Stowe Boyd

Over the past weeks, Eric Blantz, Khris Loux, Chris Saad and I have been discussing the ethics and best practices around social media and social tools, specifically with regard to the needs of a social tools vendor like JS-Kit. All of us are working with JS-Kit in some way or another, but the recent Facebook flap about their Terms of Service led us to consider addressing these issues in a larger forum.

As Eric said, ‘the value of the activity is proportional to the involvement of a wider group of smart people.’ We immediately thought of the Media 2.0 Workgroup as a good start for that wider group. As a result, JS-Kit authorized us to donate our draft materials to the workgroup for open sourcing to the community.

We have high aspirations, but we don’t know exactly what form any results of the process might take. Perhaps we will be able to define a strong consensus on a number of topics that we will craft into a document or a website. Alternatively, we might fall into camps, arguing different sides of complex issues. Perhaps we would create a series of public conversations on the most difficult and important topics, and video those, with participation of others. We don’t know.

We do know that the issues around the ethics of participation in the social web are enormous importance. The web is the most valuable human artifact ever created, and it is ours: there is no higher authority to ask ‘how should we act?’ We have to look to ourselves to find these answers, and the sooner the better.

The recent events around Facebook’s Terms Of Service have brought the need for this discussion into high relief, and we are planning to bring together a diverse set of people to discuss these issues, and hopefully develop something that could guide others. The initial group includes the following: Chris Saad, Khris Loux (On Behalf of JS-Kit), Eric Blantz, Stowe Boyd, Micah Baldwin (On behalf of Lijit), Brian Solis, Ben Metcalfe, Marianne Richmond, Jeremiah Owyang, Daniela Barbosa, Peter Kim, Loïc Le Meur (on behalf of Seesmic/Twhirl), and Deborah Schultz.

We have a site (www.mediabestpractices.com) for interaction and collaboration, but it is very early days. After we have discussed this online and at meetings (SXSW, Web 2.0 Expo) we will likely have something more substantive to share.

Marvell: Plug Computing.

A plug computer is a small, powerful computer that connects to an existing network using Gigabit Ethernet.

Pratham Kumar genned up a greasemonkey script, Nested Twitter Replies, that tries to nest Twitter discussions, and does so right in Twitter pages.

I tried using Tweetree for this functionality (see Tweetree: A Better UX For Twitter(, but it is annoying to have to use a completely different site for just one feature.

This script is so good that I find myself actually looking at my Twitter page again, instead of using Tweetdeck. Maybe Tweetdeck will do this someday?

Just learned about SpeakerRate, a new tool from the folks at Viget Labs/Pointless Corp.

[from the website]

SpeakerRate is a community site for event organizers, attendees, and speakers.

• Event organizers can find speakers, learn about talks they’ve given in the past, and determine who would be a good match for the event they’re organizing.
• Event attendees can provide constructive feedback to speakers, track the talks they’ve attended, and research upcoming talks that they might attend.
• Event speakers can get valuable constructive feedback directly from attendees and find out how they can improve their content and delivery for their next talk. They can also establish a SpeakerRating, which will help them earn future speaking opportunities.

SpeakerRate is a Pointless Corp. project. We built SpeakerRate because we are event organizers, attendees, and speakers ourselves, and we felt like a site like SpeakerRate would be useful for us and others. We hope others agree.

Looks interesting. I will try it out in the future to see if it is as useful a feedback tool as it appears to be.

Geolocation tools fall into two broad categories:

• Predictive location, generally oriented toward arranging to meet with other people when traveling to other places (like Dopplr and TripIt), or in your own town (like Mixin)
• Location streaming, generally oriented to keeping others informed of location (like Google Latitude, DodgeBall, Plazes, or Brightkite), either for arranging meetings, or to maintain a geolocational lifestream.

I have used tools in both categories, and written about my experiences with them.

Most recently, I have been using Dopplr for predictive purposes, and Brightkite for location streaming. But in recent weeks, I have found that Brightkite is too rich an experience, overlapping too much with what I am doing with other tools, particularly Twitter as my primary lifestream, and the various blogs I maintain on Tumblr. Perhaps it is also that I don’t have a deep sense of community on Brightkite.

One thing in particular annoys me about Brightkite, and that is the Twitter integration. While they have provided a sophisticated template-based approach to posting tweets based on Brightkite location updates, the tool to support updating o Twitter location in the user profile is just broken. When I post ‘542 Brannan St, San Francisco CA 94107’ the Twitter location gets set to ‘542 Brannan St’ dropping the city, state, and zip code.

