broadstuff

Bruce Schneier is one of our heroes, in a crypto-geek way - great article from him over here. We quote some of it below:

As RFID chips become more common, they'll be tracked, too. Already you can be followed by your cell phone, even if you never make a call. This is wholesale surveillance; not "follow that car," but "follow every car."

And thats just the start - the endgame is that everything will be tagged, certainly down to a c $25 price level within the decade, as prices fall - so clothes, books etc will all be tagged - good news is less petty thiever, bad news is we will know everything about you and your ephemera, every move you make.

Computers are mediating conversation as well. Face-to-face conversations are ephemeral. Years ago, telephone companies might have known who you called and how long you talked, but not what you said. Today you chat in e-mail, by text message, and on social networking sites. You blog and you Twitter. These conversations – with family, friends, and colleagues – can be recorded and stored.

It used to be too expensive to save this data, but computer memory is now cheaper. Computer processing power is cheaper, too; more data is cross-indexed and correlated, and then used for secondary purposes. What was once ephemeral is now permanent.

Who collects and uses this data depends on local laws. In the US, corporations collect, then buy and sell, much of this information for marketing purposes. In Europe, governments collect more of it than corporations. On both continents, law enforcement wants access to as much of it as possible for both investigation and data mining.

Regardless of country, more organizations are collecting, storing, and sharing more of it.

True, but different areas have different laws covering it - European Data Protection is far more on the Citizen's side than US, for example.

More is coming. Keyboard logging programs and devices can already record everything you type; recording everything you say on your cell phone is only a few years away.

A "life recorder" you can clip to your lapel that'll record everything you see and hear isn't far behind. It'll be sold as a security device, so that no one can attack you without being recorded. When that happens, will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good, just as prosecutors today use the fact that someone left his cell phone at home as evidence that he didn't want to be tracked?

You're living in a unique time in history: the technology is here, but it's not yet seamless. Identification checks are common, but you still have to show your ID. Soon it'll happen automatically, either by remotely querying a chip in your wallets or by recognizing your face on camera.

And all those cameras, now visible, will shrink to the point where you won't even see them. Ephemeral conversation will all but disappear, and you'll think it normal. Already your children live much more of their lives in public than you do. Your future has no privacy, not because of some police-state governmental tendencies or corporate malfeasance, but because computers naturally produce data.

Now some may think this wonderful, but any aspirant Science Fiction writer could rapidly imagine some fairly dark scenarios. As Schneier notes:

Cardinal Richelieu famously said: "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." When all your words and actions can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply.

It would be a mistake to think the laws that apply in a non persistent, non traceable comms world are acceptable in the emerging ones.

Jaron Lanier, the Original Virtual Realist (respect!) writing on the TED conference, makes an interesting point about how technology is shifting as it becomes more established:

When the conference began in the 1980s, nerds were on the rise. Brilliant young innovators, often shunned at high school, were making millions with computers. But now the tables have turned, with a new crop of Web 2.0 businesses—Twitter, Facebook and so on—all run by handsome, pleasant, popular guys. Their projects—mostly about small improvements in user experience—require little technological prowess. They certainly don’t make money. They are the business equivalents of popularity contests, in which entrepreneurs get rich by selling the large audiences that they have attracted to older nerds at Google and Microsoft, who hope that someday a business model may appear.

Or as Andrew Orlowski once remarked, "presentation layer people trying to solve Infrastructure layer problems".

The lesson to take away is that, in this cycle anyway, the hard architectural problems have been solved to a "good enough" degree, now its about making them easier to use etc. Its like post war cars - once it was sorted out how they worked, where to put the pedals etc, it became largely a styling game for quite a while.

The thing I noticed at TED was the huge number that were "not for profit" startups, and wondered if that was a new trend - or, if its just a clearing market for these as a result of a TED subculture where, as Lanier notes:

What was once an intimate gathering of artists and scientists in an out-of-the way part of California has become an extroverted celebration, in Los Angeles, where intellectuals entertain and court philanthropists—something of a laboratory for post-capitalist motivational psychology.

Or is it simply that there is bugger all money in the VC's now, and less scrutiny in Not for Profits?

We were talking yesterday at Amplified 09 about when and how the Cool School decide to move on from any one thing, and how its typically when something goes mainstream. And then the conversation moved on to Twitter, its incipient mainstreaminess, and thus where the Cool Kids will go (because go they will - last year this time it was All About Facebook, if you recall....). Yesterday morning, in the Digital Britain report, the chairman peered at his computer and pronounced that there was "A question coming through on the Twitter", much as operators of Telegraphs in tense moments in Cowboy movies did. Funnily enough, today I see someone else had the same idea - Kerry Gafney:

The 5 signs something has gone mainstream

People start to ask if it is the new version of the last thing went mainstream

The spammers move in

People try to find an advertising model

Celebrities are all over it

The Daily Mail claims that it causes cancer/brain damage/end of society as we know it (and politicians adopt it...)

