First of all, thanks for all the great work you’ve done testing the alpha version. So far we received over 200 feedback messages from our alpha users. And while some of you wrote just to say you like the system (thanks!), and some wrote just to say “adsfasdf”, the vast majority of e-mails contained valuable ideas and bug reports.

Please remember, that the fact we haven’t fixed your specific issue yet doesn’t mean we ignored it. We rarely fix bugs one by one our live version. We generally roll many fixes into a single system update. If you reported something three weeks ago, and it’s still not fixed, please don’t worry! There was no major system update since then. The next one should be coming shortly.

And to prove we listen, here’s a quick list of some popular suggestions – and what we’re doing about them.

1) Tags and topics

Some people asked us to allow grouping sources or tagging pages. We definitely agree! We’re working on a great system of topics, that should solve this – and much more. Unfortunately, just like all awesome things, it’s bound to take some time, so I wouldn’t expect it in the next update.

2) Tutorial pop-ups

A minor, but annoying issue. Many testers reported, that on some screens and resolutions the tutorial pop-ups are going off-screen. This, of course, is a bug, not a planned feature. We’re currently working on making tutorial smarter and leaner at the same time.

3) Easy browsing

Several testers wanted to be able to browse freely, or asked us for a dedicated browsing bar. We’ll be addressing this VERY soon. We’re currently integrating a full URL entry bar into our page view pop-up. What it means, is that you’ll be able to browse through StormDriver just like with your regular browser. First implementation of the browsing bar will be quite simple, but bells and whistles, like auto-complete and search, are also on the roadmap.

4) Feed grouping

Again, a popular request. Many of you have noticed duplicates or similar evens occupying a lot of your precious screen real estate. Making all the feeds nicer is one of the highest priority tasks we have now. Let’s just say we really started to appreciate the amount of work Facebook and Google did to make their feeds feel right. Our feeds, unfortunately, are much more complicated, due to real-time and location-based philosophy of the system.

A compete feed re-vamp is currently underway. Once it lands on live serve, both your global and your sources stream should work much smarter, grouping similar events and avoiding duplicates.

5) Various typos

Will do.

6) Incompatible pages

We’re aware there are some pages, that won’t display properly in StormDriver. We also know the system won’t accept some URL’s. Some pages we really like are among those affected, so trust me if I say we’d love to fix that ASAP.

Browsing through StormDriver server is more complicated than it seems, and even though we’ve built one of the most polished proxy back-ends ever, there is still much to be done. We could really use whole a dedicated page compatibility team during the open beta stage, but for now, we have to do with what we have.

We’re trying to implement some general fixes, and we try to work on some specific cases individually. If you have a page you’d like to see working, please send us a message using the feedback form. We’ll prioritize stuff that’s important to our users or popular.

7) Random crashes.

This is bound to happen from time to time. We didn’t call it “alpha” without reason, you know

8 ) Multinational pages showing in UK or IE version

Just like some of our inquisitive testers guessed, StormDriver is currently deployed on a server in Ireland. And yes, that means people from US are greeted with the UK version of Huffington Post. The same goes for IGN and some other location-specific sites. You see, our StormDriver browsing server is seen by most sites as a very hyperactive user, that’s sitting somewhere in Ireland, clicking 100 pages a minute between spis of Guiness. We’re going to tackle the problem from both sides – we want to improve the way StormDriver handles region-specific sites, and we’re also going to deploy in more geographical locations once the system grows enough.

9) But what about MY bug?

Again, if you’re issue is not on this list, it doesn’t mean we ignore it. It would be hard to contain everything we got from those 200 e-mails in a single article, but you can be sure we read everything and we talked through every single piece of feedback.

The next steps

As you can see, there are lots and lots of issues to fix. But we’re not only doing bug fixing at the moment. In fact, bug fixes are not even our top priority. What we want first, is to nail down basics, to make StormDriver simple, fun, addictive and easy to learn.We need a great proof of concept.

Currently, our top priority is to simplify the system. That was what a lot of users have asked for, and that’s what a lot of VC’s and experts suggested. We even found a great way to do this – we’ll just… add a brand new functionality. No worries though, it will replace two existing ones, so in the end the system should become leaner and easier to learn. We’re really proud of this solution, and we hope you’ll like it too.

We’re going to reveal this functionality soon, so watch this space!

But the mystery functionality is not the only thing we’re planning to surprise you with. We’re also preparing something big – just as big as the alpha launch, if not bigger. And no, I’m not talking only about the beta version.

Soon you’ll see. In the meantime, if you have’nt tested StormDriver yet, be sure to sing-up here, while the Alpha lasts! We want to see your feedback. Next stop: five hundred messages!

They’ve been media darlings for half a decade now, and some people even go as far as saying that we live in the age of Social Media. Is it true? Let’s start our little crash course in perspective with some hard numbers. Because that’s what big apps like to throw around – numbers, numbers, and more numbers (all of them self-reported, of course).

The number crunching game

Twitter touts 175 million users. Sounds impressive?

