Be Organic, not Viral

I just got back from the VLAB Multi-platform Social Networking event, which I thought was very interesting overall. Jeremiah Owyang did a great moderating job, and Jia Shen, Sourabh Niyogi, Ken Gullicksen and Steve Cohen brought lots of different viewpoints to the discussion. Growing and deriving value from Apps within Social Networks is still full of lots of unknowns, but it was good to hear some basic shared principles come through - my summary of one point was 'before you think about a Business Model, make sure you have a Pleasure Model'.

Another point well made by Steve Cohen of Bebo was something I've been thinking for a while too - the hunger for 'Viral' growth is a mistake - what you really need is 'Organic' growth. Just as we distinguish between Organic search results and bought or spammed ones, social network sites and their users are distinguishing between the viral apps that are essentially parasitic, using their hosts as a means to their propagation, and the ones that organically become part of the social ecology, making both the site and the users richer by their presence.
I spent the last weekend fighting off a flu virus, partly by eating lots of organic fruit. I expect social networks and their users will continue to do the same.

The Social Cloud

My talk from LIFT is here for you to watch below (20mins, needs flash):


The others are up at the LIFT Video site

LIFT Conference starts

Geneva Sunrise
Originally uploaded by Kevin Marks

I'm in Geneva for the LIFT conference, watching Bruce Sterling riff on Carla Sarkozy as a black swan. The photo is what the sunrise looked like over the Alps at breakfast.

Sheet music redux

I've long been involved with amateur theater and music performance (my boys are performing in a Schumann recital tomorrow with the rest of their piano teacher's pupils), and I grew up seeing double bass cases plastered with Musicians' Union "Keep Music Live" stickers around the place, but I always thought this was a luddite rearguard action against the tide of recorded media that began flowing about a century ago.
But this week, the news was that Rock Band  had sold 2.5 million downloaded songs for you to play along with (it comes with 58). 
Having researched this thoroughly with my boys, the fun of this game is more in the playing than the listening — the 'guitar' playing is clearly simplified, though the drumming is pretty close to reality, and the less said about my 'singing' the better.
Looking at this in the longer view, it can be seen as the return of sheet music in a new form; before recordings took over, sheet music sold for amateur performers was the dominant form. Here's Douglas Adams again:

during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’

‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’

‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’

‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.’

Fear of the new - the Internet, Tea, and MapReduce

Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6 said:

“Al-Qa’eda has prospered and as it were regrouped largely because of the energy and effort it has put into its propaganda, largely through the internet.”

Sir Richard added that the internet had become the main channel for “radicalisation” and coordination between al-Qa’eda cells. He said: “In dealing with this problem, there is no alternative to imposing significant controls over the internet.”

This is what I call the "cup of tea" problem, after Douglas Adams:

Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.' They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans 'over a cup of tea,' though each of these was new and controversial in their day.

Some people have been surprised that tea was controversial, but William Cobbett's 1822 'The evils of tea (and the virtues of beer)' had this to say:

It must be evident to everyone, that the practice of tea drinking, must rended the frame feeble and unfit to encounter hard labour or severe weather, while, as I have shown, it deducts from the means of replenishing the belly and covering the back. Hence, succeeds a softness, an effeminacy, a seeking for the fireside, a lurking in the bed, and in short, all the characteristics of idleness, for which, in this case, real want of strength furnishes an apology. The tea drinking fills the public-houses, makes the frequenting of it habitual, corrupts boys as soon they are able to move from home, and does little less for the girls, to whom the gossip of the tea-table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel. At the very least, it teaches them idleness.

Which brings me to the attack on MapReduce today, which spectacularly misses the point by attacking a programming technique for not being a database and contains the striking line:

Given the experimental evaluations to date, we have serious doubts about how well MapReduce applications can scale.

(MapReduce is what Google uses to run complex data-manipulation problems on lots of computers in parallel to do things that databases fail at, like building an index for all the webpages it has found, or rendering map tiles for everywhere on earth in Google maps).

OpenSocial Hackathon next week in SF

OpenSocial Hackathon hosted by Six Apart

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 4:00 PM - 11:00 PM

Six Apart 548 4th St,San Francisco, California

Find out the latest news about OpenSocial's 0.6 release and what Shindig and Cajoling can do for your next web application
Work with developers of OpenSocial Social Networks to get your applications up and running.
What to bring:

• Your laptop
• Your web application code or your social networking idea

What we provide:

• Wifi and power
• Help getting into OpenSocial 0.6 sandboxe
• Developers from at least Google, MySpace, Hi5, Plaxo, and Six Apart
• and don't forget pizza!

