Internet Web Help

Two “Social Media is Dead” posts hit my blogoscope today, so this must be an emerging meme. Firstly, Adriana Lukas who was an early ingurue in this field, notes that, like tourism, it is being strangled by over-(ab)use by the people for whom it is the golden goose, ie the PR/Marketing profession (aka the Tragedy of the Commoners ) :

First of all, social media these days is whatever most people do online. To someone like me, it was about blogging and social bookmarking, with upstarts like Facebook and Twitter playing a secondary role. To most people these are social media with an assortment of web apps that involve interactions and scale to high heaven. Where is the line between the web and social media for most people? Once they are on Facebook and/or Twitter, it blurs beyond definition.

Secondly, social media, whatever it means to different people, at its most fundamental level is the combination of the internet architecture (i.e. a distributed network) with technology that enables individuals to publish and distribute online without the need to code and without a prior permission from an institutional authority. This, in the long run, will be as impactful as the printing press. (That said, with the rise of the super-platforms, individuals online are herded into silos, their autonomy and privacy taking a beating. But that is a different rant.)

All this has little to do with media, advertising, marketing and PR. Other than undermining them. Watching people from these industries discuss and pontificate on how to ‘do’ – read use, abuse, benefit from, exploit etc – social media is like listening to producers of leather harness for horses, carriage drivers and stable owners talk about cars and how they are going to use them blasted machines. After all, it’s all about transport. Right?!

Social Media is dead as a driver for change. It was killed by the very people it meant to change. Ironically, just like the barbarians at the gates of Rome, they didn’t mean to kill it, they just wanted to have a part of it. But without changing themselves.

The other article is by Seth Priebatsch on the HBS website, who argues that the special layer of middlewars that is “Social Media” is now built out, and will, like previous layers of new new things (VOIP, email, etc etc), just fade into the overall infrastructure:

I don’t mean that we will stop using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr to share with our friends, colleagues and families. In fact, quite the opposite is true, our combined usage of these social networks will continue to increase. Rather, the decade of constructing the social layer is complete. The frameworks that we’ll use to share socially are built, defined and controlled. Construction on the social layer ended with the launch of Facebook’s Open Graph protocols over the last several months. All the interesting social stuff that will occur over the next decade (and there’ll be lots, I’m sure), will exist within this predefined framework built and controlled by Facebook. In short, the decade of social is over.

He believes, by the way, that the Decade of Games is now coming – and that is a good excuse for another post, but more on that later.

But what to make of the Death of Social Media?. My take is partly a combination of the two above, in that I think:

- I agree with Seth Priebatsch’s view that it will fade into the architecture over time, raher than die

- Adriana is however right in that dumb commercialism will kill a lot of Social Media’s usefulness (like Spam hurt email), and I shudder in anticipation of the abuses that will be committed under the term “Social Commerce” in the next year or so before it dies, crushed under the weight of its own bullsh*t

Where I would disagree/amend their theses is on the following points:

(i) Social Media progress isn’t over yet – I think we are in the “OSP” stage – as with the Online messaging world c 1994, you know how it will work architecturally but its still locked up in walled gardens (AOL is Facebook, CompuServe is MySpace, etc etc) and we are waiting for the emergence of the Social Netscape platform.

(ii) It won’t die – older comms media is subsumed by the next new things, but it desn’t die. (That’s called Riepl’s law by the way). Like email, Social Media is too damn useful to too many people. But, like email (and VoIP) I doubt it will make the money that the current crop of hopefuls think it will. In fact what is interesting is a trend by the self-declared social media gurus who banged on about “Microblogging” and Facebook is they are now charging back to Blogging (yelling “follow me” as they elbow to the front to “lead” the crowd moving in that direction anyway )

(iii) Like email, it will be abused by every Marketing/PR jock out there – but again like email, we will adapt tools, filters and attitues to cope with the spam. We at Broadsight have predicted for 2 years that Twitter clients will look like email clients in 3 years time (ie by end 2011), and I reckon we are still in good shape to win that bet.

(iv) Bandwidth always changes things – there will be evolution as bandwidth increases, so I don’t think the technology development is over yet either.

In fact, rather than a a Death of Social Media, I think right now there is a Dearth of the open social networks that will be – in my opinion – the next phase. Who wants to be Netscape this time round?

