broadstuff

From the Wilfully Misreading Statistics Dept:

I'm sure most people have read the statistics regarding the differing number of sex partners men and women have on average - the New York Times did a very good article on it recently:

One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5.

The issue, as anyone even vaguely familiar with statistics will tell you (and probably anyone who just thinks about the numbers), is that these numbers are virtually impossible statistically - or rather the "what you have to believe" beggars belief in terms of the extreme vigour of a small number of very busy women. (Or perhaps they are too busy to answer these surveys.....)

Anyway, the main point I am driving at is made in the NYT article later:

Dr. Gale added that he is not just being querulous when he raises the question of logical impossibility. The problem, he said, is that when such data are published, with no asterisk next to them saying they can’t be true, they just “reinforce the stereotypes of promiscuous males and chaste females.”

And thus

“In this way,” Dr. Gale said, “the false conclusions people draw from these surveys may have a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.”

In other words we allow ourselves to be taken in by irrational stuff because the data does not support what we want to believe.

I feel the same way with many of the statistics posted about the various Social Nets and our behaviours on them - they just don't add up. I recall thinking that with the Second Life numbers last year and then they were eventually shown to be - er - inflated. At the moment there is not enough hard data coming out of say Facebook, but having been on it awhile I have the same feeling I had with Second Life - if all these millions are coming onboard Facebook, then where are they?

Never mind the assumed valuations of a user - $3m for a company that has 2.3m "users" of a Facebook application.

My experience is that the Facebook group activity is low (messages per person) vs equivalents on say Yahoo Groups, and emails between people on Facebook is fairly minimal too. I don't see a vast increase in my pre-existing contact base week on week there either. Now it could be I'm just a Johnny No Mates, but I suspect that we are yet again seeing the Second Life Syndrome.

As I know so many people whom I both like and respect but who are also very keen on Open ID, I've been reluctant to carp (and it could just have been me who found it hard going), so I'm glad someone else has come out the closet on this.. Jan Miksovsky logs most of the issues I came across and many more, and his conclusion roughly matched mine:

For the time being, I can’t imagine a sane business operator forcing their precious visitors through this gauntlet of user experience issues just for the marginal benefits that accrue to a shared form of ID. I've read numerous claims that all it will take is for someone big like Google to support OpenID to crack this problem open. Unfortunately, there's no business of any size that can afford to direct their traffic down a dead end.

In short, if it's fiddly for a tech tart like me, its not going to fly with the mass market. Jan offers a good list of proposed solutions. I'd like to second them otherwise this idea of an Open ID, which I support, will wither away.

1. Redesign the OpenID home page for consumers. The page's main content should contain a brief explanation of OpenID in consumer-friendly terms, along with a giant Get an Open ID button. Move all the developer material behind a Developers button.
2. Design an end-to-end process for getting an OpenID from a service operator's site. Since most services won't care which provider the user uses, let these services send the user into a real flow for picking a provider, getting an ID, and most importantly coming back to the original service to use the new ID. When they get back to the service, the new OpenID should be prefilled.
3. Give the above flow a sidebar titled "Do you have a blog?" that explains that, if they have a blog on LiveJournal, TypePad, etc., they can use that for their OpenID. A link in the sidebar should shunt the user into a page that has them pick their blog provider, then tells them what the (blog service dependent) form of their OpenID is. The flow should then return the user to the service they started on (again, with their OpenID prefilled).
4. Organize the list of providers around factors that can actually influence a user's decision. Consider offering provider ratings based on ease of use, uptime, etc.
5. Refine reference designs for the complex range of cases that come up in using OpenID with a service. E.g., define the expected behavior and terminology that should be used when a user tries to log in with an OpenID but does not already have an account with that ID.
6. Define guarantees that services should offer to users in the event their OpenID provider goes out of business.
7. Build an organization that can do real usability testing on this service with real consumers.

So, like the rest of the planet we have had a Skype-Outage for a lot of the last few days....its sort of back up now, with a few people appearing and disappearing here and there. However, I read of companies that have stopped using landlines and are now in dire straits. What were they thinking?

There is an engineering (as opposed to management) view of redundancy, i.e. that extra options are good. Especially for networks, where the last thing you want is to lose service if a network drops out.

