(Ed. note:  This is Part I of a series of posts I plan to do on Google+ and its potential long term future.)

In September 2008, I posted "Future of the PBS," in which I speculated as follows:

If I'm watching the National Convention live on the Public Broadcasting Service and I turn to my friend and make a comment in response to something David Brooks just said, will my two cents one day go (to the extent I want them to go) where they *want* to go along the "social graph" and (to the extent that you might want them to) pop up on your live viewstream?  Are my interjections worth your hearing?  Are you my friend?  My follower?  Perhaps you want to speak for yourself?  The future of television's talking heads is surely some as yet unimagined version of bloggingheads.  I mean, just how many talking heads are out there anyway?  And who will do the editing, annotating, vetting, fact-checking, routing, and re-routing of all that content?  Are you particularly interested in what Chris Matthews has to say to Keith Olbermann about that last speech, or is that just what's on your screen, your radar?  Maybe you're more interested in what Sean Hannity had to say to that guy who used to be on Inside Edition?  Or perhaps you'd rather hear what that professor who inspired you in college might have had to say?  What about the sharpest and best presented analysis available from the sharpest minds available based on a forever more granular understanding of each mind's domain expertise?  The future of television is not television because (1) the web can and will do video and audio much better in the long run, (2) the future of advertising is not push, but  pull, and (3) the future of ensuring the compensation of (co-)creators is not copyright.  Can you guess who will do the pulling?

As a hybrid "social network" that utilizes both Facebook's bilateral "friend" model and Twitter's unilateral "follow" model, Google+ is the closest thing yet to the "Public Broadcasting Service" of the future I envisioned in the post.

I will try to unpack what I mean by this, but first I need to engage in a bit more conclusory bullet-point speculative futurism in order to give you a better frame of reference.

1.  If +Drummond Reed is right about this:

[Update 9.2.11:  Google Chairman +Eric Schmidt at #df11

]

2.  Then maybe one day Google might:

• "own" the Graph (there's only one) by getting everyone on the same Platform, inventing the federated PDS system, and offering the best in class PDS.  By "owning" the Interest Graph, Social Graph, Question-Answer-Advertisement-Performance Graph, and Location Graph (see Slide 12 here) -- as well as most all Enterprise Clouds -- Google could become the "meta-firm" and theoretically establish dynamic, reliable, accurate, fair, trusted, and trustworthy domain-specific "klout" scores for all vendors and people ("PeopleRank") in all knowledge domains/topics, as well as for all Quora 2.0 & Hangouts 2.0 disputation arena participants (read: academics, public intellectuals, netizens, and wonks of all stripes), all students, and (are you listening +Reid Hoffman?) all job-seekers and taskrabbits/elancers;

• turn media into the global "conversation"; think self-generating Circles with a million different views, a million different focuses into your HD Kinect-tech-enabled GoogleTV and voice-controlled Google tablet; context-aware, personalized, live, real time, and right time

• "pay" peer producers and content creators in proportion to Platform performance for each user; "pay" them with both $$ and "klout" as appropriate given the context; this perpetually lowers search costs, org costs, and transaction costs for all p2p, v2p, & w2v interactions

• solve email; with everyone on the same Platform, the messages you need and want to see in any given context are the messages you are most likely to see in that context; G+ (the PDS provider) *knows* the relevant graphs of both sender and receiver; the federated PDS system could also facilitate anonymous & pseudonymous (vis a vis everyone except PDS) interactions whenever desired and lawful

• merge VRM + CRM + HR on one Platform, creating a forever more efficient marketplace with forever more perfect market information available to all consumers, firms, investors, netizens, and workers on a forever more equal basis; a wikipedia for data, open gov for all citizens; knowledge workers take their professional reputation scores with them when they change jobs or start new firms/partnerships;

 • make education free and available to all; Khan Academy 2.0; "klout" & $$ to the contributors/teachers in proportion to real world learning metrics of students (education is lifetime endeavor);

