social networks - TheWayoftheWeb

Privacy, Frictionless Sharing, and Hasah Elahi

December 5, 2011 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

I originally wrote about Hasan Elahi four years ago following an article in Wired, which described how he was incorrectly questioned by the FBI, and the Tracking Transcience project he began as a result to share everything about his life – where he was, what he was eating, his purchases etc. (My original post is here). Way before frictionless sharing became available to us all!

I thought it was worth sharing his recent TED talk which was queued up in my always growing list of videos to watch;

It’s something which is going to be a growing issues for more of us as ‘frictionless sharing’ and online lives are the easiest for people to track and interact with. Rather than trying to hide everything, perhaps overwhelming the systems with information is the more effective route, particularly, as Elahi points out, the various Government agencies in every country whose stock and trade is information. After all, ‘Everyone’s a curator now‘

Frictionless sharing and frictionless ambivalence

I’ve been looking at the rise of ‘frictionless sharing’ – exemplified by Spotify autoposting every song you play on Facebook. The insightful Chris Thorpe summed it up well with his blog post comparing it with frictionfull sharing.

What I really want and act upon is that one personal recommendation from someone I trust/respect/like for the one thing that really matters – a new song, a book, an article. Something that someone saw and though they absolutely had to share with me.

After all, I thought at this time of year it’s meant to be ‘the thought that counts’, and ‘it’s better to give than receive’. No thought goes into autoposting, and you’re giving me nothing – except a bunch of unfiltered noise alongside everyone else doing the same thing in my friends list.

Unless you’re doing it to devalue government information agencies, in which case you’re far more interesting than your choice in mainstream pop suggests…

Buffer

Filed Under: social networks Tagged With: autoposting, facebook, frictionless sharing, sharing, spotify

The user experience of sex…

November 16, 2011 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

Really interesting video of Tor Myrhen, the President and Chieft Creative Officer of Grey New York using the tale of how he lost his virginity at age 14 to compare the user experience of the process between 1986 and 2011.

It’s a good reminder of how technology may change, but at their core people don’t, and how although the core desires and motivations remain identical, the ways in which we communicate and connect do lead to different interactions and outcomes. But where it goes further for me is in the repercussions of those changes and how they may have an effect on the way our core desires now manifest themselves

Desire in the connected age:

I’m not much younger than Myrhen, so most of the references are pretty familiar, particularly skateboarding. I actually have a VHS cassette that a friend put together of a group of us hanging out and attempting to skate from around 20 years ago, and I wonder whether I’d have let myself be filmed if I thought anyone outside of the five of us would ever see it? I’d still want to be an awesome skater, and I’d still suck, so would I dare go near a board if I thought it would end up on Facebook and Youtube in minutes?

Given the public nature of connections, would I have pursued the same girls, or had the same serendipitous moments of mutual interest? And would my friends have been using technology to screw them up more effectively than they managed in real life?

And when some of those teen romances inevitably ended, what implications does it have when it’s announced publicly on social networks, with an almost micro-celebrity level of PR regarding who was dumped, whose story gets out first, and who gets blamed?

As Myhren says, all of the data that got shared on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and indexed by Google, is essentially around for eternity, or at least as long as those companies are with us, so flashing forward 20 years in my own life, what effects does that have on me now? In my 30s in 1986 it would have taken a lot of effort to track down past friends and girlfriends if I was feeling nostalgic, compared to a quick search on Google and some social networks – I’m in regular contact with three of my best friends that I met living in the U.S despite being terrible at keeping in touch before the broadband revolution really took off in the UK, for example.

Out of curiousity, after seeing this, I did a quick check to see how many ex-girlfriends I could track down with barely any effort, and without revealing my personal quantitative data, I managed about 70% success in about an hour. Does that change what happens with regards to nostalgia and ‘ending’ relationships which can be so easily resumed? Does it mean that although the desire for a quick romance still exists for many people, the reality is that it’s always easy for one party to at least attempt to resume it online, whether or not that leads to problems?