So, for comms that means having at least one other option - and better a non Internet one in case you lose all IP. And better also a non wire backup in case the phone line goes down. For full resilience we use VoIP, IM, POTS and Mobile communications. So should you if you depend on comms in any way.

The same rule also applies with Webservices, which is why we don't recommend any service that does not allow you to do stuff offline. So, yes all these webwidgety things are dreadfully fashionable right now, but let Skype Out be a warning.

Think about what you are using and what happens if:

(i) You are offline, and / or
(ii) The Webservice loses your data

In addition, think about what happens if the webservice exposes (or abuses) your data. It can, and does, happen, and will happen increasingly as more people put more valuable stuff online, making it worthwhile to hack it. For this reason, keeping your stuff in more than one place is good.

Here endeth the lesson...the weekend beckons

Postscript - read quite a few comments on various blogs moaning about Skype.....our reply would be that if you put all your eggs in a free consumer service...well, you gets what you pays for.....

Post-Postscript...Om Malik asks where were eBay during all this. Certainly not blogging about it.....maybe they only had Skype phones as part of the drive to get synergies on their $2.6 bn acquisition

Post Post Postscript - it would appear it was mass reboot of PC's following a Windows patch wot did it. This clearly has interesting implications for what people who have infrastructure layer assets can do to application layer plays.....yet another reason for going for redundancy.

So it would appear that the "Where I've been" app on Facebook has been bought for $3m. I've removed it immediately, and here's why:

When this was an intra-Facebook app I was happy with the idea, it would be seen by my "Friends" - i.e I controlled access (or at least I trusted the self interest of the small outfit that ran it to not screw their user base or they would die).

Now that it is "going corporate", and has had a lump of money paid for it, (apparently I was worth $1.30) the pressure will be on to monetise and get an ROI - which very likely means use of my data outside of the narrow confines I mandated for it - and that means I lose control of my data for no discernable benefit to me - most likely scenario is that it will now to be a source of attempts to appraise me of offers I would be a fool to refuse (ie flog me stuff I don't want), and there is the potential of easily cross-analysing my travel patterns with the other data on my profile and mining that.

Call me paranoid, but they survive

Congrats of course to Craig Ulliott who built it and sold it.

(Incidentally I've also just removed "My Questions" - I was surprised at the naff questions clever friends were asking me, when I realised it was a using a spam system to market itself I killed it.)

Maybe its because it was so soon after reading about J&J suing the Red Cross for use of a Red Cross, that this story about Saatchi's One Word Equity also made me splutter out my morning tea (tip of hat to Nic Brisbourne for mentioning it).

There must be something in the air at the moment that these PR/Ad types are sniffing

Anyway, Nic pointed to a piece Umair Haque at Bubblegen wrote on this - I quote:

Here's a mini case study of how to actively get commoditized: M&C Saatchi's One Word Equity. The big idea is to reduce a brand to a single word - to "own" a word, globally, permanently, always and everywhere.

There are a few drivers of this. The first is globalization, and the opportunity to market globally, reaping enormous efficiency gains. The second, and more important, is search. Single words, to put it bluntly, are tailor made for search-focused marketing.

Now, this is an example of a marketer literally handing market power over. From a strategic point of view, M&C is saying - search, you win; we will simplify our brands, neuter our creative output, and dilute the emotional and social value of the very brands we wanna build - all to fit into your new value chain.

That was my thought exactly - the question immediately in my mind was "do those people even get the basics of how broadband networked (aka new) media works?"

There is one word for this gambit - panacea. The real opportunity is in the opposite direction - in the days long gone by it was called customer satisfaction. This is the ability to create loyalty and identification by the many small interactions the person has with the brand - the Moments of Truth - and in an online, feedback-loop world the opportunity has never been better to do this.

In fact we would hypothesise that companies - Brand or no - that cannot do this in future are at the highest risk, no matter how many words in their Equity chest. This is because the online world talks to itself. Brand X claims "Reliability", blogger Y says their product sucks, game over. Today the "Voice of the Customer" is not something a company can choose to hear via its feedback forms, market research etc. That voice is being published on the 'Net, for all to listen to, as an alternate media about the company. The key is engagement. In that respect the J&J team are on the button, the PR group blogging about it no matter how tough the task.

Or, in Umairspeaque:

Put another way, the edgeconomy - the millions of markets, networks, and communities that are the edgeconomy - offer marketers the game-changing opportunity to bring brands to life, to build social and cultural institutions around them, to embed value creation into the very fabric of consumer behaviour itself.

