Stowe Boyd

Kurt Opsahl has pulled together a timeline of Facebook’s eroding privacy model:

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2005:

No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2006:

We understand you may not want everyone in the world to have the information you share on Facebook; that is why we give you control of your information. Our default privacy settings limit the information displayed in your profile to your school, your specified local area, and other reasonable community limitations that we tell you about.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa 2007:

Profile information you submit to Facebook will be available to users of Facebook who belong to at least one of the networks you allow to access the information through your privacy settings (e.g., school, geography, friends of friends). Your name, school name, and profile picture thumbnail will be available in search results across the Facebook network unless you alter your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa November 2009:

Facebook is designed to make it easy for you to share your information with anyone you want. You decide how much information you feel comfortable sharing on Facebook and you control how it is distributed through your privacy settings. You should review the default privacy settings and change them if necessary to reflect your preferences. You should also consider your settings whenever you share information. …

Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, may be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), is subject to indexing by third party search engines, may be associated with you outside of Facebook (such as when you visit other sites on the internet), and may be imported and exported by us and others without privacy limitations. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings.

Facebook Privacy Policy circa December 2009:

Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available to everyone, including Facebook-enhanced applications, and therefore do not have privacy settings. You can, however, limit the ability of others to find this information through search using your search privacy settings.

Current Facebook Privacy Policy, as of April 2010:

When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, user IDs, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. … The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” … Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.

More to follow, but this basically demonstrates that Facebook is veering from privacy-based to publicy-based, and it makes for a lot of nosebleeds from the decelleration involved.

Great post from Whitney Hess on UX ‘guiding principles’, like ‘have empathy’ and ‘present few choices’. I smell a book!

20 Guiding Principles for Experience Design

1. Stay out of people’s way
   When someone is trying to get something done, they’re on a mission. Don’t interrupt them unnecessarily, don’t set up obstacles for them to overcome, just pave the road for an easy ride. Your designs should have intentional and obvious paths, and should allow people to complete tasks quickly and freely.
2. Present few choices
   The more choices a person is presented with, the harder it is for them to choose. This is what Barry Schwartz calls The Paradox of Choice. Remove the “nice to haves” and focus instead of the necessary alternatives a person needs to make in order to greatly impact the outcome.
3. Limit distractions
   It’s a myth that people can multitask. Short of chewing gum while walking, people can’t actually do two things simultaneously; they end up giving less attention to both tasks and the quality of the interaction suffers. An effective design allows people to focus on the task at hand without having their attention diverted to less critical tasks. Design for tasks to be carried out consecutively instead of concurrently in order to keep people in the moment.
4. Group related objects near each other
   Layout is a key ingredient to creating meaningful and useful experiences. As a person scans a page for information, they form an understanding about what you can do for them and what they can do for themselves using your services. To aid in that learning process, and to motivate interaction, don’t force people to jump back and forth around disparate areas in order to carry out a single task. The design should be thoughtfully organized with related features and content areas appropriately chunked, and…

via whitneyhess.com

Over the next few months, I will be developing a report on the use of microstreams in the business context, called Social Architecture: Microstreams In Business. I plan to analyze the promise and actual benefits of streaming applications in the business context.

The report will provide in-depth review and analysis of general purpose technologies such as Twitter and Facebook in the business setting, but will dig deep into offerings intended specifically for the business, such as Yammer, Salesforce.com Chatter, Threadbox, SocialText Signals, Workstreamer, Socialcast, Socialwok, Present.ly, Shareflow, BantamLive, and others.

Our goal is to determine key factors that these applications are focused on, and what the important differences are between them, to help business users make the best choice when considering a microstreaming (or microblogging) tool.

Subscribers to the Microstreams In Business research will receive

• a copy of the final report, planned for late August 2010 release;
• a two-hour web briefing discussing the findings and their application to the specific company’s needs.

The full research sponsorship is $500.

Apparently, a bunch of folks in Philly are doing more than eating cheesesteak: several recent events demonstrate that that city is on the cusp of big changes.

First, Philadelphis Newspapers was bought by its creditors so the three majors — the Inquirer, the Daily News, and Philly.com — are not longer in local hands.

Second, The William Penn Foundation announced plans for a ‘regional journalism collective’ for the area.

Thirdly, a Bar Camp was held called News Innovation Philadelphia, where Jack Lail referred to the attendees as edglings.

Lost in the events of last week was the announcement of my joining Somesso’s advisory board. Somesso are the group, led by Arjen Strijker, that teamed with Headshift for the recent Social Business Summit in London. I look forward to finding ways to develop some interesting new vehicles to collaborate with Somesso this year.

The French continue their crackdown on concealing the face for religious reasons (or is it more a protest against the rights of a secular state?):

via Reuters

A 31-year-old French woman has been fined for wearing a full veil while driving, a further sign of France’s effort to clamp down on the niqab, the Islamic veil that leaves only the eyes uncovered and that President Nicolas Sarkozy says demeans women.

The unidentified woman told LCI television on Friday that the police had stopped her last month while she was driving in the city of Nantes, near the Atlantic coast of France. She was wearing a black niqab, and the police handed her a $29 fine, saying that her clothing posed a safety risk to her driving.

“My eyes were not covered,” she said. “I can see just like you, and my field of vision was not obstructed.” She said she would appeal the decision.

The incident has now reached France’s ministerial level.

On Friday, the interior minister asked the immigration minister to look into revoking the French nationality of the driver’s husband, who he said was a polygamist married to four women, with whom he had a total of 12 children.

But, it’s not about whether you can see, but whether you can be seen.

Here, in the US, most states have laws against concealing your identity in public, but apparently that’s not the case in France.

