Connecting the Dots

Social Networks, Collaboration and Community

Most amounts of traffic on the internet are related to human interaction. Every click, transaction, communication or consumption that we do triggers events that are responded to within software running on internet connected machines.

The hope of the semantic Web fostered by Web inventor Tim Berners Lee, is to facilitate machine-to-machine communication and provide meaning to data. The kicker? Machines don't buy things, fall in love, play games or create and there isn't much money chasing them since making machines more efficient at processing and understanding reduces costs. Motivating humans to interact when they want to buy, hook up, play or collaborate on creation drives top-line revenue.

For the last month or so, I've been deeply involved within the next generation internet aspects of social software, networking, forums, collaboration and other aspects that are driving people's attention to sites like Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, MixedNutz.net, or Mooble.

When you think about social software and networks, don't focus on the technology, interoperation or how cool microformats will be when little pieces of functionality can be shared around the 'net. Instead, focus on what is driving the incentives and motivations of people that are connected since this will inform your understanding of why people cluster together.

For example, did you know that the nonprofit sector share of GDP (gross domestic product) is close to 7 percent, and it employs 10 percent of the work force in the United States? (Brookings Institution PDF). To get a feel for just how many organizations there are out there in this sector, idealist.org maintains a directory of over 52,000 nonprofit and community organizations in 165 countries.

Why do people join? What do they do once part of the non-profit or an affinity group? What are their payoffs?

Affinity groups are often characterized as people interested, say, in photography, a certain make or model of automobile, airplane, boat or hobby. I've seen knitting groups, people interested in places in Scotland, and ecotourism groups. The term "affinity group" actually came out of activist terminology but people clustering around shared interests is probably as old as humankind.

As I've been assisting a couple of groups on sites that really should go far beyond simple forums like vBulletin, phpBB or SMF, I've learned that the only way social sites of any kind will be successful in the long run is if they do a few things really well: be the hub for the group, while being set up to interconnect and interoperate with other sites that are similiar, aligned or would make sense to partner with in some fashion.

Civicspace (built on Drupal) has this interconnection and interoperation at top-of-mind. What appears to be a re-engineering of forums and community, is a platform called CollectiveX still in beta. These two are evidence of a growing body of people that are focusing on what it will take to drive social connections and the power of the collective to the next level with technology.

The only way for you to truly get a handle on the gignormous onrush of offerings attempting to meet the needs of people in a myriad of ways, is to actually pay a visit to them. If you'd like to see a really terrific compilation of social-oriented sites that will get you started on understanding the new connectedness, let me recommend this one at Razorwest.

Getting platforms, standards, and microformats in place (along with digital identity so we don't have to create profile-after-profile-after-profile for every single social site we join) can't happen fast enough for me.

Typepad Widgets

Typepad has introduced Widgets. This is exactly the kind of development I'd hoped for when choosing Typepad (vs. Movable Type or Wordpress) when I first started my blog.

What’s a Widget, you ask? It could be a list of your most recent photos, or a topic-oriented search box, or a stats counter, or ads that help you make money, or a badge to help your users subscribe to your feed, or even a Flash game or a chat window. We call it "bling for your blog." We're launching with dozens of widgets from more than 30 partners, and more are on the way.

Many people in-the-know already understand the power of microformats and Widgets are conceptually analogous. Think of a calendar entry on a web site. Today, there are a bazillion ways to post event information online -- but everyone is doing their own thing with code that is standalone on their site. With one microformat, hCalendar, events could be tagged, subscribed to or "fed" to calendars all over the internet. Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Learn more about microformats.

Widgets, while technically not a microformat, at least pave the way for non-technical people to travel down the path of understanding the power of little snippets of code that allow internet connected machines to deliver alot of additional functionality for miniscule amounts of effort.

Your Consciousness + Global Connections = Human Evolution

My intention in this post is to collect my thoughts and raise your awareness.

For many of you more enlightened than I am, much of this may be old hat. If not, let's do a thought mashup since I've been thinking about several things while seeking to understand the cultural and societal impacts of the next generation internet we're experiencing:

• Your Consciousness
  • Social Software: People discuss this software in a Web 2.0-like context like it's just cool ways to connect people. But it's more than that...much more. Instead of a super-directory connecting people or allowing them to collaborate, what's beginning to emerge are ways for people to find their own comfortable place to cluster with others that share an interest.