I was quite happy to stumble upon a small but beautiful location streaming tool the other day, called Twiphlo. It seems like the main window is designed for a mobile interface use, like iPhone. The basic idea is that you can post something, while at the same time updating your Twitter profile location.

Note that the creator of the app, Ben Clemens, added a new feature when I asked: the ‘post location tweet only’ checkbox. If you check the box and enter a location, the app will send a tweet like ‘#location 156 South Park, San Francisco CA’ while also updating the profile location.

Clicking on the ‘my map’ brings up a map, with Twiphlo tweets superimposed, and the stream of tweets displayed in order at the bottom.

There are a few other features — RSS and KMLfeeds and a way to clear the history and map — but that’s it. A tiny app, designed to do just one thing, completely integrated with Twitter.

I am very interested in these co-apps, like those offered by Twtapps, and I am giving Twttrip a try. But that’s another post.

Mojo isn’t a new word, but this is a new homonym:

[via How I want to redefine my role, and the reader’s role, in the newspaper by Daniel Victor]

Once the equipment arrives, I’ll be starting in a new position at [central Pennsylvania’s] The Patriot-News as a mobile journalist, or mojo.

What that means is, correctly, still to be determined. We do know it’ll involve video, still photography, print stories and a lot of updates for the Web. We know I’ll have a laptop and an aircard, will file most of my stories from my car and coffee shops, and will aim to be in the office as little as possible.

Interesting. They are making civilians from journos. Could be interesting.

Brian Solis got involved in a controversy about Yelp possibly strong-arming small businesses to have bad reviews moved down in their ratings, but he backs off from the basic extortion and focuses on the marketing aspects too much.

The initial impetus was a story in the East Bay Express by Kathleen Richards:

[via Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0]

[…]

John [a restaurant owner that was approached to pay $299 to minimize the placement of negative reviews] may sound paranoid, but he’s got company. During interviews with dozens of business owners over a span of several months, six people told this newspaper that Yelp sales representatives promised to move or remove negative reviews if their business would advertise. In another six instances, positive reviews disappeared — or negative ones appeared — after owners declined to advertise.

Because they were often asked to advertise soon after receiving negative reviews, many of these business owners believe Yelp employees use such reviews as sales leads. Several, including John, even suspect Yelp employees of writing them. Indeed, Yelp does pay some employees to write reviews of businesses that are solicited for advertising. And in at least one documented instance, a business owner who refused to advertise subsequently received a negative review from a Yelp employee.

Many business owners, like John, feel so threatened by Yelp’s power to harm their business that they declined to be interviewed unless their identities were concealed. (John is not the restaurant owner’s real name.) Several business owners likened Yelp to the Mafia, and one said she feared its retaliation. “Every time I had a sales person call me and I said, ‘Sorry, it doesn’t make sense for me to do this,’ … then all of a sudden reviews start disappearing.” To these mom-and-pop business owners, Yelp’s sales tactics are coercive, unethical, and, possibly, illegal.

Brian zooms in on Yelp’s response, as a case study in dealing with bad news:

[via Yelp Gets a Bad Review: Embracing a Crisis to Shape Perception]

As a practitioner of total transparency and just good business, Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp, responded with an impressive blog post.



If the story ended there, we’d have a textbook case of what to do when confronted with bad PR.

[Uh, no Brian, we’d still be left with the extortion, since that claim hasn’t been proven one way or the other.]

However, The East Bay Express’ detailed six page article didn’t just accuse a highly popular company of unethical behavior, it humanized the alleged victims through their fearful narration of Yelp’s purported blackmail attempts over time. It engendered empathy.

And, Jeremy didn’t just write a blog post in defense of his company, he also fired back with a defense worthy of a legal drama, at one point, insinuating that Kathleen’s use of anonymous sources was beneath the standards of journalism and therefore less credible.

So let’s back up a bit and analyze this scenario from a communications and crisis response viewpoint.

Whether or not you agree with the practice of referencing anonymous sources, The East Bay Express still published a piece that references several businesses who came forward, but were literally afraid of any potential acts of retribution from Yelp.com.

[Use of anonymous sources is commonplace in journalism, Brian, as you know. Why should this journalist be forced to reveal her sources to the man whose company is being accused?]

The article states, “During interviews with dozens of business owners over a span of several months, six people told this newspaper that Yelp sales representatives promised to move or remove negative reviews if their business would advertise. In another six instances, positive reviews disappeared — or negative ones appeared — after owners declined to advertise.”