Only until you learn that, out of those 175 million, a whopping 56 million never posted a single tweet or followed a single account. Also, 90 million accounts have zero followers. That still leaves us with 85 million users, right? Not exactly. Most of those are currently inactive. They belong to people who got bored, or just gave up after a week.

In the end, we’re left with around 50 million active profiles. The thing is, it still means “profiles” not “users”. Go to YouLikeHits, Twiends or any other places created specifically for boosting the Twitter followers count. They’re filled to the brim with automated accounts with tacked-on stock avatars and random names. Check what they post. It’s mostly spam and automated rubbish from RSS feeds. They’re here only to pad someone’s meter.

And don’t even get me started on fake personas created for marketing purposes. I’ve seen a guy who successfully ran several dozens of fake Facebook and Twitter accounts, just to be used in his projects.

I don’t really know how many of those 50 million active accounts are just brand accounts or automated bots. There are estimates that there are really only 20 million active human users on Twitter. If you’d exile every Twitter user in the world somewhere far, far away, they’d create a country the size of Madagascar.

Now let’s get some perspective.

That’s 1% of the Internet population, or a paltry 0.25% of the global population. Yes, if you’d grab a random sample of 100 people that crawl the web, only one would tweet or read tweets. According to http://www.worldometers.info/, a great site if you’re the sort of guy who wants to know how many bicycles are produced each year, currently we have approximately 2,300,0000,000 Internet users. That’s two billion, almost a quarter of earth’s population. Out of those 2300 million, only around 20 million use Twitter.

Of course, Facebook is way bigger. Recently, it was boasting 425 million daily active users, and almost twice that monthly. Sounds impressive, but only until you see what it actually takes to be an active user in Facebook’s eyes. Those are not only people who visited their page, clicked around or wrote some updates. Facebook also counts everyone who clicked any of the “Like” buttons scattered all over the web, or anyone who wrote a comment on any site that has a comments section run by a Facebook plugin.

Even if you abandoned your Facebook account many years ago and your last update was about the 2009 Superbowl, you might still be an active Facebook user, simply because you comment on Mashable.

Let’s also remember that at least 50 million accounts are fake, created for boosting friend numbers or for playing games. Even though Facebook tries hard to fight this, many people hold duplicate profiles, to separate their private lives from their professional issues.

Suddenly, Facebook user base is not that overwhelming anymore…

And G+? It was supposed to be a success story. The launch was booming, the user base sky-rocketed. So far it grew to 54 million. Except, registered users hardly spend any time at all there. With an average visits of just under 3 minutes per month, G+ is scraping the bare bottom of the user activity barrel. Three minutes a month is less than most people spend picking their noses. A truly appalling result for a place that’s supposed to be fun.

As you can see, really active users of social networks are not as numerous as we think. If you live on a campus somewhere in US, it might seem that just about everyone is available on Facebook. In fact, it’s further from the truth than you imagine. Majority of Internet users never got into this “social thing”, or got bored already, and even if they didn’t, in many countries they are using local platforms. You might think that Twitter is the center of the digital world, but your Brazilian friend thinks the same about Orkut, and your Russian buddy is having a severe case of Vkontakte deprivation while on holidays.

How important are Social Media?

Raw numbers are not everything. Sometimes, it only takes a small group of people with big ideology to shape culture, politics or history. For example: the motion picture and television industry in America employs under 2.5 million people, yet this group has a profound impact on popular culture all over the globe.

But then again, social networks – unlike Hollywood – do not create any new content. They just make it easier to stay in touch or to see what content is relevant to your friends. Is it important? Sure! But before them, we were able to accomplish all of this by different means. You see, even before Twitter, people knew pretty much everything about famous musicians and celebrities just by reading press and watching interviews. Twitter didn’t really improve the quality of information, it only allowed it to multiply faster. It allowed us to access it almost instantly, from anywhere on earth. It grouped it into bite-sized 140 character chunks. Oh, and professional networking worked just fine even before LinkedIn.

But what about the political importance? We all heard about how social media helped the recent middle-east revolutions, right?

Not exactly. Today, more and more journalists agree it was a bit blown out of proportion. Twitter fueling Arab rebellions was just too attractive a topic for any tech journalist to pass up. Unfortunately, the raw data says that the combined number Twitter users in Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia is less than 15.000. Facebook is more popular – 13.5% of Egypt’s population has a Facebook account. Considering everything I wrote so far, I guess less than a half of them might be actual active users. Not bad, but still a drop in the bucket.

Social networks mostly helped people in the west to get a glimpse of what was happening in real time, without leaving their chairs. But they did not contribute so much to spreading social unrest as we’d like to think. Yes, FB was frequently used as a communication tool, but there was also a host of other communication tools involved, from home-printed brochures and posters to mobile phones, good old fashioned e-mail and the all-powerful word of mouth. Similarly, during the SOPA / ACTA debate in EU and US, popular image boards with funny pictures and smart parodies did at least as much as Facebook, if not more. And I’m not even mentioning the old fashioned press.

