Evolving Web

I'm Gonna Learn Ya Some Wikipedia, Boy!

I was the first person in my high school to write a senior thesis using a computer.   My teacher was very skeptical.  The conversation went something like this:

Jim: I would like to write my thesis on a computer, is that okay?

Teacher: No, I don't like that dot matrix print.

Jim: I have a daisy wheel printer which looks and formats just like a typewriter.

Teacher: I don't believe that.

(Jim digs through bag and shows him proof of daisy wheel printer output).

Teacher: Well, no, you can't because you can use spell check, it's just like the computer is writing the paper for you.

(Mind you this is a TRS-80 Model II with 64k of RAM and no hard drive).

Jim: I can turn the spell check off.

Teacher:  Why do you want to write it on a computer anyway?  Isn't it just the same as writing it on a typewriter in the end?

Jim: Not really.  With the computer I spend more of my time focused on the composition and less time on merely typing and retyping the same pages.

Teacher: Well, okay, but I want to see daily drafts from you, to make sure you aren't using spell check.

As we move forward in technology, our productivity is enhanced. In my case it was merely getting freedom from the IBM Selectric that sat in my bedroom. 

Today it is in actual speed of research.  But apparently a professor in Brighton is on a crusade to stop student from using Google or Wikipedia for their research.  Professor Tara Brabazon says (emphasis mine):

"It is down to institutions to prevent this from happening. It is not good for anybody.

"I don't think students come to university to learn how to use Google, they can all do that before they get here.

"It is an easy way out for tutors to let them work to their own devices using search engines.

"People have to pay to come to university now and what they are paying for is the knowledge, experience and guidance of people like myself.

"There is a school of thinking that it should be about them directing their own learning but I think giving guidance is crucial.

"I ban my students from using Google, Wikipedia and other websites like that. I give them a reading list to work from and expect them to cite a good number of them in any work they produce."

Two quick and obvious issues here:

1. Um, why not both?

and

2. Giving them a reading list is filtering.  It's DOING THEIR RESEARCH FOR THEM!

When I read this I, well, I'm still laughing actually.  It's so patently obvious that in the quest to remove students from lazy study habits she has, instead, given them an even bigger crutch.

In essence, she's turned research into book reports.

Tara, if you want to give your students specific instruction, tell them they cannot cite Wikipedia directly.  Wikipedia and Google are actually neo-card catalogs that drive people to primary sources.  Wikipedia is a heavily referenced information source.

Your students should be rewarded for deep research and not rewarded for shallow research.  But banning information sources or the primary avenues of initial research is misguided at best. 

And please, stop doing their research for them.

--

For what it is worth, The Inflation Calculator tells me: What cost $4000 in 1981 would cost $9436.59 in 2006.

Technorati Tags: Tara Brabazon, technophobia, technosoap, culture, google, wikipedia, grand island senior high, trs-80

Lecturer Bans Students From Using Google And Wikipedia (from The Argus)

When A Bunch of People Become Community

No matter how far removed my daily life gets from Urban Planning (I was a real-life urban planner for about 20 years), it still amazes me how I'm still right in the middle of it. Today on Twitter, Shel Israel sent out a note about a great post by Laura Fitton called "Twitter is my Village."

Her posts cover the basic aspects of community.  Transportation, Culture, Commerce, and Continuity.

Transportation

In her first paragraph, Laura says (emphasis mine):

For me, connecting on Twitter with someone I’ve just met in person is inviting them to live in “my village.” Follow-up won’t be limited to the “nice meeting you” email cul-de-sac. On Twitter, we’ll cross paths incidentally and without pressure. I may bump into them “around town” for maybe a word or two at the “coffee shop” or “post office.” Over time we may discover common interests (aka social objects) in each others’ tweets, and connect more deeply as neighbors or friends.

We instantly see an organization of interaction based on conceptual transportation.  Laura recognizes the community-busting implications of cul-de-sacs and represents them as dead-ends in conversation.  Twitter is not a medium you can ignore - because it is constant motion.  You may not notice everyone all the time and you are not expected to.

An email is a demand for a reply.  "Do you not get my email?"  An Instant Message is even more so.

Twitter is more like being in a community and seeing people walking by on the street.  You may or may not run right out and say hello, because they are always there.