• Participation Culture: This next phase of the internet is accelerating people's participation. What makes this nextgen Web different than the first is blogging, vlogging, social spaces, search, tagging, The Long Tail, etc.

• Trends in News Media. While it would've been helpful to obtain pure statistics on TV, radio and print media growth or share loss to online use, this was the only one I could find. Suffice to say our attention is increasingly going to online, on demand access to news and information. We're our own filter and editor, though more of us are drowning in choices.

Where are you paying attention? What about those global connections and how the hell does this somehow equal human evolution Borsch?

All software does 80% of what you need

Over the last two days I've been heads-down on analysis of open source (and some commercial) software for multi-user blogging, content management, wiki's and forums. Like I've said before, none of this software is truly click-n-configure and does only 80% of what is needed. Lots of customization is required.

I can't find this quote or the context of his remarks, but Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce.com) once remarked something along the lines of knowing that they could only deliver 80% of the functionality customers would need in a hosted offering and the true value would lie in the 20% of a customer's requirements and would need customization to be truly useful for any given organization.

Salesforce built a robust API (Sforce) and have delivered appexchange. The latter enables customers and partners (who've used the API and built applications) to sell/license them to Salesforce customers.

I've found the same 80% thing with open source packages. They *almost* do it all but not quite. In the case of phpBB and SMF, they've got all the functionality one would need to support a community of users (with granular access control of forums or private threads) but modifying the look-n-feel, having a landing page when you first log on that looks like a Web home page, are simple elements I know...but they require technical acumen to customize.

99% of small-to-midsize businesses or individuals are NOT going to do that.

Herein lies an opportunity and many Web 2.0 companies are focusing on API's as a core part of their value propositions. It will enable mashups and web services to actually flourish (instead of being something pontificated about in analyst reports). They'll also enable something which I see as even more important.

At some point in the not too distant future, there will be more new presentation layer paradigms like Ajax, OpenLaszlo or what Microsoft is planning with Expression. Perhaps we'll see open source programs delivering functionality through their API's that can be consumed by these richer user interface approaches. Interfaces that superusers (vs. technoweenies) will be able to click, configure and operate with little or not technical intervention.

Left Brain or Right Brain? Remixing the World

If you've read Daniel Pink's book A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, you'll understand his argument that left brain, linear thinking is of flat value and more prone to outsourcing (because it can be) and that the next phase of value creation and innovation will come from the right brained among us. Higher order thinking, pattern matching and an ability to connect the dots (which can't be outsourced) will be highly prized and will be the intellectual fuel for tomorrow.

Disruption, creation and innovation spring forth from seeing unmet needs, patterns, mixing together elements from multiple sources, creating new and innovative products and services from unique combinations or methods and yes, accidents. According to Pink, high value innovation will be delivered by those who can see and think differently (needless to say that I found Pink's book pretty validating on how my brain is wired and that I'm not just some guy going off on tangents all the time...and with far too many Categories on his blog).

My April 2006 issue of Wired came today (yes, I still appreciate the dead trees version) and the cover story is by Will Wright (creator of The Sims and other games) and his "New World of Games" and his essay Dream Machines:

"In an era of structured education and standardized testing, this generational difference might not yet be evident. But the gamers' mindset - the fact that they are learning in a totally new way - means they'll treat the world as a place for creation, not consumption. This is the true impact videogames will have on our culture.

Society, however, notices only the negative. Most people on the far side of the generational divide - elders - look at games and see a list of ills (they're violent, addictive, childish, worthless). Some of these labels may be deserved. But the positive aspects of gaming - creativity, community, self-esteem, problem-solving - are somehow less visible to nongamers.

I think part of this stems from the fact that watching someone play a game is a different experience than actually holding the controller and playing it yourself. Vastly different. Imagine that all you knew about movies was gleaned through observing the audience in a theater - but that you had never watched a film. You would conclude that movies induce lethargy and junk-food binges. That may be true, but you're missing the big picture."

How does what Pink say map to Wright's views?

Brightcove makes WYOU possible

Watching Jeremy Allaire demonstrate Brightcove's value proposition in person, I immediately understood how powerful and fast it would be in enabling video content to be assembled, ads inserted, and delivered in Flash by a non-technical user.

