Forget Me Not/Forget Me Now

I've written about internet privacy concerns several times before on my blog, and I recently ran across another privacy issue that I hadn't seen pop up before: the right to be "forgotten." It poses some interesting questions for organizations, especially those that own and operate social networking communities.

It turns out that the European Union has some rather interesting views on a person’s data privacy rights; the EU long ago laid down directives pertaining to what conditions under which personal data may be collected, how it must be secured, and how citizens have the right to correct erroneous data. (Although codified, the directives are non-binding, and privacy laws in Europe still do vary from country to country.)

Spain, for instance, has established a Data Protection Agency to monitor and enforce their data privacy laws.  Recently, it ordered Google to remove links to material about 90 or so people (Google gets asked to remove links all the time and generally ignores them).  This "right to be forgotten" has just surfaced in the last few years as search engines have become more effective at collecting and indexing information on the web.  Information (both old information and erroneous information) is now much more easy to find, so people in Spain at least are starting to bring lawsuits to have search engines remove links to the information that they find objectionable.

This poses some interesting issues for organizations that run social networking sites.  If people register as members, participate for a while, and then decide to leave a community, do they have the right to tell the community to delete all their information?  This would include not only their username and other personal information they shared, but also all of the content they had ever generated (forum posts, blog posts, comments, funny cat pictures, links to YouTube videos, etc.) while they were a member of the community? 

I'm pretty sure that people in Spain (and probably most of Europe) would unequivocally say "yes," while people in the United States would most likely say "no."  After all, there are disclaimers on most social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Quora, etc.) that basically state that any content you choose to share with the community is owned by the community, and by posting the content you are implicitly giving the community the right to collect it and use it as they see fit. (Privacy policies are continually evolving, but pretty much all the social media sites I've seen take the position that if you post it, they own it.)

It also poses some interesting challenges for operators of commercial social networking sites domiciled in the United States.  What if someone from Europe joins your community? After all, most sites don't go to the trouble—yet—of figuring out where someone is accessing their community from so they can apply different privacy rules (plus, even if you try there are lots of tools that let people “spoof” or hide which country they are from).  Big sites like Google and Facebook who do a massive amount of business internationally may be willing to bend over backwards to appease local laws (assuming they wish to continue to do business in those countries (cough, cough, Google, cough China).  But I doubt commercial owners of social sites (intended for customers in the United States, for instance) that don't do business in Europe will be overly concerned if they receive a notice that someone in Spain is suing them.

Just for fun the next time you log into your social networking site, see if you can figure out if they’ll let you delete all your content when you leave.  If they don’t already, social networking sites might someday have to transition from their current “forget me not” attitude to “forget me now.”

Failure and Success at Social Customer Support

Lots of companies now employ people to regularly monitor the major social media sites for complaints.  I know a few months ago when I tweeted something on Twitter (where else does one tweet) about the poor service I had received from my cell phone carrier, a support representative from the carrier tweeted me back within minutes offering to help.  This surprised me at the time, since it hadn’t occurred to me that companies were actually paying any attention to rants on Twitter (or any other social media sites, for that matter) looking for opportunities to provide support.

I had another opportunity to interact with a social media customer support representative recently, and was left both pleased and disappointed with the experience.  Allow me to explain:  Like so many people in the last few months, my wife’s email account (which she’s had for over a decade) was hacked.  The hacker registered a name very similar to hers, and started by sending all of her contacts the now-infamous “I’m stuck in London after losing my wallet please send me money” scam (an approach generically known as a 419 scam).  Since most of her friends (and I) knew she wasn’t in London and wouldn’t have sent such an email even if she had lost her wallet, I wasn’t too concerned when I first got the email.  But the hacker had not only broken into her account, he/she/it had also changed her password, so she could no longer even log in. A big problem, needless to say.  So we searched through the “what to do if you can’t get into your account” links at the provider’s site looking for an email address or a phone number to contact.  Nada. Zip. Nothing. Instead, we could only find a “fill out this form and we’ll get back to you in 24 hours,”  which was not at all what we were hoping to find.  So without any other recourse we filled out the form, and almost exactly 24 hours later got the password reset and she got back into her account.  End of story, or so I thought.

When it happened again two weeks later, I was determined to get a more timely response out of the email provider.  So instead of filling out a “we’ll get back to you with an automated response within 24 hours” form, I fired up Twitter and started to tweet one or two reasonably snarky (I know you are shocked…me??  Snarky??) remarks hoping to draw out a customer support representative from the company (and yes, I tried searching for the handle of a Twitter representative before I ever started ranting).  No response whatsoever from the Twitterverse until the next morning, when a random follower suggested a handle I could try to contact the company.  So I tried that, also apparently without any luck.

However, the handle I tried turned out to be one that apparently was being looked at (occasionally) by a Twitter customer service representative for the company, who upon noticing it contacted me asking for relevant details.  Details were provided, and an actual human person made an actual telephone call to my wife the next day to straighten out the problem.