Does each individual own their DNA? Can we prohibit others from taking cell samples, if thet does not endanger us? Is the human genome something that we should hold in common, as a resource like the air or the oceans, or is it like mineral rights, which are controlled by those that own the land they reside under?

The Havasupai Indians sued Arizona State University for ‘misusing’ DNA samples:

Researchers and institutions that receive federal funds are required to receive “informed consent” from subjects, ensuring that they understand the risks and benefits before they participate. But such protections were designed primarily for research that carried physical risks, like experimental drug trials or surgery. When it comes to mining DNA, the rules — and the risks — are murkier.

Is it necessary, for instance, to ask someone who has donated DNA for research on heart disease if that DNA can be used for Alzheimer’s or addiction research?

Many scientists say no, arguing that the potential benefit from unencumbered biomedical research trumps the value of individual control.

“Everyone wants to be open and transparent,” said Dr. David Karp, an associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who has studied informed consent for DNA research. “The question is, how far do you have to go? Do you have to create some massive database of people’s wishes for their DNA specimens?”

The Havasupai settlement appears to be the first payment to individuals who said their DNA was misused, several legal experts said, and came after the university spent $1.7 million fighting lawsuits by tribe members.

Even as the Havasupai prepared to reclaim the 151 remaining blood samples from a university freezer this week, Therese Markow, the geneticist, defended her actions as ethical. Those judging her otherwise, she suggested, failed to understand the fundamental nature of genetic research, where progress often occurs from studies that do not appear to bear directly on a particular disease.

One aspect of the suit is related to researchers using the DNA to investigate the anthropological origins of the Havasupai, which in large part contradicts the group’s folk history. To me, that seems like Christians arguing against evolution because they think it runs counter to Christian doctrine.

From a communitarian veiwpoint, the benefits that could be gained from collectively owning our species-wide DNA are great. Diseases might be cured, the history of our lineage could be exhaustively compiled, and other unanticipated advances could occur.

Individual genetic privacy — the information about what is in your genes and what it means for your health — is a concern largely arising from people’s concerns that they might be denied health insurance based on some genetic condition. Or possibly denied a job for similar reasons. The answer to that concern is to make it illegal for insurance companies to deny access to insurance based on genetic or other pre-existing conditions, which is notably a part of recent health care reforms. And likewise to make it illegal for companies to deny employment for simialr reasons. Notably, the health insurance reforms may in fact decrease the motivation of companies to deny employment to those with genetic conditions.

Group genetic privacy — like the collective genome of the Havasupai — is a more amorphous issue, simply because the boundaries that define groups are so variable. The isolation and language of the Havasupai makes their ‘groupness’ fairly strong, and because the legalistic nature of the relations between Indian nations and the US government, the Havasupai have a collective identity, and appointed officials to represent them. But who represents red-headed Scots-Irish people? Or American Jews of Sephardic origin? There is — in general — no organization empowered to act on the behalf of many, or most, interesting genetic groups.

And at the greatest collective level, the entire world population, no one is husbanding our genome. So, unless something is done, we will have a landrush, with companies patenting genes, and groups like the Havasupai carving out their own deals with researchers looking for clues in the corridors of the double helix.

In a world carrening toward open and public as the norm, we will need cultural and legal safeguards so that good can be done, and harm averted.

I have been among the many who have complained about the New York Times cavalier attitude about quoting anonymous sources, usually with the flimsiest of excuses: ‘The senior official declined to be named, because he is not cleared to speak publicly on the topic,’ or the like. They shouldn’t be quoted, then. These are political tools, not people frightened by a despotic government.

The pubic editor at the Times concurs:

Clark Hoyt, Squandered Trust

The Times continues to hurt itself with readers by misusing anonymous sources.

I have received complaints about recent articles in which unnamed sources were allowed to 1) accuse a real estate agent of racial discrimination, 2) provide a letter from a dead man in the midst of a political controversy, and 3) discuss the press strategy of a politician who seeks to manipulate reporters with, among other tactics, off-the-record phone calls.

Despite written ground rules to the contrary and promises by top editors to do better, The Times continues to use anonymous sources for information available elsewhere on the record. It allows unnamed people to provide quotes of marginal news value and to remain hidden with little real explanation of their motives, their reliability, or the reasons why they must be anonymous.

As another indication of the transition to a publicy-based society, web-based coupons carry a whole lot of information abou the person that found and printed those coupons:

Stephanie Clifford, Web Coupons Know Lots About You, And They Tell

Coupons from the Internet are the fastest-growing part of the coupon world — their redemption increased 263 percent to about 50 million coupons in 2009, according to the coupon-processing company Inmar. Using coupons to link Internet behavior with in-store shopping lets retailers figure out which ad slogans or online product promotions work best, how long someone waits between searching and shopping, even what offers a shopper will respond to or ignore.

The coupons can, in some cases, be tracked not just to an anonymous shopper but to an identifiable person: a retailer could know that Amy Smith printed a 15 percent-off coupon after searching for appliance discounts at Ebates.com on Friday at 1:30 p.m. and redeemed it later that afternoon at the store.

“You can really key into who they are,” said Don Batsford Jr., who works on online advertising for the tax preparation company Jackson Hewitt, whose coupons include search information. “It’s almost like being able to read their mind, because they’re confessing to the search engine what they’re looking for.”

While companies once had a slim dossier on each consumer, they now have databases packed with information. And every time a person goes shopping, visits a Web site or buys something, the database gets another entry.

“There is a feeling that anonymity in this space is kind of dead,” said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology’s information privacy programs.