This Boston Globe story tells the tale of Brightcove announcing later today that they've acquired Seattle-based MetaStories.

Why is this important? Because cool technology -- and the reach of the global internet -- is interesting, but without enabling tools *that manage and accelerate workflows* for mass, *non-technical-user* use, any new thing is less useful and thus slow to be adopted.

From what I've seen and what others have said, Brightcove was missing really robust, multiple-media assembly tools that took content and delivered a highly refined and finished product able to be delivered in Flash (running on 97% or so of the world's web browsers). With the acquisition discussed in the Globe article, Jeremy Allaire ha's vaulted Brightcove forward and will be in a better position to provide tools for rapid assembly and delivery on the internet.

Brightcove's technology could help fuel ''an Internet video explosion," in which publishers large and small would be able to easily put video online, said Josh Bernoff, principal analyst for Forrester Research in Cambridge.

It will remain to be seen whether or not these tools are affordable. Yeah...it's nice that Apple's iMovie/Final Cut, Adobe Premiere and other non-linear editing tools exist, but it's a stretch to go from creation to delivery published on the Web. If there are true enabling tools for the masses creating and delivering content on the Web already, this truly will manifest as an "internet video explosion." If not, then it will be relegated to those with big budgets and making your own internet TV station (WYOU) isn't going to happen.

Web 2.0 List of Lists

As I have all my life, I'm constantly scanning to discover new ways of doing old things. Disruptive developments. Paradigm shifts. Trying to always see things that others don't and/or are missing. Mentally taking developments from one area and mixing them with those from another. Kind of a mental mashup I guess and from that spring forth new ideas and methods.

During this scanning and consideration process, I archive mentally the possibilities and from that come new stuff. That's why when I sit with friends, clients or colleagues who are wrestling with business or organizational problems, I'm able to reach inside my mental solutions bag and pull out things that might help them fix them.

This is what I do with what is happening with Web 2.0, mashups and the shift occurring as we all move in to the next phase of the internet as a platform. I came across the logo explosion graphic on Boing Boing that a guy, Ludwig Gatzke, in Germany had put together and thought I'd put up my own, archived list-o'-lists to go along with it.

If you've got a couple of spare hours to click around and look at Web 2.0-ish companies (or use this as a reference going forward), have I got some lists for you:

• UPDATE: Just came across this one (via Scoble) at Sacred Cow Dung @ 8:32pm today and it's now my new favorite list

• My absolute favorite list at eConsultant because it's categorized

• Emily Chang's eHub. This is my second third favorite compilation (more robust than my #1 but I like clean, quick, directories like eConsultant's). Her list is unique since she and her Ideacodes cohorts interview several of the Web 2.0 company leaders and deliver writeups about their respective value propositions

• Dion Hinchcliffe's fabulous Web 2.0 blog and this list of the best of 2005 and his more great Web 2.0 software page

• Virtual Karma's The Complete List of Web 2.0 Applications (ahm...complete list? I don't think so)

• Listable's Complete List of Web 2.0 Applications (ahm...another one?)
  

• List of Web 2.0 betas to sign up for and try out

• List of the best Wiki's

• Business 2.0's The Next Net 25. 25 Startups that are Reinventing the Web

• ZDNet's Best of Breed in Web 2.0 applications

• Programmable Web's List of Mashups

• Are you a developer? Here's a list of the Web-based API's to leverage and build your own mashups

• Technorati's Explore categorization let's you easily and quickly find blogger's writing about Web 2.0 and have tagged their post as such

• Web 2.0 is a joke? Here's a list of parody sites.

After you go through many of these, you'll have a deeper appreciation for my post called, Too many "Web 2.0" value propositions. How many calendars, social bookmarking, search, tagging and other like offerings does the Web need? How can each get their respective value props even looked at, let alone buzz built?

I've noticed that there are a handful of bloggers -- the most noticeable being Mike Arrington's TechCrunch (which ironically is down this morning) -- who announce new sites and have become the equivalent of PR for Web 2.0 startups.