So the whole experience was very much a good news/bad news affair.  On the bad news side, the provider’s website was totally useless with respect to customer service: no email, no phone, no way at all (other than a form) to contact someone at the company who might be able to solve the problem.  One would think if a company is going to go the social media customer support route, they might even have a “contact us via Twitter or Facebook” button, but no. If I hadn’t gone to Twitter and started ranting about the lack of service, I’m sure I’d still be exchanging form-based trouble tickets with someone or live-chatting with a person who isn’t authorized to help.  On the good news side, once the right support person got involved the problem was resolved quite quickly.

So kudos to the company for providing support via Twitter; boos to the company for not making easier for someone who *isn’t* on Twitter to get support.  I think there’s a lesson here: If you are going to provide customer support by monitoring a social media venue, you might want to make it easier to find your CSR there.  Otherwise, the CSR is probably going to be dealing with angry and frustrated customers, who have probably already publicly bashed your company.

Social Networking Bill of Rights

As you probably know, the last year or so has been challenging for organizations like Facebook and Google (with their Buzz feature) with respect to keeping member’s data private.  At the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference  held last year in San Jose, CA, a draft “Social Network Users Bill of Rights” was created. (I found it curious that the bill is posted on Facebook, and you vote by “liking” the page…when the pervasive and public use of “liking” is one of the things privacy experts complain about.)  The bill is as follows:

We the users expect social network sites to provide us the following rights in their Terms of Service, Privacy Policies, and implementations of their system:
1. Honesty: Honor your privacy policy and terms of service.
2. Clarity: Make sure that policies, terms of service, and settings are easy to find and understand.
3. Freedom of speech: Do not delete or modify my data without a clear policy and justification.
4. Empowerment: Support assistive technologies and universal accessibility
5. Self-protection: Support privacy-enhancing technologies.
6. Data minimization: Minimize the information I am required to provide and share with others.
7. Control: Let me control my data, and don’t facilitate sharing it unless I agree first.
8. Predictability: Obtain my prior consent before significantly changing who can see my data.
9. Data portability: Make it easy for me to obtain a copy of my data.
10. Protection: Treat my data as securely as your own confidential data unless I choose to share it, and notify me if it is compromised.
11. Right to know: Show me how you are using my data and allow me to see who and what has access to it.
12. Right to self-define: Let me create more than one identity and use pseudonyms. Do not link them without my permission.
13. Right to appeal: Allow me to appeal punitive actions.
14. Right to withdraw: Allow me to delete my account, and remove my data.

While I think the idea of a social networking users “bill of rights” is an interesting one, I also think the chances of any social networking platform adopting it at this time are realistically zero.  I’ve written on data privacy several times before. And as I’ve previously explained the problem isn’t so much that social web sites are collecting too much data or that they are making too much data available outside the network: the problem is that--without government protections--the data is going to be used in inappropriate ways. 

An example: Let’s say you have a friend who is trying to quit smoking.  You might visit a web site on how to stop smoking, to get some tips on how to help them or at least be supportive.  How would you feel if your insurance company cancelled your non-smoker discount the next day, assuming that your visit to the stop smoking site was an indication that you secretly smoked (and hid this fact from the insurance company) and that you were looking for ways to stop.

Far fetched?  Not at all.  There are lots of examples of insurance companies abusing private data, and those companies aren’t alone.  While there have been numerous protections put in place regarding the dissemination and permitted uses of data (particularly health data), organizations with a financial incentive will continue to push the data privacy envelope as long as they are permitted to.  Tools that use sophisticated data mining techniques to discover correlations between otherwise innocuous data are readily available to large organizations, and they’ve repeatedly shown a willingness to use public data in “creative” ways.

The most effective social networking bill of rights I can think of can be expressed in one line:

I have the right to prohibit organizations (including government) from using my public data in ways for which it was not intended.

That’s a petition I would sign. (Not that I think that petition has any better chances than the other one.)

Cloud Music

As you probably read, this week Amazon announced a new option for music aficionados. Their Cloud Drive service allows people to store files (including music) on Amazon’s servers, and their Cloud Player allows people to stream their music files to either Android devices (phones or tablets) or their favorite browser.

It’s an interesting idea to be sure, and certainly has advantages and disadvantages over the conventional approach to keeping your music locally on your MP3 player or smart phone.  But do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages? Here’s my take.

First let’s start with the advantages (from my perspective).

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1) You no longer have to worry about keeping your music collection synchronized across several devices. I currently have an iPhone, an MP3 player for my car, three iPods and three PC’s that I occasionally use for listening to music.  I certainly try to keep the music on all these sync’d, but in practice it’s a royal pain.  For instance, if I buy a CD (which I do about once a year these days) I have to rip it on one of my PC’s, then transfer it to all my other devices (I haven’t “played” a CD in years—the first time it comes out of the jewel case it gets ripped, then it goes back into the case and into a storage bin).  Basically the same thing is true if I buy an album off of iTunes or Amazon, for instance.  It initially gets saved to the PC I synch my iPhone and iPods to, then has to get transferred to all the other devices and PC’s.

2) You no longer have to worry about storage space on your music player.  If your music collection is bigger than the storage space on your player (or your phone) you have to constantly decide what music you want to take with you vs. what music you want to leave behind.  With Amazon’s new Cloud Player, it doesn’t matter how much local storage your device has: as long as it can connect to the internet, it can play any of the music you have stored in the cloud.  And you can store as much as you want (for a price, of course).  So another advantage is that you might be able to save some money the next time you buy a phone by buying a cheaper model with less memory, but still be able to access and listen to all of your music.

