The Social Network for the World's 200 Most Powerful People: An Interview with TopCom's Matt Quinn

Back when the news dropped that the World Economic Forum had commissioned software giant Tibco to produce TopCom, a social network supposedly designed for the 200 most powerful figures in the world, people started to freak out. It was described as the antithesis of the open, social web: A hyper-exclusive Facebook where the world’s elite could communicate instantly and secretly, whether that be coordinating sanctions against Iran or sharing goofy cat pictures from mansion galas.

Blame it on the Internet’s raw nerves following the SOPA fiasco and general paranoia, but the news about TopCom ruffled skeptics’ feathers. The Esquire profile of Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadivé, which focused on his vision of dominating the information-aggregation realm, may not have helped allay fears that TopCom wasn’t the tool of some new world order.

According to Tibco CTO Matt Quinn, TopCom is ultimately an über-secure version of tibbr, Tibco’s social platform that builds connections around topics rather than relationships. For world leaders, it’s billed as a quicker way to find expert advice on key issues and disasters. I talked to him about TopCom, security, and the future of the social web.

The exclusivity of TopCom is what people are getting worked up about. How do you feel about working on something that is limited to very few people compared to everything else on the social realm?

There are a couple of different ways that I look at that. The first is that the underlying technology is actually valuable to everyone. So this is not a one-off exclusive platform that is built just exclusively for the World Economic Forum. The type of technology that was actually used was off-the-shelf tibbr, standard Spotfire for visual analytics, and standard FormVine for form capturing. So, yeah, from that point of view we weren't working on it being super special. They were looking for off the shelf software that would meet their needs.

The second thing I would say is, look, it’s not like these world leaders and heads of industry don't talk already today. What we're doing is simply providing another mechanism for them to communicate. We're not providing something that's unique. It’s not like they didn’t talk before, they do, and we're just providing a new mechanism to help them express themselves.

Who do you pick to get in TopCom? Do you kick them out? Who's running this?

(Laughs) Well, no, at that point we are just the software provider, the service provider. We have an administration component of the tibbr platform, so the World Economic Forum controls all of that stuff. We have given them the tools to self administer all of that.

What are you replacing with TopCom? Why is Barack Obama or Bill Gates going to use it?

Well, we're not actually replacing anything. I think that’s actually an important thing. We don’t rip and replace anything because usually there are social obligations wrapped around in what people currently use.

I'll give you an example. Trying to replace the telephone would be almost impossible because the telephone is now part of our social consciousness. I look at these leaders of industry in the World Economic Forum and they have multiple different ways of communicating. In some cases tibbr is augmenting what they already have, so things like email and SMS. In other places we are simply providing new functionality that may not have existed in the past. In this particular case, that may be the social angle, the ability to create a network of peers around a particular topic or a set of topics.

How does having the conversation revolve around specific topics rather than people effect the social aspect of the network?

We found that following people is a necessary part of any social platform. You need to be able to provide that functionality. However, what we saw with tibbr was that the ability to follow information, machines, applications, and topics was actually, in some ways, more important than the individual relationships.

I think that that was really one of the key points for the World Economic Forum. You know, we run so fast in this world that we don’t develop the deep relationships that we may have developed 20 or 30 years ago. Being able to identify experts or people who are interested in a topic, especially when you may only meet a person once or twice a year, is almost impossible.

The social dynamic is shifting to being issue-based rather than relationship-based. That's a pretty powerful concept because it means that over time the issue may remain but the people involved may actually change, or the issue may evolve and the people may change. But with a topic-based network, you don’t have to destroy those personal relationships – or not destroy, but diminish those relationships — which exist across multiple topics and multiple issues. Does that make sense?

Yes. I'm curious though how flexible that is. If you're focused on specific topics and those are changing as you move through your life, how do you stay connected with the people if there’s no focus on relationships?

You need to have both. It's funny because when you build a business tool that’s focus is to arrange social relationships… it’s kind of a dichotomy, if you will. On one hand organizations are a command-and-control environment, while the world of social networks is certainly much more chaotic and follows different social laws.

To talk about TopCom specifically some more, it's based off the tibbr architecture, how are you guys able to guarantee security of this? I know that’s a hallmark of TopCom, but how can you guys guarantee this if you have Anonymous, say, breaking into FBI websites and shutting them down?

The number one thing you never want to do is you never want to bait the bull, so to speak. I certainly don’t want to bring up the specter of Anonymous by any stretch of the imagination.