After all, the rules and guidelines of society, whether legal, religious, or community generated have all come about to enable humans to combine their core desires with the need to live, work and exist together in a fairly mutually acceptable way. So given that those rules and guideliness are changing at a faster pace than ever due to the speed of technological change, are we going to cope with the new rules and guidelines, and what does that mean for our kids? We can talk about digital natives seeing the internet and mobile as natural parts of their lives, but our kids and grandkids will still have the same core desires that we’ve had for centuries. The difference will be how they reconcile them with the world around them, both digital and physical.

Buffer

Filed Under: Digital Culture, social networks Tagged With: changing technology, connecting people, dating, generation y, romance, social networks, teens, user experience

Is Google becoming evil?

November 3, 2011 By Dan Thornton 2 Comments

Given the high standards Google set for itself with the aims of indexing the world’s information, and the mantra of ‘Don’t Be Evil’, it’s likely we hold it to higher standards than most companies. After all, in 2004, Joel Bakan described corporations in this way ‘As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognise nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others. Nothing it its legal makeup limits what it can do to others in pursuit of its selfish ends, and it is compelled to cause harm when the benefits of doing so outweight the costs’.

Now whether or not Google is becoming evil, there are certainly much worse offenders around the world, but given the lofty ideals and the integral part that has played in the Google brand, any start down the slope to the activities of the traditional corporation could be damaging. You might somewhat expect it of Microsoft, or ignore it if you’re a member of the Cult of Apple, but when Google acts in ways which particularly hurt small businesses, publishers and potentially vulnerable individuals, it’s particularly jarring.

‘Secure search’:

The right of an individual to online privacy and security is a good thing, and difficult to argue against. The use of https by sites is a positive step and one that shouldn’t be discouraged.

But recently Google made an announcement that Google Analytics would no longer provide keyword information for users who are logged into their Google profile and using secure search. That move was done with the stated aim of privacy and currently a relatively small percentage of users are searching via the secure connection.

Two problems with that – already many people are reporting significant and growing numbers who are now hidden in terms of keyword data, and secondly, having had access to that data for years, it does not indicate in any way, shape or form who was using a specific keyword and therefore affect privacy. All I knew was that 20% of people visiting in the last month typed in ‘thewayoftheweb’ into a Google search box, regardless of whether they were secure or not, and no further information was available.

But hang on – if it really doesn’t matter to individual user privacy, could it be related to the launch of a paid Google Analytics for enterprise with a hefty price? After all, if you’re paying $150,000 for Google Analytics Premium, you’d be expecting all information.

So Google moves in a traditionally corporate way, using a freemium model to gain market share, then starting to remove features from the free version and concentrate on getting the top percentage of big users to start paying.

The people who lose out are small business and publishers, who won’t know how an increasing number of visitors are finding their site, and that number will only increase with more people staying logged into Gmail and Google+. After all, no-one can optimise for searches they don’t know are happening – although I’m not sure if the privacy still applies when I click-through on Google Adsense or Adwords advertising next to the search results, regardless of my connection.

‘Anti-social Google Reader’

There’s been a pretty big uproar regarding the redesign and loss of features which has been rolled out to Google Reader, despite the paltry week’s notice given to users. My concerns regarding the actual design are fairly minor, as it makes it slightly more difficult to use, but I can cope.

What’s difficult to reconcile is the loss of various features which are obviously and explicitly an attempt to shoehorn users into more activity on Google+, which have a number of negative effects for individuals and businesses.

