Bionic Systems: Amplify Participation

A small boom of terrific social applications has appeared in the last few years (and there are more are on the way). I find social applications very interesting because they bring personality to a web service. Compared to completely automated systems, social applications reflect the appealing human qualities of passion, perspective and nuance. These attributes can give social applications have a real leg up on completely automated systems.

However, the web community will have a tough time supporting the large entries of social applications. There is simply not enough participants/participation (or attention) to go around. New services that are essentially empty applications that require participants to add content and value will have a harder and harder time. We should expect to see a handful of such services dominate eBay style (where the network effect works its awesome magic). But unless these services can create lock-in the way eBay did with its feedback score, we have seen the fickleness of the crowds also abandon services just as quickly.

So many social applications will have to introduce methods that allow it to exist and thrive with less and less participation. Perhaps this is focusing on narrower niches, using only automation, or using a bionic system.

What is a bionic system?

Bionics is the study of living systems with the intention of applying their principles to the design of engineering systems. So a bionic system would be an “engineering” system that has the principles of living systems. Some examples of bionic systems:

recommendation systems through collaborative filtering, which have been around for years, take the personal preferences of many individuals in a group and use them to find new recommendations to the single individual,
link analysis systems (such as Google’s PageRank, Memeorandum, and Technorati) takes the link information on web pages to uncover relevant or popular content,
photo-recognition systems, such as Riya, which has machines that takes a few human identifications of a face and then uses that information to identify many others. In an interesting bionic system that goes the other way, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has used humans to tell computers where stores are located in a photo (computers can do wonders with just a little bit of a repeating pattern, but if there is no pattern; it falls apart).
sentiment analysis: at Biz360 (where I am founder and Chairman), we built a Point-of-View Sentiment engine where we automatically rated news stories and blogs stories as positive, neutral or negative from our client’s point-of-view. Humans rate dozens of articles and the machine learns and rates thousands, even tens of thousands, of articles.
Content filtering and preference: at Boxxet (where I am founder and CEO), we are working to employ a bionic system to capture a small number of ratings and submissions and amplify it to sort and filter the best content on many subjects, even subjects that may have only a very small community.

In all these cases, the impact of human participation is significantly amplified by the machine. There are downsides to bionic systems; errors can be amplified and machines can make head-scratching decisions (we have all laughed at off-base recommendations). But the upsides are clear: the passion, perspective, nuance and wisdoms of crowds, even a small crowd, is captured and used far beyond the individual contribution. Bionic systems also help cushion the downside of fickleness, fluctuation and distractionâ€”other qualities of the crowd. These benefits will help social applications extend its usefulness and longevity.

Note: I will be talking more about bionic systems Wed, March 8 at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. See you there. Also expect to see deeper thoughts on bionic systems in the upcoming weeks and months.Â

8 Comments so far

When we spoke, You Mon, you referenced the 70s TV show, the Six Million Dollar Man, which had a somewhat different slant on “bionics.” It was the integration of biological and mechanical to create an enhanced system that is more powerful than either alone.

Tim: well stated: a bionic system as a combined system of biological and mechanical is stronger than either system alone.

In the Six Million Dollar Man, Steve Austin was capable of physical feats far exceeding a man yet had the passion and compassion that a machine or robot would not.

I found this to be a great analogy for how today’s technology needs to evolve.

In this particular post, I was trying to be specific with my use of bionics as applied to social software systems. I believe that bionics can help the machine make best use of the participation that a social software system can get. And I am worried there are too many apps asking too much.

The participation success of a Wikipedia or digg is hard to reproduce so most software applications will have to find another way. I believe the tremendous leverage that a bionic system can provide is one such way.

[...] A great deal of Web 2.0’s hype, or the justification of its promise, is rooted in the fact that social application’s are engineered specifically to unleash the network effect. There’s a new social application being launched ever day now it seems. But You Mon Tsang, founder of Boxxet, makes a fantastic point in this post about bionic systems: with attention increasingly scarce, the web community simply will not support a large number of social – there isn’t enough participation to go around. His words: …the web community will have a tough time supporting the large entries of social applications. There is simply not enough participants/participation (or attention) to go around. New services that are essentially empty applications that require participants to add content and value will have a harder and harder time. We should expect to see a handful of such services dominate eBay style (where the network effect works its awesome magic). But unless these services can create lock-in the way eBay did with its feedback score, we have seen the fickleness of the crowds also abandon services just as quickly. [...]

For all the talk of “attention scarcity”, it’s ironic that so many of the app’s dujour rely so heavily on attention in the form of participation – and it’s surprising that more people are not talking about this. Does the system “amplify participation” needs to be the question asked by anyone attempting to determine who will be left standing when all this Web 2.0 business shakes out.

You make a great point, and I cant wait to see boxxet in action.

[...] Well, sure, they are. But how many sites or services can do this – how many can create the critical mass required to build value in the service? Probably quite a few, but as competition for user participation increases, it will become harder and harder for startups to rely on the "new wisdom of the web" as their business proposition. Unless they head the advice of You Mon Tsang of boxxet and build intelligence into your services use of participation that immediately amplifies its value. If that makes zero sense to you, read about bionic systems As the title of my blog suggests, I don’t see much very new in the "new wisdom" that everyone is now tauting as revolutionary. It’s simply an understanding of how to leverage the network effect that has always been baked right into the web. Newsweek continues to push a misconception that somehow all of this is now possible because of some mysterious "improvement" of the Web: This rebooting owes everything to the enhanced power and pervasiveness of the Web, which has finally matured to the point where it can fulfill some of the outlandish promises that we heard in the ’90s. The pervasiveness has increased, for sure, but the power of the web, fundamentally, hasn’t changed. Service providers are just now starting to really bake the power of the network into their services. I know, I know, bandwidth boom, wireless access, yadda yadda. But the real fact is that the successes now being realized by embracing the Cluetrain concepts (which I still think are the real definers of Web 2.0 thinking) are helped abit by faster download speeds and a bit more ubiquity in access, but those things simply help the services – they haven’t made this "new wisdom" possible, and web 2.0 does not, as Newseek suggests "owe everything" to this mysterious new "power". [...]

As one of the first softwarephysicists, I started doing bionic programming in 1985. For some historical perspective, take a look at:

http://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/2006/07/softwarephysics.html

[...] can also be used by bad guys to send more spam, pose as humans, etc. • Use Wikipedia to teach computers to understand terms and connections between [...]

[...] can also be used by bad guys to send more spam, pose as humans, etc. â€¢ Use Wikipedia to teach computers to understand terms and connections between [...]

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