What could be more powerful than that?

And necessary !

Postscript...something has been nagging at me since I wrote this post - and this is it: Big picture - advertising, marketing, branding et al is moving online, but online as a medium is much more like direct marketing than creative marketing in that it is has direct feedback loops and is discretely measurable. This play may make sense in the old school creative marketing world but is the opposite of what you would do in the online, constant feedback world.

This is one of those posts that stew around for a few days.....Marc Andreessen recently set a challenge.

So here's my first challenge: to anyone who has an opinion on the role of age and entrepreneurship -- see if you can fit your opinion into this model !

His model is, in a nutshell:

Generally, productivity -- output -- rises rapidly from the start of a career to a peak and then declines gradually until retirement.

This peak in productivity varies by field, from the late 20s to the early 50s, for reasons that are field-specific.

Precocity, longevity, and output rate are linked. "Those who are precocious also tend to display longevity, and both precocity and longevity are positively associated with high output rates per age unit." High producers produce highly, systematically, over time.

The odds of a hit versus a miss do not increase over time. The periods of one's career with the most hits will also have the most misses. So maximizing quantity -- taking more swings at the bat -- is much higher payoff than trying to improve one's batting average.

Intelligence, at least as measured by metrics such as IQ, is largely irrelevant.

So in effect creativity, innovation etc are not really about special techniques, self help books, 6 point plans or whatever - its about hours spent and number of shots at goal - a numbers game in other words.

He also notes that research shows different types of endeavour peak at different ages:

And here's my second challenge: is entrepreneurship more like poetry, pure mathematics, and theoretical physics -- which exhibit a peak age in one's late 20s or early 30s -- or novel writing, history, philosophy, medicine, and general scholarship -- which exhibit a peak age in one's late 40s or early 50s? And how, and why?

(There is a fascinating aside that talents in the early peaking fields also tend to die young btw ).

One of the problems with waiting for one's thoughts to percolate is that others get there first. Naval Ravikant pretty much hit some of my first thoughts, which were roughly on his lines:

Now I prefer a slightly different hypothesis. More of the creative instinct is driven by the sublimated sex drive and the desire to attract a mate than we give it credit for. And more of it is squelched by the demands of family than anything else. An extreme take on it is presented by Kanazawa:

"Scientists tend to 'desist' from scientific research upon marriage, just like criminals desist from crime upon marriage."

Sociobiologists have long speculated that creativity (and intelligence overall really) have just been an aid to getting our jeans down and our genes up into the next generation. (Of course, if this were totally true then geeks would all get laid constantly, which - on empirical observation - is not a very provable hypothesis. It is clear that if you are going to peak young and leave progeny, poetry is a better approach than physics )

The other - and more salient here imho - point Naval made relates to time. As anyone who has tried to start anything from scratch knows it takes a huge amount of time - as does family life. And when the two collide, it makes for very hard choices (and getting it on is normally on the opposite side to setting it up as well). The other thing is that families need cash, and cash - by and large - does not flow from the early work required in an entrepreneurial endeavour.

Therefore, I would hypothesize that there are 2 main points at which there is significant free time for real creative, innovative endeavour (ie time to generate lots of shots on goal) in most people's lives:

- Pre having Young Kids - for most people that's the 20's
- Older, post Young Kids (and probably when you have earned enough to send the bleeders to college) - ie from say mid 40's on for most people - hence the 50's peaking. (In a few cases like Marc's the first swing of the bat means that all this is solved at a stroke, but that is probably a small minority)

Underlying this is an assumption (i) of an S curve, i.e the fruits of one's overnight success have been laid in damn hard work for 3-5 years previously, and (ii) that one takes one's family responsibilities vaguely seriously. Hence the 20's and 50's peaks.

Now a thought on why the difference in fields where things peak. The ones that peak young do not require a holistic view of multiple things, you can win by being very good in One Thing (Youth in general not usually noted for holistic views). The endeavours of the Old Lags seem to require (in general) a much more rounded set of experiences - familiarity with more things - and a more holistic world view.

So the question is - what sort of skillsets does starting a business require - The One Big Thing or Many Small Things? This is the Fox vs Hedgehog Hypothesis (The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing). So, by this logic:

Hedgehogs are the 20-somethings - if the market is hot to trot for curling up in a ball with spikes outwards, you're a hit. If not, you're a one trick pony (as it were) and will get eaten as there are simply not the skills to duck and weave (talking generally here).