What we've done is consult with the World Economic Forum, with some of their hosting partners that are providing support for this platform, and other various people who have stake in this. We believe we have come up with a reasonably good and secure system.

When it comes to security especially, you never want to say it’s perfect because that's just like waving a red flag for someone to try and break in. We've taken all of the necessary precautions, we've consulted the right experts to get the right details, and we think that we do have a secure platform.

One of the things you've got to focus on, if I was to boil it down to one thing, is when you've got a secure platform you need to be vigilant. What you thought may have been secure yesterday or last week is maybe not secure today. One of the things we've instigated is a very frequent review of current security, the current things that are going on in the marketplace, and I think it's that internal vigilance that helps give us some comfort.

Do you think that TopCom is a specific target? I mean, because when people say it’s a Facebook for the most powerful people in the world do you think people are viewing that as some elitist social web or it’s like Bohemian Grove?

Well look, I think the first thing I'd challenge is, I understand there could be a perception out there, but it’s really not. If TopCom is a vehicle for people to communicate who in normal circumstances would communicate via phone or via text message, we're just simply providing another avenue for that communication to take place and perhaps using some of the new social aspects of the web to augment that.

Does that make us a target? To be honest with you, I wouldn't know. It's really difficult when you look at the things that are being targeted so far. I don't know what triggered this stuff off. Sometimes you can guess but sometimes you can't. I don't think we're doing anything for a special group of people. We are just simply providing a mechanism along with other mechanisms they have, using standard technology that is available to everyone.

I guess the broader question is, considering how it’s more inclusive of a lot of different forms of communication, how does tibbr compare to the rest of the social media landscape?

In the near-term we see quite a lot of focus around bringing that third dimension, if you will, into tibbr. We've got the people, we've got the topics, the subjects, the machines, and the applications, and that's all pretty important with bringing in that third dimension of geospatial. What we've seen is that often people communicate and understand things better, not just as subjects, but as a region, as a place.

Bringing that into something we call tibbr Geo is going to be pretty key in the short-term. In the medium-term you start to look at the app store concept within the social world. There are some parallels between the app store concept and back in the day with web portals. Something that portals never really succeeded in utilizing was user-driven applications. We see these platforms broadening out to encompass these user-driven applications, which we think is going to explode the creativity that we see hedged up and locked up in some corporations.

But longer-term you start to look at the original premises of tibbr, which is to help augment communication between different parties within an industry, within a corporation, and I think we still have a long way to go there. There's so much that we're doing early research on around the question of how people communicate today within a company.

What's the future for social?

I was explaining to a group of R&D people a few weeks ago that if you think about the telephone, it’s such a ubiquitous device, yet there are so many social laws that are wrapped up in taking a call. I was using the example that if you're in a meeting and your phone rings everyone just stops the meeting until you either answer the phone or turn the phone off. I mean 50 people will just stop and wait for that call to be taken.

I know that if I call somebody and it rings once and then gets sent to voicemail I know that somebody is either in a meeting or is doing something and just hung up on me and they’ve just let it got to voicemail. I mean, think about all of these social aspects of even the dumb telephone.

We want to look at how people are communicating, at a pretty deep level, and see how can we augment it, how can we improve that, how can we bring in context and all these other things into the social spectrum. And companies are really open to this—they want their people to communicate more efficiently and effectively and anything they can do is going to be positive. I probably got on my soapbox a little bit there.

No, I understand, definitely. Outside of tibbr, what social network do you spend the most time on yourself?

I would say that I'm a Net consumer on Twitter. I'm usually there just looking at things. I do use Facebook. My challenge is I have a lot of family back in Australia so things like Facebook have been great just to keep touch with family and friends. I don’t have to get that phone call from my mother asking me why I haven't contacted my sister because I can already see what she's doing. But actually the social network I spend the most time on is tibbr. I find, as CTO, I end up having to be pulled in many different directions and I enjoy just being able to use tibbr to manage my social relations as well as topics of interest and things I have to do.

I noticed you didn’t mention Google+ at all.

I am on Google+. I've got some colleagues that are on Google+. I don't tend to see much activity on Google+ from my circle, to use their terminology. I was kind of late for the party.

I think it’s very interesting what they're doing, integrating it with search. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that. I think they're doing some very interesting things. The competition is good. If competition forces new things to happen in the market place then that’s not a bad thing.