To be fair, there are some rather severe disadvantages (in my humble opinion) as well.

·        
1) To be able to listen to your music, your music player (or PC) must be connected to the internet.  Not so much a problem if you are listening to your music on your phone (unless you are on an airplane; or in an area where you have no service; or you are bandwidth-capped by your phone company; or if streaming your music kicks you into a higher bandwidth billing rate for the month, etc.).  But none of the iPods or other MP3 players I own connect to the internet, so a bit of a disadvantage there.  Not a big deal: future devices will if this takes off.  Perhaps a bigger concern is the following.

2) You have to trust that the cloud won’t eat your data.  There are numerous examples out there of organizations starting a cloud-based storage solution for various data, only to shut down and delete all the data months or years later.  Granted, “the cloud” is a lot less risky as a storage locker than it used to be, but ultimately your data is beyond your physical control.  I can see keeping a copy of my music in the cloud for convenience sake, but not my *only* copy.

The biggest problem is that, at least the way it works today, it might be illegal. Not illegal for you to store your music on Amazon’s servers and not illegal for Amazon to store your music for you, but illegal for Amazon to *stream* your music to your device.  If you’ve been around for a while you might recall a similar offering by a company called MP3.com over a decade ago: it was promptly sued into oblivion by the music industry.  Now granted, Amazon offering a similar service is a much different proposition. And I would think they will be able to sufficiently license rights to stream music from the music industry (What? You don’t want to license us the rights? Ok, no problem.  We’ll just stop selling your CD’s). And it appears that other big players also want to enter this “cloud music storage” model (such as Apple and/or Google), so the music industry will likely get the deal done whether they like the idea or not.

So as a convenience, the advantages might outweigh the disadvantages for some people.  But personally I think I’ll hold off for a while.  At least until everyone figures out how I can use the service on an airplane.

Crowdsourcing College Basketball

I saw an interesting article a few days ago about using crowdsourcing to make your picks for the big college basketball tournament currently underway (I don’t think I’m allowed to use any phrases that contain the words “madness,” “final,” “March,” or “four” or the initials “N,” “C,” “A,” or “A” without paying somebody a royalty, so I won’t). 

The article turned out not to be what I thought it might be about.

When I first saw the headline, I thought it might somehow be a crowdsourcing project to find out what a perfect tournament bracket would look like going into the tournament (after all, filling out a perfect bracket after the tournament is a trivial exercise).  That seemed like a mildly interesting idea but ultimately a futile one: we don’t award titles based on how people *think* teams are going to do, but how they *actually* do.  As the old saying goes, “that’s why you play the games.” So what do you do with a crowdsourced bracket where the crowd picks the winners?

Why else fill out a bracket?  The article presented a strategy for betting (ok, not “betting” betting, but more like “winning the office pool” betting, since “betting” is illegal in a lot of places).  The idea, originally put forward by author Mark McClusky last year, is to figure out what that ideal bracket is—the one with all the favorites identified—and use some basic statistical analysis to figure out how to bet (ahem, position) against it.  In other words, if the idea of the office pool is to pick more winners than everyone else, it would be good to pick some teams that have a reasonable chance of winning, but are not the favorites.  That way, if you are right, your picks vault ahead of the “crowd” that picked the “likely” winners.

Of course, in a year where there are no upsets (which isn’t very likely) you’ll undoubtedly lose.  All the players who pick the favorites will all tie for the top spot and have to split the pool.  Kind of like playing Hurley’s lottery numbers from LOST and winning. (You would think not very many would have played those numbers in January 2011, since LOST went off the air last year. You would be wrong. Over nine thousand people hit the New York Mega Millions jackpot with those numbers this January: they all split the total pot, of course, and received a whopping $150)

Of course, using crowdsourcing to set odds is not new: if you’ve ever been to a horse race or dog race, that’s how the odds are calculated.  The horse (or dog) that most people have picked to win is the favorite, with the long odds on the horse (or dog) that the fewest people have picked to win.  (Which, by the way, is why most movies or TV shows that show someone winning a fortune by making a big bet on an underdog are bogus: if you bet a million dollars on a million-to-one long shot, you just made that long shot into the new favorite, and *if* it wins you won’t get much more than your bet back.)

In any case, I thought it was an interesting way to use the wisdom of the crowds to bet (er, position) against the crowd.  A high-risk, high-reward strategy to be sure, but an interesting one.

And for the record, this year I’m picking Kansas University to win the national championship (to be fair, I pick them every year). I didn’t attend KU, but I lived near Lawrence for nearly 30 years and know a lot of people that did. So Rock Chalk! Jayhawk! Go KU!

Social Networking Privacy Policies Won't Cut It

Last week I blogged about the gradual erosion of privacy rights in the digital world.  This week I’d like to follow up with why privacy in a social networking setting is a double-edged sword and how to address some of the major issues associated with it.