This morning I picked up my trusty Twitterscope, but to my horror I saw 3 things I am increasingly seeing from people I follow who, though basically good eggs, are sometimes tempted to overshare:

- The conference/conversation/date they are getting to/at/with, via a stream of 140 character updates

- Every so often they are tempted to pimp (or worse still, retweet one of their idols pimping) something fairly vacuous and inane.

- Generally pumping up their own volume

What I want is a temporary filter that “turns them off” for a bit. I don’t want to go through the hassle of unfollowing and then having to remember to refollow, I just want them turned off for a few hours or so until they get over it.

In other words, rather than wave the Red Card and send them off the field, this idea is like the concept of “Sin Binning” in sports like Ice Hockey or Rugby, where temporary overenthusiasm is met with being sent off the pitch for a few minutes.

Even better if they could (optionally) know that a whistle had been blown so they could (ahem) reflect on their tweeting behaviour, something like:

@curmudgeon has sin binned you for being boring dahling ….. (and then you can either add the reason or not)

This of course is in addition to my keyword filter which would of course come preloaded to filter any twts with the words “awesome”, “kitteh”, “om nom”, “special” or “lunch” therein.

Now that would be awesome…..

Daring Fireball makes an interesting point about Ping. Yes, it’s cr*p on your PC, but better on a mobile:

Ping on the iPhone feels like a decent native client to a social network. Ping on the desktop (Mac/Windows) feels like an afterthought to iTunes — one little source list item halfway down the list, with content that doesn’t seem designed at all. Not that it’s poorly designed, but un-designed. It takes the shape of default iTunes Store content.

There is an interesting thought here – simple, low grade socnets will work beter on mobile, more subtle ones that need more subtle interaction with others also need more UI with the machine.

Sort of a Shannon’s Law for Social Nets, ie the bandwidth of the channel determines the social information it can carry.

Google Instant now offers a drop down menu and updates the page in real time when you search so it speeds up the typing and gives you a steer towards what similar terms others might be using. Some people think it’s the death of SEO -Steve Rubel for example:

Here’s what this means: no two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick – and everyone saw the same results. That’s what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviors. 
Think about it. When you push a door and it doesn’t open quickly, you push harder. When you try to drive a car up a hill and it doesn’t go as fast as you would like, you step on the gas. Feedback changes your behavior. 

Eh? I would have thought more people will hit the same phrase on the toggle thus reducing variability on what people see, and SEO will be key to get your website onto that first googlepage, which will now be more samey so the ante will be upped

As always, on the Internet “the death of” is usually somewhat exaggerated.

Postscript – by the way, while I think it’s all very clever, the real high impact shift was the original drop down menu. This is bunce, but of course those ads served at lightning subliminal speed probably get charged for

We have been fascinated by virtual goods ever since reading more pieces of furniture were sold online in Korea in socnets like Cyworld than in real life. You may also recall that a number of companies experimented with virtual goods in 2nd Life (c’mon, you can’t have forgotten 2006 – unless you were one of those 2nd Life marketeers ). Anyway, hey ho we are off again.

…..some large companies are testing whether they can raise awareness of their brands — and sell more actual goods — by creating and offering their own pretend merchandise. Volvo Cars of North America, the clothing retailer H&M and MTV Networks are among the diverse brands entering the market for virtual goods — the make-believe items offered on social-networking games, smartphone apps or fantasy Internet sites.

…………….

So far, the virtual goods market largely consists of micro-purchases. Consumers typically pay $1 to $3 while playing games like FarmVille or Mafia Wars, both created by the social-gaming company Zynga, to get a jump on game rivals. Users also can give a gift, like flowers, or build a collection of items — just as collectors do in real life.

Those impulses will be worth nearly $2 billion in revenue or more this year, according to ThinkEquity, a financial research firm in San Francisco. Its analyst for new media and games, Atul Bagga, said his research found that the market could reach $2.6 billion next year.

……………..

To succeed, “branded virtual goods have to be identifiable and have a real world relevance,” said Ravi Mehta, vice president for products at Viximo, a social gaming platform provider. “They are driven by the relevance to the purchaser. Paris Hilton has people who buy her virtual goods because they are fans and want to identify with her, her hair, her place in pop culture.”

I think he is actually serious about Paris Hilton…..

Actually, we’ve been arguing for a while that this is the best model for Facebook, but whether people will buy virtual trainers etc on SocNets any more than they did(n’t) on 2nd Life is still an open question. Those “decorate your own room” socnets have largely passe’d away. All the evidence is that virtual goods are bought in pursuit of another (typically game based) objective, not “real world relevance” – unless maybe they can be converted into free drinks, like 4square mayoralties at Starbucks.