The case was reinforced with a condemning statement, “Several business owners likened Yelp to the Mafia, and one said she feared its retaliation. “

The themes are reiterated throughout the verbose feature and actually serve as the foundation for Yelp to develop a strategic and meaningful response.

- Many business owners believe Yelp employees use such reviews as sales leads.

- Several suspect Yelp employees of writing them.

- Yelp does pay some employees to write reviews of businesses that are solicited for advertising. In fact, the publication uncovered one documented instance where a business owner who refused to advertise received a negative review from a Yelp employee.

Whether these accusations are right or wrong, they’re incredibly defamatory. And, if the reporter indeed interviewed dozens of fearful companies who shared this sentiment, perhaps there’s credence in the experiences. Either way, there’s a perception that certain Yelp salespersons are crossing the line. And, in the world of online social influence, perception can be reality.

Even more important, reality can be reality. If Yelp is in fact — directly or indirectly — using strongarm tactics they should deal with the consequences, which may include legal action. I hope there is a DA out there somewhere willing to look into these allegations.

And we, the social media technorati, should treat this on a much more serious level than the PR fallout. If a company like Yelp acts in the way that has been alleged, we should call for a boycott of the company, and an investigation to get to the bottom of this.

Related Stories

Is Yelp Extorting San Francisco Businesses For Good Reviews?

Yelp’s servings could use a dash of candor by David Lazarus

Local Advertising Isn’t Jumping Online by Sarah Lacy

Yelping for Dollars by Bert Helm

Last week I spent a few days in New York, meeting with a diverse group of startups, and one of the themes that kept reappearing was the nature of what I have been calling flow applications for the last few years. One sharp colleague asked me to define a flow app in a simple way.

I tried, and I think I came up with the key features of stream or flow applications. I also came up with a few applications that demonstrate those features well.

The Stream, Not The Inbox

Streaming applications are involved in communication, and are displacing the email models that typified Web 1.0. We all known how inboxes (a la email) work: people write an email, address it to one or more people (or groups, in some cases), and then send it off. The email infrastructure delivers the mail to those addressed, who receive it in their respective inboxes:

1. The inbox model is inherently private: the email is only delivered to a select group, and others cannot see it, even if that was desired.
2. The reach of the email is completely determined by the email’s author, and it is made on a piece by piece basis.
3. The ownership of the email shifts to the recipients when it is delivered: they have to delete, or file the email, which is no longer under the control of the author.

Flow apps work very differently:

1. Streaming apps are inherently open: the premise is that users create and share information in the open. This is about supporting open discourse.
2. The recipients opt into ‘subscribing’ to certain people’s streams, so the decision about access to information is made by recipients, and this decision is general, not made on a post by post basis. I call this the ‘open following’ feature, meaning anyone can choose who to follow.
3. The handling of the streamed posts does not transition to the recipients: it is still under the control of the author. Posts can be deleted, for example, or edited. And posts do not have to be ‘handled’ by recipients: filed or archived. They simply slide from the top to the bottom of the stream, and march into oblivion, without the recipients having to manage them at all. While an archive exists, it is managed automatically by the streaming application. Collectively, these features add up to an anti-inbox model

Two representative flow applications: Twitter and Staction

Twitter is an amazingly small application. It’s almost all stream and nothing else, although the notion of direct messages runs counter to the basic model.

Staction is another very tight streaming application (see Staction: Another Run At Workstreaming and Staction: Starting To Knock Down My Objections), but one that is intended for the business context. Like Twitter, it has a stream of posts that makes up the core of its functionality, and posts can be directed to the attention of particular users (like Twitter @replies). However, Staction posts are not limited to 140 characters and can be linked with a particular project, limiting visibility to those users who have been invited to the project.

This one tweak — along with the basic narrowing of membership to those who have been granted login access to the company’s Staction instance — makes Staction a very productive work streaming application. Note: the folks behind Staction, Paste Interactive, recently released a new version that supports newlines in posts, providing the most minimal of formatting of posts, but it led to one of my few complaints being satisfied. Also note that Staction supports time tracking and to-dos, but that’s outside the scope of this posts.

These two apps share a common model of use, based on the basic streaming affordances. Posts are pushed to all users (except the Staction project visibility filtering). No filing has to be done as in inbox apps. Posts can be brought to the attention of specific members of the community by indicating their names with ‘@’ but these are still visible to others.

Follower/Following Model Of Social Relationships

Most of the most interesting flow apps are extremely social, and use the follower/following relationship model. The F/F model is asymmetric — I can follow people that don’t follow me, and vice versa — and generally, I can follow anyone I want: I don’t need their permission to see their public information.