Hosted at Six Apart's 4th street offices, it's a short walk from Caltrain and indeed the Macworld Expo.
Six Apart's post
RSVP at Upcoming

Identity Theft is not a crime

Fraud however, is.

Jeremy Clarkson scoffed at the UK Government data leak debacle, and published his bank details in The Sun:

"All you'll be able to do with them is put money into my account. Not take it out. Honestly, I've never known such a palaver about nothing," he told readers.

But he was proved wrong, as the 47-year-old wrote in his Sunday Times column.

"I opened my bank statement this morning to find out that someone has set up a direct debit which automatically takes £500 from my account," he said.

"The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again.

"I was wrong and I have been punished for my mistake."

Police were called in to search for the two discs, which contained the entire database of child benefit claimants and apparently got lost in the post in October 2007.

They were posted from HM Revenue and Customs offices in Tyne and Wear, but never turned up at their destination - the National Audit Office.

The loss, which led to an apology from Prime Minister Gordon Brown, created fears of identity fraud.

Clarkson now says of the case: "Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy."

I'm amazed that the normally combative Clarkson has accepted this feeble excuse from his bank, when they have just handed out a huge sum of his money to someone else against his wishes, revealing that they are failing in their primary purpose of keeping money safely.

That their security process can fail spectacularly in this way, enabling fraudsters to siphon off money, is sadly all too common.

What is notable is that the banks have spent enormous sums of money promoting the concept of 'identity theft' through clever TV adverts, diverting their customers' attention from their security cock-ups, despite the fact that they are liable for the fraudulently dispersed funds. I don't understand why the banks continue to use "mothers maiden name" as default password, and enable debits this way, then hide behind data protection legislation when their error is pointed out. Clarkson should be railing at the idiots at his bank, too.

Update:

Thanks to Kerry Buckley in the comments for this excellent comedy sketch that sums it up perfectly:

memes, dreams and themes

Cameo pointed me at this dada album cover meme today:

1. The first article title on the Wikipedia Random Articles page is the name of your band.


2. The last four words of the very last quotation on the Random Quotations page is the title of your album.


3. The third picture in Flickr's Interesting Photos From The Last 7 Days will be your album cover.


4. Use your graphics programme of choice to throw them together, and post the result.

I got the following via this flickr image (which I hope counts as fair use - Suw uses CC images instead)

I just found out via Twitter that my colleague from (mumble mumble) years ago, Nikki Barton, has a blog; she's wise - read her.

Rosie asked me "Was there a Solar eclipse in Yorkshire in 1967?" - the answer was No, but I found this great NASA site, which reminded me of my Astronomy tutor at Cambridge from 1987, who at the time had booked a hotel in Cornwall for the 1999 total eclipse (I hope the clouds lifted for him). I'm re-reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle at the moment, so I am tickled that I can look up an astronomical ephemeris this easily.

Finally, the Edge question this year is What have you changed your mind about? - a lot of food for thought there.

URLs are people too

There is an assumption buried in the collective mind of developers that is hard to remove, and it is that people are best represented by email addresses. Go to almost any website to sign-up, and you are prompted for an email address and password. Signing up usually involves digging out the site's reply from your spam folder and clicking on a link to get confirmed, then giving it a password. Sometimes you get to pick a username too, from whatever stock of namespace is left at the site.

Elizabeth Churchill and Ben Gross looked into this and found out that people find it easier to remember passwords than usernames, because they use the same passwords everywhere, and they end up with multiple different email accounts to handle the problem of having handed them to to all these sites and getting spammed by them.

Meanwhile, over here in the blog world, we've been using blog URLs to refer to people for years, and social network sites have proliferated URLs that are people. I have several that refer to me, my events, my music, my twitters and my photographs linked from the sidebar here. We even have XFN's rel="me" to connect them together, and OpenID to allow them to be used as logins elsewhere, instead of emails.

The underlying thing that is wrong with an email address is that it's affordance is backwards - it enables people who have it to send things to you, but there's no reliable way to know that a message is from you. Conversely, URLs have the opposite default affordance- people can go look at them and see what you have said about yourself, and computers can go and visit them and discover other ways to interact with what you have published, or ask you permission for more.

So, developers, remember that URLs are people too.