I await with fascination to see if Nike will be selling under-armour gear on World of Warcraft, and Wilkinson Sword will sell…… but I think this is far more likely to be more akin to the 2nd Life experience, as corporate clumsiness leads to egg on faces and rivers running with red ink…..

Still, as these goods cost nothing to make and distribute, they could be the last hurrah of Freeconomics

News that Google will launch an into-the-TV service later this year:

(Reuters) – Google Inc will launch its service to bring the Web to TV screens in the United States this autumn and worldwide next year, its chief executive said, as it extends its reach from the desktop to the living room. CEO Eric Schmidt said the service, which will allow full Internet browsing via the television, would be free, and Google would work with a variety of program makers and electronics manufacturers to bring it to consumers. “We will work with content providers, but it is very unlikely that we will get into actual content production,” Schmidt told journalists after a keynote speech to the IFA consumer electronics trade fair in Berlin.

Sony said last week it had agreed to have Google TV on its television sets, and Samsung has said it was looking into using the service. The announcement comes less than a week after rival Apple unveiled its latest Apple TV product and will intensify a battle for consumers’ attention and potentially for the $180 billion (117 billion pounds) global TV advertising market.

That last line says all you need to know. Well, except its a battle to lock up search on another type of screen:

Schmidt also said Google would announce partnerships later this year with makers of tablet computers that would use Google’s Chrome operating system, due to be launched soon, rather than its Android phone software, which has been used for mobile devices until now.

Interesting that they think Android hasn’t got the jets….. (Update – I may have misread the Reuters piece – Kevin Marks says TV has Android its some tablets that will use Chrome, but that is interesting too)

…or maybe not. We have been watching the twists and turns of Craigslists’ – ahem – “adult” classifieds for some time, and in the last week or so various Attorneys General have slapped “do not publish” stickers on. This was hardly unpredictable, they have been threatening this for some time (how about this post of ours in 2008) but of course now everyone is shocked, shocked I tell you.

Jeff Jarvis believes this is a move by an Olde Meedja Not-Quite-Conspiracy, though in my view he spoils his argument a bit by an aside on the Germans vs Google (see asterisk* at end of piece):

So why are government and media going after craigslist? The same reason, I think, that media and government in, for example, Germany are demonizing Google (even as the German people give Google its biggest market share anywhere in the world). They’re going after the disruptors, the biggest disruptors in sight.

Since craigslist and the internet have existed, newspaper classified revenue has fallen by $13 billion a year, leaving that money in the pockets of former advertiser-customers. Since Google and the internet have existed, many more billions have left traditional media as Google offered their former ad customers a better deal.

The New York Times today belittles craigslist’s censorship, calling it a “stunt” and “ploy” and labeling as “screeds” craisglist CEO Jim Buckmaster’s defenses of the service—and of free speech—against attorneys general and against ratings-starved CNN ambushing Craig.

Perish the thought that Craigslist are trying to protect $44m of their own revenue, eh Jeff

And just what has the naughty NYT said – well, they are alleging that Craigslist just might be playing the whole thing for PR, the cads, and may not really be serious about shutting it down – like they did last time (and did we mention the $44m):

Craigslist, by shutting off its “adult services” section and slapping a “censored” label in its place, may be engaging in a high-stakes stunt to influence public opinion, some analysts say.

……..

Lisa Madigan, the attorney general of Illinois, was more skeptical about Craigslist’s intentions. “Certainly because of the way they did it,” she said, “it leaves an open question as to whether this is truly the end of adult services on Craigslist or if this is just a continuing battle.”

For a site that prides itself on being a neighborly town square, Craigslist has been increasingly pugnacious in response to its critics.

Jim Buckmaster, Craigslist’s chief executive, has written screeds on the company blog explaining and defending Craigslist’s efforts to combat sex crimes, including manually screening sex ads and meeting with advocacy groups.

So there you have it, gentle reader – and if it all seems a mite po faced and puffed up to you – the bloggage, I mean (The basic issue is simple – do the US citizenry want, or not want, their biggest online classifieds website to pimp pro gals, and that will be fought in court, and as the NYT points out the law is currently on craiglist’s side) then I think you are right – as the great philosopher Tom Lehrer noted the last time this came round in the 1960’s:

Unfortunately, the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it owing to the nature of the laws as a matter of Freedom of Speech and stifling of free expression and so on, but we know what’s really involved: dirty books [Ads] are fun. That’s all there is to it. but you can’t get up in a court and say that I suppose. it’s simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the constitution unfortunately.