Let’s say you are a cat fancier, but you live in a part of the world where no one close to you shares your passion (I know, unlikely—we’re talking cute cats after all—but stay with me for a bit).  While surfing the web one day you happen upon a wonderful website, www.catsbook.com, where cat fanciers from all over the world can share stories and cute pictures of their cats. You wonder if any of your old cat-fancying friends from back home are on the site, so you do a quick search. Lo and behold all some of them are indeed there.  “What a great place,” you think to yourself, “where do I sign up!”  So you cheerfully press the “Join Now” button and are taken to a page that asks you to put all of your personal information online: your name, your cat’s name(s), your address, your email address, your phone number, how long you’ve been interested in cats, and so on.  You begin to wonder: “why do they need all this information?” and perhaps “what are they going to do with it?”  So, acting with an abundance of caution, you go to the privacy settings page and carefully make every bit of information “private.”

Weeks later you wonder why no one you know has tried to “cat friend” you.  In a blinding epiphany, you realize that by making all your information private, no one who might be trying to find you as a “cat friend” will be able to do so.  So, acting with an abundance of enthusiasm, you go back to the privacy settings page and cheerfully make all your information public.

The results are almost instantaneous.  Within seconds dozens of people like you are reaching out as potential new “cat friends.”  Then you notice you have 128 new email messages in your inbox from companies with cat products that they are sure you can’t wait to buy.  Then your phone begins to ring. The first few calls are from some of the same companies offering you an exclusive chance to buy their cat products at a deep discount.  After a while, the calls change from cat product companies, to dog product companies, then to pet product companies, then to Nigerian estate officers.

And thus the double edged sword of privacy in a social network environment becomes evident.  If you are overly pessimistic and make all your information private, no one that you would *like* to be able to find you can do so; if you are overly optimistic and make all your information public, everyone can find you. Both the people you *want* to find you and lots of people you *don’t* want to find you.

The big problem with privacy isn’t so much that people are foolishly putting personal information on the web: that’s sort of the point when you are dealing with social networking. The problem is with the owners of the social networking sites (who control the data), and with the organizations (and governmental agencies) that can access that data.  As long as organizations are able to sell your personal information without your permission, and as long as organizations that buy it (or find it online) are allowed to use your personal information for whatever reasons they want to, society is going to have major issues with privacy. 

An annoying phone call from a cat-care company in the middle of the night is annoying.  Being denied insurance because of a study that links the genes favoring cat ownership with major diseases (just kidding…there aren’t any…I hope) is slightly beyond annoying. It should be illegal. And thus the solution presents itself: true privacy protection isn’t about organizations using your information. It’s about organizations, public and private, *misusing* your information for purposes you do not approve of. Organizations and governments misusing your data shouldn’t just be frowned on, it should be illegal.

To be fair, many misuses of data are already illegal, depending on which part of the world you live in. For further information, I highly recommend an article published this week by technology writer Bob Sullivan Why should I care about digital privacy?

Privacy in the Age of Social Networking

When telephone systems began to assign phone numbers to households in the last century, a number of people objected to having their phone numbers (and addresses) published.  Thus the concept of the “unlisted number” was born: the phone company would publish your name, address and phone number unless you asked them (and paid them extra) not to.

The definition of what information is considered “public” and what is considered “private” is one that is constantly evolving.  Consider for instance the ongoing flap between some communities (as well as the EU) and Google Streetview: does having a picture of your house online—taken from a public road and showing no more than any member of the public would see from the same location—constitute an invasion of privacy? (It should be noted that Google will indeed “unlist” your home’s photo if you ask them to.)  The lines are so fuzzy that both the US and the EU publish guidelines on what is considered “public” and what is considered “private” data, mostly in an attempt to stem the huge problem of identity theft.

In the era of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so many other online social networks, many of us voluntarily put a lot of information online that might otherwise be considered private: who we are dating, who we are socializing with, where we are going to dinner, what kind of pets we own, what kind of music we like, what politicians we vote for, etc.  In some respects that’s precisely why these sites are so popular: they enable us to have (often) intimate conversations with groups of people that we want to keep in touch with.  We expect that these social networks will respect our privacy settings and only share the information as widely as we have designated: I might not care if my circle of friends knew I was attending a certain function, but I might not want co-workers or my employer to know.

If you aren’t already concerned about the amount of information you put online and how it might be (mis)used, you might be after hearing about Robert Collins’ recent experience.  During a job interview with the Maryland Department of Corrections, Robert was asked to divulge his Facebook password. Not asked if he had a Facebook account, mind you, or to identify which “Robert Collins” was him on Facebook.  They. Asked. For. His. Password. Needless to say, he was understandably shocked that they asked. And not knowing what the right thing to do was, he gave it to them, and then sat stunned (I would have to imagine) while the logged in *as him* and looked at all of his posts, as well as the posts of his Facebook friends.

It goes without saying that this should concern you (it certainly concerns the ACLU).  I certainly assume that if I’m applying for a job, all the information I’ve put online for the public to see is fair game for my prospective employer to look at (and if I’m stupid enough to put things on Facebook that would disqualify me for a job, then I have no right to be upset if an employer finds it).  But should employers (either in the public or private sector) have any right to request the keys to your Facebook account? 

To me, it’s not far removed from asking for the keys to your house so that they can come in and poke around.  After all, the argument goes, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.  Here’s a tip: if anyone ever uses that phrase, you can assume someone is about to invade your privacy. Probably illegally.