If we take a look back at our common history, a clear pattern emerges. Every couple of decades a big wave of political change sweeps through each country. America had its late 60’s, eastern European block had its 1989, and let’s not forget that Iran we know today was born out of social revolt of 1979. And guess what, all of those revolutions didn’t have a benefit of social networks. Hippies didn’t tweet. During French revolution not a single Facebook update was posted.

That’s why the middle-east revolutions would have taken place anyway, without social media or Internet – simply because the time was right, and people were pissed off.

An age? Or more like a minute?

To sum up: 2,3 billion people browse the web. Only around 10-20% of those frequently use any sort of social network. Even in US, the birthplace of social networking, people spend just 23% of their time online on this sort of activity. What’s with the other 80%? Well, it seems we’re still good with old fashioned browsing, watching vids, chats, e-mails, forums, image boards, games, and various web apps.

And now let me give you the final two pieces of the puzzle. Recent data seems to show that the growth of popular social platforms is slowing down. Not everyone realizes it yet, but it’s entirely possible that the popularity of social media will peak this year, going into slow but steady decline as soon as 2013.

If you think of the Web as a city then Twitter is just a big trendy club, and FB is a busy downtown mall. And here’s where I have an advice for everyone who tries to make a living out of the Web. Even though people on social networks are very easy to reach, there’s a whole huge world outside of Facebook walls waiting to hear about what you do.

So get out of the club and hit the streets, before someone else does.

That’s what we plan to do, by the way. Yes, we’re active on all major social platforms, we have a popular Facebook fan page and a sizable Twitter community. But we also think hard about how to reach out to all the people that are looking for something new to do in the Web; to people who were not quite gripped by the interaction that happens in the Social Networks and would like to try something different.

If there’s one thing that never goes out of our minds it’s how to  reach out to those 80-90% of Web users.

It’s been the first time we have shown our system to the public, with a full hands-on demo. The result was very encouraging. It was great to see how people react to StormDriver, and how many of them thought it’s something new and interesting. Before the end of the show, our pockets were already filled with business cards.

But the prospect of finding a serious investor was not the only thing that made the LWS a success in our eyes. We’re also very happy we could talk about the system with industry experts who possess incredible know-how and experience. We carefully noted all their suggestions, of course, and it really mattered for us a lot that they saw big potential in our system.

Due to the feedback we’ve gathered, there will be some changes coming to StormDriver soon. We want to make our system a bit simpler and more intuitive, so that new users instantly know what to do. We also want to work closer with page owners and content providers to tell them why including our StormDriver site button might be a good idea, and to show them how they can use our system to better interact with their readers.

If there’s any downside to our little trip, it’s that we didn’t actually get to see too much of the LWS itself. Apart from short periods of calm, there was always someone by our stand. But hey, that’s exactly what we wanted! That and a relaxing afterparty with free beer and some good catering…

All in all, we feel it was well worth it. We now go back to work on StormDriver with renewed strengths!

Volunia’s launch made me think it’s strange how many new systems try to discover some kind of new, involving interaction that could happen in the web. That’s probably because real Internet users showed us they are ready to do more and share more. They want to get involved in new kinds of activities.

Just take a look at this study and see what happened, when Facebook allowed third parties to publish information about user actions on FB timelines. People suddenly found sites like Pinterest, Yahoo! News, and even old and tired MySpace more exciting, as soon as they were able to telegraph what they do there to FB friends in real time.

So the big question is: who will finally put the pieces together in the right way and satisfy this need? What is the “winning combination” and what will it look like?

Taking a look at the others

Out of curiosity, I checked Volunia out, and noticed one funny thing. One of their features offered a visual map of the web, that showed subdomains and subpages of a website as houses, mapping the page structure like a real city.

It seemed funny, because at some point we also thought about giving users a visual map of the web, and we wanted to present our Open Web Layer as something you can travel through, using page relation as your roads. But in the end, we thought the result would be quite gimmicky, and wouldn’t provide our users with enough unique information to justify the feature.

We were afraid to end up with something similar to Yoowalk. Check it out if you haven’t seen it before. A great concept, that will amuse you for five minutes, and then (most likely) you will never come back. Why Yoowalk creators put so much work into recreating Web as an actual city?

Probably because for many years developers thought that in order to make a system easy and obvious to new users, it has to be modeled on something from the real world. For example, when creating calendar applications, some people thought they need to imitate real notebooks, sometimes even down to a horrible faux-leather cover (I’m looking at you, iCal).

Of course, imitating real items and shapes is not always the best way to lay your system out. If you want a proof, just take a look at infamous Microsoft Bob. Presenting your computer as a physical room didn’t help users at all, it only served to annoy them and clutter the screen. Another example would be the music controls of Cockpit for Mac, that simply wasted a lot of screen space only to look like a real iPod.

As you can see, it’s not only about taste, it’s also about efficiency, and sometimes also about usability, as realistic interfaces can be misleading. Just take a look at this article – there is a whole new concept of Uncanny Valley of UI’s. Some designs are so realistic they become confusing.