His manifesto on the subject, “Smut”, is sung in the Tom Lehrer youtube vid at the top. Pretty much says all you need to know on the subject. (As he points out, in teh 1960’s the Supreme Court protected the right to publish, well, smut.)

* Those naughty Germans are after Google because they were sniffing WiFi data without telling anyone, and nor are Google collaborating in removing people’s data according to EU data protection law. These are things that Europeans unreasonably think might be a bit Evil (as opposed to Disruptive)

Update – I would like to say Danah Boyd has written a marvellously insightful piece on the subject, but I can’t get past the issue that she calls craigslist an ISP. And its in HuffPo.

Article on TechCrunch arguing that the mobile address book is the next obvious area to be mined in the interests of social graphings:

I’ve written before that I think location is the bridge between social networks and actual social life. But why do we even need that bridge? Why are so many startups content to build on top of the Facebook or Twitter social graph, when a lot of them can access your actual social graph in your mobile contact book? We’re seeing more and more apps go “mobile first, web second” these days, and that’s likely to increase going forward. This means that they start as services on mobile devices. So again I ask, why not just get to your actual social graph through your contacts there?

……..

It seems that companies like Apple and Google are sitting on a treasure trove of actual social data with these contact lists. Calls, texts, emails, it’s all right there. Google obviously has tried (and failed) to build a social graph through your email contacts before — but they went about it wrong, and they did so on the desktop. Mobile is the key to this.

I fully understand why every Tom, Dick and Harry who wants to monetise the mobilo-socio-location world wants this data, but all the human factors research we have ever seen or done on mobile says it is Personal – and that also means a lot of it is Private. One would have thought after Buzz’s debacle with the email address books the penny would have dropped re using people’s “hidden” social graphs and making them visible.

A mobile address book is even more sensitive than an email one as (i) like email, it’s a far wider social graph than what most people will happily let others see publicly and (ii) it holds phone numbers which are even more “private” than email addresses. As with Buzz, people have phone numbers of people that they would far rather others’ didn’t know about.

As one commentor on the TechCrunch piece wrote (summing up many of the other comments):

“When was the last time the address book saw any innovation?” Well – actually – it was when malware authors discovered they could mine your Outlook address book as targets for spam and viruses, that’s when! And if the mobile “app developers” let iPhones and Androids be compromised in the same manner, people will take their phones and chuck them in the nearest body of water – assuming that the malware hasn’t bricked them, of course!

Keep your bloody hands off of my address book, OK?

It would take just one Buzz type incident to blow any one player’s credibility for good, which of course is why the Telcos have been so careful so far.

Reading Stowe Boyd’s blog, I saw this GigaOm post about Twitter’s Ev Williams talk:

Williams, on stage at a Girls in Tech event at Kicklabs, compared Twitter to email, where information overload can be incapacitating. “The problem with email is that it’s sender-driven, and sender-driven media doesn’t scale,” he said. On the one hand, the recipient hates email for being spammy because “the sender is motivated to send as much stuff as possible because it’s free.” On the other hand, the sender may be dissatisfied because she’s not reaching the right audience for whom she may not even have email addresses.

Blogging (Williams was previously the founder of Blogger) and Tweeting can be different (and better) than email, he said, because people who have something to say can find their audience. That’s a much better situation for both the publisher of the information and the consumer of it. So recipient-based media can scale better “in a world of infinite information,” he said.

That’s also a contrast to Google, said Williams, which serves more purpose-driven needs versus Twitter’s focus on “an interest-based world.”

Stowe’s view is that:

I like the recipient- v sender-driven distinction, but I think the reason that stream apps seem to help us cope with a crazy busy world (‘overload’) is that they tap into the flow state in our heads allowing us to multithread, while inboxes are purely linear.

My view is more quantitative – aka volume driven – when you have to rely on Twitter for the heavy lifting email does today, it too will move from interesting but throwaway stuff to royal pain in the arse, mainly because it will shift from recreational to workload adding – and in fact if you look at Twitter clients they are becoming increasingly like email clients in functionality, as my colleague Dave Short predicted they would end up looking like several years ago.

Also, for twitter to really reduce my Information Overload it needs far better filtering (which Mr Williams admitted in the talk).

