ubiquity vs. applicability

there's this idea i've been developing for the last decade about "ubiquitous" services on the internet, and i finally realized it might be worth posting about. if you talked to me about PKI (public key infrastructure) in the last decade, the last thing i always say about them is a warning: the sum of ubiquity and trustworthiness is a constant.

that is, you could probably build a PKI system that is ubiquitous, including a CA that anyone could use to as a relying party and anyone could request a certificate from. but in doing so you would need to weaken the certification practice policies to such a degree that it would be laughably easy for a "bad guy" to acquire a fraudulent certificate.

in this instance, ubiquity was in conflict with trust and security. if you're depending on a certificate to positively identify the end entity who presents it, and there's little trust in the verity of that identity, then you really haven't bought anything.

this is one of the contributing factors, IMHO, to the downfall of PKI. PKI vendors went out of their way to find new and "innovative" ways to use their products. like any product company, they were trying to maximize their revenue by increasing sales.

in retrospect, i think there are few who would argue that PKI wasn't oversold. fortunately we live in kind of a post-PKI-hype world. overhyping PKI is an easy way to be shown the door in most enterprises.

we live in a world now where social media is the current, ubiquitous craze: facebook, twitter, linkedIn, buzz! it's the latest fascination amongst internet users; and for good reason, it's fun.

don't get me wrong, i love my twitter.

but... i think a number of us are repeating our expectations for ubiquitous applicability. go read leo laporte's recent blog post about buzz: "buzz kill." i'll wait.

okay, you're back? great! have a cookie!

leo seems to be saying that social media is a crock because the way he used it was not effective. from the sound of it, he got in the habit of "shouting into the echo chamber," but never listening for cogent replies.

and that's okay. leo laporte is one of these guys that everyone likes to listen too. he's got the ubiquity knob dialed over waaaay high and his social media following is massive. his online social graph is so huge, there's no way he has the time to read, much less process, the buzz stream from that community.

and i think that's why the effect was unsatisfactory. social media tools like twitter and buzz CAN be used to supplement broadcast-only media like blogs and podcasts and so forth. but once your community grows past a certain point, you really hit the wall of diminishing returns.

to the degree that social media tools are supposed to do anything other than make lots of money for their creators, they're about facilitating a back and forth conversation.

and this is what leo wasn't doing. and in my humble opinion, that was sort of like expecting to frame a house while holding your hammer by the head. tools work best when we use them for what they're good at. by having tens of thousands of buzz followers, i assert that leo was misusing his social media tools.

or rather, he was using them sub-optimally. the sum of applicability and ubiquity is a constant, and leo's buzz feed was oh so ubiquitous. it's no surprise it had little utility.