Of course, I’m not only talking about graphical interfaces. Sometimes the whole concept of the system can be based on something from real life, just like a first version of Facebook was heavily inspired by physical university facebooks. Or how corkboard.me was designed to imitate your trusty old corkboard.

Why do we try to build so many parallels between real life and abstract realm of computer software and information? Is it even necessary?

The story of nativity

According to writer Marc Prensky,  most of us come from a generation of digital immigrants. It basically means the modern web developed during our lifetime, it is a place we migrated to, discovering its potential. But people aged 20 and younger are not like that at all. They are digital natives, they’ve spent their whole lives here.

“Hey, let’s do a digital version of our college facebook” is a digital immigrant’s idea, just like “Hey, let’s make something like a classifieds section of a newspaper, only this one will be online”. Or “Hey, let’s make an online auction hall”. “Hey, let’s make a place for online video rentals”.

You get the picture.

The thing is, recreating items, ideas and interactions from the physical realm already ran its course. We moved everything we could from the real life to the digital world. But where are the systems created for digital natives from grounds up?

Maybe the real solution is to go in an entirely different direction than Yoowalk? Should we cut off our ties with the real world, and stop providing straggling digital immigrants with crutches?

I believe so. And there are proofs to support that.

When small mobile devices started to become common, one of the problems people faced was typing e-mails and text messages on a touchscreen. The solution that everyone went for in the beginning was to use virtual QWERTY keyboards. But they just didn’t work very well on 4-inch screens, even with the help of auto-correct. That’s when some clever guys thought “What if we designed a keyboard made specifically for mobile users, that does not try to replicate the full 104-key desktop thing”. The result was called MessageEase, and guess what – it kicks ass. If you haven’t tried it, just take a look here.

Yes’ it will never be as popular as a run-of-the-mill virtual keyboard, because you have to learn how to use it from the scratch. But it is better and more efficient in every other sense.

It shows us, that rethinking the basics is sometimes the best things we can do.

A shift to abstract

As you probably know, several weeks ago, we decided to ditch “Friends” and “Following” lists from StormDriver.

We knew that some people are really accustomed to see a “Friends” list in every social system, because that’s simply what Facebook has. The thing is, the idea of Facebook is based on something that exists in the physical world, namely a university facebook. StormDriver, on the other hand, was created to allow for new activities in the Web. It has no parallels in the real world.

Besides, for most people on earth, Facebook is already a place where you keep your real-life friends, and it will be next to impossible to wrestle this functionality away from them.

But is being friends the only  reason to add someone to your list? Twitter proved that you might also be interested in folks you haven’t met, who produce good updates. That’s because in the digital age we all like good, reliable sources of entertaining stuff.

It pushed us to rethink our basics, and to go one step further. We realized, that in the Internet, websites generate updates just like real humans do. When you write about your test, a website publishes a new article.  And that’s how our new Sources concept came to be. We know it’s much better suited to our system than a simple friends lists derived from the real world.

We believe we came a long way from fake desktops, notebooks with leather bindings, and software that emulates real-world concepts. It’s time to move on, rethink the basics, shift to abstract, and build new systems from grounds up.

It’s time to embrace digital natives and give them something cool, that doesn’t try to imitate existing concepts.

I guess the title already told you what I’m going to reveal now. Achievements are the next feature we implemented in StormDriver, and I’d like to tell you both “how” and “why”.

Achievemets

It came to us recently, that we have all the ingredients necessary to create a great achievement system.  We have an established point mechanic. We have streams and notifications that let you know whenever something interesting happens globally or among your friends. We keep track of everything users do through StormDriver for the sake of various algorithms and statistics. We realized, that introducing achievements would be a logical next step.

We developed a couple of them, did some testing, and found they not only fit in really well, but are also very engaging. It’s always nice to know if someone did something crazy or unusual.  Or to get some recognition and a shiny badge. And speaking of recognition – where can you get more of it, than in the system, where all the users will instantly know if you achieved something great? With various event-propagation methods in StormDriver, achievements go to a whole different level.

Right now we have nearly a hundred of them in the pipeline, and the list is likely to grow. We will never make a full list public – you’ll know only about the ones you’ve seen in streams, or the ones you’ve discovered by accident. Some of them will be awarded for doing basic things, like sharing good content or inviting friends. Others… let’s just say will be more creative. Here’s a short example of what you can expect:

“Mirror Image! – Find a user who’s your Clone and enter his or her profile”

“I Knew It Before It Went Mainstream! – Be the first person to up-vote a page, that subsequently gets at least 100 Rocks”

“Divided By Zero – Stalk someone who stalks someone who stalks you”

“Storm-a-holic – Log on to StormDriver at least once a day for a full week”

People who added you to their Sources will be notified about every achievement you get. You will also get your own trophy cabinet on your profile, so that everyone who visits, knows what you’ve done. The badge designs you’re looking at are an early version, but they should give you a general idea of what want the trophies to look like.

But wait, Achievements are not everything.