The coupons can be devised in ways that circumvent a ad service’s efforts to make information anonymized. By creating specific URLs for different searches, an advertizer or coupon provider can triangulate a mouseclick back to a specific person or at least specific IP addresses if and when they take definable actions.

This means that they can make different offers to different people:

The coupon efforts are nascent, but coupon companies say that when they get more data about how people are responding, they can make different offers to different consumers.

“Over time,” Mr. Treiber said, “we’ll be able to do much better profiling around certain I.P. addresses, to say, hey, this I.P. address is showing a proclivity for printing clothing apparel coupons and is really only responding to coupons greater than 20 percent off.”

That alarms some privacy advocates.

Companies can “offer you, perhaps, less desirable products than they offer me, or offer you the same product as they offer me but at a higher price,” said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for the United States Public Interest Research Group, which has asked the Federal Trade Commission for tighter rules on online advertising. “There really have been no rules set up for this ecosystem.”

No rules because we have no social mores in place, yet; and by the time we do, our sensitivities may have shifted so far that we will never get back to something like 1999ish privacy.

I have been so heads down on the Social Business Edge event (1pr 19, in NYC; being livestreamed at http://www.livestream.com/socialbusinessedge starting at 9:30am) that I hadn’t read the stories about Twitter’s Ev Williams announcing their own URL shortener in in the works.

They have a URL shortener working now, for direct messages, ostensibly as a way to track malicious sites and block them, so this isn’t that new on a technical basis. However, on a business basis it is more of what market watchers all have been guessing at, based on Fred Wilson’s post last week (see Twitter Raising The Infrastructure). He basically stated that URL shorteners were just filling a gap in Twitter’s core functionality.

That suggests that Twitter will try to develop the deep analytics that Bit.ly has built: it is a natural requirement for the media and corporate users of the microblogging service. However, as has been noted by John Borthwick, the CEO of Bit.ly, URL shorteners are not constrained just to the Twittersphere, and even in the Twittersphere on a small proportion of short URLs are generated by the Twitter webpage:

John Borthwick, Bit.ly and Platforms

Twitter.com pretty much stopped using bit.ly to shorten URL’s on Twitter.com in December.    Since last fall the bit.ly team and Twitter have been talking about this transition.    Today Twitter.com represents less than 1% of bit.ly links shortened — when the transition took place in December it was closer to 3-8%, depending on the UX on Twitter.com and the day.   We continue to work with the Twitter team and we are currently figuring out how to get key whitelabel URL’s working on Twitter.com.    The default shortening partnership worked well for a period of time – approximately six months — during a period of hyper growth. Today bit.ly is growing and continues to scale — irrespective of the change in rules last December re: shortening on Twitter.com.

Borthwick goes on to state that start-ups have to be careful about platforms, because although you need to build on them, they are fundamentally unstable and uncontrollable, like tectonic plates. He makes that case that start-ups need to diversify their reliance across multiple platforms. if possible.

John also takes a poke at Fred Wilson’s ‘filling holes’ argument:

Lastly, talk about holes and filling holes in platforms is misleading at best.    Take a list of emerging to mature companies — great companies … Is Groupon a hole in Facebook? Facebook a hole in Google?? Google is a hole in Microsoft???  Microsoft in IBM????  Maybe it’s holes all the way down?    Innovation — building great companies — is about finding, filling and even creating holes.   But entrepreneurs shouldn’t — and most don’t — focus on filling holes in other people’s platforms — they should think about how to build great things — things that in 2010 may be bootstrapped on platforms but great products, products that people love, products that move people to organize their world differently, or to see the world differently.   The slogan “Think different” captured most if not all of what entrepreneurs need.   After 30yrs of personal computing history we have a lot of platform and application history to draw from — Apple understands this very well, so does Google,  same for Microsoft, Amazon, and Ebay.  And yes — once again, the cycle of innovation is turning – great new platforms are emerging and great businesses will be developed on of these new platforms.

Instructive lessons to learn all around. To Twitter, the world may look like a bunch of holes, but Borthwick points out that Bit.ly, at least, is more than a hole to be filled.

[disclosure: I am an advisor to Bit.ly and have a financial interest in the company.]

I had missed the departure of Gina Bianchini from Ning a month ago (around the time of my mother’s death, and I wasn’t paying much attention), but the current plans that the new CEO, Jason Rosenthal, has sounds like the death spiral has started. He’s laying off 40% of the staff — 70 people — and canceling free accounts. As Jason Kincaid points out, this is going to piss off a lot of people, and scare off others who might have used the system.

Here’s the email from the CEO:

Team,

When I became CEO 30 days ago, I told you I would take a hard look at our business.  This process has brought real clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and what we need to do now to make Ning a big success.

My main conclusion is that we need to double down on our premium services business.  Our Premium Ning Networks like Friends or Enemies, Linkin Park, Shred or Die, Pickens Plan, and tens of thousands of others both drive 75% of our monthly US traffic, and those Network Creators need and will pay for many more services and features from us.

So, we are going to change our strategy to devote 100% of our resources to building the winning product to capture this big opportunity.  We will phase out our free service.  Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services, or transition off of Ning.  We will judge ourselves by our ability to enable and power Premium Ning Networks at huge scale.  And all of our product development capability will be devoted to making paying Network Creators extremely happy.

As a consequence of this change, I have also made the very tough decision to reduce the size of our team from 167 people to 98 people.  As hard as this is to do, I am confident that this is the right decision for our company, our business, and our customers.  Marc and I will work diligently with everyone affected by this to help them find great opportunities at other companies.

I’ve never seen a more talented and devoted team, and it has been my privilege to get to know and work with each and every one of you over the last 18 months.