All we need now for someone to claim that Twitter is dead and we can all move on to the next big thing.

So, in the interests of completing these conditions, let us now see if there is substance behind that last claim that "Twitter is Dead".

Clearly, when we say "Twitter is Dead" we don't mean that the service is actually defunct, more that it is no longer cool, and that the "In Crowd / Early Adopters / Opinion Formers / Name Your Term" will be looking for The New New Thing (TNNT) to differentiate themselves from the lumpen majority. So, are there any signs emerging, any Green Shoots of the TNNT?

Well, a few months ago FriendFeed was going to be TNNT, and there is still a cadre that believes it will all go Web 3D as we live our Second Lives, and Plurk emerged as an alternate lifestream service - but right now all their stars seems to be waning - and once waned, it is very seldom that anyone waxes lyrical again. But clearly lifestreaming is Going To Be Big - after all, Stowe Boyd said so

So, what could replace Twitter, given there is no obvious New New Thing?

Well, Lifestreaming will be multimedia, multimodal, multimessageing - so I've been quite interested in the development of what I'd call Twitter Aggregation Boards (TABs), like Tweetdeck and so on. These effectively become the "Netscapes" of the RealTime Lifestream Web. Once you use those in any coherent way, you no longer actually use Twitter itself - it drops back to its core function, which is a Unified Comms service - the middleware on top of the Web on top of the 'Net that makes the End User Requirements really work.

And of course once you have these sort of TAB systems, you can use them to aggregate the stuff coming in from any other messaging services - and not just Identi.ca and Friendfeed and so on, but all those Feeds you Reads - even (gasp) email. So you move from Unified Comms to Unified Conversation Systems.

And at that point you will want to put in powerful search, and ratings, and "Electronc Person Guides" etc etc - and people will set up TwitMeme and LastTwit.fm and Twitnorati and so on.

And at that time, the user base has moved off Twitter onto the next layer up and like the cities of old, the Twitter Layer is buried under the New layer, until it too is covered by the digital detritus of the layer above it, and so on, and so forth.

Update - in a parallel post, John Battelle likens Twitter to YouTube:

So, fast forward to today. What's the most important and quickly growing form of search on the web today? Real time, conversational search. And who's the YouTube of real time search? Yep. Twitter. It's an asset Google cannot afford to not own, and also, one they most likely do not have the ability (or brand permission) to build on their own.

Leave aside that YouTube is not a search engine but an aggregator and (lousy) program guide (Google does the search function), he is describing the same phenomenon - its that Twitter becoming the transport mechanism for "text radio" (to introduce another media into the mix, but I think its more apt) channels - where he is wrong though, is that we will consume it on TAB Sets, not on the the direct firehose.

Update 2 - a later post by Ross Mayfield, explaining the issues with popularity bringing defective behaviour:

you may have noticed a rise in @reply spam. Real and fakester accounts are being set up and using @replies to get messages into the view of users who aren't following them. Some marketeers have seemingly mastered the meeting, like the ShamWowDude (not to be confused with the ShamWowGuy).

Twitter already fights the good fight against phished Avatars, but the war is escalating and changes are inevitable. They have the advantage of being able to kick bad users according to their policy. And disadvantages given what Twitter is (its hard for me to imagine traditional spam filters applied to neartime communications at this scale).

One of the interesting things about pan-New Media events like Amplified '09 is you get to talk to some interesting people you'd otherwise never meet - so thats how a digital strategy and back end infrastructure wonk like me gets to meet a songstress like Lobelia Sabo, with a voice that's almost heaven (well, she's from West Virginia* - give her a listen below) to talk about how she uses Twitter as a comms medium.




In short, she noted that Twitter has become a really efficient form of talking to her fans (worshippers, surely with a voice like that!)

- It is voluntary - people have chosen to follow her, so the messages are "pre-approved" rather than push
- As a medium it is intimate and non intrusive - "ambiently intimate" (and of course, is far more cool that email )
- Short - 140 characters means you can send messages without high comms overload
- Flexible - can access both sids via multiple mediums

Its interesting re the first point, as Lobelia noted that you only get the "right" to promote your music through Twitter if in your comments you are putting a lot into the community first and foremost - it's not a slamdunk pimp mechanism.