The consequences of this open model — the ‘cocktail party’ model, where everyone attending the party can wander around and join into any conversation — are extremely broad. It stands 180 degrees apart from the inherently closed model of email.

This is also a model that (sort of) underlies RSS, which is why I often say that flow apps are the unholy offspring of RSS and instant messaging. The chat and buddylist metaphors from instant messaging, and the presumed public access of RSS feeds.

Snackr: An RSS Streaming App

One of the applications that has profoundly changed the way I use and experience the web is Snackr (see Snackr: An RSS News Ticker).

Snackr is not a true social application — it does not support direct communication between users, for example — but it employs a streaming metaphor instead of an inbox for RSS feeds.

Like other streaming apps, I don’t have to file or delete RSS items: they simply erode after a defined period of time (in my case, 3 days or after I read them). In the image above, I have clicked on an interesting post which is opened in an associated window. I have the option to open the original post in a browser window, and to ‘star’ the item, which places it in a list of items that don’t erode, like a pushpin or a Twitter favorite.

Snackr — which syncs with my Google Reader account — has changed my RSS usage completely. Items stream by, I glance in an ambient way from time to time, clicking if something looks hot, but I no longer have to empty my inbox, or declare RSS bankruptcy and mark everything read.

I would like to see Snackr more integrated with other streaming applications: for example, a means to push an item’s URL to my Twitter stream is an obvious need, and the more complex but equally interesting option of having Snackr watch my Twitter stream for URLs, and to treat them as equivalent to RSS items.

[Update: immediately after writing that paragraph I discovered that v0.39beta of Snackr supports cross posting snacks into tweets with a short URL option. But not the second, more complex feature of sniffing my Twitter stream for incoming URLs.]

Conclusions

I believe that the overwhelming majority of future social applications that will have big impacts will share the characteristics I outlined: open discourse, open following, and the anti-inbox.

Bit.ly, the URL shortener, has released real-time stats for URL access:

I think it’s fascinating that posting a bit.ly into the Twitter stream can lead to a cascade of retweets and clicks, leading back to a blog post.

[disclosure: I am an advisor to bit.ly.]

Fred Wilson once upon a time read a certain list of blogs religiously, and had a blogroll. When he stopped using RSS readers his blogroll got ‘stale’ — meaning that there were blogs in the roll that were not ones that he really read consistently. So he dropped the blogroll from his blog. Recently someone asked him to provide a list of what he’s reading — a blogroll all over again. This led to a small inspiration:

[from The Blogroll I Want For A VC]

Yesterday, I received an email from Allison Kellman. She asked:

Would you consider publishing a blogroll or a list of blogs you read often somewhere on your site? I’d love to know what you’re reading.

And without thinking, I wrote back:

The only blogs I read every day are my wife, daughter, and brother

Everything else is based on links I see on the web

I wish there was a last.fm for blogs

A last.fm for blogs! I want to scrobble my blogreading and publish it as a blog roll on AVC.

If it exists, please send me the link and I’ll add it today. If it doesn’t, please someone build it and I’ll be your first user.

I commented:

A few thoughts:

1. Ambient News is a Firefox plugin that a/ watches what you read (browse) on the web, and b/ develops a page of recommendations for you as new posts/pieces emerge on those sites (it’s watching the RSS without you making a list). Ambient News opens in any new empty Firefox window. It’s conceivable that Atul Varma, the guy behind Ambient News, could be convinced to develop a ‘streamroll’ for Ambient News.
2. I use Snackr as a replacement for traditional RSS readers. It’s very different for a number of reasons: see http://bit.ly/Q7wtz. Most important, it brings back that serendipidy, since I can have hundreds and hundreds of feeds, but ignore 99% of everything that goes by.

The streamroll metaphor is much more apt than blogroll, these days.

What Fred and I want is a presentation of what we are reading — presumably the ones that we rate as interesting — and to provide that to our community in a usable form.

I am doing quite a lot of link posting these days (see /messagelinks and /groundlinks), but that is too time-consuming, and is not general enough.

A streamroll is a stream of what blogs, posts, and other sources you have been reading, served up to the community in some way or another, for example, as a widget on a blog. I am emulating a more well-defined product with my link blogs, others are emulating with bookmarking apts, but a real streamroll would involved much less work for the individual than either of these approaches.

A really good solution would include a merger of Snackr functionality — to stream in RSS feeds, and URLS pushed to me in Twitter and other social tools, and stream them past my attention — coupled with the ‘look-over-my-shoulder’ scrobbling that Ambient News does inside the browser. I could set thresholds or blacklists to filter in/out various sites, or I could ‘star’ pages as I read them and comment on them if I wanted to.

