broadstuff

I recall reading this exam question with interest awhile ago (sad, I know), and the recent release of the facebook API's makes it much, much more relevant:

John Arrow operates UnFaced.com, which enables “compatibility tests” between Facebook users. Assume Joe and Karen are registered Facebook users. Karen can register with UnFaced.com and display a link on her Facebook profile to UnFaced.com’s website. Joe can follow that link to UnFaced and request a compatibility test with Karen by submitting the URL2 of his Facebook profile.

UnFaced then automatically accesses Joe and Karen’s Facebook profile URLs using robots, downloads each profile, and uses the profile data to assess compatibility using a proprietary algorithm. UnFaced then shows Joe a web page describing its compatibility assessment, which presumably can facilitate further flirting between Joe and Karen. Only registered Facebook members can access Facebook profile pages (unregistered web visitors who try to access those URLs simply get a login screen).

Thus, John must be a registered Facebook member to access Facebook profile URLs. To register, John entered into a mandatory non-leaky clickthrough agreement containing the following terms:

Provided that you are eligible for use of the Site, you are granted a limited license to access and use the Site and to download…the Site Content solely for your personal, non-commercial use

…[Y]ou may not republish Site Content on any Internet, Intranet or Extranet site or incorporate the information in any other database or compilation

.... [Y]ou agree not to use automated scripts to collect information from the Service or the Site

.…In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to…register for more than one User account...or register for a User account on behalf of any group or entity; [or…] create a false identity on the Service or the Site.

According to a news report, John “admitted that he's ‘scraping’3 data from the Facebook profiles, but said it shouldn't matter because UnFaced only did so at the behest of users who gave Facebook that content in the first place.”

So, how much easier would the new API's make it to set up UnFaced - and what else might an identity scavenger use the API's for?

Hmmmm...not just us who are concerned...

There is a fascinating article here from Paul Kedrosky about how the Web is being colonised by the Vox Populi, and the Geeks are being sent back to the corner, as connoisseurs of tat consume Paris Hilton's jail-break and all the other necessary ingredients of modern mental bubble gum.

To quote:

Sure, I have diddly use for Ms Hilton and the 24x7 coverage of her brief jail visit, but there is a deeper import here. A bunch of blogs that I don't read, like TMZ, are newly winning the traffic wars. What such sites generally have in common is that they don't even have passing acquaintance with technology, geek-ish stuff, and early adopters. Instead, they are oriented toward the sort of inane pablum that fills supermarket glossies, 7pm TV shows, and such. They are, in other words, all about celebrities, gossip, and entertainment.

We are witnessing the move from Web 2.0 to Sleb 2.0..............and the main points are that:

- these sites' traffic are blasting straight past TechCrunch, Huffington Post et al - Web 2.0 has hit the mundane mainstream (if you stop and think about it, it is odd that nearly all the top blogs on Technorati are around geek porn, PR tipsters and suchlike - this is not representative of humanity at large).

- cometh the masses, cometh the Ads

Mind you, talking of inane pablum - geekdom doesn't really have a leg to stand on ( coming from a community that is agog over Twitter for example ) - and we're all decamping to Facebook anyway apparently

(also picked up on GigaOm and O'Reilly and here )

...who have just got lucky to the tune of £2m

Its an interesting combined PC / mobile service that does - well - flirting, and judging by the demos and the satisfied customers, do it very well.

But much more interesting to a Social Networker is this bit....

Usage levels are currently four to five times higher than industry norms, with mobile users visiting the site on average more than 8 times a day, and web users spending longer on Flirtomatic than main stream social networking sites such as Facebook

Hmm...maybe Facebook should flirt with this more social of mediums.......

(maybe we should set up Broadstuff on Flirtomatic as well as Facebook

Sometimes a startup feels like playing snakes and ladders, and the gameboard is full of snakes - but some days - like today - it all goes well, and you know why you are doing all this.

A busy day in a very interesting workshop, we are flat out workwise (a good problem to have and doing some cool work for some cutting edge projects right now in Mobile Multimedia, B2B Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 global platforms and helping a leading UK Web 1.0 company transform to Web 2.0, and seeing the benefit of their astounding growth in the last few weeks as the new techniques come on stream.

...and then find someone saying something nice about you without us paying a PR flack*

And, some really great news that makes us feel our predictions over the last few months seem vindicated, and the digital multimedia industry is coming right:

EMI says that DRM free music is selling well - we have blogged for months on this as the best outcome

The OSI is starting to get tough on people who claim they are Open Source when they are no such thing. Good topic for the Kendra Initiative annual conference.

And maybe we can make money from blogging

One small snake though..."blog" is considered one of the most irritating words spawned by the Internet

Now back to the night shift....

* thats our story and we're sticking to it.

Does this settle a discussion we have had many a time...do Social Nets all keep their users in a happy community, or are they fashion items, making and losing friends as their star rises and then falls?

