Chocolate-Covered Rice Cakes

In terms of taste, rice cakes offer the least amount of excitement among any snack. Usually rice cakes taste very much like a combination of bland white rice and cardboard. Their nutritional impact is minimal as rice cakes serve a purely utilitarian purpose, to satiate without fattening.

But today, for the first time, I tried chocolate covered rice cakes: Quaker Rice Cakes Chocolate Crunch. I was very pleasantly surprised. Although the amount of added chocolate is quite small, the overall experience is many times better. The improved taste combined with the traditional fulfillment turned rice cakes into a pretty good product.

Since rice cakes have been around for years, it's amazing that I haven't seen this variety in the past - although apparently the added flavors have been around for awhile as well. This little treat points out that a slight change can have a disproportionate impact on an old product or service - in the case of rice cakes, it has prolonged and enhanced the existence of a food-type that would have probably been extinct by now. This is what Twitter might do to SMS. This is what Gmail might do to email. This is something that offers countless opportunities for those willing to recognize and improve products that most overlook.

There Is No Such Thing as The Norm

I define norms as expectations for both personal and collective behavior - these expectations are based on everything we've encountered and experienced in the past. Recently Seth Godin wrote about social norms and how they translate in the online world. His belief is that digital norms are still quite diverse and unpredictable because so little time has gone by since the Internet became popular - not nearly enough time for uniform behavior to be established.

Godin is on the right track but he's understating the reality of change - since he assumes that widespread norms will be established at some point. I believe that the Internet offers such a unique platform for the development of new communication channels that nearly-universal social norms (such as handshakes) might never come about (or at least not in the foreseeable future). Taking the written word as an example, in 20 years we've gone from bulletin boards to email to chat to instant messenger to blogs to Twitter - with newer channels built on top of the old, never replacing, only adding further complexity.

If you compare the simple actions of emailing an acquaintance vs. tweeting an original link/comment into the ether of acquaintances, I suspect that two fundamentally different sets of response-expectations play out. Once an email is sent, there is a longer high-probability response-period - with rapid declines after certain periods of time (correlated with email-responding hot-periods such as morning and evening). The world of Twitter moves at a much faster pace. A response is initially more probable (due to the one-to-many nature of Twitter) but quickly declines because of the fast-paced flow of new messages.

The reality of Internet-enabled, rapidly evolving communication-channels forces us to constantly re-learn and re-socialize. This need to repeatedly re-establish norms has wide-scale implications for both individuals and companies. Adaptability and a fundamental comfort with change are required for successful communication.

Your Email Can Predict the Future

An examination of emails sent by Enron senior staff, for an 18-month period until the company's downfall, seems to show that email-patterns can be a good indicator of impending organizational-demise. The investigators didn't read the emails but instead only looked at exchange-patterns.

The study claims that the main indicator of crisis seems to be the growth of email cliques - small and isolated groups that exchange emails amongst themselves. The logic is that before times of trouble, people tend to communicate with those that they trust most within an organization. Of course, further investigation will be required to confirm these initial findings.

If these patterns are proven to be valid signs of future problems, then this could represent a substantial leap forward for social-predictive technology. This information might be used for positive purposes such as predicting man-made disasters or impending epidemics. It could also be abused by over-zealous security agencies or evil-doers to foresee threats or public discontent.

With basic social interaction quickly shifting to the digital world (primarily Internet and Mobile), real-time digital records can be easily collected and stored. I predict major debates in the near-future on how to apply these heaps of new and valuable social-data.