Social Nation Building, Part 2

Last summer, I blogged about the fact that both Twitter and Facebook had achieved membership numbers that were on a par with many of the larger nations on the planet. I wondered what those virtual nations were good for, aside from playing games and stalking ex’s.  Over the last few weeks, we seem to have discovered at least one of the answers to that question: virtual nations seem to be really good at overthrowing real nations.

We’ve known for a long time that the true value of social networks lies in their number of connections and the quality of their exchanges: the greater number of connections and the higher the quality of exchanges, the more powerful the network (which is one of the biggest reasons why social networking “pilot projects” usually fail—too few connections and too little value exchanges).  This power gets harnessed in lots of commercial ways by sites like Amazon.com (through recommendations) and eBay (through ratings) and Facebook (by targeted advertising).  But it now seems obvious that the ability of social networks to connect ordinary members of a society to one another and to enable political exchanges between them has become a big enabler (if not the biggest) of actual, real-world social change. 

It is a political tsunami unlike any before. Starting with Tunisia in and then Egypt, regime change now seems inevitable in Libya (as of this writing) and perhaps a few additional countries in North Africa and the Middle East.  This defiance and ultimate overthrow of some long-time autocratic rulers has happened with incredible speed (it is mind-boggling to realize this has all happened within the last 60 days). 

And the role that both Twitter and Facebook have played in these popular uprisings seems to be substantial.  They certainly didn’t cause the unrest, but they enabled the unrest that was already there to explode.  In a sense, these giant, pervasive social networks acted as catalysts to speed social reactions that might otherwise have taken months or years to reach fruition, if they reached it at all. Amazing.

This “social network as political catalyst” is certainly a remarkable effect, and one can only guess what will happen as these and other networks like them continue to grow.  We have already seen governments try to defuse these social networks in different ways.  From Egypt, we learned that turning off the cell phone networks and blocking the internet really didn’t seem to have much effect on the ultimate outcome.  In a completely different kind of approach, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has offered $36 billion worth of “gifts” to Saudi citizens in the form of new jobless benefits, education and housing subsidies.  While certainly a more positive tactic to defusing social unrest, it remains to be seen whether it will be effective in the long run (or not so long, given the velocity with which events in other countries have unfolded).

Even in the United States, a breaking story this week involved an apparent solicitation from the Air Force to create software that would allow a person to create numerous artificial personas in a social networking site, in an attempt to influence its exchanges (but that’s a story for another blog entry).

It seems that real nations have awakened to the potential power of these virtual nations. And I would have to believe that, for the most part, they don’t like what they see.

Watson. Come Here. I Need You.

Although it doesn’t have much to do with social networking (or anything to do with it, for that matter) I wanted to write this week about a rather remarkable achievement in computing.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that this was the week that the syndicated game show Jeopardy! aired a three-part tournament pitting IBM’s newest computer wunderkind “Watson” against two of the best human players ever, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.  Watson (spoiler alert) won easily.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t in any way, shape or form belittle IBM’s achievement with Watson (well, actually I do a little—read on).  It is truly remarkable that Watson, unconnected to the internet, drew from a vast well of facts that ranged from Beatles songs to Art History (although it seemed, ironically, to not be able to parse questions about keyboards or U.S. Cities, both categories I would have guessed it would do well in).  Without a doubt, the ability to parse Jeopardy! clues and come up with the correct questions as often as it did was amazing.

I was hoping that Ken and Brad would do a bit better.  Before the show aired, I thought that perhaps the humans might stand a reasonable chance against Watson.   After all, people have the advantage of first-hand contextual knowledge about a lot of subjects, they are much better at associative memory and they had the advantage of listening to Alex Trebek read the clues, so they could anticipate when they could buzz in rather than react to a signal that the clue was complete (as Watson did). I realize after I watched the show that Brad and Ken never stood a change, and in a sense the deck was stacked against them. 

For one thing, all the questions were presented in textual format, easy for Watson to parse, analyze, and look up the answers.  There were no “video” questions that would have required Watson to “see” a picture or understand what the clue presenter was referring to in a video clip.  So, there was no complex visual contextual analysis for Watson to try to decipher.  Advantage Watson.

Although Watson was indeed relying on a signal that it could ring in—rather than have to anticipate when Alex was done speaking—everyone has to realize that computers are lightning fast: microseconds (at most) after the signal was given, Watson was able to send the signal to actuate the buzzer to ring in.  No human can match that speed, and a lucky button press might *occasionally* beat the computer to the punch but not very often.  Also, if the human rings in early, their buzzer is locked for a fraction of a second: this is something that Watson was *incapable* of doing.  And, if you think about it, they could have built in a “human-sized” delay into the button actuator Watson used.  What do you think adding a few dozen milliseconds to the button press would have done to Watson’s success rate?  Again, advantage Watson.

Another point: Watson doesn’t get nervous, tired, or frustrated. And while Ken and Brad were likely well rested and have nerves of steel, they very much appeared frustrated at times, which certainly might have had some effect on their performance. Once again, advantage Watson.

The final advantage is simply one of timing.  IBM rehearsed Watson for months before the contest was taped, pitting it against IBM employees at first and then actual Jeopardy! Champions.  Does anyone think that IBM would have suggested the contest if they weren’t *convinced* that Watson could beat the best players on the planet? 