So, Rupert Murdoch was quoted today in the above article (about trying to hive MySpace off to Yahoo):

A News Corp source said that Rupert Murdoch, the company’s chairman and chief executive, remained committed to the internet, although he has conceded in an aside in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal that the privately owned Facebook was gaining ground. Asked whether newspaper readers were drifting off to MySpace, Mr Murdoch joked: “I wish they were.

They’re all going to Facebook at the moment.”

Clearly he was joking

(We believe they all have a limited shelf life, but we have been in arguments more than once on this one, some with some real supposed Social Media "gurus", we can tell you*)

* but we won't

I was at the Chinwag event "The Dark Side of Social Media" last night, where a panel of worthies was looking at the sordid underbelly of every PR hack's darling, Social Media. Sam Michel chaired the panel, which consisted of:

Luke Razzell - Identitologist and Entrepreneur, weaverluke

Tim Ireland - Online Marketing & SEO Consultant, Bloggerheads

James Cherkoff - Director, Collaborate Marketing

Mike Barrett - Director, Compound Media

Cristiano Ventura - Business Manager, Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft

(Their blog urls are listed in the Chinwag link above)

Sadly I arrived late - combo of work and missed trains - so only got to hear a bit of the panelists' talks, but was there for the Q&A, which speaking to Sam afterwards seemed to be a longer session and with more value than any Chinwag event to date.

All the usual Dark Sides were aired - identity theft, online bullying, proliferating paedophiles and pederasts, sock puppets, astroturfing, group gaming, flogging and PR ghostbloggers - though curiously enough very few people in the room had heard of the Kathy Sierra incident on a show of hands, nor were many familar with "stream of consciousness" (aka river of irrelevance) media like Twitter (maybe no-one was prepared to admit to that in public - so not clear what the general level of familarity was (seemed bimodal almost judging by the questions - some newbies and some real veterans) - anyway, I have put links to the above if anybody wasn't familiar with them

There was, as you can imagine, quite a lot of discussion about "what to do about it all" and there were 2 overall schools of thought on this in the main, ie:

- Live and let live - it is what it is, people will learn to see though it, it will become self policing etc etc - and similar naive beliefs

- Man the barricades - raise barriers to entry (walled systems), increase identity / security requirements, monitor etc - a different sort of Dark side tendency.

Our view - based, we can tell you, on work we have done for clients ( whose Identity we may not disclose) - is that both these beliefs are incomplete - and the reason is that todays social networks are very unsubtle and are poor models of human social networks.

Compare to the nuances of our relationships in the real world, they are laughably simple - and this is where it all goes wrong. These systems do not model our real word, so we cannot easily reproduce the filters we have there.

Firstly, in real life there are very subtle variations in how we hold our friends - layers of an onion if you like - and that determines what we tell them, what they can see of us, what they can see of our other friends. How do I reproduce that on Facebook, for arguments sake - the toggles are friend / not friend and a bit of fiddling with privacy. How do I tell Skype that I am always on for family, not on for work colleagues etc..

Secondly, what we call "microbarriers" - imagine that onion, at every layer there is microbarrier to entry - pass it and we reveal a bit more of ourselves, fail and stay where you are or recede - its for this reason we disagree with Tara Hunt's call for mo' walls - its unsophisticated as an approach compared to microbarriers.

Thirdly, what we call "transactional interaction" for want of a better word - the "Tit for Tat " of a relationship that allows us to build a dynamic picture of trustworthiness of a person, ( we have no visibility - apart from on eBay - of someone's reputation) means we have to move to a transaction system - email, IM, text, chatroom if it exists - and this brings its own problem, since.....

Fourthly, bandwidth is limited - we have no body language, voice intonation etc to gauge the shades of meaning (which is why it is so easy to be misunderstood in text )

Fifthly, in general energetic minorities can always self organise better than disorganised masses, so it is probably extremely difficult to self police, especially if there are no public sanctions (again, apart from eBay's reputation approach)

Which, in our view, is why the "live and let live" crowd are being touchingly naive - humans are already evolved to lie, cheat and steal in our much more nuanced real world, so in a far cruder social net as these it is far harder - and takes longer, if it is at all possible - to spot fake identities and malicious intent.

It is also, in our view, a better approach to add nuance than to barrier / ban / monitor the heck out a a social mediaset.

The other thing which had me stunned was the naive simplicity of the "let it all hang out, cut em some slack" crew re putting huge amounts of personal data up...I just don't think people "get" that that means the silly thing you did at 20 and plastered all over MySpace is still there when you are 40 and in a different landscape, in a highly competitive world.

For example, some stuff that was "OK" when we were 18 is totally un-PC now 20 years later (like the fashions....)...but what do us old farts know....