We’ll use today to say goodbye to our friends and teammates who will be leaving the company.  Tomorrow, I will take you through, in detail, our plans for the next three months and our new focus.

Thanks,
Jason Rosenthal

So, they are going to make people convert from free to some form of paid account, but a lot of those will move off, I bet, to something else, like Facebook.

Ning has occupied a weird space in the social communities world: a customizable solution for a personalized social network. But those that have really specialized needs can’t be satisified with what they offer. Perhaps they will move in that direction, and carve out a new competitive strength. But right now I fear they are running out of runway.

Rosenthal says that they will announce detailed plans in two weeks. We’ll see what he has to say.

When Twitter announced it was building and buying its own clients, it seemed fairly clear that the purpose was to own the user experience, and although Ev Williams couched the announcement as driven by concern for confused users (see Twitter Raising The Infrastructure: App Builders Better Run For The Ultrastructure) the reality is much more mercantile: they are going to be serving up ads.

The program is being unveiled today, timed with the Chirp developer conference.

It appears that there two parts to the program.

The search part — to be rolled out first — will serve up ads to users based on the keywords they are using in search queries. This is pretty standard fare for those of us weaned on ads in Google search results.

Biz Stone writes at the Twitter blog:

Q: What are you launching? What are Promoted Tweets?
A: We are launching the first phase of our Promoted Tweets platform with a handful of innovative advertising partners that include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America — with more to come. Promoted Tweets are ordinary Tweets that businesses and organizations want to highlight to a wider group of users.

Q. What will users see?
A. You will start to see Tweets promoted by our partner advertisers called out at the top of some Twitter.com search results pages. We strongly believe that Promoted Tweets should be useful to you. We’ll attempt to measure whether the Tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate. Promoted Tweets will be clearly labeled as “promoted” when an advertiser is paying, but in every other respect they will first exist as regular Tweets and will be organically sent to the timelines of those who follow a brand. Promoted Tweets will also retain all the functionality of a regular Tweet including replying, Retweeting, and favoriting. Only one Promoted Tweet will be displayed on the search results page.

Q. You said, “first phase”; what else do you have planned?
A. Before we roll out more phases, we want to get a better understanding of the resonance of Promoted Tweets, user experience and advertiser value. Once this is done, we plan to allow Promoted Tweets to be shown by Twitter clients and other ecosystem partners and to expand beyond Twitter search, including displaying relevant Promoted Tweets in your timelines in a way that is useful to you. 

Q: Is this what you said we would love and would be awesome?
A: While we are excited about the platform in general, there are several specific aspects of the launch that we are delighted to highlight. Since all Promoted Tweets are organic Tweets, there is not a single “ad” in our Promoted Tweets platform that isn’t already an organic part of Twitter. This is distinct from both traditional search advertising and more recent social advertising. Promoted Tweets will also be timely. Like any other Tweet, the connection between you and a Promoted Tweet in real-time provides a powerful means of delivering information relevant to you at the moment.

There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet. Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar—they must resonate with users. That means if users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.

Q. Anything else to say?
A. This is a new thing and we expect to iterate to make it better. We’re really excited to get it out to you and look forward to getting your feedback.

Note that Biz doesn’t really get into the later phases planned, because what’s coming is likely to be more controversial — and hard to get right. Twitter is proposing to insert other ads into the stream as ‘promoted tweets’. Twitter has decided that this can be useful and won’t be annoying to users. But this means that we will be getting ads — ‘sponsored tweets’ — from twitter accounts we don’t follow. This is a big change.

Will I get ads from companies that I explicitly block? I presume they will uphold that aspect of the social contract. But can users opt-out? Can I block all advertising and pay a fee? The NYTimes pieceby Claire Cain Miller does not touch on this issue.

Biz says that ads that are not treated like a first class tweet — being replied to, favorited, retweeted, etc. — the ad will ‘disappear’. So if advertisers act like spammers instead of twitterers will they be disappeared, too?

According to the Miller, Twitter will be using a metric called ‘resonance’ to direct ads:

Twitter will measure what it calls resonance, which takes into account nine factors, including the number of people who saw the post, the number of people who replied to it or passed it on to their followers, and the number of people who clicked on links. If a post does not reach a certain resonance score, Twitter will no longer show it as a promoted post. That means that the company will not have to pay for it, and users will not see ads they do not find useful, Mr. Costolo said.

That’s a tall order.

Other have been quick to notice this radical reaarangement of the working principles of the Twittersphere. John Battelle makes it sound like a battle cry when he writes “Twitter’s new ad platform will mark the first time, ever, that users of the service will see a tweet from someone they have not explicitly decided to follow” although he softens later in his piece.

Otherwise, no great howls yet. Of course, we aren’t getting spammed yet, either.

Japan’s largest business newspaper, the Nikkei, is outdoing Murdoch. Not only have the erected a pay wall, but they are trying to control all links referencing pages on their new web site:

Hiroko Tabuchi, Nikkei Restricts Links to Its New Web Site

Japan’s largest business newspaper, the Nikkei, joined the trend of other news sites last week by requiring readers to pay to view its Web site. But, in a twist, it also imposed a policy severely restricting links to its articles — or even its home page.

Links to Nikkei’s home page require a detailed written application. Among other things, applicants must spell out their reasons for linking to the site.

In addition, regular readers of the site will also notice that the paper has disabled the ability to right-click — which usually brings up a menu including “copy link address.” The paper’s “link policy” ends on an ominous note: “We may seek damages for any violations of these rules.” 

The Nikkei says the rules are intended to make sure its pay wall is not breached and to prevent the linking of its content from “inappropriate” sites.