So congratulations to IBM and Watson (and don’t feel sorry for Brad and Ken, they were well compensated for a day’s work).  The lessons learned from building Watson will impact all our lives in ways we probably can’t even begin to imagine.

People are still better than computers at lots of things.  First and foremost is that we can build computers like Watson: computers can’t (yet).  Arthur C. Clark once observed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and Watson is well on the way to proving that any sufficiently advanced Artificial Intelligence is indistinguishable from real intelligence.

So like Ken, I also welcome our new computer overlords.

Social Media Overload

Instant Messaging.  You probably use it at work with your co-workers and at home on Facebook with your friends. But I can’t help but remember how I used instant messaging when it was new vs. the way I use it today, and wonder if something similar isn’t going to happen with social media.

When instant messaging first hit in a big way back in the late 1990’s, there were initially a few big players. (Of course, IRC messaging had been around for a while but wasn’t ever really mainstream.) AOL instant messenger was one of the first to achieve wide adoption, along with ICQ, MSN chat, Yahoo chat, and then a whole bunch of others.  Two things about this early IM environment seem relevant to today’s social networking landscape.  First, in those early years none of the IM clients were interoperable. In fact, if one service announced compatibility with another the other promptly changed their protocols to break the interoperability (Yahoo and AOL went through several rounds of this chat arms race).  The net effect was that for some time if you had some friends on MSN, some on Yahoo, some on ICQ, and some on AOL you had to have four different IM clients running at the same time.  Second, IM usage (at least for me) was very different than it is today. When instant messaging was new and exciting and everyone just discovering it for the first time, everyone wanted to chat.  A lot.  And usually all at the same time.  I remember that it wasn’t unusual for me to have four, five or even six or more chat windows open at the same time (in two or three different clients).  It quickly became apparent to me that it was darn near impossible to carry on four or five simultaneous conversations—even if they were important or interesting.  Today, I use the same consolidated IM client at home and at work and rarely have more than one conversation open at any given time.  IM’ing is much more manageable now than it was then.

So what got me thinking about chat, and how the changes I’ve seen might be relevant to future changes to the way I use social media? USA Today had an interesting article a few days ago about how a lot of social media users are grappling with social media overload.  The author, Jon Swartz, talked with AOL executive Brad Garlinghouse who said something that certainly sounded familiar: “consumers don’t have the bandwidth to process so many fragmented convos online and, often, at once.”  At any given time at work, I usually have browser tabs open for Twitter and Yammer (an internal corporate “Twitter”-like site) and sometimes others like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Quora, Google and at home, those sites plus Reddit and Facebook (hey, I work for a social media firm).  

I’ve thought for some time that trying to keep up with all the different things happening in all my different social networks was becoming unmanageable.  And guess what, I’m not alone.  My suspicion is that although all of us have a different tolerance level to the number of different networks/tools/conversations that we can absorb (and yes, it may be a generational thing), everyone has their limit.  I strongly suspect that, like chat, the social networking sites we use today will be integrated in one form or another (probably in some meta-client like Trillian or Pidgen that allow people to use multiple chat protocols in one integrated client) over the next few years, making our social networking lives much more manageable.

This phenomenon of social networking information overload should also raise a red flag for organizations planning to get into social media.  If you decide to run your social media campaigns through a popular social networking site like Facebook, for instance, you have to accept all the restrictions and controls that they impose (not the least of which is that you don’t really own your data). On the other hand if you decide to create your own social media destination site that you completely control, you run the risk of being lost amid the noise and bustle of all the other social networks out there clamoring for eyeballs.

The Humanity of Social Networking

In a recent article, MSN blogger Suzanne Choney discusses some observations that MIT professor Sherry Turkle makes in her new book "Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other." In the book, Turkle writes that all the interaction that people have with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are taking away from time that would otherwise be spent interacting face-to-face with other people, and that such interaction makes us “less human.”

Without critiquing Professor Turkle (since I haven’t read her book yet) I did want to talk about this concept that too much social networking might somehow make us “less human.”  I’m always amused when someone attempts to define humanity: It is, of course, a moving target. What it meant to be human 1,000 years ago was different than what it means today; what it meant to be human 10,000 years ago was very different; what it meant 100,000 years ago, a million years ago or 10 million years ago graphically illustrates the inherent flaw in the analysis.  If our far-distant ancestors weren’t human (i.e., “like us”) then what happens when we ourselves aren’t “like us” anymore? Are we more than human, less than human, or just differently human? And how much do you have to change to become “not human?” (It’s an interesting problem that science fiction writers have had forever: it’s nearly impossible to write a story from the perspective of “trans-humans” since no one knows what that might be (and if you think you do, how do you make their motivations understandable to mere humans?))

I would argue that technology has always taken time away from face-to-face interaction beginning with the written word. When writing was invented, people started to spend time reading instead of listening to other people tell stories; or they perhaps spent time writing rather than telling stories.  What that ultimately enabled, of course, was the broadening of the scope of impact one person could have on another.  Instead of just communicating with a small group of people in your immediate proximity, people had the ability to “speak to” and “listen to” other people from all over the world.  Indeed, writers could speak to people not yet born, and people could listen to people who had long since died.  Did that change what it meant to be “human?”  Now granted, if people spend their lives reading or writing exclusively, that certainly will have a detrimental impact on their other human interactions, which I suspect is likely the point of Professor Turkle’s book. 