• invent the 21st century middle class (+Richard Florida's "creative class"; +Daniel Pink's "free agent nation"; +Venkat Rao's "Coasean growth"); living wages for workers online and on grid along Zittrain's Pyramid; and don't forget micro-credit 2.0 on a network of distributed trust

• minimize org costs for entrepreneurial "app" creators; facilitate a true plug & play & earn "app" economy; quickly forming and dissolving project-specific partnerships from Benkler's Dream to Calacanis's Wallet; peer producers and developers paid out ($$ and "klout") in proportion to "app" popularity, use, and performance

• shepherd us through a fruitful globalization (Slide 207 here); science, innovation, and insights without borders and on steroids, with checks on existential threats, checks on governments, checks on corporations (Slide 172 here; XBRL), and checks on Google itself built into the Platform; a hyper efficient global marketplace of ideas, 24/7, less and less wrong; a true deliberative democracy and representative Republic; all running on one Platform with privacy & due process by design

• #coaseangrowth is my current shorthand for all this.  I am still very much in the "thinking out loud" stage.  Thinking out loud:  What comes after consumer capitalism?  Prosumer capitalism: a knowledge, media, and perspective economy made possible with digital plumbing designed and executed by ?ONE FIRM?

(That's all I have for now.  I will try to go into more detail on this in Part II.  Circle me on Google+ to discuss this idea.)

But Mr. Moglen . . . 

A compromise position for open societies (#CoaseanGrowth)?

Except +1 thing . . . 

(@CassSunstein:  but who decides decent conditions?)

Foundational elements . . .

For massive innovation:

Everyone is now a participant . . .

(and we mean everyone)

In some combination of  . . . 

Peer to Peer Production.

I hope the rumors that this man will be the next Secretary of Commerce of the United States of America are true because he understands as much as anyone where capitalism is going, and where it needs to go:

Venessa Miemis and team are kickstarting what looks to be a great series on the long term future of Facebook:

Watching the video, I tend to think that Doc Searls is right:  the Future of Facebook is not Facebook, but (very VRooMy) Personal Data Stores (PDS), clever ways of connecting them, a Networked Public Sphere, and perpetual global Disputation Arenas.  

It will be David Siegel's vision meets Nicholas Negroponte's vision meets Craig Newmark's vision meets David Gelernter's vision.  And we'll have reputation scores, game mechanics, and "centripetal focus" to burst the filter bubbles.  

Don't believe me?  Take a look at this infographic from WSJ:

Do you want a privately owned corporation, or a publicly traded, shareholder-driven corporation, to be the primary identity broker for the web?

Honestly, I'm not sure the Platform actually gets built any other way.  

Who else could possibly assemble the expertise to build out the alternative "Open Graph" Platform?  

Who else could make it cool enough to convince a billion+ people to sign up?

If nearly everything I make and do online and in the world funnels into my PDS, I could choose to provide a subset of my data to any third party on terms that I set. For example, I could choose to give Yelp a substream consisting of my restaurant experiences and evaluations.  I could provide this information at whatever level of granularity (pseudonymity or anonymity) I choose--from actual log data about the items I've ordered and wait times, to reviews I've written or "cinch casts" I've recorded about my experiences.  Yelp would be free to use this information to provide its services to all of its users, but it would have to use my data under the terms I set through my PDS provider.  This may include "interest" payments on my data measured by the value (advertising revenue, pay-per-action, purchases) that my data has directly produced.

What emerges under this scenario is many vertical service providers and a federated PDS system comprising a single Platform.  Vendors compete with one another to provide services and apps that operate (and seamlessly interoperate) on the Platform. Users are in control of their data and decide the terms under which they will share their data with any given service provider.  

Measurements of reputation, domain expertise, and accreditation--derived from user data and verified user activity streams disclosed to the PDS--are among the many value-add services users have the option of participating in.  Your PDS, or personal cloud, could also, at the employer and employee's discretion, link up with an enterprise cloud, making professional reputation (derived from professional activity streams) a more portable commodity.  