Individuals can no longer have a basic sharing and following network within Google Reader. As opposed to the thousands of connections I had on social networks, there was a small group of around 30 or so I followed on Google Reader, simply because I was intently interested in seeing what they deemed worthy of curating and sharing on a tight subject list, without necessarily interacting with them about their holiday photos. And as with Twitter, it was asynchronous sharing – they didn’t have to know me or approve me, or figure out what I want then create a Google+ circle on that premise. But worse is the claim that many users in more repressive countries were using Google Reader as social networks were blocked, and had connections of several thousand in many cases. That’s entirely lost now.
Business revenue is affected: Via RSS, and Google’s own acquisition of Feedburner, a business could display advertising in their RSS feed. In addition to losing control of sharing a full or partial RSS feed, the snippets shared to Google+ also conveniently remove any feed advertising – Google may lose their share of that revenue, but also completely control Google+ and any monetization that happens.
RSS is under threat: Consumer adoption of RSS has remained relatively small, but concentrated towards heavy and earl-adopting technology users. And of that group, Reader had a market share of about 70%, crushing most competitors and removing incentives to innovate in that area. If Google has decided RSS is redundant, what will happen to the popular Feedburner RSS service which powers many, many blogs RSS feeds? The analytics side of Feedburner has been pretty much permanently broken, but it still provides a simple and easy way to set up a feed which is compatible with numerous other places and services.
In addition, for business use, it’s been possible to take the feed of Google Reader shared items, or utilise the unofficial Google Reader API to separate out tags to put onto business intranets or publish externally. Given that shared items is gone (Including my own 16,000+ articles over 5 years), what faith can you have in an unofficial API to support paying clients?

WTF Google?

I’m certainly not against businesses making money – I’d like my own to keep earning more in the future, and my expertise is more directed towards the content and marketing side of business operations. It’s entirely possible that in such a large organisation it may just be coincidental that various changes all suggest a new self-interest which has happened just as a founder resumes control of the company and indicates more of a focus on their new social business.
I’m also enthusiastic about experimentation and change – the fact that Google Buzz and Google Wave have both been deemed failed experiments doesn’t negate the important experience and influence they may have had both within Google and externally.

But I do question whether the current focus on Google+ is causing the big G to lose some of what has made it so immensely popular and powerful. Whether that’s the influence of the success of Facebook as a walled garden which uses elements of coercion to get us to help power it in terms of advertising and brand revenue, or whether it’s just the misalignment of every non-search free product as a feeder for Google+, I can’t say.

But either way, I’m not alone in feeling unsettled by Google’s new direction, and as we’ve seen, current success doesn’t mean permanence, particularly online. Google has some security in that the integration of Gmail, Reader, Analytics, Apps for Business etc are so deep into our lives and companies that it will take a significant motivation to switch, but given the current moves from my techie friends to alternative feed readers, and the existence of established and good paid analytics alternatives, it’s not inconceivable that the move could start to happen.

And given the results of some blind search engine result testing, it appears that one of the main reasons for Google continuing to dominant search is the familiarity of the brand, rather than the results being returned in comparison to Bing – which means that losing the perception of their values may not just damage the potential success of Google+, but could also lead to a greater threat to their core search business.

Buffer

Filed Under: Analytics, Branding, Google+, marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, social networks Tagged With: brand values, google, google analytics, google becoming evil, google reader, redesign, secure search

Everyone’s a curator now…

October 10, 2011 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

We’ve talked for years about citizen journalism and self-publishing, but more important than the channels of distribution are the ways in which content and context are discoved via search engines and social recommendations, and the fact that theoretically this leads to any piece of content available online being indexable, findable and potentially popular.

But what’s interesting me at the moment is the rise in curation – not necessarily on a professional level (for example NPR’s Andy Carvin curating Middle East tweets to an audience of almost 60,000 followers, or the increased use of tools such as Ushahidi and Storify by journalists and news organisations), but the effect it has on ‘ad hoc’ content curation – note how I’m trying to avoid that increasingly ridiculous line between amateur/citizen and professional/establishment content production!

What I mean by ad hoc is that we’re all walking around with cameras or mobile phones, and many of us are then sharing via our various online networks – and that can range from family pictures and days out to long form writing and video. And I’m struck by the way in which my own experiences are changing, even at a family event.