If all websites did this, what would we have? The pace of the Web would slow to a crawl, as every writer or researcher would have to ask permission for the links in stories. And the largest media companies would in effect gain control of what was being said, and what was being said about their policies and opinions, simply because they could block anyone that displeased them.

In a recent post, Umair Haque reminds us of McLuhan’s famous insight: “The medium is the message.” And how McLuhan explained that was this: ”The ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” And then Umair takes flight:

Today, the meaning is the message. The “message” of the Internet’s social revolution is more meaningful work, economics, politics, society, and organization. It promises radically more meaning: to make stuff matter, once again, in human terms, not just financial ones. And that’s never mattered more. Industrial era business was “meaningless” because it was antisocial.

Yes, meaning is the message. I have made the argument in various talks about social business recently that ‘meaning is the new search.’ Our social networks that connect us to the others that are most important to us, these will be the source of what we need to know, replacing the algorithms of Google search, which really is just a way to find what we already know. And yes, business has an antisocial cast to it. It seems to try to stamp out what makes us human, so often, and to reduce what we do to some mechanical version of what we should be doing. Umair goes on:

Most “social media” strategies have one or more of three goals: to “push product,” “build buzz,” or “engage consumers.” None of these lives up to the Internet’s promise of meaning. They’re just slightly cleverer ways to sell more of the same old junk. But the great challenge of the 21st century is making stuff radically better in the first place — stuff that creates what I’ve been calling thicker value. Organizations don’t need “social media” strategies. They need social strategies: strategies that turn antisocial behavior on its head to maximize meaning. The right end of social tools is to help organizations stop being antisocial. In fact, it’s the key to advantage in the 2010s and beyond. […] Using the social to “build buzz” and “push product” is about as smart as using a warp drive to visit your local Wal-Mart. Social tools today are used mostly as a new “channel” to push the same old useless stuff of the industrial era at hapless “consumers.” That’s meaninglessness at it’s finest. It’s the least productive — and most soul-deadening — use of a formidably powerful tool. Social media strategy fits inside a marketing (business, corporate) strategy, and is shaped by it. Social strategy fits outside business and corporate strategies, and shapes them. Social strategies are about rewriting the logic of the industrial era entirely, shifting gears in how we think, envisioning a broader, more powerful, more challenging use of social tools. They are about developing the capacity to understand an organization’s role in society, and how to play a more constructive one, wielding sociality as a source of advantage — by acting radically more meaningfully than rivals. Social strategies are about reinventing tomorrow. Their goal is nothing less than changing the DNA of an organization, ecosystem, or industry. Want to get radical? Stop applying 20th century principles (“product,” “buzz,” “loyalty”) to 21st century media. The fundamental change of scale and pace that social tools introduce into human affairs — their great tectonic shift — is the promise of more meaningful work, stuff, and organization. Start with “the meaning is the message” instead.

The architecture of social business will require this sort of quantum shift in thinking: the active and intentional putting aside of worn-out modes of operation that stunt the growth of companies and the people that make them up. [I confess that I tried to get Umair to speak at the upcoming Social Business Edge in NYC next week, but we couldn’t make the scheduling work. But, next time, I hope.]

John Hagel comments on the theme of the just-released book he wrote with John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, The Power of Pull:

Pull allows each of us to find and access people and resources when we need them, while attracting to us the people and resources that are relevant and valuable, even if we were not even aware before that they existed. Finally, in a world of mounting pressure and unforeseen opportunities, pull gives us the ability to draw from within ourselves the insight and performance required to more effectively achieve our potential.

The power of pull puts each of us, individually and together, in a position to collaborate in a complete re-imagination of our biggest private-and public-sector institutions, one that may eventually remake society as a whole. As customers, we have more choices, and more information with which to make those choices, than ever before. As talented employees we have greater power too than before, since we create the lion’s share of today’s corporate profitability. As each of us votes with our feet and allies ourselves with new generations of institutions, we’ll abandon the old ones, leaving them to drift into obsolescence and setting in motion a reshaping of broad arenas of economic and civic life.

Pull means a lot of things, then for different institutions. Employers that fail to provide sufficient professional development opportunities for their employees. These companies will lose their most talented workers to more magnetic organizations that provide better chances for learning and growth.

John is speaking on this topic at the Social Business Edge show, 19 April 2010, which will be live streamed. (More information to follow on that.)

A few recent slips with Twitter catch the attention of Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor of the NY Times:

Nobody edits Times reporters on Twitter, and its prevailing style — fast, chatty, personal — can lull a user into opening up far too much. The Times has written guidelines for social media. As Philip Corbett, the standards editor, put it, they boil down to a warning that Times staffers on Facebook and Twitter “can’t think of it as a personal activity. Like it or not, they are seen as a representative of The New York Times.”

Hiroko Tabuchi, who said she knew the guidelines, nonetheless let frustration get the better of her on March 29, when she attended a news conference by Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota. Her string of tweets about the event was first reported by The Nytpicker, an anonymous Web site that focuses on The Times.

With less than three hours of sleep, Tabuchi wrote, she had to get up at 6 a.m. “We love you Mr. Toyoda!” After the news conference, she wrote that Toyoda took few questions and “ignored reporters, incl me who tried to ask a follow-up. I’m sorry, but Toyota sucks.”

Lawrence Ingrassia, the business editor, said reporters have always complained to one another, about irritations at work, sometimes vividly, but when they do it “to the world, live, I think it’s unacceptable.” I would have pulled Tabuchi from the Toyota story, but Ingrassia said he decided not to because what she wrote indicated she was upset with the company’s press arrangements, not prejudiced against it or its products. He said he saw no bias in her reporting and had received no complaints about it.