But in Twitter you may see someone walking by saying "I am eating haggis" and you might say, "Why, I love haggis!"  And run out to catch them.  As she says, you "Bump into them."  Great to do on foot, terrible to do in a car.  Great to do in Twitter, nearly impossible to do in E-mail.

Culture

Both Laura and Shel in his post mention how when you first get to twitter you "don't get it."

Shel said:

I've been using Twitter since September, and like she said, for a while, I could not get what it was all about. I was new in the village.  people said hello to me and exchanged niceties. The language and content of the 140-character spoonfuls of conversation seemed to me to be kind of shallow. .... But over a period of less than four months, I find I am more intimate with the people I'm talking with on Twitter.

When you are from somewhere and you go somewhere with a very different culture, many things seem patently stupid.  Why would someone care if I stuck my chopsticks in my rice and left them there? or Why did he look upset when I gave him a thumbs up and a smile? or Why do I say Thank you before I'm given something?

Twitter is a tool, but it didn't define the culture.  The culture grew out of the people there.  The tool created a bounded world where certain rules applied and a new type of communication developed.  This is culture which creates the community.

Urban planners like to think that a plan is a community.  Architects like to think a design for a house is a home.  On line community builders like to think our tools are the community.  A community is never the infrastructure.  Usually the infrastructure is what restricts the community.

Commerce

The currency of twitter is the conversation.  No market can happen without critical mass.  In Twitter, your market is as valuable as the amount of capital being traded.  When you first get to Twitter, part of your disorientation is that you haven't started trading and have no trading strategies.

As you enter the community, you need to participate.  To add to the activities of the market.  If you do not, then you will not get ROI from Twitter and the community will not gain from your productivity.

Continuity

What was most beautiful about Laura and Shel's posts was the underlying assumption that once people begin to care about each other - that caring has an enduring quality.  This creates underlying continuity in a community.  On Brainstorms, a now rather mature online community, the people involved will seriously fly around the world to meet with each other.  They honestly care for one another and this seriously transcends whatever tool may have brought them together.

Thanks, Laura and Shel, for giving me some very nice things to think and write about this morning!  (I am @ourfounder on Twitter)

Technorati Tags: Laura Fitton, Pistachio, Shel Israel, urban planning, community indicators, community, design, social software, social networking, twitter

Sweet Whispers in the Dark

Read Write Web today tells me:

The DataPortability Workgroup announced this morning that representatives from both Google and Facebook are joining its ranks. The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era of Data Portability - where users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse elsewhere and where vendors can leverage safe cross-site data exchange for a whole new level of innovation. Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges. If things go right, today could be a very important day in the history of the internet.

If this really works, and people really can move their data from place to place, it will be an amazing gift to every person with ... well, personal data!

It would be everything I've been asking for.

I want this to happen.  I really do.

I am skeptical, of course.  So many half implementations.  So many thinly veiled non-attempts.  This should take some time.

It's popcorn time!  Let's sit back and watch the show.

Technorati Tags: google, facebook, data portability, siren songs

Mark Zuckerberg - Data Vampire

I vant to suck your data. :-)

By now you are sick of reading about Robert Scoble's banning from Facebook.  But this is a really interesting conundrum.

Here is what Scoble was doing.

OK, so I’ve been released from my NDA. I was alpha testing an upcoming feature of Plaxo Pulse — this feature has not yet been released and now that my account has gotten shut down it’s not clear whether it will be released. It is a Facebook importer that works just like any other address book importer.

What does it collect?

Names and email address and birthday.

Why those? Because it’s trying to connect Facebook names with names in its database.

For instance, it learned that of the 5,000 people in my Facebook account about 1,800 were already on Plaxo.

It did NOT look at anything else. Just this stuff, no social graph data. No personal information.

Why do this?

I wanted to get all my contacts into my Microsoft Outlook address book and hook them up with the Plaxo system, which 1,800 of my friends are already on.

It’s ironic that you can import your Gmail address book into Facebook but you can’t export back out.

Privacy

We really can't be too upset about Facebook protecting our privacy.  In the end, their bot was designed to make sure that people wouldn't get in an harvest personal information from Facebook.  That is cool, it is laudable, and we should encourage it.