How curation changes our lives:

I recently went down to the war museum at Duxford for the second time this year to celebrate a family event with my parents and my son. And as always, I was carrying my phone (a Nokia N900 for the record), and taking a mix of personal family pictures and ones which I intended to make public on my Flickr account and possibly elsewhere. All totally normal.

Consolidated B-24M Liberator Second World War American Bomber

Except here’s the change. The first time we visited I took a load of pictures of the amazing planes and tanks on display, and then made them public with most of them just called something like – ‘Plane at Duxford’. I’d uploaded probably 80 or so photos and didn’t really want to spend a whole Sunday cataloguing them. And the blog post it inspired was a thought about how the rise of communications technology etc seems to have sucked all the glamour and excitement from air travel.

This time I did something totally different.

Almost subsconsciously, every time I took a picture of a vehicle on display, I also snapped the information beside it about the model and historical information.

And I wasn’t doing this for myself. Occasionally I’ve snapped museum information if it’s something I want to investigate further later on, but although I quite like planes and military history, I don’t have the time or inclination to start reading up on it at the moment.

Instead, I realised I was automatically doing it becuase I knew at some point I’d have the time to make those images public, and I wanted to be able to hopefully provide the correct and relevant information for anyone seeing them, as well as potentially feeding my ego by making them more discoverable. I recently discovered that my Flickr account has had over 12,000 views, and although I know that those stats include all the times I’ve looked at my own snaps, that still leaves a lot of views from other people – some of whom have been kind enough to leave comments on the images I’ve made public (apparently 699 photos, with far less tagged and geo-located, according to the handy stats page).

Considering the huge number of other people at Duxford that day armed with cameras and mobile phones, I wonder how many other images were being captured, shared and then found online, and how many other people might start doing similar things to catalogue their own creations?

How much more content is being produced already which isn’t being curated and tagged, and therefore lies undiscovered? And how many more people will start creating collections of items which interest them, using tools which are easier and more accessible than a traditional blog? We’ve already seen that to some extent with the rise of simpler tools such as Tumblr, or the amount of video and photo content which is being shared on Facebook every day, along with the immense volume of videos on Youtube. And there seems to have been an increase in tools and services which attempt to help curation, whether it’s the more established universal shopping and fashion industries, or newer ideas. But none of them have got mass traction yet – if one does, how will that change things. Is there a way, for example, for a service to help me not only collect and curate everything I might have uploaded to Facebook, but to easily let me share it outside of that particular walled garden?

It’s one reason why I use Flickr, and pay for a Pro account, along with increasingly looking at using the likes of Audioboo and Soundcloud for audio. Obviously Youtube and others such as Vimeo have video covered, and my blogs and websites do the job for text. But at some point someone will crack the way of making all of these points easy to distribute to, and more importantly, collate and curate from? (You can already do easy sharing to a number of those sites even via older phones and services – for Flickr and Youtube etc I tend to use the built-in service on the Nokia, but I know several others exist for publishing – just not for pulling it all back together). I could hack everything together myself to make a coherent lifestream, but I’ve never found enough reason to take the time, and I suspect most other people feel the same ( I do find the time if clients agree to it though, so have some experience of pulling it all together!)

It’s even more obvious with the launch of the new Facebook Timeline profiles. It shows how much time, effort and content we’ve all pumped into something which has inherent value in many ways, but also locks that content up inside itself.

How might it serve us, and others, to be able to set it free, and accumulate it all in the same way as Klout and Peerindex attempt to pull in our activity and interaction to assign us scores for influence? Back in June 2007 I wrote about Hasan Elahi, who created a site to which he uploaded his entire life as a response to being mistakenly put on the FBI watch list and getting detained at an airport. I’m not suggesting we auto-publish all our data all the time, and there are many privacy implications involved in that debate, but we’re all becoming auto-curators, and that could potentially lead to a second era in terms of social media and networks as that behaviour becomes part of everyday life for us all.

Buffer