Is it possible that I’m thinking about the same stuff this morning as Fred Wilson and Jeff Pulver?  Fred just put up a post titled The Biggest Social Graphs and Jeff just posted Social Media is changing the Face of Communications. 

Well – ok – yeah.  We’re getting together tomorrow, along with a couple of other friends including Matt Blumberg and Tom Evslin to talk about this stuff.

Paraphrasing a recent email from Fred – "Email is Dead, Long Live Email."

I spent seven years at MIT and managed to pick up two degrees before they kicked me out.  I describe the place using the 10/40/50 rule.  10% of the people there are off the chart brilliant and nothing phases them.  40% of the people are extremely smart, figure out the system, and make it through with moderate but not life threatening scars.  50% of the people are extremely smart, but never figure out the system and their experience at MIT is a "daily assault on their self esteem."  Fortunately, I was in the 40%.

In 2004, Frank Gehry’s amazingly designed Stata Center (home of the MIT Computer Science AI Lab) opened to much fanfare.  It’s as fascinating inside as it is outside. Lots of really interesting people have offices there and wandering around in the place is like living inside a Dr. Seuss book (while looking at it is like staring at a Dr. Seuss world.)

The first time I actually saw the building (in the winter of 2004), my first thought was something like "man – this thing is going to be trouble."  I love architecture (I’m an architect in a parallel universe), but I lived in Boston for 12 years and all I could think about was stuff like "so – what happens when the ice falls off the roof and breaks through a window." 

Apparently that question is currently being addressed.  On 10/31/07, MIT sued Frank Gehry (and Skanska USA – the construction firm) claiming negligence and a breach of contractual obligations.  I’m not big on lawsuits, but I loved Joanne Wilson’s post on it titled M.I.T. and Gehry.  If you’ve ever done a big construction project, I’ll bet you can identify with what Joanne said.

At the same time, I also loved John Maeda’s post on it titled Leaks Are To Be Forgiven.  Maeda’s office is in the I.M. Pei designed Media Lab, the "bathtub building" that was built while I was in school there but that has nicely stood the test of time and is now being expanded by via a design from Fumihiko Maki.

It appears Frank Gehry is having his "MIT 50% experience."

I’m completely baffled.  Yesterday, Saul Hansell of the New York Times had an article titled Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network.  Saul’s article is short and punchy, but excruciatingly obvious to anyone that has been playing with email for a while.

The amount of "social network" information contained in a typical email user’s data store is enormous.  Google and Yahoo are sitting on huge amounts of very interesting email data that to date they’ve done nothing with.  According to Saul’s article, this is about to change (with the subtle insinuation that "Facebook should watch out.") 

So what.  Seriously.  The real data lives in the gazillions of Microsoft Exchange servers that are distributed around the world and connected to this magical thing called the Internet.  Don’t think about your inbox (or your Outlook PST file) – think about "the server."  Yeah, I know – many large organizations run multiple Exchange servers – just envision an abstraction layer on top of them and think about each company.com address as a single element.

The amount of "social information" – especially in a business context – is staggering.  In the past there have been a few startups like VisiblePath and Plaxo that looked like they might go after some part of this.  Recently, a new wave has emerged like Xobni and ClearContext.  As far as I can tell, everyone is focused on the client side (Outlook) rather than the server side (Exchange).  This confuses me since the information, distribution, and the leverage (especially with regard to selling stuff) is on the server side.

But the bigger and more mysterious question is "where is Microsoft?"  This is their world and their domain.  Over 15 years they demolished IBM/Lotus (and everyone else) in "email" only to be ready to fumble the next wave of this.  I don’t get it.

We learned from our investment in Postini that large enterprises will let parts of this problem live in the cloud.  Google is quickly expanding on this vision.  I’m haven’t concluded whether this should live in the cloud, or be attached to a server, but I don’t think it matters (e.g. either – or rather – both work). It’s about the data, how you surface it, and what you do with it.

Yes, there are privacy issues, but they should be straightforward to address as long as one is being thoughtful about them.  Plus, that’s part of the fun of it.

I’m looking for entrepreneurs that are working on this problem, especially if they love Exchange servers (my ideal entrepreneur is someone who cuddles up to one in the winter to keep himself warm.)  If you don’t know how to integrate with AD (or think AD is a abbreviated version of ADD), don’t bother emailing me.