Browsing goes pop-up

As if we didn’t have enough work already, we decided to do another revamp of our browsing system. Browsing was one of our oldest gripes in StormDriver. Testers who’ve been with us from the start probably remember, that it went through many, many changes.

The reason is simple. No one has ever done a software social browser like that before. We were treading on unknown grounds, we had to find a way to make it all work by ourselves, without any systems to compare to. Now, we’re happy to say we’re closer to reaching our target than ever.

Right until now, if you clicked on any page in the stream, the system would go into the browsing view and then you’d go to the page of your choice. We found a better solution. In the new version, if you click any link, the browsing view opens up OVER the stream. You can view the full page just like before, you can check a public layer of this page to see who was there, who’s there now and what they say. However, if you click a new “close” icon in the top bar, the  website disappears and you end up back in the stream, exactly where you left it. It gives a nice feeling, that the social networking part of StormDriver stays in place the whole time, and all of the browsing happens above it.

I know it doesn’t sound as much, but when we tested it, we were surprised by how much faster, easier and more intuitive the browsing becomes, without having to go back to your Home screen every half a minute, and without the feeling of disconnection you get, when after clicking a link you are brought to a different part of the system.

Other improvements

As you can see, we rolled out three major and time-consuming changes. We also made a lot of smaller improvements. The performance tweaks made browsing faster. We improved grouping of similar events in all streams, and made them cleaner and easier to read. We improved the way videos are shared and played throughout StormDriver (including both Youtube and Vimeo). We did a lot of bug fixing.

That’s quite a lot of work for just one month. Fortunately, we’re almost done now, and the new version, called Release Candidate 4, should roll out next week. Of course, we’ll invite a lot of new testers to give it a proper spin!

Oh, and I saved one interesting piece of information for the last part. After the RC4 hits the deck, we are planning  to do one more alpha release, RC5, that will add a final layer of polish to the system, finalize all functionalities, and fix the remaining bugs.

After RC5 we plan to go into full-blown open beta.

It’s too early to throw any dates around, but it will happen sooner than later, most likely in the next few months. Stay tuned for further announcements, and keep an eye on your inbox, as the big wave of invites for RC4 testing should go out soon.

Regardless, we are all doing our best, and this month we successfully created a new version of the system, that’s being internally tested right now. It’s probably one of the most important releases in a long while, as it brings big and bold changes, including “Sources”, a concept we have thought about for quite some time now.

To keep you in the loop, I prepared a run-down of the most important changes and features coming to StormDriver in a matter of days. And because there’s just so much of them, this article will run in two parts.

Introducing Sources

If you read our article on convergence, you probably know we’ve been debating this step for quite some time. Finally, in this build, we decided to go forward and add a completely new functionality to StormDriver – Sources. They will soon replace Friends and Following lists, and will become one of the key features of our system.

What are they and how they came to be?

Well, some time ago we realized that users and pages in our system are generally similar. Essentially, they are all remote entities that create updates from time to time, and build their own activity streams, or what we call internally “nearby streams”. Your friend invites a new person to the system. A review appears on your favorite games site. Your mother decides she loves that “Top 20 Funny Cats” list. A white paper on nuclear physics gets another related article. Your friend, your mother, your games site, and your white paper are all basically sources of updates that appear on your StormDriver home stream.

That’s why, in the upcoming version of the system, you can add any interesting person or page you see in StormDriver to your Sources with a single click.

Even though current test version of Sources is pretty basic, in the next build we want them to contain as many sub-groups as you like. For example: if you create a Sources group called “Football”, it can include SD profiles of players and sports journalists, as well as important blogs and football news pages. A group called “Family” might contain some of your real-life relations, but also a blog of your sister, a Picassa gallery of your mother, and a LinkedIn profile of your brother.

Whenever you find a really interesting page or person in StormDriver, you will be able to add it to any group in your Sources with a single click. Think of the Sources as of your personal treasure chest, or a scrapbook that you fill with everything you find cool and interesting.

All items you have in your Sources will contribute to your home stream. You can also display a stream from a specific group.

Keep in mind that Sources are more than a cosmetic addition. We integrated them into most StormDriver subsystems. To give you one example, people who have same pages in Sources are considered more similar. Pages that are most often placed in the same group are considered closer related to each other. Sources also play a big part in our page recommendation algorithm.

As a result, StormDriver should not only become more unique – but it should also work better in many aspects, and become far more customizable.

More announcements coming soon!

Sources are certainly a highlight of our next version, something we want to become one of the defining features of StormDriver. But if you think they are the only big thing we have worked on this month, you will be very surprised. There are more announcements coming your way, and I’m sure some of them will be surprising.

Stay tuned and see you on Friday, when a second part of this preview will go live!

Three months ago, we wrote a short piece about the prismatic personality concept, and how it clashes with real name policies of most social networks. Both Google+ and Facebook were notorious in their attempts to drive away users that preferred nicknames to their actual names, and they went as far as banning prolific artists, journalists with established pen names, and human rights activists that tried to protect their families. We thought it’s not only wrong, but also very counterproductive.