Tabuchi said: “The banter on Twitter is often very casual and forces us to economize on words. That can be perilous. But the last thing I’d want is collegial banter and humor to affect perceptions of our coverage.”

Tabuchi said she regards Twitter as an invaluable way to connect with readers and to get sources for stories. Jennifer Preston, the social media editor, said The Times has used it successfully on major breaking news like the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile and the shootings at Fort Hood.

We will become more used to people being human and not robots, as they share more of the everyday frustrations of their jobs. Don’t be surprised when there is some leakage of emotion, even in an organization that is predicated on the journalistic credo of dispassionate observation.

So, Fred Wilson’s recent blog post (see Fred Wilson Plotting Twitter’s Future) turns out not to have been the ramblings of philosophical market observer: it looks more like the starter’s gun at the outset of a footrace.

He suggested that Twitter might start to fill ‘holes’ in its architecture, holes that may be occupied by other applications built by third parties. Then, the next day, they announced the roll out of a ‘official’ Twitter client for Blackberry, and today, Ev announced the acquisition of Atebits, the maker of Tweetie, the most popular iPhone client:

Ev Williams, Twitter for iPhone

Twitter has been growing by leaps and bounds around the world. Mobile has always been a focus for us—starting with SMS which lead to the 140 character limit. People everywhere should be able to access Twitter without friction or confusion. Careful analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes AppStore revealed massive room for improvement. People are looking for an app from Twitter, and they’re not finding one. So, they get confused and give up. It’s important that we optimize for user benefit and create an awesome experience.

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve entered into an agreement with Atebits (aka Loren Brichter) to acquire Tweetie, a leading iPhone Twitter client. Tweetie will be renamed Twitter for iPhone and made free (currently $2.99) in the iTunes AppStore in the coming weeks. Loren will become a key member of our mobile team that is already having huge impact with device makers and service providers around the world. Loren’s work won the 2009 Apple Design Award and we will eventually launch Twitter for iPad with his help.

Note there is no fiddle-faddle about the name: they immediately rebranded to ‘Twitter for iPhone’.

And the motivation? People are confused that there is no Twitter branded client, so Twitter has decided to do the right thing and give them one. No mention of the existing players in those niches, and all a week before the developers conference.

Here’s what is happening: Twitter is consolidating its position at the center of the ecosystem it has engendered, and as part of that functionality that is deemed necessary to the infrastructure is going to be built by them, or at least owned by them through acquisition.

The old model had a lot of holes, like search, clients, Url shortening, pictures, and geolocation. These niches had many players trying to establish themselves, creating a rich ultrastructure above the platform:

Twitter started to buy some companies to fill glaring holes (like Summize for search) and they have built some parts of other capabilities (like their own URL shortener for direct messages), but mostly the maps was still a mess.

Now, they have bought Tweetie, built a client for Blackberry, and they are moving toward a new theory of where the platform begins and ends:

Of course there is no saying that Twitter will leave the line there. They are going to have to make their roadmap clear at the upcoming Chirp developer conference, so that third parties can make reasonable investments in new applications without the fear that Twitter will step on their toes.

However, I am making a bet. I am sure that Twitter realizes the value of analytics: the treasure of information about the flow in Twitter can’t be treated as a side show, because it is the show. Therefore, I am predicting that Twitter will build or buy technology to capture all sorts of information — what links are streaming by, who’s using what hashtags, and sentiment about brands — this is enormously valuable. Acquisition of companies like Radian6, bit.ly and a few others would make sense, especially considering the value to large companies, media, and even political parties.

The other ultrastructure niches really make sense as independents. Consider games: they come and go, like hit music, and it requires a big sprawling community of developers. Not a good fit inside a single monolithic company. The same is true with communities, like Stocktwits. And obviously, niche apps.

***

So, Wilson’s shot was heard round the world, and now Tweetie is part of the new Twitter infrastructure.

This won’t mean the end of competition by players like Tweetdeck or Seesmic. These have large and dynamic communities of users. But we have to see how Twitter plays this nesw game. Will they use the same APIs as everyone else, or will they exploit their knowledge and access to the inner workings of Twitter’s technology to make their own offerings faster and more reliable, a sort of Microsoft approach? Will Twitter transform itself into a Salesforce-like platform, with hundreds of integrated offerings, but owning the CRM heart of the platform?

I am sure we will hear these questions at Chirp, and although I won’t be attending (conflict with work on my own event on 19 Apr, Social Business Edge), I will be watching the Twitter stream from the event very closely.

[disclosure: Bit.ly is a client of mine, and I have a financial interest in the company.]

Update on Saturday, April 10, 2010 at 1:01PM

This looks like the weekend’s big tech news story:

Daniel Ionescu / PC World:   Twitter Gets Official iPhone, Blackberry Apps Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life:   Twitter Slaps Developers in the Face and How They Can Fix It Greg Jarboe / Search Engine Watch:   Newspaper Blogs Break Story of Twitter’s Acquisition of Tweetie Marshall Kirkpatrick / ReadWriteWeb:   Why Twitter Buying Tweetie is Great News Stowe Boyd / /message:   Twitter Raising The Infrastructure: App Builders Better Run For The Ultrastructure John C Abell / Epicenter:   With Tweetie Acquisition, Twitter Locks On Mobile Zee / The Next Web:   Twitter Acquires Tweetie. Launches on the iPhone. Mathew Ingram / Fortune:   Twitter nabs top app maker Brad Linder / mobiputing:   Twitter acquires Tweetie, introduces official iPhone Twitter app Dave Winer / Scripting News:   Twitter Week for client developers Mark Evans / Twitterrati:   Tweetie: The Start of Twitter’s M&A Activity? Ben Parr / Mashable!:   BREAKING: Twitter Acquires Tweetie CellPassion:   Twitter acquires Tweetie, to make it the official Twitter iPhone app Dan Moren / Macworld:   Twitter acquires Tweetie developer Atebits Shane Richmond / blogs.telegraph.co.uk:   Twitter buys Tweetie Stephen Bennett / GeekSmack:   Twitter acquires Tweetie for iPhone Kiet Chieng / App Advice:   Twitter Acquires Tweetie, Will Become Official Client On iPhone Jason Kincaid / TechCrunch:   Twitter Acquires Tweetie GigaOm / Silicon Alley Insider:   Twitter Buys Tweetie, Adds Fuel to Developer Fires Rafat Ali / paidContent:   Twitter Makes First Client Acquisition: Buys Tweetie For iPhone Client; What’s Next? Alexia Tsotsis / The Snitch:   Twitter, Now Filling Its Own Hole Peter Kafka / MediaMemo:   Twitter Goes Shopping, Comes Home With Tweetie. Next? Mike Schramm / TUAW:   Breaking: Twitter acquires Tweetie, will make it official and free Seth Weintraub / 9 to 5 Mac:   Twitter buys Tweetie, iPhone app to become free Charles Hudson’s Weblog:   Three Reminders about Platform Businesses (Apple, Twitter, and Facebook) Jay Hathaway / Download Squad:   Twitter acquires Tweetie, hires developer Loren Brichter Rene Ritchie / TiPb:   Tweetie to become official Twitter for iPhone Jim Dalrymple / The Loop:   Twitter buys Tweetie Ray Basile / iPhone Savior:   Twitter Buys Tweetie As Their Official iPhone App Phil Nickinson / Android Central:   Twitter buys Tweetie for iPhone; which Android client would you serve up? Krishnan Subramanian / diversity.net.nz:   Twitter Acquires Tweetie, What’s Next? Jesse David Hollington / iLounge:   Twitter acquires Tweetie, to become official Twitter app Krishnan Subramanian / CloudAve:   Twitter Acquires Tweetie, What’s Next? Scott Beale / Laughing Squid:   Twitter Acquires Tweetie iPhone Client Ben Metcalfe Blog:   Twitter continues on the offensive: now iPhone Federico Viticci / MacStories:   Twitter Acquires Tweetie, Becomes “Twitter for iPhone” Soon Free in the App Store Daniel Kaszor / FP Posted:   FP Tech Desk: Twitter aquires Tweetie, renames it Twitter for iPhone » All Related Discussion

Update on Sunday, April 11, 2010 at 9:18AM

Interesting piece by VC Mark Suster (Twitter’s Acquisition, Chirp & Managing Developer Relationships) on the Twitter Atebits acquisition and what it means.

Fred Wilson has written a post about Twitter’s future, one that reads like a market analyst wrote it. The problem is, Fred is one of the original investors in Twitter, and sits on the board, so I have to wonder what this is all about. Is this Twitter policy? Did he pass this by the management there? Is he going public with this a week before the Twitter developer conference to prepare people for a big announcement? Is he attempting to influence policy by taking an argument public?

Fred Wilson, The Twitter Platform’s Inflection Point

Which brings me to the title of this post. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Twitter Platform and Ecosystem recently. I think it is at an inflection point, much like the desktop software and hardware business was in the mid 80s as the desktop platform started to mature.

Much of the early work on the Twitter Platform has been filling holes in the Twitter product. It is the kind of work General Computer was doing in Cambridge in the early 80s. Some of the most popular third party services on Twitter are like that. Mobile clients come to mind. Photo sharing services come to mind. URL shorteners come to mind. Search comes to mind. Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience.

When you talk to a new user, they want to know how to post a photo to Twitter, they want to know “what is this bit.ly thing?”, they want to know how to get Twitter on their iPhone. Names like Summize, Twitpic, Tweetie make no sense to them. Of course, without Summize, Twitpic, and Tweetie we would not have the Twitter we have today. They and many other third party products and services filled out the holes in the Twitter product and made it work better.

But those services don’t feel like Lotus or Aldus to me. What are the products and services that create something entirely new on top of Twitter? I’ll come back to that question, but one more history lesson, this one recent history.

When Facebook platform launched, we saw a massive number of new products and services launched on The Facebook. But many were slight variations on existing Facebook features (like Superwall) or holes in the Facebook service. As Facebook closed up those holes and enhanced their own feature set, those apps fell to the wayside.

Note: Those Facebook apps that ‘fell by the wayside’ went out of business because Facebook decided to pull that functionality into the core platform. Is that what Twitter is going to do?

As one example, Twitter has rolled out its own URL shortener (http://twt.tl) which is being used in direct messages. Are they planning on replacing Bit.ly?

And then Fred goes on to suggest other areas that are likely to be hot for Twitter application development, presumably after Twitter fills the holes that other. earlier apps filled:

And because Twitter is so open and so lightweight, I am surprised that there aren’t more “new kinds of killer apps” to quote my friend who I started this post with.

Here’s are some places where I think we might see these killer apps emerge:

* Social Gaming - There have been a number of attempts to build social game experiences on Twitter. But I’m not aware of any successes of scale like we’ve had on the Facebook platform. I think we will see it emerge soon.

* Verticals - We have some successes to point to here like Stocktwits for finance and Flixup for movies but this is a wide open opportunity in most verticals and we haven’t seen as much effort here as I’d have expected.