Foxes are the 50-somethings - can probably turn their hands to many things, know the ropes - but that is both a blessing and a problem, in that the Hedgehog has to keep that ball thingy going through thick and thin, and by sheer perseverance may still survive and prosper. The Fox on the other hand can easily drop something that looks too hard and go off in another direction.

So, applying this to entrepreneurship, I hypothesise that :

The Hedgehog strategy probably works really well where the One Big Thing is in a new area (ie no one knows how to unravel spiky balls) and is fairly simple to co-ordinate (does not require knowledge of lots of other tricks). Imho a lot of the "Web 2.0" hypestuff is like this - its Presentation layer, pretty, fairly simple to do really, just requires some cutting edge know how and requires sheer perseverance and usually a lot of chutzpah.

The Fox Strategy probably works better where things are a bit more complex, need bit of ducking and weaving and a lot of disparate skills. Infrastructure layer start-ups are probably more of this ilk. In general this is more capital intensive as well. Foxes probably can strt Hedgehog businesses but are less likely to be in the New new areas (it may also be that many of those Hedgehogs that succeed go for younger consumers which the Foxes are less likely to grok

)

This is a simplification of course, but seems like as good a hypothesis as any to go with.

So, an answer of sorts then - its a function of the time available to swing the bat , shoot at goal or whatever (which is bimodal on average) plus positioning the type of startup to the skillset you have. And as its a numbers game - there are very many SocNets or VideoShare sites, only a few make it - this brings one on to a discussion of Luck....I have 2 views on this from empirical observation.

The first is that many (most?) entrepreneurs who have "made it" were "right place, right time" (some even put in the hard yards of long times, many places), though all of course believe its their own skills etc. The proof is in what they do next.

The second is about "creating your own luck". It's really a play on the numbers game - or options theory if you prefer - in that the more bread you cast on the waters and time you do it, the more likely you are to get a bite. For those interested, Richard Wiseman has done quite a bit of research on Luck., and his conclusions in a nutshell are:

Principle One: Maximise Chance Opportunities
Lucky people are skilled at creating, noticing and acting upon chance opportunities. They do this in various ways, including networking, adopting a relaxed attitude to life and by being open to new experiences.

Principle Two: Listening to Lucky Hunches
Lucky people make effective decisions by listening to their intuition and gut feelings. In addition, they take steps to actively boost their intuitive abilities by, for example, meditating and clearing their mind of other thoughts.

Principle Three: Expect Good Fortune
Lucky people are certain that the future is going to be full of good fortune. These expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies by helping lucky people persist in the face of failure, and shape their interactions with others in a positive way.

Principle Four: Turn Bad Luck to Good
Lucky people employ various psychological techniques to cope with, and often even thrive upon, the ill fortune that comes their way. For example, they spontaneously imagine how things could have been worse, do not dwell on the ill fortune, and take control of the situation.

Now there is a danger this all sounds a bit Self-Help like, but all he is really describing is the equations in any numbers game - Chances Created x Balls to go for it x Execution x Know when to cut your losses.

It would appear that Facebook Secrets, the blog that posted some of Facebook's source code (we blogged about that here), has been taken down by its host Blogger (owned by Google) under the logic that it violated the DMCA "safe harbour" conditions ruling. As Mike Arrington at TechCrunch points out, it is not clear whether this argument is valid, but c'est la vie.

Facebook’s statement on the matter came down to “it offers no useful insight into the inner workings of Facebook” and “the reprinting of this code violates several laws.” We disagreed on both points - the leak provided information to potential hackers as to potential security holes, and the fact that Facebook accidentally released the code themselves on their site may have made it very difficult for them to claim protection under the law.

That being said, it’s unlikely the anonymous author of the blog would be around to defend his/her position.

Facebook Secrets has reformed itself as Facebook Secrets Again showing the correspondence between itself and Blogger. There are some useful learnings here:

Firstly, we would concur with TechCrunch, its far from certain that the DMCA rulings - or any rulings in fact - are really admissable when code is spilled into open forums by the organisation that created it, involuntarily or no.