Back then, our article was only a speculation based on a gut feeling, some analysis, and an interesting speech by Chris Poole at the SXSW conference. But recently, real numbers cropped up to support the case, and that’s why we decided to revisit the topic.

You know what Disqus is? It’s the most popular comment system on a planet. It’s currently featured on 750 000 pages and blogs, and it has a reach almost double that of Facebook comment system. If you wonder what Disqus looks like, just take a look at the bottom of this article.

While at it, you can actually use it, if only to say “Hi”.

Anyway, with 500 million unique commenters every month, Disqus guys have a lot of data to work with. Recently they’ve decided to bite into it, and analyze posts left by completely anonymous users, the users that adopted an internet handle, and the users who registered with their real names.

What they found was pretty surprising. For years we associated pseudonym touting commenters with poor and trollish posts. But as it happens, people that had an internet persona were much more active, they were posting more answers with higher average quality than the real-name guys. Folks that didn’t even bother to give a pseudonym came up last.

Lets rephrase that: users hiding behind handles and pseudonyms are the most active and creative participants of discussions on the Internet. Or, as Disqus puts it, pseudonyms drive communities.

Now let’s compare this to a certain quote:

“I think anonymity on the Internet has to go away. People behave a lot better when they have their real names down (…) I think people hide behind anonymity and they feel like they can say whatever they want behind closed doors.”

Do you know who that was? It’s a quote from Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s marketing director. She didn’t think for a moment, that people with their real names on the line might be a lot more passive. That some of them won’t participate in the discussions simply because they are afraid their coworkers or employers will know too much about their personal views. She never realized, that the best answer to a “is this tablet any good” question might come from a tech support worker, or an industry insider, that wouldn’t post under his own name. But the DIQUS research clearly shows exactly that.

Now I didn’t write all of this only to blow our own trumpet. It all ties in nicely into the SOPA discussion in the US, and the ACTA debate in the EU. After all, one of the anti-piracy measures proposed by those acts is to curb the privacy of Internet users, and  to enforce a direct responsibility of the website owner for the actions of its users. Just to give one example: Wikipedia would be held accountable for every article that might possibly be accused of being derivative in nature. As a result, most sites would have to enforce strict real-name policies among the submitters. Wikipedia would have to sign contracts with content creators. And guess what, it would be a lot less productive, than collaborating with a broad Internet collective.

I think what Disqus data really shows, is that internet pseudonyms are the catalysts of innovation, and that lack of privacy would hurt the web. Think about this for a moment: how many great web videos would have never been created, if their authors used real names and were subsequently sued to oblivion by everyone who thought their work infringes anything?

What copyright lawyers don’t understand, is that ownership and authorship of many products of today’s culture is very complicated. Quite often there’s no just one clear owner. The works are built by a collective, layer after layer.

For example: a movie company creates a blockbuster flick, then a Youtube user does a great spoof using his commentary and some added music, a spoof explodes as a viral, it mutates, it’s shared as an image all across the web, some guy puts it on t-shirts and sells them on eBay, the comment creator gets his radio advertising deal, then a modern painter creates a painting using a part of the image, and earns even more money. This is how popular culture is made nowadays, and that’s what would become impossible without a certain degree of privacy and creative freedom on the Internet.

Today, not only our personalities are prismatic. Copyrights and ownership often become prismatic as well.

Of course, thanks to all of you, SOPA is now dead and buried – at least for the time being. But there are other forces that want to curb the web anonymity, and prominent social networks are just one of them.

There are two main lessons to be had from Disqus research, if you’re a software developer. First: contrary to what many believe, by basing your system on a real name policy, you will get less discussions, fewer comments, and their overall quality will be lower. Second: if you want people to be really creative, let them wear the masks they choose.

The Internet will be much more colorful if you do.

UPDATE (25/01/2012): Who would have guessed? Just a single day after we’ve posted this article, Google decided to relax its naming policy. They will allow the use of handles an nicknames, but only if you can prove that the nickname is your established online identity. I wonder if they’ll take forum screenshots and comment printouts as a proof? Anyway, Google rarely does anything without proper previous research. It is threfore very possible, that they came up with similar results as Disqus.

As you can imagine, most developers on our team watched the CES coverage with interest. Apart from some strange moments, like Bill Gates busting dance moves in a weird remix, and some crazy gadgets like the guitar conversion for iPad, we were eager to know what 2012 will look like according to the companies that shape the technology world, like Microsoft, Google and Sony.

One thing that’s very easy to spot is that the social aspect of technology is still very important for each one of these companies.

Windows 8 metro interface has “Share” as one of its main buttons. It’s actually just as big as the traditional “Start” button. And if that doesn’t tell you everything, Google wants to integrate G+ deeper into the search functionality, and Sony plans to leverage its network of 100 million TV sets connected to the Internet to create a web-social-tv-entertainment-who-knows-what. Even Sony Walkman, a device previous generations used to switch off and hide in their own personal bubbles, is getting an Android makeover that will enable it to handle messaging and social functions among other things. Social? On my music player? Next up I’ll be getting Facebook updates on my wrist watch.