* Enterprise - CoTweet comes to mind as well as the efforts that Salesforce has made to integrate Twitter. This is a huge opportunity.

* Discovery - This is one area where there is a significant amount of effort. Hunch, Listorious, TweetMeme, Cadmus, WeFollow, and MrTweet all come to mind.

* Analytics - While Twitter will obviously be delivering better analytics to its users, particularly its marketing and business users, I believe that there is always a market for third party analytics. Google Analytics is available for free and yet none of the large analytics providers have seen their businesses suffer. There is simply a voracious appetite for information on the Internet. So companies like bit.ly, Radian6, HubSpot, Scout Labs, and others have a bright future.

Again, I don’t know how to read this. Is Fred explaining what is to come? Is he trying to steer Twitter management? No matter what, he is not some dispassionate Twitter user wondering about what might come.

[Disclosure: I am an advisor to Bit.ly and I have a financial interest in the company’s future.]

Update on Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 5:24PM 

Nick Carlson came to the same conclusions I did.

Update on Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 5:30PM

Nick Carlson has more:

Responding to our post, Fred back-tracked, commenting, “that post was my work, not Twitter’s work. While i am on the board of twitter, I don’t work there and I don’t speak for them.”

But Twitter’s third-party developers don’t buy it.

One industry source nicely summarized what many others told us they were thinking, telling us, “Fred is lying to you.  Twitter was aware of his plans.  This was intentional to soften the blow later and provide advance notice.”

One big reason for all the skepticism? Yesterday, plenty of Twitter employees were cheer-leading Fred’s post.

Doug Williams, who helps run Twitter’s platform, tweeted, “Incredibly timely @fredwilson piece that all Twitter developers should read http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/04/the-twitter-platform.html.”

Ryan Sarver, Doug’s boss, re-tweeted Fred’s post and then later tweeted it again, asking his followers, “what are your thoughts on @fredwilson’s post? http://bit.ly/aruik7”

Twitter analytics lead Kevin Wheil wrote, “Wow, @fredwilson nailed it:   http://bit.ly/b5RvlO.”

Twitter product guy Josh Elmen wrote, “Great post on platforms and building innovation vs filling holes by @fredwilson: http://bit.ly/bkpqjv.”

A follower of Josh’s replied to that tweet, “I would be terrified reading Fred’s post if I was a hole filler startup. Thanks but now you die!” and Josh answered, “in the history of platforms, hole filling has always been a great place to start, but never a great place to end, right?”

All this cheerleading has Twitter developers very skittish. One of the guys behind one of the very most popular Twitter apps told us:

“It wouldn’t surprise me if they now deem it important to own more eyeballs. I don’t agree with this strategy but, as I said, I wouldn’t be surprised. [Twitter shouldn’t] underestimate the value of the innovation in the long tail. I hope this is not stifled if Twitter appear to be competing.”

We’ve asked Twitter CEO Ev Williams for a response to all this, but so far we’ve heard nothing.

As our society careens into a challenging and turbulent era, our value systems change. For the first time, trust and transparency trump product quality in our decisions about brands:

via Edelman

I have to wonder if this is a permanent shift in the social fabric, or a temporary phase induced by the financial turmoil of the recent past. I am betting on a permanent change in cultural norms.

I think Cory Doctorow’s Whuffie idea has gotten too deep into Craig Newmark’s thinking about trust and reputation. This is from his newest piece on this topic:

Craig Newmark, Trust and reputation systems: redistributing power and influence

How do we trust the custodians of trustworthiness? We need to have some confidence that they’re not fiddling the ratings, that they’re reasonably secure. After all, trust and reputation are really valuable assets.

I think the solution lies in a network of trust and reputation systems. We’re seeing the evolution of a number of different ways of measuring trust, which reflects a human reality; different people think of trust in different ways.

Also, the repositories of trust information are the banks in which we store this big asset. Like any banks, having a lot of this kind of currency confers a lot of power in them. Having some competition provides some checks and balances.

We need to be able to move around the currency of trust, whatever that turns out to be, like we move money from one bank to another. That suggests the need for interchange standards, and ethical standards that require the release of that information when requested. Perhaps there’s a need for new law in this area.

Restating the bottom line: we are already seeing a shift in power and influence, a big wave whose significance we’ll see by the end of this decade. Right now, it’s like the moment before a tsunami, where the water is drawn away from the shore, when it’s time to get ahead of that curve.



I think the metaphor of reputation and trust as a sort of currency leads people astray. It isn’t like a fiat currency, which is backed by a nation or a central bank, and whose value rises and falls with the state of the nation’s economy.

Trust — like knowledge — is an emergent property of social networks, an attribute of social relationships. That I trust a friend and that friend trusts me is a construct of emotions and thoughts, based on interactions over time, and the result of past experiences:

• “Last time I loaned Joe $5 he paid it back; I trust him to pay me back this $10.”
• “Betty’s recommendations in the past have been great.”
• “Whenever we go to movies together, Carlos makes great comments about the direction and acting. I think I’ll ask him what I should see this weekend.”

Attempts in the past to suggest that knowledge can be managed as an asset have largely been fruitless. I predict the same will be true of trust and reputation. And not just because it can be gamed, or that it is highly contextual, but because it won’t connect with our minds well, and how we think and feel about trust.

On the other hand, I believe that trust and reputation measure is possible, through inferences based on how people interact, and what they talk about. But for this to work, a trust analysis tool would have to read email, twitter streams, blogs, and other tangible reflections of our everyday interactions. But I doubt it will lead to Trust Bucks, or other tangible or fungible currencies, folded in our wallets.