I do not have my birthday on my Facebook page because we all should know that our birth date is an excellent proxy data point for identity theft.  Your name and your birthdate quickly get people to your social security number.

So, yay! To Facebook for protecting us.

Data

Facebook is a data sink.  It is a drain into which our energies and attention pour.  In Facebook we have built very little of value.  However, items of value in Facebook we have built are our contact lists and any organization of them we have done.  Those are our lists.  If Facebook doesn't wise up and see that the only thing of value they have, they hoard.  They will find a lot of people looking for the next pretty social networking platform. 

Scoble is right, if I can get my data out of gmail, I should be able to get it out of Facebook.  Or LinkedIn for that matter.

So Thank You and Shame On You

Thank you Facebook for setting up bots to detect invasions of my privacy.  That's excellent.  Shame on you for not building into your API something that allows for smoother transition of my social information.  And Shame on you for hurting poor, defenseless Robert Scoble!  :-)

Technorati Tags: robert Scoble, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, data ownership, data vampires, privacy, plaxo, plaxo pulse

Seeds of a Meme

Look people, this is not a culture war, everyone does not need to be on Twitter.

Today, there was a firestorm of posts about Twitter, spawned by the assertion that Twitter's bandwidth needs far outstripped its ability to pay for additional scale.  Jason Calacanis cried "bullsh*t" on that and posted three ways that Twitter could make money tomorrow.

A lot of other posts popped up around this.  Many of them centered around a comment on Jason's post by Anthony Brown:

When getting management at the San Francisco Zoo on board, there was some issues with; "Twitter being too much of a niche demographic." I then explained that this is just the beginning, everyone will be twittering soon.

This really worked its way into my brain.

I do not think everyone will be Twittering soon.  And if they do, Twitter will collapse under its own weight - for the company and for users alike.

Twitter has been called a conversation ecosystem.  It is actually part of a larger conversation ecosystem that includes .. well .. everything.  Blogging, Facebook, email, chats at a coffee shop, daydreams.

I see Twitter as a plankton layer-level of the ecosystem.  Every animal on earth does not need to eat plankton, but without plankton we'd all be in a world of hurt.  "Everyone twittering" seems like an absolute nightmare.

Everyone will not be twittering.  Everyone will not be blogging.

But conversations will start in one medium and move to another and then another.  From Twitter to blogs to mainstream media to public discourse.  Twitter and its successors will seed the conversations of the future.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, bold claims, overstatements, conversation ecosystem, jason calacanis, anthony brown

Rules of the 2.oad

Over the last few years there have been several rule sets written for Web 2.0, rules for social media, and rules for social networking.  Rules, rules, rules.  Yet, new web sites repeatedly make mistakes that are entirely borne of not paying attention to these rule sets.

It took me only about an hour this morning to overpopulate my del.icio.us archives with rules.  Dozens of them.

I started thinking about this today, after Ben Newman left a comment on my Evil Spock post.  Ben was responding to Andrey Golub's comment before his.  Andrey was making the case that Spock was pure web 2.0 and a search engine and therefore was exempt from the moral implications of data misuse.  (Which frankly shocked me so much, I never commented back.)

Ben said it better than I would have:

The problem isn't that 2.0 is evil, the problem is that the Spock platform seems to ignore one of the most critical aspects of any online community — the ability to know where information comes from.

When we look back over the various rules of [web2socialmedianetworking], we find several rules in agreement with Ben's interpretation.

The problem is there are about 100 rules now, splashed across the Internet.  If only to get a handle on them myself, I thought I'd make a distilled list of rules.

Here's the big huge map of ones by Jimmy Wales, Dion Hinchcliffe, David Chartier, Visionary Marketing and the 5-turned-17 started by Influential Marketing.  You'll have to click on this puppy to read it.

All together, these seem more like the Tax Code of Social Media than they do a set of design tenets.

Let's try to get them down to some good ol' Moses-style pithy.  You'd need an airlift to get these tablets of them mountain.

So here they are.  It's the web, feel free to turn these into 8 million rules again. :-)

I folded all of the previous ones into these families and gave them some categories.  But, just like there's apparently a lot of gray area around commandments like "Thou Shalt Not Kill", there are elements of these commandments as well.