One other thing: what if the moniker "Web 2.0" falls completely out of favor? (It's pretty un-cool now). I've renamed my Web 2.0 category FutureWeb since I didn't like the 2.0 descriptor myself. But nextgen internet is good, Next Net, Joe Schmedlap's Pretty Good New Web, whatever. The point is that -- just like a good startup -- it would be good if one of the lists above became THE place to go to see what was new.

UPDATE April 30th: Another new site debuted that is YAACW20 (yet another attempt at categorizing Web 2.0) but is pretty terrific.

The Rest of Us

Do you remember Apple's early Macintosh ad tagline? It was: Macintosh. The Computer for the Rest of Us. That resonated with me at a time when personal computers were in their infancy and were ruled by the left brain among us (you know...those people that actually loved MS-DOS?). The right brain connected to the left brain of the Mac sucked me in and good user interfaces have never let me go.

I wanted then to live in Silicon Valley. Life (and love) kept me in Minnesota for a time before moving to Chicago and then moving back some years later. You know what? I'd like to be in the Valley now (except for the buying-the-house part of the adventure).

So it bugs me to know there are a whole bunch of people that can get in their cars and drive over to the SD Forum Search SIG meeting tonight. The panel on “The Search for Attention” features:

• Gabe Rivera, Memeorandum
• David Sifry, Technorati
• Seth Goldstein, Root Markets
• Mike Arrington, TechCrunch

I'd like to hear these four guys in person. Hmmm....let's see. There are many of us out here in flyover country that are working real hard to stay abreast of developments in search and the attention economy. Also, there is a plethora of social sites, collaborative offerings, and 'net technologies that could be leveraged to cast the net of inclusiveness a bit wider.

Am I expecting too much? Wouldn't it be a good thing to include smart people that could, say, leverage all those API's being delivered by these guys and others. The only way Web 2.0/NextGen Internet/<Your Name For It Here> is going to work is if concepts and development paradigms are embraced and extended all over the Web. Perhaps it's time for a new kind of developer and business leader evangelism.

Web 2.0, You and the Bird Flu

It's a good idea for you to at least think about what might happen to you, your family, your business and your community *if* the bird flu evolves genetically and jumps to humans causing human-to-human viral transmission.

I've been keeping up on the developments and public pronouncements about this flu. There are Federal government sites like PandemicFlu.gov, the FluWiki, and the University of Minnesota-based Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy run by Dr. Michael Osterholm, former Minnesota State epidemiologist and a guy I've admired for many years since he takes a pragmatic view of infectious disease.

Let's imagine for a moment that the H5N1 virus mutates and the pandemic begins next Winter (2006-2007). According to everything I've read, the world will experience deaths in the millions and an influenza pandemic could kill up to 2 million Americans and force health officials to take draconian steps such as shutting down transportation systems and quarantining entire towns.

It's the Winter of 2007-2008 when the outbreak will hit in full force. Since most of our fellow citizens are not critical thinkers (as evidenced by the ongoing fear of the boogeyman called terrorism), the fear reactions and panic will be the hardest thing to deal with in business.

Besides having a strategy on dealing with the fallout from panic (e.g., grocery shelves depleted), and ensuring you can eat and have water to drink for several weeks, what will be the effect on your work life or business? Your kids schools if teacher's didn't show up (and would you even send your kids to school)?

Then there is the economic impact on any business where people co-mingle. Would your employees show up? I'm sitting in a coffee shop typing this post and a flu pandemic would kill this coffee business. Who'd come to socialize out of fear of a contagion? Who'd work in a place where anyone wandering in could bring along their parasitic companion H5N1? What would happen to the restaurant business overall?

What about the conferences business? Deliveries of goods or services? I could go on-and-on but you catch my drift.

Though this may sound ghoulish, there are many Web-centric businesses that would thrive. Any Web-based collaborative offering would explode in use. When you think about my post yesterday about Microsoft Sharepoint and their opportunity, there's going to be an enormous demand for methods to map an existing business on to the Web and quickly.

So at least give it some thought...

Microsoft Sharepoint. A missed opportunity?

Since I'd been very enamored with Sharepoint services a year ago (built five intranet proof of concepts in a few hours), I thought I'd sign up at Microsoft's site to get in to the free 30 day trial demo and see what was new.

As you can see from the screens above, my experience wasn't very good. The screenshot on the left is what I experienced over and over again when trying to register (it finally was fixed by a server administrator, I presume, since I was able to get in an hour later).