Addiction to technology is certainly a common problem (particularly among introverts) but even if you are a socially awkward “nerd” you are still human (or so I assume).

It seems to me that the change in the way people interact through social networking is similar to the change most technology has had: it enables us to communicate in ways and with people that we otherwise would not. But the fundamental “human” element of communication is still there.

Now when we all start communicating telepathically, we’ll have to talk. (An interesting question: if we evolved telepathic abilities vs. invented them via technology, would either change the definition of what it meant to be “human?”)

Glossophobia and Million Dollar Ideas

In last week’s blog I wrote about a municipality’s proposal to use Facebook as a mechanism to attempt to instill the fear of embarrassment and public ridicule in repeat drunk driving offenders.  This week I’d like to talk about a different aspect of social fear: not as a mechanism to encourage good behavior but social fear as a demotivating or dampening factor inherent in social networks and some of the different forms it can take.

You probably know what glossophobia is, and if you are like most people you’ve probably even experienced it to one degree or another at some point.  Glossophobia is the fear of public speaking, perhaps one of *the* most common fears out there (and as those who know me would be quick to point out, clearly not one from which I suffer).  If you have this fear your body actually starts to produce adrenaline when you are in a public speaking situation (the flight or fight hormone, or in this case “speak” or flight) resulting in physical symptoms: sweaty palms, heart palpitations, dry mouth and even nausea.  In some people this phobia is so intense that they go out of their way to avoid situations that could potentially cause them to have to speak in public.

The reasons behind glossophobia are complex and certainly have strong psychological components, but I have to think that deep down they probably also have a fundamental genetic component as well: human beings have limited survival skills as individuals, so early humans who had a genetic bias to hang around and work in groups had a far better chance of survival. 

Certainly a big factor in social fear as an impediment to participation in social networks is related to glossophobia: when presented with a new social network a potential member must overcome the fear of contributing in a way that would lead to public embarrassment.  No one wants to post something that others in the community will ridicule or revile, so successful social networks try to reduce this barrier by giving potential users control over their privacy settings (who is allowed to see or comment on what I post) and interaction settings (who is allowed to send me messages or see if I’m online).  Effective and timely moderation is also a method of reducing social fear; users can see that abusive or offensive material is quickly removed and repeat offenders banned.

But there are other elements of social fear besides embarrassment that act as barriers to participation.  There is the fear that a social network will use your participation to try to sell you things you don’t need or want, or the fear that a site might be using your participation for other more sinister purposes (elements I’ve written about previously).

There is another social fear that I haven’t yet touched on in any of my earlier blogs that I’d like to bring up here.  Anytime a social networking community attempts to do ideation—the generation and improvement of ideas by a group of community members—the community must overcome the fear of intellectual property theft.  If, for instance, I visit a site that asks me to submit an idea (or improve upon one that’s already been submitted), how do I know that my idea won’t be appropriated and used by others without compensating me for my contribution?  How confident am I that if I post a great idea, someone else won’t steal it (or take credit for it)?

Protection of ideas online is an interesting problem, and one that may not have clear cut solutions.  People submitting ideas might hold certain details back from the submission with the hope that a potential idea thief wouldn’t appropriate it.  But that might defeat the purpose of submitting the idea in the first place, if the reason for submitting it is to get suggested improvements or interest potential investors (a la Kickstarter.com).  To be successful, ideation sites must offer value for value: if you expect members to contribute content that is valuable to your organization, you must offer something of value in return. But how do you offer value to a member for contributing a million dollar idea?

Readers who have ideas on how to overcome this issue are cordially invited to submit them in the comments below.

(You see what I just did there…)

Using Facebook as a Wall of Shame

You’ve probably read in the news this week about the city of Huntington Beach, CA.  A city councilman there proposed that pictures of repeat drunk drivers be posted on the city’s Facebook page in the hopes that “public shaming” would discourage people from driving under the influence.

To be sure, the city has historically had a big problem with people driving under the influence.  According to the AP the city was “ranked top out of 56 California cities of similar size for the number of alcohol-related traffic fatalities” with 1,687 DUI arrests and 195 people killed or injured in 2009.  Perhaps wisely, the city council shot down the idea when it was proposed, recognizing that it was the wrong solution to the problem.  The city council concluded that it wouldn’t prevent DUI’s, but would instead serve to further embarrass family members of alcoholics, who probably have enough problems to deal with as it is.  And further, the information is already publicly available on the police department’s website.
 

The idea of government using fear and embarrassment to influence behavior is not new: public shaming goes back a long, long way (What? An adulterer? Let’s put a big red “A” on her forehead and lock her in the stocks in the town square!).  What is new is the idea of government using a popular social networking site like Facebook—which is in no way, shape, or form affiliated with the government—to drive behavior among its members. 