Scratch that, it already happened.

So, it seems that everyone cares a lot about “social”, “sharing”, and “connecting”, even though many of us thought it’s the melody of the yesteryear. Big technology players are still looking for new ways for you to stay in contact with people who matter, regardless of what you’re doing.

How is that possible? Isn’t Facebook and Twitter enough? Not really. Even with all the social networks and devices around, we still haven’t found the optimal solution. Heck, we’re not even sure what it is that we want from “social” technology. Do we want to see everything about people who interest us? Or maybe just what they want us to see? What types of activities do we want to share? How do we want to telegraph them? How often and in what format?

Would you really take part in a pop-up chat while watching your favorite television show? Do you really need social options hard-wired into your operating system? Those are the sorts of questions that pop-up after reading through countless pages of CES announcements. Are we going too far with the social integration, as Twitter developers claim? Or are we still only halfway there?

We don’t know yet. There are myriads of ways for integrating “social” with “technology”. The race is still on. The well is not dry yet.

I guess that just reaffirms what we’ve written last time – people are constantly looking for innovative social interactions. And the solutions offered by technology range from a social hub on Windows Phone mobile and socially integrated TV sets all the way to StormDriver.

Of course, I’d like to think that what we’re building is one of the best attempts at discovering a new field of interactions. After all, we don’t ask you to shell out your hard earned cash on new gadgets, or migrate to new platforms in order to try something new. You can use StormDriver for free, without any installs or plugins on anything that can browse the web comfortably – including most devices shown on CES.

Yes, even on internet-connected fridges or smart TVs.

It seems that 2012 will be a year of connecting. That’s a good year to push our system out of the gate.

While it might sound strange, I’m really excited by the results. Why? It just shows that people are tired of updating their social accounts constantly. After several years, the formula is getting old. First we had a fine art of writing letters, then we had long telephone calls, then e-mails, then instant messaging, social networks – people are social by nature, but they are constantly looking for new ways to stay social. Sharing your party photos on FB was a new thing years ago, but it doesn’t have the appeal it used to have. Some even feel forced to do it simply because that’s what’s expected of them. And that might be the reason behind this mysteriously popular resolution.

People won’t be any less social in 2012 than they were before. They will just look for ways other than writing updates and posting photos.  We seem to be ready to depart in yet another direction…

In StormDriver team, our new year’s resolution is simple. We want to launch a public version as soon as possible, even though it would probably require a 48-hour working day. The feedback we had so far was very positive – a lot of people who checked StormDriver out really want this project to grow and thrive. Encouraged by them, we would love to release a complete public build, and let everyone into the system. But first, there are lots of things we still need to develop or improve.

And to show we’re not just playing darts and drinking beer all day long, here’s a list of changes in the latest version, that rolled out just before Christmas:

1)  Easier browsing

You asked and we listened. That was probably number one requested change so far. You see, we never wanted to add a full browsing bar to StormDriver – not only having two browsing bars visible at the same time looked bad, it was also very confusing to some users. Instead, we extended the functionality of our multi-purpose share box to cover browsing as well. Now it allows you to post updates or share content, but also to simply navigate to any particular website you want to open in StormDriver.

2) Image Selector

It’s just one of those small quality of life improvements that every well-developed system should have. Say goodbye to poor feed icons – now when sharing a page, you can actually select which of the page’s pictures will represent that page in the feed.

3) Bottom browsing bar

We have added a collapsible bar that you can see on the bottom when you browse pages in the full-screen view. It allows you to see some basic info, like who’s one the page now, without turning the full social layer on.

4) Remove pages from trending list

The trending pages list didn’t change that often. That’s because if something’s popular, it’s likely to stay popular for a while, thanks to many community propagation mechanisms in StormDriver. But it doesn’t mean you have to stare at a top article you’ve already seen for hours. Now you can remove pages from the top list with just a single click.

5) Google+ integration

Another often requested change was a better integration with Google+. That’s why, from this version onwards, you can sign-up and login using your G+ credentials! Other options are sure to follow as soon as Google expands its API.

6) Improved stream layout

We took a look at how we display information in various system streams and did some minor tweaks, like improved grouping and altered layouts, that will make them cleaner. The overall conclusion of alpha testers was that the system has a really nice and clean design. But hey, there are always some little things you can improve, right?

7) System User

There’s a new user hanging out and about the system. He’s called StormDriver and he’s easy to spot thanks to a cloud avatar. Obviously, he has some special powers. For example, he can create system-wide messages that will display in everyone’s stream all across the system. We will use them to notify you about important testing events, to announce planned maintenance, and generally to provide any vital information about the tests.

8 ) StormDriver Bookmarklet

And here’s where the real fun starts. To make it even easier to add pages to StormDriver, we’ve developed a very nice bookmarklet. What is it? It’s basically a link you can put in your bookmarks bar. It will be there whenever you start your browser, and you can simply drag&drop any of your browser tabs to a bookmarklet, in order to quickly add a page to StormDriver, upvote it, downvote it, and do some other things.