So, the elements are:

Be Useful

Web 2 and social media applications need to build extensible, self-organizing tools.  Developers need to give the users the freedom to use the basic application.  Also APIs and feeds are standard practice for all sites, all pages and all searches.  In the end, listening to user needs and quickly responding to them in text or in action is vital.

Be Open

Users need to feel a connection with Web 2 and social media sites.  A lot of this is through "Being Real" - your site needs a personality of its own and personalities behind it.  I know that my personal use of sites like Platial and Yelp were greatly enhanced by their community advocates.  The cohort of friendliness is honesty.  Every list talked about transparency in one form or another.  Users need to feel that you are dealing straight with them.

Be Nice

Nice people are by nature respectful and ethical.  The Nice elements fall into ranges between the two.  You want to reward people for everything you can think of, you want to treat them well (talk nicely, don't forget them) and you want to give them gifts in the form of good services.  You want to share anything you have with them and always be respectful of their content and their identity.

Be Community

You are the creator of this microworld.  You need to participate, you need to facilitate.  You have to show up for your own party.  Communities grow, so you need to nourish them.  Don't let them grow too quickly, seed conversations and participate to keep them flowing, encourage real collaboration, reward good deeds, and allow users to edit nearly everything.  Help your content travel throughout the Internet, let ideas go and let them flow.

Here's the whole re-orged mind map.

To see the full run downs of all these line items, here's the source:

1. Rohit's original post that launched several more: he started with 5 rules that spread to 17.  This post has links to the other additions.

2. Visionary Marketing's 15 Golden Rules for Web 2.0.

3.Jimmy Wales' list on CNN

4. Dion Hinchcliffe's technically-oriented very detailed list.

5. David Chartier's rules - from Dec 2006!  Look, longevity on the internet!

Technorati Tags: Dion Hinchliffe, David chartier, Jimmy wales, visionary marketing, social media, social networking, Rohit Bhargava, Ben Newman, rules, edicts, mandates, commandments, golden rules, online communities, community indicators

Photo by Karuvelil Thomas.

Personal Brand v. Community Participant

Three years ago, I moved my blog from my own web site to Typepad because I liked their features and wanted the stability.  I was lazy at the time and didn't bother to brand the URL.  I could have left it with my personal soundbag.com branding - but did not.

Now, ourfounder.typepad.com is a known entity.  This is an issue for continuity.  Technorati, Alexa, Compete and other elements of the web track you by your branded URL.  The strength of your google juice is also impacted by the longevity, activity and links to your url.

So changing a long-standing URL is no trivial matter.

Add to this the fact that most web sites are gated communities and won't allow you to own your own information - and you end up diluting your personal brand across the Internet.  Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites take more than your attention.

A while back, I started to re-create soundbag as my personal brand.  Using a variety of widgets to bring content back to my main site.

The problem with this is that the content - the searchable elements of my content - do not end up at the soundbag.com site.  So the only reason one would ever go there is because of a morbid curiosity about me as a person and not about the content I had generate.

The Jim Benson Information Portal (or J-Bip) just wouldn't be a massive draw.  So the actual content needs to be folded into the site.

Some things allow this gracefully:

Typepad will allow me to incorporate the blog into my domain fairly easily.  While it's hosted at Typepad, it would be seamless for the user.  It would all loo like soundbag.com/blog.

Platial has a very nice widget to allow me to incorporate maps into my web site.  I've toyed with the idea of combining Platial and Wordpress to do a nice spatial blog with the content actually resident on my site.

Slightly less gracefully:

RSS feeds will allow me to incorporate content from Yelp, Twitter, and other sites.  Allowing, over time, the creation of a fairly massive reservoir of personally generated or relevant content.

But ...

At the moment this involves a massive effort on my part to rebrand, redirect and reorient my social media strategy.  I have to consider how this changes how I relate to new web sites.

Laurel Papworth beat Seth Godin's Squidoo with a broken bottle today (well, she did it tomorrow for me because of the international date line) because of not dissimilar issues.  Laurel wanted more detail on how her personal information was going to be used.  Direct statements were not forthcoming.  Then she opted out of further mailings - and got a mailing.