I hope someone actually builds a streamroller good enough to allow me to step back from manual linkblogging.

I had my old, worn-out Macbook Pro die on me the other morning, in NYC. I wasn’t really that surprised: it’s had a hard life.

I had replaced the keyboard in late 2008 after the Berlin beer incident, but otherwise it seemed ok. A few weeks ago I noticed the ethernet port wasn’t working. Then the screen started to show some flutter, and the DVD drive wouldn’t accept many movies.

So, I broke down and bought a new Macbook, the unibody 13”. It is the same model I had in the fall (after the Berlin beer incident), although the earlier one was stolen in Paris (the Paris bistro incident). When I got back, macless, from Paris, the old Macbook pro was working, so I started using it again, waiting for the Macbook prices to drop. They haven’t.

So, in a way I am just as happy, although now I will have to figure out how to get things out of Time Machine, since the old Mac won’t boot.

So, when I was in the Apple Store buying the new Mac I inquired about the new earbuds with integrated microphone that are designed principally for the iPhone: would they work on the new Macbook?

The Apple staffer in the audio section said that they would work as headphones but the audio input — the mic — wouldn’t work. ‘Too bad,’ I thought.

So I glanced online today, and guess what? The spec for the Mac says they will work:

[via Apple - MacBook - Technical Specifications - All the specs for the 13-inch MacBook notebook]

* Supports Apple Stereo Headset with microphone

No big deal, since I will be taking my dead Mac into the Store tomorrow to see if it can be resuscitated, and I’ll buy a set to improve the video recordings I am doing through Skype. But still, it annoys me that the staff doesn’t know these things, and instead of saying, ‘I don’t know, let’s look at the specs,’ he just told me the completely wrong thing.

Walter Isaacson is the former managing editor of Time, so I am unsurprised that his conjectures about the future viability of newspapers get so many things wrong.

He starts by pointing out that there is a crisis of ‘meltdown proportions’ but then makes the most bizarre assertion, that young people read newspapers.

[from How to Save Your Newspaper — Printout — TIME]

During the past few months, the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.

There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.

The Pew Research Center For The People And The Press reported in December that television was the number one sources of news for Americans, and for the first time the Internet has supplanted newspapers in the number two spot. The younger the individual, the less likely they are to read newspapers, and the Internet is starting to rival television for this demographic:

[from Internet Overtakes Newspapers as News Outlet]

For young people, however, the internet now rivals television as a main source of national and international news. Nearly six-in-ten Americans younger than 30 (59%) say they get most of their national and international news online; an identical percentage cites television. In September 2007, twice as many young people said they relied mostly on television for news than mentioned the internet (68% vs. 34%).

Figure

The percentage of people younger than 30 citing television as a main news source has declined from 68% in September 2007 to 59% currently. This mirrors a trend seen earlier this year in campaign news consumption. (See “Internet Now Major Source of Campaign News,” News Interest Index, Oct. 31, 2008.)

Considering he gets these core facts wrong, it follows that his conclusions and conjectures zoom off into lala-land.

His answer is paid content. He suggests that the NY Times should follow the Wall Street Journal in erecting a paywall for at least some of its reporting, and make people pay to access through a micropayments scheme.

I find it particular obnoxious that he equates reading the NY Times for free with stealing ice from gas stations in his childhood, but leaving aside the misdirected analogies the simple fact remains: even if the NY Times could successfully erect a paywall, that will not be the case for all the local dailies in 100 metropolitan centers. It is not a scalable model, even if it were to work for the old Gray Lady.

My view is that the thinking about the existing newspaper business, as delimited by the existing models of operation, is unhelpful.

I don’t need the NY Times to write about sports: there are a bazillion sources for that. Likewise, food and restaurant reviews, which are overwhelmingly NY-biased, don’t offer much value to me as a VA/SF resident. The thing that the NY Times does well is it’s national and international coverage, and it should focus on that, and cede the Escapes page to Conde Nast and Fodors.

Couldn’t the NY Times become like a Techcrunch or Huffington Post for national and international left-learning reportage on politics, economy, and society? It could be the best. Drop the dross, and focus. Move online and drop the hardcopy.

Get over it, or go down in flames.

Oh, and as an example of the wrong thinking in the modern day, his Times piece didn’t link to anything in the entire world except other Times’ pieces.

I am not a hyperorganized person. I am more of a ‘scruffy’, as defined by Abramson and Friedman in “A Perfect Mess” (a wonderful book about the impulse to organize ourselves).