Good article in The Economist that looks at the wide range of datamining activity on Social Nets – firstly, it breaks marvellously benign new ground:

..broadening data mining to include analysis of social networks makes new things possible. Modelling social relationships is akin to creating an “index of power”, says Stephen Borgatti, a network-analysis expert at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. In some companies, e-mails are analysed automatically to help bosses manage their workers. Employees who are often asked for advice may be good candidates for promotion, for example.

Crime can be reduced….

Ellen Joyner of SAS, an analytics firm based in Cary, North Carolina, notes that more and more financial firms are using the software to uncover fraud. The latest version of SAS’s software identifies risky borrowers by examining their social networks and Internal Revenue Service records, she says. For example, an applicant may be a bad risk, or even a fraudster, if he plans to launch a type of business which has no links to his social network, education, previous business dealings or travel history, which can be pieced together with credit-card records. Ms Joyner says the software can also determine if an applicant has associated with known criminals—perhaps his fiancée has shared an address with a parolee. Some insurers reduce premiums for banks that protect themselves with such software.

The police department of Richmond, Virginia, has pioneered the use of network-analysis software to predict crimes. Police officers know that crime increases at certain times, such as on paydays and when there is a full moon. But the software lets them analyse the social networks around suspects, such as dealings with employers, collection agencies and the Department of Motor Vehicles. The goal, according to Stephen Hollifield, the department’s technology chief, is to “pull together a complete picture” of suspects and their social circle.

Party plans turn out to be a particularly useful part of this picture. Richmond’s police have started monitoring Facebook, MySpace and Twitter messages to determine where the rowdiest festivities will be. On big party nights, the department now saves about $15,000 on overtime pay, because officers are deployed to areas that the software deems ripe for criminal activity. Crime has “dramatically” declined as a result, says Mr Hollifield. Colin Shearer, vice-president of predictive analytics at SPSS, a division of IBM that makes the software in question, says it can largely replace police officers’ reliance on “gut feel”.

Secondly, it finds the real influencers, good and bad:

TELECOMS operators naturally prize mobile-phone subscribers who spend a lot, but some thriftier customers, it turns out, are actually more valuable. Known as “influencers”, these subscribers frequently persuade their friends, family and colleagues to follow them when they switch to a rival operator. The trick, then, is to identify such trendsetting subscribers and keep them on board with special discounts and promotions. People at the top of the office or social pecking order often receive quick callbacks, do not worry about calling other people late at night and tend to get more calls at times when social events are most often organised, such as Friday afternoons. Influential customers also reveal their clout by making long calls, while the calls they receive are generally short.

…………….

Network analysis also has a useful role to play in counterterrorism. Terror groups are often decentralised, so mapping their social networks is akin to deciphering “a big spaghetti picture”, says Roy Lindelauf of the Royal Dutch Defence Academy, who develops software for intelligence agencies in the Netherlands. It turns out that the key terrorists in a group are often not the leaders, but rather seemingly low-level people, such as drivers and guides, who keep addresses and phone numbers memorised. Such people tend to stand out in network models because of their high level of connectedness. To find them, analysts map “structural signatures” such as short phone calls placed to the same number just before and after an attack, which may indicate that the beginning and end of an operation has been reported.

Marvellous, I hear you say – what can go wrong? Well, nothing except the amount of data about you that they want, and all the other things they can predict with it – like your infidelities for example (believe me, you can…). But it is not going to go away:

The market for such software is booming. By one estimate there are more than 100 programs for network analysis, also known as link analysis or predictive analysis. The raw data used may extend far beyond phone records to encompass information available from private and governmental entities, and internet sources such as Facebook. IBM, the supplier of the system used by Bharti Airtel, says its annual sales of such software, now growing at double-digit rates, will exceed $15 billion by 2015. In the past five years IBM has spent more than $11 billion buying makers of network-analysis software. Gartner, a market-research firm, ranks the technology at number two in its list of strategic business operations meriting significant investment this year.

And its getting easier – 5 years ago I needed all I’d learned in an MSc in Engineering doing what what was effectively Stats and Operations Research, but now:

A decade ago IBM employed experts with PhDs in mathematics to study social networks, according to Mark Ramsey, the firm’s head of business analytics for eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Today, college graduates can operate analysis software handling enormous quantities of data. Bharti Airtel employs only about 100 analysts to keep tabs on its 135m subscribers.

I was at an early futurology session on this about 10 years ago, the endgame was succinctly described as being able to predict the “Net Present Value of your Future Spend”.

You have been warned……..