Secondly, it is clear that unless the blogger is prepared to contest such an action, it will happen - neither Blogger, nor Google, its parent, were in this case prepared to argue the niceties of the matter.

Thirdly - a corollary to the above - if you want your blog to stay up in adverse circumstances, don't put it where a Big Boy legal team can easily get at it's host company or their owners.

A few months ago a similar thing happened when Blu-Ray HD-DVD code hacks were reprinted all over Digg, and initially Digg tried to take it down but a grassroots rebellion made them U turn and vow to go down fighting. As far as we know (I looked a few minutes ago) Digg is still standing, (most of the legal eagles on blogs thought Digg would win any action) - and if anything the manufacturers possibly had a stronger case, as they had clearly not released their own IP into the public domain, and damages were probably easier to prove.

In this case one supposes that anyone who wants a copy of this code already has one, so its not clear what has been achieved, as Blogger (not Facebook in this case) has now left themselves open to a countersuit from any digital freedom group wanting to make a reputation for itself.

We await new developments with interest....

Postscript...if you look for the offending code in the caches, its still there.....

Update....nope, Digg has now also taken it down it would seem (can't get an image but here it is). Interesting that they would stand up to Consumer Electronics behemoths but not Facebook.

The Broadstuff Blog is now exporting its Facebook status to Twitter and adding to the global River of Drivel. When I can do what I already do for all my other reading matter - ie get ALL the data onto email or RSS aggregator, and the ability to reply via email, then I think Facebook will be fairly useful. The "friction" of toggling through all those webpages on Facebook is too hard - is it just my Facebook friends or is anyone else noticing a rapid slowdown in activity?

What is interesting about this exercise is that:

(i) These Facebook Export data capabilities are slowly creeping in
(ii) They are, um, non obvious - (aka incredibly hard to find) - a sense of reluctance pervades.

Tip of the hat to Jeff Sandquist for the arcane arts required:

First, find your status RSS feed on Facebook. It is buried. (Thanks Bizzle! for helping me find mine.) To find it, you need to visit your profile on Facebook and on your mini-feed select "See All". On the right you will see a list of items, select “status stories” and finally below this a feed link can be found.

Don't see a mini-feed on your profile page?

You've most likely been changed your feed settings. Resetting them to their default values from the feed preference page will bring back the mini-feed.

Finally add your newly found status RSS feed to the TwitterFeed service.

Why would anyone do this, I hear you ask? Well, take one look at the IP rules in Facebook, not to mention its "black hole" messaging properties and you begin to see why.

There are two useful articles on TechCrunch on the various options available today, an initial review of 9 commercial platforms and the yesterday a review of 34 more. To these I would add Phuser, a UK play.

(Great blog posts by Phuser's George Black about the travails of competing with Facebook over here - and here - mind you, he has had some top class advice now

So...just spent the better part of an hour registering our company's .mobi address. Here's why:

(i) Our UK addresses won't work - you cant have "City" as London and "State" as London - its repeating you see, and there is no "Middlesex" or "UK" for "State"

(ii) Guess what - in the UK, our telephone numbers have different codes - and amount of numbers in them - to the US - and they don't start with 001 either. So, you have to frig a 'phone number.

(iii) When you finally get the thing done, the F"£$%^& site freezes - but you can't re-enter data because - (a 1997 moment here) - your previous order now has told the system that .mobi address is taken back. No unwind.

(iv) Finally, finally it is sorted (in a way - an email tells you you have reserved it but have to pay at this looooong url) - so off you go to pay - and its over to Paypal and the same darn US centric thing happens all over again - yes, and you have to re-enter every piece of freakin data..*!

Now one can say "what the hey, just frig your data - which is fine, but does not help when things go awry or mayhap you need to claim on insurance (trust me on this one). So, for the benefit of .mobi and any other mobile or "2.0" business considering e-Commerce in foreign climes, some strong hints from a Web 1.0 Old Lag:

(i) Guess what - foreign addresses, telephone numbers etc are different - don't put your country's address screening systems in

(ii) Furthermore, it may come as a shock but it is very unlikely that they will have the same states/provinces/counties as your country!

(iii) In general in commercial transactions it is a good idea that if the transaction fails, it unwinds itself

In short, if you want to make money over the Web, make it Easy for The Customer!

There....that's the next best bit of free consulting you'll ever get

* To be fair, they did allow London and Middlesex to co-exist.