However, I live and work in the real world, and I need to accomplish things, and to do so I need to keep track of what I need to do.

Although I dream of a world without email, it is a cental part of the communication flow that defines my life. And that flow rolls right through Gmail, so I am skittish about doing anything to change that setup.

For example, as a side effect of the new Offline capability for Gmail, the Remember The Milk Firefox plugin for Gmail isn’t working as it is supposed to, so my workflow is temporarily screwed up. (Note: this has happened a number of times before, and the RTM folks seem to be able to fix their stuff within a few days. They are constantly trailing the Gmail upgrades a bit.)

At any rate, I have a fairly minimal use of filters and labels in Gmail. I don’t want to spend a lot of time filing things, so I generally rely on Remember the Milk to hold onto the emails that are related to tasks I need to accomplish in the next few weeks, and everything else I simply deal with, delete, or archive, relying on my memory or Gmail’s search to fill in the gaps.

So when I read about Gmail’s so-called ‘multiple inboxes’ my immediate reaction was, no way! First of all, as has been observed by Jason Kincaid and Zoli Erdos that it’s really a multipane view, not multiple inboxes.

Second, looking at the screenshot above I was struck at the busyness of the screen. I could get lost in this very easily.

My goal with actions like email is to figure out ways to have less information on the screen, not more. Perhaps because I use multiple screens at once, I often have multiple Gmail windows open — one editing an email, a second searching for something, a third showing my inbox — but those are different screens, each designed to do one particular activity.

So I am not going to adopt this new UI even if it could coexist with Remember the Milk which currently occupies the rightmost 20% of my Gmail inbox screen:

I just don’t want to have my workflow derailed, and messing with the inbox is just too close to the bone.

What RTM gives me is a way to array emails that need to be responded to or followed up on in a time ordered way, but not the time of arrival which is how inboxes work. It’s ordered by time, but based on when I determine it needs to be handled. So I move emails from the inbox very quickly, archiving them, but assigning dates in the RTM plugin. So my inbox only holds the email that I haven’t read yet, or that I am going to handle in the next few hours. All pending mail is archived, and date ordered in RTM. Then I subsequently pull up emails (and other tasks) that need to be done on the day they need to be handled.

Something like this ‘multiple inboxes’ may help people who use their email inbox in a very different way that I do, but I don’t see how it would help me at all.

[Note: Google brought out their own task manager integrated with Gmail, but it is inferior to the RTM implementation (see Going Back To Remember The Milk, Goodbye To Gmail Tasks).]

Some of the terms of the Facebook agreement are ridiculous:

[via Facebook Isn’t Private, and 7 Other Things You Should Know « Legal Andrew]

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

A few weeks ago, I reviewed Staction, a new workstreaming application (see Staction: Another Run At Workstreaming), stating that the application had a few limitations that made it impossible for me to adopt as my core collaboration tool:

[from Staction: Another Run At Workstreaming]

Personally, I don’t want to get so minimal that I can’t format messages, and Staction doesn’t allow me to write something like this post in the messages it supports. It doesn’t even support newlines to break a message into paragraphs. The alternative, I guess, is to write a document and attach that to a post, but that seems like a step backward for me. I would recommend that they support HTML, Textile, and Smartypants markup for the posts, and that would solve my primary objection to using Staction. (Note: Present.ly ‘solved’ this problem by allowing an arbitrarily long text object to be associated with every post, but I still dislike the ‘on the side’ feel of that approach.)

I also begrudge the lack of an intrinsic notion of links, and since HTML is not supported in the body of messages I can’t create one manually.

While Staction allows arbitrary tags to be used, and searched for, the tags aren’t displayed in the stream, even when the ‘more’ is clicked to show other metadata and the ‘edit’ and ‘delete’ controls. I would suggest an additional tab in the control panel for ‘Tags’ like People and Projects.

It turns out that a new version of Staction was released today that supports newlines in messages. So at least the most basic sort of formatting — paragraphs! — is possible.

But they seem to turn a single newline into two, so I can’t create a list of with no whitespace between the lines. Grrr.

However, it turns out that if you enter a URL into a message (“/message”) it is handled as you’d imagine: a clickable link is generated.

So that only leaves the question of a fuller treatment of tags to meet my objections to the tool. And just a leetle, leetle more formatting: I really want a subset of HTML or Textile.

My hope is that the nice folks at Paste Interactive will create a simple way to designate some messages as being formatted, and support markup in those at least.

Vimeo has a simple value proposition for signing up to its Plus video hosting service: getting to the front of the line.