"Filter bubbles" can be popped because the personalized "NewsFeed" providers can measure the extent to which a user legitimately engages in alternative viewpoints.  Where the PDS allows a robust, dynamic interest graph to form for each user, discovering new interests and introduction to new concepts can be built in. Challenging a user's viewpoints--providing the opportunity for that challenge to take place--can be built in.  

The Live Web (Hangouts 2.0) can emerge in the form of public disputation arenas in which PDS-backed individuals engage in structured, data-driven and algorithmically-enhanced discussion of the issues of the day.  Individuals could accumulate reputation and accreditation in the process.  Disputation arenas could:

• organize, classify, and distribute knowledge across the graph of PDSes such that competing memes come into constant "awareness" of one another
• link those who would speak to those who would hear, facilitating real-time engagement and interaction
• measure the degree of engagement with legitimate criticism and counterpoints that each user undertakes
• attempt algorithmic determination of the reliability of sources and authority of a user in any given domain

In an attention and intention economy, on a Platform that is forever more difficult to game, service providers can pay (with money, reputation scores, or special offers) PDS-backed peer producers in proportion to each user's contribution to the Platform's performance for all other users.

Where every product has a digital birth certificate, and view streams and purchase streams are (always upon informed consent) tracked by the PDS, it becomes possible to more directly compensate people for the role they are playing as filters and distributors of content, as well as for their role in influencing conversions, pay-per-actions, and purchases.  

All content creators - from amateurs to big budget movie makers and "TV show" producers - will compete for attention on the open Platform, sharing advertiser or "flattr" (Emancipay) revenue  (ad-free subscription model) in proportion to the attention they legitimately garner.

These ideas can be extended to independent, "open source" developers because developers are prosumers too.  If a developer contributes code to make the Platform work better, that contribution can be tracked, and that developer can be awarded (in money or reputation as appropriate) in proportion to his or her actual contribution to Platform performance.  

If you create a new app or service, a blog post or a tweet, release it onto the Platform.  To the extent your contribution gains attention and use, you get paid or credited.  If you want to charge people to use your app or service, set your price.  To the extent you want to use PDS-backed users' data and peer production in your service, you have to offer terms of use they will agree to.  

Reciprocal transparency is the winning strategy on this Platform.  The more you give, the more you get. The incentives--economic and social--favor sharing and disclosure.  Where they can convince users of the value proposition of sharing their data, entrepreneurial service/app/feature providers can plug into an avalanche of structured user data to help them provide those services.  

The Platform is the distribution channel.  Users are the routers. You build your brand by building your product, your semantic activity streams, and your API. Moreover, with verified names, verified activity streams, trusted identities, and known entities, perpetration of fraud becomes increasingly difficult.

Ultimately, the Platform could be leveraged to provide real-time, context-aware intelligent agents for all users.  The Platform leverages and seamlessly integrates a spectrum of services in the context of a single user interface, bringing to bear trillions of data points from millions or billions of PDSes.  Like W. Daniel HIllis' Knowledge Web, it is the peer producers and vertical vendors--not a single company or enterprise--who contribute the knowledge and code that allows the agent to intelligently interact and meet the needs of all participants.

I'm working on a paper about how reputation scores and centripetal focus may be able to burst the "filter bubble" described by Eli Pariser above and Cass Sunstein here.  I'll update this post when I get further along in my research.  In the meantime, if you know of any good resources on this issue, please contact me or leave links in the comments.

UPDATE 1:  Contrary to what Pariser argues, I think that as personalization and filter services get better and more efficient, they will in fact become more likely to expose us to legitimate competing viewpoints and new topics. As they get better, they converge on quality.

There are also considerations Pariser does not take into account, including: (1) The Sidewiki Model; (2) Quora as Disputation Arena; (3) "I'm not trying to pass judgment, I'm just trying to say . . ." (scoring algorithm); and (4) the immune system for democracy.

Authenticating brothers and sisters:

As they walk down the street:

The hay helps them look:

Kynetx and Personal Data Services from Phil Windley on Vimeo.

Personal Data Locker Vision from dsiegel on Vimeo.

   = a pathway to global civil society's collective desired future state?

[stay tuned]