Her social media strategy had some key points:

1. If you expect my participation, let me know where my personal info is going.

2. Don't overload me with additional information, I'm filtering as fast as I can already!

Jay Fienberg and I have had many many long detailed conversations about this.   Everyone is looking right now to feel some ownership over their own information.  No web sites are stepping right up to provide this.  Yes, we have RSS feeds - but the goal of the site is to get you to visit.

From a business context, this is a no brainer.  Of course they want you to visit the site.  From a user perspective, having your online identity largely trapped by a company like Facebook is not a winning scenario.

When Michael Robertson sold MP3.com to C|Net - he gave everyone plenty of notice.  It was like "ABANDON SHIP!  C|NET GAVE ME MONEY BUT THEY WILL DESTROY ALL WE HAVE WORKED FOR!"  Which, of course, is exactly what happened.  But, at least, MP3.com gave everyone time to gather up their music and head for other pastures.

That has always left an impression on me.  I don't expect that any Web 2.0 company is out there for my benefit.  The objects on MP3.com were recordings of music I personally made - there could be no doubt that I was the rightsholder of those objects.  Entries made in Facebook or Yelp are entirely different.  They specifically are the property of the service provider.

But they feel personal to me.  So, when Laurel comes after Seth for her personal information (birthdate, address, etc), the question becomes ... where does "personal information" stop?  It's not just web publication because the web is an open channel where anything can be dumped.  Including personal IDs.

There is no international standard for personally identifiable information.

All this has been discussed before, of course.  And it will be discussed again.

But where it gets personal is ... what is your social media strategy?  How far are you willing to go, for what return, and where?  What are your limits?

Technorati Tags: social media, laurel papworth, seth godin, squidoo, facebook, linkedin, social networking, platial

A Bad Day at the Office or Never Attribute to Malice

Last week, the team at Spock had a very bad day at the office and it was largely my fault.

In my earlier post, It May be the Evil Spock, I invoked a powerful word.  Evil.  I passed this post amongst my tribe and they all blessed the word evil.  I wanted to make sure I hadn't gone too far.  When the tribunal had spoken, Spock was evil.

After thousands of page views and a bunch of comments and several posts by others, Spock is reeling in the court of public opinion.  And most of these opinions jump on the condemnation bandwagon.

One of the comments was from Jay Bhatti at Spock.  Surprisingly, Jay did not think of himself or Spock as evil.  Well, that's just crazy!  Of course he's evil. 

So, this made me wonder .. what exactly is evil?  And what, exactly would make Spock evil?  Is evil correctable?

What is evil?

In the search to learn about all things evil, of course, I went to the 21st century CliffsNotes - Wikipedia.  (Which makes Jimmy Wales the 21st Century Clifton Hillegass).

Wikipedia is a great memory jogger.  Soon synapses that had long ago been shoved to the back burner - memories of Spinoza and Nietzsche.  Memories of trudging across frozen Michigan snow on my way to early morning classes.

So ... here's the deal. 

Evil is a fluid concept and a loaded term.  In it's nitpicky form, an Evil act is a harmful act caused from ignorance.  Let's call this "Oops! Evil".

In it's more loaded form, an Evil act is caused by an Evil person with malicious intent.  Let's call this "Haha! Evil".

Practitioners of Oops! Evil learn from the evil act and do NOT do it again.  Practitioners of Haha! Evil learn from the evil act and DO do it again (hopefully in an even eviler way.)

Is the Evil Spock Oops! or Haha!?

Jay's long comment on my Evil Spock post shows a few things that should be appreciated:

1. Jay and Spock understand the need to respond to flame with cool water. 

2. Jay and Spock are thoughtful and understand that Spock needs to be refined

3. Jay and Spock have spent considerable time thinking about the issues behind the collection and redistribution of personal information.

Currently, Spock is Oops! Evil.  They are not malicious.  But they do have a bit of work to do to make up for this.

Can they do it?  Certainly.  If Plaxo can dig their way out of their PR hole, anyone can.

Spock has potential

In my post that preceded the Evil Spock post, I said that Spock did some really needed things.  Most notably, it lets you really coordinate your network.  Recently (like late this week), Facebook started to allow the same thing - but Spock's implementation is better.  This would be a post in itself, so I'll just say that Spock is a better platform for this because Facebook's business model is so chaotic.  Spock is much cleaner.