Newbies posing as pundits, and spreading do’s and don’t’s about how we should conduct ourselves, should stop. They have arrived at a superficial appreciation of what is going on, but they don’t understand the deeper truths that motivate our actions online.

The social web is a fairly open place: the confusing term ‘democratic’ is often used to denote this. Newbies can show up, knowing not very much about the social interplay that goes on in various corners of the Web, and in general, aside from a bit of sniping here and there, webheads are fairly gracious in helping the newcomers learn the lay of the land. How many times have I had to explain how direct messages work in Twitter, for example, or in previous years, how buddy lists work?

But when journalists affiliated with large papers take their Sunday supplement approach to the social web, it can become a bit annoying.

One of the topics that makes my teeth itch is online etiquette.

On one hand, I am aware that etiquette exists for sound social purposes: to avoid causing offense. Fine. When all parties are schooled in the etiquette of business card exchange, or which fork to use, then no one is offended. (Aside: Unless you head to Japan, where business cards have to be examined, and a question has to be made that indicates you have really read it (“is this your primary phone number?”), or you are dining in Ethiopia, where no implements are offered at the table, and you must not use your left hand to eat (don’t ask).)

On the other hand, I get upset when print journalists set themselves up as arbiters of online morality, and begin making lists of ‘don’ts’ where social norms have yet to establish themselves.

A recent example is some strident bloviating by Bridget Carey and Niala Boodhoo of the Miami Herald, telling us we shouldn’t pipe out Twitter streams into Facebook, or our streams from social network X into social network Y:

[Mixing networks can cause annoyance - Business - MiamiHerald.com]

Last week, we took part in an online chat about social media etiquette. The discussion started off with a question: Is it poor etiquette to automatically feed all of your tweets into your Facebook status? (For those who don’t know, Tweets are the short messages sent out from your Twitter account.)

We took a firm stand on this: Don’t do it, for a couple of reasons. Facebook status updates and Twitter feeds were designed to be used in different ways. We think it’s not only disrespectful, but confusing to the Facebook audience to put your Twitter feed in your status.

For starters, Facebook’s status is designed to be written in the third person. (Example: ”Bridget is watching The Office.”) Twitter users write full sentences in the first person. (“BridgetCarey: I’m watching The Office”). Put your Twitter feed in your Facebook status, and it looks strange, and oddly repetitive (“Bridget I’m watching The Office”).

That’s awkward; but it gets worse.

In Twitter, messages are sent off in short bursts and are typically part of a conversation. Twitter users also often use shorthand and codes that just don’t translate in Facebook. So if you’re seeing lots of @, #, and seemingly one-sided status updates on Facebook, odds are, you’re seeing someone feeding from Twitter.

Before joining Twitter, we were confused and somewhat annoyed when people did this. And now that we’re on Twitter, even though we understand, we still think it’s wrong.

Disrespectful? What?

Ok, it is true that conventions that arise in one context — ‘RT’ to represent the reposting of a message in Twitter, a ‘retweet’ — may not carry over into another context in a perfect way, and these as a result may not be perfectly understood, but language is in general imperfectly understood.

It is no a sign of disrespect to friends and fans who congregate (at least some of the time) in social network A that I opt to cross post my natterings from social network B offered up to my friends and fans there. First of all, there may be some overlap in those groups.

But most important of all, the primary driver of social tool use is the desire to become and remain connected to others. Etiquette will have to flex around that driver, not the other way around.

Newbies posing as pundits, and spreading do’s and don’t’s about how we should conduct ourselves, should stop. They have arrived at a superficial appreciation of what is going on, but they don’t understand the deeper truths that motivate our actions online.

I will give Carey and Boodhoo credit for turning their pronouncement into a call for input on the issue, but because their framing of the question leads directly to a yes or no answer, instead of an examination of what people might be trying to do, it does not really lead to anything very helpful. The question isn’t about disrespect or whether Facebook prompts with “Stowe is” as the prefix to a post. It’s about connection. (And, the ‘is’ in ‘Stowe is’ is editable now, guys.)

So, the general rule of thumb is that people should not concern themselves that they are polluting one social network by redirecting their stream from another (or many others) into it. Our social contacts in all networks get to decide who to follow and why. The nature of streams is to converge, and we all have to adapt to the natural laws of flow, not the other way around.

I recently bitched about Typepda’s new blog editor ‘upgrade’ which seemed to me to be a step backwards at the best (see /Message: TypePad’s Big Improvements To User Experience: Ha!). The one niddling little example I used to characterize the true dumbness of Typepad’s UX was the calendar dating dialog:

As just one tiny example of absolute UI stupidity that refuses to die, consider the date interface below.