Update: This tension between email-as-identifier and email-as-way-to-be-spammed is what makes Scoble's attempt to extract 5,000 people's emails from Facebook for his own use less defensible than it appears at first. Dare Obasanjo recognises the tensions, but strangely dismisses the OpenSocial attempt to abstract out this kind of data into a common API.

Tardy blogging

Between Twitter and my Reader shared items, my blogging impulses have been diverted elsewhere recently; I'll try to rectify this in the new year by writing here more often, but do follow those two links if you want to hear more of my brief observations and recent reading respectively.

Do not fold, bend, mutilate or Kindle

I had some hopes for Amazon's e-book device - after all I buy paper books from Bezos via Amazon Prime weekly, I buy Subterranean Press's splendid editions, and I even end up susbcribing to the Folio Society's offers each year. I spend 8-12 hours a day reading screens and 1-4 reading paper books; I should be right in their target market. So I'm really sorry that KIndle is doomed.

I'll keep this short. Kindle requires DRM. DRM destroys value - it makes things do less and cost more, and means they will break suddenly without warning when the service inevitably goes bust.

If you have $400 to spend on a small gadget to read outdoors on, buy yourself an OLPC and give one away to a child elsewhere too. If you are still tempted by the Kindle swindle, read Mark Pilgrim's literary dismissal of it.

Open Rights Group - Happy ORG day

I'm proud to have been involved with the Open Rights Group since it was an idea at a conference, and to be on the Advisory Board.

Today, the two year report was published.

By using web tech to gather reasoned responses to digital rights issues, ORG has got a lot done in the UK, from helping persuade the Gowers review of intellectual property that copyright should not be extended, to sensibly evaluating and opposing the blind use of e-voting and e-counting equipment in May 2007's ballots, to clearly explaining to the All-Party Parliamentary Internet Group that Digital Rights Management is a huge mistake.

You should sign up to support more good work from ORG.

OpenSocial and Social Software history

In the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, danah boyd and Nicole Ellison have written a very thorough history of Social Network Sites.

Over at the OpenSocial API site we've written what we hope could be their future. Let me know what you think.

All bloggers are above average

Chuq and Joseph are pondering 'active' blogs. Chuq says:

As of today, my feed readership is between 550 and 600. My Technorati authority is 117, my rank is 54,800ish. All things considered, my blogs are small, very much personal.

Yet, do the math. 100 MILLION blogs, and mine is the 50,000th largest in the world?

Or do your own test. create an empty blog, register it with technorati, post a couple of test messages, and do nothing else. Don't advertise it, don't point to it, don't create content. you'll likely find that Technorati will throw it somewhere around 1mm in authority.

He goes on to challenge Technorati's count of 100 million blogs because of this. What is really going on? Well, links to blogs follow a Long Tail distribution. You can debate whether it's a power law or an exponential, but it isn't a gaussian. Here's a 2005 links vs rank log chart, and here's a 2006 one (if Technorati want to run my old script that generates these we could have a 2007 one). Technorati's 'Authority' is the number of inbound links in the last 180 days. So, as Chuq notes, if you have a new blog with no links to it, it is ranked about 4 millionth, tied with every other blog with no inbound links. So yes, everyone is above average - they're all on the 96th percentile.

But what happens when you start getting links? I have a couple of old blogs that have a few. With 2 links, my rank goes up to 2.6 Millionth; with 3 to 1.9 millionth, with 5 to 1.2 millionth, up to this blog with 141 inbound links ranked at 44,734. This is a very easy hill to climb in percentage terms, though clearly getting into the top 100 is still relatively hard.

So what of Chuq's contention that the other 96 million blogs with no links are "abandoned, stillborn, or some kind of spam blog" ? A lot of blogs are made for specific events, and don't need further posts adding (and so may not have been linked to in the last 180 days), and a lot have a low posting rate, sure. But, as Dave Winer once said, by that measure every book and magazine article is abandoned. Not all blogs are interested in links - many are personal journals or for a small group of friends to read, and achieving those goals well.

So Chuq's accusations of "playing fast and loose wiht the numbers" are really his misunderstandings of Long Tail distributions. In the Blogosphere, like Lake Woebegon, everyone really is above average.

AtomPub is an RFC

The Atom Publishing Protocol is now an IETF RFC standard. RFC stands for Request For Comments, but if you have any comments, it may be a ittle late. You could add them to a comment feed using AtomPub though