Direct Response to Jay Bhatti

Please do go read Jay's long comment on the Evil Spock post.  Then come back and read my replies.  I don't want my quotes to remove any of his context.

Before I respond I also want to say that a blog post is like a text chat, so my aim here is to be perfectly clear to Jay and Spock what my issues are and how they can be mitigated.  If I seem a bit forceful, it is due to the medium.

So, here we go:

Jay's first comment: We don't trick people.

... we NEVER send unsolicited email ... I hope this can clarify the issue some people raised above that we trick people to send invites. I have been trying to improve the process  as much as possible to make it more clear.

I hear the earnestness behind these statements.  The issue here is that the system makes it seem that people are on Spock when they actually are not.  "Trick" like "Evil" is a loaded word ... I don't think that Spock or Jay specifically set out to mislead people, but the current architecture is misleading.

This is an Oops.  It's also the reason for the invite flood.  People are assuming they are linking to someone already in the system, not sending an invite.  I know the system may be presenting these as slightly different - but the user isn't getting the message.

Jay's second comment: Spock's other reasons for invite flooding.

(paraphrased) Spock assumed that people in your address book was known to you.  Unfortunately, many email clients save anyone you've ever emailed or received an email from - so lots of people in your mail client are total strangers.  ....

This is compounded by the fact that many early Spockers were recruiters, biz dev consultants and others who have a vested interest in a giant network.

I did paraphrase here, so please do read his original and judge my work.

I appreciate the fact that Jay is airing a bit of laundry here and acknowledging something very important about social networking tools.

Different people have different strategies for applying their social networks.

The type of people Jay mentions in the second paragraph have a vested interest in having gigantic weak networks.  Their business model is based on breadth and not depth. 

The email issue is also very important.  When I sign up for a system like Spock and it taps my email list to seed my network, I am always saying "Who the hell is that?"  It works against my personal social networking strategy to include weak or unknown contacts.  But for those other guys, they will add me no matter how tenuous the connection.

Oddly, Spock's tagging tool which lets you organize your contacts makes it the first tool to really let you self-filter your massive networks.  So, even though this is an invite problem - Spock's architecture allows you to deal with large networks after they form.  Organizationally, Spock has this covered - socially it was a bomb.

So, how do we deal with things like this?  How do we deal with friend-whores who go out to collect every name in humanity's phone book and, in the process, fill your inbox with invites from people you don't know?

That's a big one.

Jay's third comment:  We adhere to standard search engine rules.

We crawl the web the same way any other search engine does, we adhere to every robots.txt file from every site and we only crawl information in the public domain. ...

This is cool, but most people have no idea what a robots.txt file is.  And no one has any control over the robots.txt files on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. 

Here is a conversation that I am so confident in, I will type it as it happens right now:

Jim: On your Elocution Seattle site, how did you set your robots.txt file?

Jim's wife: I don't know.

So, I'm afraid I see this as a bit of a cop out.  Jon Udell has a great post today (much more succinct than me, I'm afraid) where he welcomes Spock's coming simply because it brings issue like this to light.

People's expectations of their data, while naive, is that it will not be used without their knowledge.  This will help people streamline their data.  But, as Jon points out, the crawlers are never accurate enough to filter out the difference between personal attributes and the topics of writing.

Also, as I noted before, names are not unique IDs, so building a massive database based on a non-unique ID is problematic.

Jay's fourth comment:  We present good information

In the process of crawling, we do gather a lot of information about people. We made a decision .. that we wanted to represent people in their best light, and not in a creepy way. We try to never display publicly identifiable information (email, address, phone number, im, etc), even if we gathered it from a public source. We just don't think it is cool to show PII.

This is a good start, but doesn't seem to have served Spock well.  I know that if I went in and looked around again, I'd find more pages declaring me to be an astronaut.  I am very grateful that no Jim Bensons have done anything particularly nasty.

Unlike presidents.  Neither George Bush nor Bill Clinton have taken the time to claim their Spock pages which are being systematically and ideologically defaced. 

When I did a search for pedophile, I found 156 results.  156 people directly labeled by Spock as a pedophile.  Somehow, I'm sure none of them stopped by and okay'ed that label. 

It doesn't do a person a whole lot of good to protect their IM account over their reputation.