The screenshot on the right is what I experienced inside the demo when clicking on the "Home" link from within the demo site itself. If you popup the window and squint, perhaps you'll notice I came in on Firefox and Mac OS X, but this is a server issue.

Microsoft may be missing an opportunity.

A smartphone in your hand

Recently I bumped in to my old CEO (Bud Colligan) whom I worked for at Authorware many years ago. Bud's now a venture capitalist with Accel Partners in Palo Alto and goes to every significant conference. At this particular one, he was chatting up Mitch Kapor and I stopped and interjected since I hadn't seen Bud for quite some time.

I felt bad since Mitch excused himself and left. Interrupting them wasn't my intention. In any event, it gave Bud and I some time to get caught up a bit and I was curious what he saw as the next, big thing and where VC investments were going. "Mobile," he replied. We talked a bit about that, his brother Ed (who is CEO of Palm), convergence and the world being flat.

I've been working on something that necessitated quite a bit of research on mobile telephony, networks and where smartphones are heading. I must admit being quite taken aback at how quickly this space is growing (growth in smartphones worldwide is expected to jump from 5.7M units (11.1M in North America) in 2005 to 156.2M units (37M in North America) by 2008).  Also, the networks are accelerating in speed (GSM is 10-14kbps and the emerging third generation networks like high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) promises a theoretical speed of 10.7mbps.

Wow. I've been goofing with the new Palm Treo700w at a Verizon stand leveraging their evolution data optimized (EV-DO) network and it is very fast. There are more applications for the PalmOS than for Windows Mobile, so I'm uncertain which Treo to buy.

What's certain is that I'm weary of going to coffee shops for Wifi access, not having a device that I can do things with regardless of where I am, and a digital device that can store stuff I need and go fetch what isn't on it. The smartphone is the only way to go.

What happened to Slashdot?

For years I found cutting edge technical pointers at Slashdot ("News for nerds, stuff that matters"). Two or three times per day I'd pull up the site to see what was new and often found myself scrolling through comments, clicking on links to the main topic or ones from commenters, and generally feeling really on top of what was happening with alpha males in techdom.

Today, Slashdot (/.) is just one of many sites I skim with my RSS reader. Rarely do I see something there that I've not already seen somewhere else, or simply don't care about and thus don't read the /. post.

So why have they become less relevant? It seems to me that there are so many bloggers that are covering seemingly every development technically, that the smart people formerly posting to /. are simply doing it on a blog instead.

Makes me wonder how many other hot sites are becoming less hot now that blogging, blog conversation trackers and other sites are making new information available virtually the moment there is awareness.

9.7 Billion Web Pages and Nothing's There

As of January 2006, Google has indexed 9.7 billion web pages. When I search on a string that is even somewhat popular, I often get back hundreds of thousands or millions of results. In addition, I find it very difficult to obtain the most recent results unless I'm very, very careful about how I enter my search string. Why is it so hard to find really useful data?

Try answering these questions and tell me how easy it is for you to put your fingers on the data (without paying $2,500 and above for reports from some analyst firm):

• How many total web sites are there?
• Worldwide, what's the installed base of mobile phones? How many are web enabled?
• What are the various flavors of wireless, data-centric technologies (Wifi, Wimax, CDMA, GSM, EV-DO, et al)? How fast are they? What are the growth rates?
• What is the guesstimate for the growth in, say, data? When you think about the demand side creation of media by consumers, is there any way to quantify this increase?
• How many unique visitors does Wikipedia get per day?
• How many blogs are delivered by spammers? (Out of the 29.8 million tracked by Technorati).

I could go on-and-on but you get the drift. For simple searches on Google, Yahoo, Icerocket and others, it's fairly trivial to get good results back. But when you're searching for more complex, meaty results, it's stunningly difficult and time consuming to get answers.

One would assume that the Federal Communications Commission, the Dept of Commerce, World Wide Web Consortium or many of the other governmental or non-profit companies would provide this data (especially the US governmental agencies to whom I'm paying taxes!) but alas, they don't.

Maybe there oughta be a CampCamp?

Will there be controversy over the upcoming Minneapolis-based "CampCamp" this May?