Maybe I’m missing it (I often do), but it seems like there is magic in the Exchange data.

My affection for the amazing games from the gang at Harmonix crosses several boundaries, including the well revered financial one.  As an angel investor in Harmonix, I bow down and worship before my entrepreneurial rock gods.

I’ve been waiting patiently anxiously for Harmonix’s new game "Rock Band" (preorder your copy on Amazon: Rock Band – Xbox 360 or Rock Band – PS 3 and help feed this blogger.) 

I’ve seen the Youtube videos and the demo reel.  But the real test was the Boston Globe review which was printed today at Rock Band passes test with real musicians – and amateurs.  They should have hired me to write the headline – it would have been "Rock Band Rocks."

November 20th is almost here.  Amy is going to thank me for that PS 3 I bought recently.  And – no Ross – I still can’t get you a prerelease copy.  You’ll just have to wait.

I’m a small investor in Shelfari.  I read a ton and thought it would be fun to play along with them at home and both a user and an investor.  About a month ago I started noticing increasing chatter about Shelfari spam during the invite process in my RSS search feeds on "Shelfari."  I regularly passed them on to Josh Hug, the CEO of Shelfari.

I hate spam.  I’ve been an investor in two companies that are aimed at making email safer for humanity – Postini and Return Path.  While I’m a small investor in Shelfari, the increasing noise level around Shelfari invite spam bothered me, and I told Josh.

Josh listened, paid attention to the problem in his spare time (37 seconds a day), responded regularly to my emails, and a few weeks ago (within a few days of me increasing my "hey – this is getting worse" messages) promised a fix.

The fix is here and Josh wrote an extensive post titled Invitation design that describes the root causes of the problem and walks through their changes. I just tried it with my Gmail address book and I think the changes likely fix 100% of the issues. Josh’s explanation – both of the UI problem as well as the reasons it wasn’t obvious to Shelfari that it was an issue – is an excellent example of using blogging to communicate what you are doing as a company.

Shelfari wasn’t intentionally spamming (as they were starting to be accused of) – they were just intensely busy and weren’t focused on a problem that emerged as their user base grew geometrically.  By addressing it out in the open, they should earn extra karma credibility points.

The last time I took a Select A Candidate Quiz, I ended up supporting Dennis Kucinch.  I got a note from Ian Manheimer, the founder of Glassbooth.org, who suggested I take his Election 2008 quiz.

I thought his quiz was a little more interesting.  This time around I support Mike Gravel. A little digging informed me that he’s a democrat from Alaska (go figure) who was a Senator from 1969 to 1981.  I also like Joseph Biden and Bill Richardson.

Whatever.

My railing against software patents shouldn’t be new to you, dear reader.  Recently, this tilting at windmills has generated some attention.  Among other things, a new group of interesting people is forming a coalition named End Software Patents.

This group is being spearheaded by several very smart people, including Ben Klemens – a guest scholar at The Brookings Institution.  Ben is also the author of Math You Can’t Use, a fascinating exploration of patents, copyrights, and software that I’ll review in depth at some point.

In the short term, this coalition is looking for examples of innovative and profitable software companies that have been successful without any patent activity of any sort.  While this success doesn’t necessarily correlate with a desire to abolish software patents, we want to better understand real life examples of successful companies that don’t care about software patents.

If you fit this description and are willing to have a discussion, please contact me.

I love blog comments – I think of them as the Dark Matter of the Blogosphere.   I haven’t been able to get an accurate count of the total number of comments floating around – my guess is that there are somewhere between 1 billion and 10 billion.  That’s a lot of comments.

I’ve also talked about The 80-19-1 Rule in the past.  In blogging, the 1% are the bloggers, the 19% are the commenters, and the 80% are the readers.  However, up to this point, the tools for the 19% suck. 

One of the TechStars companies – Intense Debate – worked on a comment replacement system this summer.  They’ve officially launched and are now up on about 1,000 blogs, including Feld Thoughts.  Give it a spin and tell me what you think (in a comment, of course.)

While terrorists couldn’t seem to bring down Jack Bauer, the writer’s strike seems to have nailed him.  Oh well – at least there’s a back to the future version of 24 titled 24: The Unaired 1994 Pilot that demonstrates an excellent use of AOL 3.0.