Oh, and there’s a new cred icon too, and some minor interface changes.

As you can see, that’s a lot of coding and testing, and we haven’t even touched the real mammoth task like the implementation of “sources” that will replace friends lists, followers lists and bookmarks all across the system (you can find our first rough idea here).

But enough complaining. We have to get back to work on our next release. Remember to keep an eye on our Facebook fanpage – we’re going to announce a new wave of invites soon, as we need your help to test all of those new features.

Have fun and see you soon!

You could say that metric tons of printed paper can’t be wrong, but I think you could say just as much in a single sentence.

Social Networks are popular because we like the experiences they provide.

That’s basically what everything you get from a social network is.  A vivid description of your friend’s hangover is an experience, and so is a page with great jokes shared by your coworker, or a first drawing of your sister’s kid. It doesn’t really matter whether experiences are presented as a text update, a media update, or a hyperlink to external content. These are just technicalities.

The real deal is somewhere else: you log on to a network of your choice, you tap into your social stream, and you see a lot of experiences accessible with a single click. Some of them you might really like, while the others are not really interesting, like yet another photo of aunt Annie’s cat. You can say a lot about value of building human relations, but Facebook didn’t grow to 700 million users because they wanted to feel “connected” – after all they already had mobiles and high school reunions. Facebook grew because it’s an internet theme park serving you a mix of updates from people you care about, witty or funny discussions, and interesting content links.

Some users are more social, and they’re only interested in friend’s updates. Others enjoy good content more – they are less invested in the “social” part and they value social networks as enormous recommendation machines. Regardless, the key to keep each user happy is to provide exactly the sort of experiences he wants, weeding out all the stuff he finds boring or not really interesting.

Recently we thought about the best way to “maximize” a number of great experiences you can have when you log on to a social system. We believe the most important thing is how various social networks create feeds, present you with content, and how they allow you to filter it to see only interesting stuff. Obviously, that’s no rocket science.  Google+ already thought about it, and that’s why they created circles. A circle is just a way to sort and optimize your stream of experiences. In order to weed out the photos of aunt Annie’s cat from your feed, you simply put her in the “Distant relatives” circle. And then never look there again.

Recently we realized there might be another way, and it got us really, really excited.

Think about it: most social networks provide you with categories. In Facebook you have your Friends, on Twitter you can follow some people, and in G+ you have your various social circles. We, on the other hand, want to make it possible for you to follow anything you want, be it a real person, a page, a forum discussion, or even a single piece of content.

Why? Because – putting aside the real life stuff – in the Internet, on your screen, people, pages, discussions and events are basically the same thing. They are “entertainment entities” that sometimes create updates for your enjoyment. Your coworker writes about his clash with a parking warden, a blog about hardware mods posts an article describing their recent work, a discussion about Apple grows by yet another post. Traditionally, a page, a person, and a forum discussion are all very different. But from the perspective of a social network users, they are all simply remote entities that create an update in his feed.

Now imagine that instead of a friends list or your followers list you have an empty box. When browsing the system or the web, you simply drag and drop whatever you find interesting or amusing into this box. You fill it like your own treasure chest or a scrapbook, until it contains any mixture of people, images or pages. You can have many boxes, for many topics.

When you click on the box, it produces a feed full of the items related to what you’ve thrown in. A feed full of entertainment.

Let’s say you’re deeply interested in semi-professional photography. You create a box, drag and drop your favorite DSLR forum , you drag social profiles of some photojournalists and people who are your mentors, you drag a site that deals with best amateur photos, and then some people you met on photography course. Then you click on a box, and you instantly know what happens to each and every one of those. You get a steady stream of articles, posts and updates. More stuff that you find interesting per square inch of your screen than you could get anywhere else.

We have created a world of social networks, websites, RSS readers, forums, funny imageboards, social bookmarking and discovery engines, but always failed to recognize that for a person looking at the screen it’s all the same – “content generators” that create content to enjoy. It makes sense to have all of it sorted and accessible in the single place.

It is time to push forward to a full people-content convergence.

Why shouldn’t you follow a website or a discussion just like you follow a person? They’re just like people, some are interesting and some are not. Some you like more than others, some belong to categories you create in your own mind (like “Geeky stuff”, “College Friends”, “My freelance project”). If you think about “Your work” box, it’s obvious it can contain your work mates, but it may also contain discussions or websites about your team’s projects, their media coverage, resources that could be useful – and anything else. Boxes tear down the artificial boundaries. You can stuff them with anything you want, dragging and dropping from your feed.

Now it is still a rough concept, but we found it really inspiring. For a long time now, we felt that the artificial categories like “friends” and “followers” do not match the system we’re creating. Now we have an alternative, a wonderfully flexible one, that we will work hard to implement.

If everything goes well, the boring “Friends” and “Followers” lists in StormDriver will be replaced by something else entirely.

How do you like the idea?