"CampCamp is an ad-hoc, un-conference born from the desire for people to go to a camp since it appears that they're really, really cool.

CampCamp will be an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees, as well as wiki's, free deodorant and on-the-spot blogging about how cool it is. Though CampCamp unconference organizers have yet to pick a topic nor have invited anyone to date, this is shaping up to be one of the best camp unconferences ever.

Of course, free Wifi and power strips will be available. Dress code is open, long sleeve shirts over t-shirts with jeans. In addition, all A-list bloggers (e.g., Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer) will be invited in order to maximize CampCamp's exposure on techmemorandum, as well as inappropriate begging to ensure CampCamp is covered on TechCrunch and Valleywag."

OK, OK...I'll be serious. Matthew Ingram has quite a post about a controversy over all the "camps" (Foocamp, Barcamp, MashupCamp, Moosecamp) that have been occurring. I won't re-create Matthews post here, but suffice it to say the concept of an unconference is OUTSTANDING and there needs to many, many more of them. Paying thousands of dollars to attend traditional conferences -- plus travel and expenses -- limits the number of people who can attend and contribute.

I believe that there are no experts. Someone might be more knowledgable at some point in time, but the collective consciousness knows more than any single individual. I know that the reason I love conferences like Web 2.0, ETech and others is not the speakers...it's the attendees. The side conversations. The connections. Ideas that spark new thoughts and, in turn, new ideas.

The most important thing we can all do to create new value, innovate and solve problems we have or are yet to come, is to collaborate. If we align around a topic or as an affinity group, magic happens. An unconference of *any* kind can invite in the maximum number of people that can bring with them new ways of thinking, different points of view, and energy that traditional, expensive conferences cannot. Unconferences are the open source of the conference world.

UPDATE: Dave Winer has an essay on the subject of unconferences that you'll want to read.

Connecting the Dots podcast for March 3, 2006

It's been a few weeks since I've done a podcast. I've been busier than a one-armed, wallpaper hanger but had a bit of time this afternoon and have really been missing it -- so here you go. I'm geared up to continue the weekly podcast series so keep those earphones in.

This week's show covers my current adventure...and some things you might want to consider if you're working (but not feeling like you're in the right spot) or are considering an entrepreneurial adventure of your own. Understanding your values, purpose and what puts a spring-in-your-step is key to creating your future, and there is some data you can gather that will help you understand yourself and the choices you make will become increasingly clear.

Staying with my roots of connecting dots, I then segue in to a discussion about Web 2.0 companies and this list of 907 of them...and something to consider before you embark on investing your time, energy, effort or money in a new Web offering.

Listen to or download this week's show

The Internet *is* a platform

UPDATE: Graeme Thickins will be posting from PC Forum and has an excellent prelude post today. It covers many of the issues important to the success of internet as a platform.

If you have *any* doubt that the internet is a platform -- and that the future of the Web is upon us and accelerating -- then I provide for your clicking, your experiencing, and your gignormous investment of time, this site full of 907 Web 2.0-ish links.

Some of these sites are peripheral to Web 2.0 (or what is increasingly being referred to as "Next Generation internet") meaning they're not actual web application offerings. An example is the AttentionTrust.org attempting to ensure that all netizens own the data collected from our attention invested in all these Web offerings. You can also click "Category Definitions" at the top of the page to see how the eConsultant has categorized the list o' links.

I'm going to come back to a recurring theme I posted about earlier: there are too many value propositions and too many Web places expecting us all to invest our attention, time, energy and effort with them.

Heck...I can't even get through a list of 907 links like this one...let alone decide upon who will survive and be worthy of my attention. Which online storage place do I choose to safekeep my precious digital files?  Which calendar application can my family and I use to input all birthdays, events and work on it as a shared calendar?  Lastly, which of the collaboration sites can I either use or recommend to clients (e.g., Basecamp, Foldera, Joyent, Rallypoint, ProjectSpaces, StikiPad, et al) will still be with us a year or two from now? 

Imagine a small business, with collaborators geographically disbursed, begin to use Foldera. Everyone participating climbs the learning curve, invests in uploading and input into the various calendars and other collaborative aspects, and then what if Foldera folds in 2007?  They're now offline and all the data is sitting on their servers. This team is screwed.