It is an interesting, though flawed, concept:  Since lots of people use Facebook (over 600 million at last count), that means that a large percentage of potential drunk drivers and their “friends” are probably members.  Threatening to use Facebook to publicly humiliate someone for illegal or socially undesirable behavior is a form of blackmail: behave the way we want you to or we will “out” you in front of your friends and family (same old story, new venue). To propose that governments leverage this type of influence is a chilling thought and one we’ve moved away from as a society.  In fact we have a term for individuals who engage in this type of behavior:  We call them bullies, and are curiously enough starting to pass regulations prohibiting online versions of it.

It is one thing for government to have a presence on a social networking site in order to interact with its constituents.  To have government use the social networking site as a mechanism to publicly humiliate is quite another. 

Resolutions for 2011

Here it is almost two weeks deep into the new year and I haven’t blogged about my 2011 resolutions. After careful consideration, I’ve resolved the following for the coming year.

• Never call out a number of ways to do something in my blog title, such as “7 Ways to do X in Social Media.”  It’s an annoying trend I noticed last year, especially in social media blogs.  Why 7? Does the author perhaps think I’ll be less interested in the subject if they only write about 6 ways to do “x”? Or maybe the author thinks that if I see that there are only 7 ways to do “x” that I’ll look at my watch and say to myself “Ok, I have time to read this.”  In either case, the title would be far better without the number.
• Write more about the architecture of successful social networking solutions. As my background is in software development methodologies, it should come as no surprise that I’m interested in methods for ‘engineering’ successful online communities.  At their heart, social networks are leveraging technology to facilitate the communication between members of a community that have always taken place. They have the capacity to bring together geographically dispersed members in ways that could never be done without technology: interested in collecting green ceramic soap dispensers but don’t know of any other people that share your passion? No problem: create an online community to trade them. There is real science behind successful social networks, and I’ll be writing more about it this year.
• Use fewer parenthetical comments in my blogs. (A nice resolution, but ‘fewer’ is a relative term.) The habit is probably a vestige from writing paper books and articles where I would use a footnote to offer a more in-depth explanation than seemed warranted in the paragraph, but footnotes in a blog seem…anachronistic.
• Track my predictions for 2011. Unlike some authors who throw out predictions and then hope you don’t remember them, I’m planning on tracking the predictions I made a few weeks ago and following up on them periodically.  They all relate to initiatives I find interesting (well, the serious ones anyway (darn, and not one paragraph ago I resolved to do fewer of these)) so I’ll update my predictions as major events unfold.
• Tweet more often. I find compressing a compelling thought down to 140 characters a frustrating experience.  If you want me to kick out 500 words on a subject, I can sit down and do that in a heartbeat: If you want me to condense the concept down to a dozen or so words, I have to think about it for a while.  And often fail to find the right dozen or so words (I suppose I could just do multiple connected tweets, but that seems like cheating (and so much for that previous resolution)).

By the way if you want to follow me on Twitter, it’s @davehiggins1—but then most of you already knew that, since the only reason you are here reading this blog is that I posted a link to it on Twitter.

Crafty Content Curation

Every new industry seems to invent their own terms for things other people have done for a long time.  One example from social networking: Over a decade ago, I ran a site called www.duh-2000.com—a monthly contest to collect the stupidest things being said about the Y2K problem (don’t bother going there now…the site has been gone since the odometer flipped over to 2000…but if you are interested you can browse an archive of it on my personal website).  Each month, readers would send in nominations for silly, dumb, uninformed or just plain clueless statements being made about the problem (or the lack thereof).  I would usually make some snarky remark about the comment (what, me snarky?) and include a link to the content.  As incentive, we offered a small prize to the person that submitted the best entry for the month. (Interestingly enough, when we first started the contest we offered to give the award to the person who said the stupid thing, not the person who submitted the link: we quickly discovered that strategy didn’t generate very many submissions.)

Of course, we didn’t call it this back then, but the process of collecting the “best of” content and making it available as a collection is today often called curation (from the word curator) and is an important tool in social networking.

It is no accident that some of the most popular sites on the web such as Engadget, Gizmodo, Boing Boing, and Ars Technica are curated sites.  Editors at these sites search out content that may be of interest to their demographic, write something about it, and then provide a link for people to see the content first-hand.  In the last couple of years, some sites have achieved massive popularity by crowdsourcing the curation (Digg and Reddit, for example). Members (instead of moderators) comment on the content and vote on which content should make it to the front page. (To be fair, neither Digg nor Reddit are purely crowdsourced: both employ algorithms and human moderators that influence which popular content goes to the front page and ensure that the content changes regularly.)

Curation is just one aspect of Community Management, which also includes moderation, administration, and a lot of other activities needed to make a social network successful.  It is a powerful tool in driving traffic to a community for two reasons.  First, it allows the community to function as a centralized aggregation site. Community members interested in a given topic don’t have to search the web for new content each time they want to see “news” related to the community.  Second (done correctly) it can drive membership.  Members become interested in gaining recognition from the community for submitting interesting content.  Given the right conditions, members will actively compete with one another for recognition points, resulting in more timely and higher quality submissions, which in turn drives more readers to the site and so on. 

If you have a social media site that isn’t achieving the traffic numbers that you want, one thing you should try is some level of curation. Decide what the members of your community are interested in and have moderators make certain that links to relevant and timely content appears in a prominent spot.

Snarky comments are optional.