 Jay's fifth comment:  You can change it

We also allow people to claim their search result and remove wrong information and add information that they want to be searched on. If people want data removed, we have a easy process for them to get that data removed.

I'm going out on a limb here ... "Allowing" me to join your site and edit my data that you have misinterpreted is not a luxury for me as a user.

My personal advice here ... seed your database with people's personal information - but do not broadcast it publicly until it has been claimed.  The seed data should be to help me, as a user, quickly set up my Spock account - it should not be a threat (even an unintentional one) that makes me come to the site and clean up the messy after affects of a crawler they never sanctioned.

This is the biggest issue, messy data on your side will quickly bring a response for an accepted and open-source reputation management system.  People will lose their faith in companies that play by the accepted corporate rules but appear not to respect the people impacted by those rules.

Summing up:

It is hard to provide detail about problems without seeming negative.  Problems are negative.  It's not my goal here to take Jay to the cleaners, but to help Spock get even better - and thereby increase the effectiveness of social networking and social media in general.

I'm sorry to have caused a few bad days at the Spock offices, but I hope that in the end it'll make the product better.

Technorati Tags: spock, jay bhatti, jon udell, social networking, social media, evil, wikipedia

A Visible Case of Focused Social Media

In your web site logs you can see where people come from.  E-mail or chat based link distribution shows up with no referring site.  The other day I wrote a critique of the new web site Spock (which I'm surprised isn't a trademark).

Many other blogs picked up that post and some nice conversation happened.  I was watching the activity from this and noticed a hole I'm fairly sure is the Spock company all looking at the article at the same time and discussing it.

This is an excellent use of web resources.  Not knowing the means of internal link sharing, I can't say for sure if this is really focused social media. What would have really got me excited would be to see these all coming from an internal Spock research tag.  Seeing an organized collection of research links for Spock would have been really cool.

At this time, the article have received 3 del.icio.us links.  As seen to the left.

I love seeing focused blog viewing when it happens.  Some companies, like 103bees, are really really good at this.  The Windows Live Writer group has also been very excellent at reading and responding to blog posts about their product.

Why should Spock or any other company care if I know the tool they use to do internal research?  Because it is a further element (and a fairly harmless one) of transparency.  It's an easy way to show the world that you are participating in the market and not merely a supplier.

Might you end up linking to pages like mine that say nasty things?  Yep.  But you also get the opportunity to balance those viewpoints _and_ conveniently distribute information internally.

Either way, it is always welcome to see companies take notice of posts (good or bad) and know that the information there is incorporated into their planning. 

Technorati Tags: spock, social media, focused social media, 103bees, windows live writer

The Bigger They Are, The Harder They're Caned

Advertisers are mad at Facebook and their much-maligned Beacon application.  The users of Facebook have been up in arms.  It seems all people can talk about.

So, as Henry Blodget says:

it's no wonder that, in the face of ongoing brand-damaging stubbornness, Facebook observers are beginning to call for CEO Mark Zuckerberg's head. 

This is after he says:

...after applauding Facebook for acknowledging user complaints and changing Beacon, commentators are starting to notice that the system still isn't "opt-in" (or even permanently opt-out). Why it isn't is no mystery: The vast majority of Facebook users would never use it, making it difficult for Facebook to support its assertion that Beacon et al are the most important media and advertising developments in the past hundred years.

You know, Beacon is over-reaching, but ... "The vast majority of Facebook users would never use it?"  I've got to pull back from that a bit.

A very large number of users already had widgets that provided many of the Beacon features.  I can't see how they'd never use Beacon if it were opt-in, unless it was opt in for everything in the world.  It seems pretty likely that if Facebook allowed the same initial configuration of Beacon that Plaxo allows for Pulse - there would be no problems here.  The current configuration almost gives you this.

The other issues about secrecy at Facebook simply come from being a large company.  It's clear that Facebook is now a large company.  Along with their size, comes the desire to grow ever-bigger and hoard ever-more information.  When they were a small company and 50% growth meant hoarding 50% more information - that's okay.  But now they are huge and to grow they need to hoard ever larger chunks of data and attention. 

Like Microsoft and Google before them, so goeth Facebook. 

Welcome to the party Mark!

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Microsoft, Google, size matters, Plaxo, Pulse, Beacon, Henry Blodget, Silicon Valley Insider