The other great thing for me was to finally meet (in the flesh) Luke Razzell (and his charming girlfriend), a blogger and cyberfriend whose work on identity I have enjoyed for some time. Good luck with Blog Friends, Luke.

...over here - click on each speaker's home icon to get their Future of Online Advertising talk.

Overall seems like it was a very good conference, sadly we couldn't go as we were too busy actually doing the stuff

CenterNetworks has done a review of the talks online, and a summary post pointing to them over here

The one theme that came out from a lot of the commentary on FOOA 07 was there was not enough thinking about the "future" of advertising, more about the present. We're not that surprised as by and large its an industry that seems very conservative in its adoption of new media.

(Yes, we know its now growing fast, but look at the gap between time online vs ad $ online, and the time lag....)

When we did our report research on interactive advertising this year, and in our work with interactive advertising startups over the last 2 years we interviewed a number of people in the "digital ad media" industry and were struck by how conservative (with a small c) the industry was structurally - ie there were some very go-ahead people, but by and large the industry seems to be clinging to an older world it rather prefers despite the rush of people's attention online

The industry stalwarts typically argued that this was because clients didn't want it, it was hard to measure etc etc, and there is something in this - but, as more than one Ad person we spoke to told me informally, its also that many Ad types far prefer chasing the creative awards and party circuit rather than doing the sort of unglamorous stuff that most 'net advertising boils down to - it is more like the much less loved (and lower status apparently) direct mail ad game, where results are musch more measurable and its all about small tweaks rather than large creates.

In a recent Beers and Innovation session in London called "Do Agencies Innovate", we had the same comments from Ad people (after a few beers) , and in fact a very interesting argument was made that the PR world is actually better structured for 'net advertising than the Ad world (as the 'net is more about many small conversations) - see our post on this here.

And of course it is becoming clear that all those megadollars spent on going into things like Second Life are..well, spent - rather than well spent.

Shameless plug - our report that we did with STL Partners on interactive advertising's impact on telecoms overall is available over here..

Why did we start a company at all, we sometimes wonder.....

Marc Andreessen (who has done 3 ) has written a clearly heartfelt essay on the subject over here that touches on a lot of the stuff any founder will know.

First, and most importantly, realize that a startup puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced.

You will flip rapidly from a day in which you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again.

Over and over and over.

And I'm talking about what happens to stable entrepreneurs.

And thats the easy bit - financial risk, reputation risk, opportunity cost - all greatly magnified if you are more than a 20-something by the way and past it.

Take Financial Risk for example - the October edition of the Academy of Management Journal 2006 had the first good research we saw on the "Founders Discount", from Harvard assistant professor Noam Wasserman. Essentially as a Founder you typically make less money, for longer, than if you were a similar level employee of even your own company (typically a c $30k difference - c 15 to 20% - in the USA). As failure rates are so high, this is seldom made up in any equity benefit. What this means is that the risk / reward structure for the founder is very often badly skewed verses nearly everyone else involved with the enterprise. There are various reasons as shown, but at least when data is open like this the Founder understands the hidden games and can do something about them.

So, why bother.

I think Marc has some of it here:

Most fundamentally, the opportunity to be in control of your own destiny -- you get to succeed or fail on your own, and you don't have some bozo telling you what to do. For a certain kind of personality, this alone is reason enough to do a startup.

The opportunity to create something new -- the proverbial blank sheet of paper. You have the ability -- actually, the obligation -- to imagine a product that does not yet exist and bring it into existence, without any of the constraints normally faced by larger companies.

The opportunity to have an impact on the world -- to give people a new way to communicate, a new way to share information, a new way to work together, or anything else you can think of that would make the world a better place.

Amen to the bozo thing.....it can be a major issue as Guy Kawasaki notes here. (though having a great boss is also an amazing experience and not one to be discounted)

The money thing is nice if it happens, but looked at logically the probability is quite low, so the fun has to come from elsewhere.

For us it was simply - "hey, we want to do all this cool new stuff and no one else in big companies is doing it" (that was c 3 years ago). How do we do it? Dunno...but lets start anyway - bit of consulting, build some interesting services.....we know enough about startups to know that you seldom wind up where you thought you would at the beginning.

But another thing is to do it so as not to regret not doing it....we all believe we have a great novel or a startup in us, but its only when we try that we know just how hard it can be, how good when it goes well, how bad when the world seems against you.

I liken it to sailing in a small sailing boat in a large sea (another crazy interest of mine) - you are in control, with minimal power, of a frail thing at the mercy of larger forces that you have to navigate through - its full of ups and downs, very exhausting - but also exhilirating.

Postscript...article by Steve Rubel inferring that corporates are taking on more of a startup model....it will take a long time methinks, the internal dynamics are very different.

Post PostScript - Jerry Yang just can't keep away either - maybe Steve was right, corporates are the new startups