TypePad - Edit Post, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Imagine for one minute that you’d like to date a post, say 16 December 2006. This interface does not allow you to simply type in the date. You have to click the tiny little button, going back one month at a time, until (eventually) you get to December 2006.

Bless their pointly little heads, they took my griping to heart (due to the labors of Ginevra Whalen), and they have added the obvious date field:

I will give credit where credit is due, and they did fix that annoying UI design error. But I am still moving ahead with my plans to move /Message and my other Typepad hosted blogs over to Tumblr as soon as I can, for a long list of reasons, only one of which is the headache caused by this recent ‘improvement’ in the user experience at Typepad.

Let me just list a random sample of the annoyances that haven’t been fixed, or have been introduced, in this last release:

1. Editor offers me no way to set my preferred editing mode as a default (HTNL, convert lines breaks) so I have to set for every new post. Note: this was introduced in the new ‘improved’ release.
2. I can create new authors, but I can’t edit their profile information unless I log in as them: which isn’t hard since I assigned their passwords, but still, once they change their passwords I can’t do it at all.
3. In a blog with multiple authors, wouldn’t it be nice to automatically create an about page that consolidates the various authors’ profiles?
4. Authors other than the owner of an account can add a picture to their profile, but their is no primitive in the template language to allow me to access them. I can only get at the picture of the owner.
5. If you fixed the above problem, then it would be nice to be able to automatically have the photo of each post’s author appear in their posts.
6. The mechanism for importing a banner into a template is based on a single image file, which is not the way that modern designers build websites.

Anyway, you get the idea.

The econolypse is rippling through the world, a shock wave moving across countries, industries, and nations, and right into our lives.

I have spoken with dozens of friends directly impacted: losing jobs, laying colleagues off, cutting back on plans for business expansion.

My business is just me: I am a soloist. My work continues pretty much as it has in recent years. I am working with companies that are creating new social tools, or enterprises that are trying to apply them. That really hasn’t changed, and I am seeing a fairly consistent stream of opportunities, despite the faltering tech economy.

But I am cutting back on a number of plans that I have discussed in recent months, so that I can focus on a handful of important projects:

• Edgewards — Starting last year, I began formulating plans for a blog ‘swarm’ to be called Edgewards. I still think there is a place in the world for the really top-notch writing by our brightest, but I am putting this on the back burner (and turning the burner off), for now.
• /Mind — as part of my Edgewards plans, I launched a blog on the topic of cognitive science called /Mind with some solid contributors (Brynn Evans and Sanjay Kairam). But with Edgewards being shelved, /Mind doesn’t make as much sense. I will be pulling my entries out, and reposting in /Ambivalence (from which /Mind grew in the first place). I know that Brynn and Sanjay will be posting elsewhere.
• Same-old, Same-old Events — I am cutting way back on most events since in the best of times they are generally yawnfests, and in this, the worst of times so far, they are a sort of conspicuous consumption that is totally unhelpful. I am not against conferences, per se, just boring ones. I will be attending some events this year, but way less than the two per month I was averaging even a year or so ago.

I am pushing ahead with a small number of focused initiatives, like the Open Enterprise 2009 research project. I am working on this project with Oliver Marks, researching the state of the industry. It has been fun in the past weeks, and we are just getting started. Check out www.stoweboyd.com/oe09 for more information, and to participate in the crowdsourcing of topics, companies, and other themes we should be pursuing. I have a strong sense that E2.0 is high on many companies’ agendas in light of the economy, and we will be presenting a stream of our findings and observations. Take a look at my recent interview with JP Rangaswami.

As my socio-political interests have surfaced, /Ground has become more central to my sense of connection to the world than ever. My contributors there — Rachel Weidinger, Marnie Webb, Hillary Hart, and recent guest Karl Long — and I will continue to explore the problems that globalism and unsustainable economics are causing the world, and what we can do — individually and collectively — to counter them.

One theme that I have been pursuing in recent weeks: I have a sneaking hunch that executives in the tech sector — like others — may have started to twig to the fact that things will never go back to how they were a year or so ago. We have crossed some invisible Rubicon, and return is impossible. But at the same time, we don’t know what the future really holds, or even the shape of things to come.

The focus on near-term tactics has dominated discussion recently: lay-offs, financial results, stock valuations, and CEOs coming and going. How can business leaders take strategic action if they have no really good strategic basis to plan or project? They can’t just extrapolate from a small number of data points into an uncertain future, can they?

I have been kicking this theme around with some very smart people, and I hope to be able to talk more concretely about it in a few weeks.