols such as PubSubHubbub or XMPP would speed syndication to those in your open social graph. Salmon protocol is needed to capture/collect comments on activities on your blog or profile page that are scattered by the syndication mechanisms of  XMPP, ATOM and PubSubHubbub. It should not matter what platform you use, Tumblr, WordPress, Posterous and Blogger it all flows to you from everywhere your content syndicates to.  And it doesn’t have to be confined to the social forms of communications and could include emails, chat sessions and SMS. These places or dataspaces could be more lively with the power of the  wave protocol that powered the now defunct Google Wave.

Now these are not new concepts. Diaspora received $200,000 big ones to attempt this and with a code drop slated for 15 Sept. I am curious and hopefully to see what the community does with this. What would be new is a seamless aggregation of these Web 2.0 building blocks to make this possible. I propose a more Blog centric approach to this that would call on the major blogging platforms that host or allow self-hosting to encourage and contribute to this endeavor.  But this doesn’t need to be confined to the Blogging platforms that exist. There are many broadcast avenues that could start implementation, Twitter comes to mind as the most minimalist player that could start experimenting  Activity Streams with XMPP syndication and Salomon protocol for track-back capability on comments (tweets).  However, these are ultimately just the tools of the trade (so to speak) that will complement that dataspace concept not silo it.  Looking at the current state of Social the problem is clear (at least to me), there is too much fragmentation of “you” across services and no universal dashboard to control your identity, your ‘data’ and most importantly your privacy. Our identity needs a place that can be the space of record for us and we, through virtue of authentication, allow other players into our space to advertise and sell to us.  In payment for this privilege we are offered services while our contributions (our data)  is offered as another form of currency for the service. Our data becomes on par to our money. Data is or will soon be currency. Heady stuff but I basis for how we should look at social networks going forward.

Well that was my one part proposal, one part brainstorm. What do ya think.