*Go on, admit it - that was a clever reference

A lesson - if another one was needed - on the inherent risks of putting trust exclusively in Cloud based Web services - Gmail went down yesterday, and there was many a dazed webhead walking around London Town, discombobulated and Twittering plaintively. Its now over, sez Our Goog:

The outage itself lasted approximately two and a half hours from 9.30am GMT. We know that for many of you this disrupted your working day. We’re really sorry about this, and we did do everything to restore access as soon as we could. Our priority was to get you back up and running. Our engineers are still investigating the root cause of the problem.

But really, how many times must this happen before these Web Savvy Netizens get a proper bl**dy email client?

From the Grauniad:

Social network sites risk infantilising the mid-21st century mind, leaving it characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity, according to a leading neuroscientist.

The startling warning from Lady Greenfield, professor of synaptic pharmacology at Lincoln college, Oxford, and director of the Royal Institution, has led members of the government to admit their work on internet regulation has not extended to broader issues, such as the psychological impact on children.

.....

She told the House of Lords that children's experiences on social networking sites "are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity".

Arguing that social network sites are putting attention span in jeopardy, she said: "If the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of fast action and reaction, of instant new screen images flashing up with the press of a key, such rapid interchange might accustom the brain to operate over such timescales. Perhaps when in the real world such responses are not immediately forthcoming, we will see such behaviours and call them attention-deficit disorder.

Naturally the Social Mediarati have harrumphed away and even twut tutted, but frankly I don't think any of them have the jets to take on someone like Dr Susan Greenfield over this stuff*. Don't know what to make of this myself yet - from what I do know of the brain it is possible, but not clear if it is probable. Will ping a few psychologist / psychiatrist friends and report back.

* I am getting a bit concerned that to some in the New Meedja, clueless passion is seen as a valid argument against informed opinion.

Useful post here by the WSJ, reminding the Freeconomic fans of the Facts of Economic Life:

When author Stewart Brand coined the expression "Information wants to be free," he focused on how technology makes it cheap and easy to communicate and share knowledge. But the rest of his quote is rarely noticed.

This says, "Information also wants to be expensive." The right information in today's complex economy and society can make a huge difference in our professional and personal lives. Not having this information can also make a big difference, especially if someone else does have it. And for valuable information, online is a great new way for it to be valued.

This is a basic tenet of our opposition to FreeConomics. Not all Info is free, or ever will be - its chained up in various ways.

People are happy to pay for news and information however it's delivered, but only if it has real, differentiated value. Traders must have their Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters terminal. Lawyers wouldn't go to court without accessing the Lexis or West online service.

By 2007, the Journal's Web site had reached one million paying subscribers who value full access and convenient navigation to its unique business news. Another 20 million people each month read Journal articles made available free. Likewise, the Financial Times and ESPN generate significant online revenues from subscribers, along with free content. So do consumer services such as Consumer Reports and Zagat. Steve Jobs proved we'll pay up to $1 for digital songs on iTunes, and Amazon's Kindle established $10 as reasonable for a digital book. Beyond the Web, consumers pay monthly cable or satellite charges in the thousands of dollars per year.

Yet few city newspapers try to generate revenues directly from readers online, a huge problem now that advertising is so weak in print and online. Something needs to change if these newspapers and their large news staffs are to survive. The market capitalization of the New York Times Co. last week fell to the $500 million range -- what the MarketWatch Web site cost Dow Jones to acquire just a few years ago. Thus the renewed focus on new business models.

We've been developing this view ever since we started looking at the Future of Print Media, and I mean to blog a fairly detailed summary soon - but this puts it very succinctly for now.

A suggestion by NYT writer Tom Friedman that it is better to give bailout cash to sunrise rather than sunset industries and thus to Silicon Valley et al, was pooh poohed in Techmeme yesterday. The interesting question to me is why. Friedman:

G.M. has become a giant wealth- destruction machine — possibly the biggest in history — and it is time that it and Chrysler were put into bankruptcy so they can truly start over under new management with new labor agreements and new visions. When it comes to helping companies, precious public money should focus on start-ups, not bailouts.

You want to spend $20 billion of taxpayer money creating jobs? Fine. Call up the top 20 venture capital firms in America, which are short of cash today because their partners — university endowments and pension funds — are tapped out, and make them this offer: The U.S. Treasury will give you each up to $1 billion to fund the best venture capital ideas that have come your way. If they go bust, we all lose. If any of them turns out to be the next Microsoft or Intel, taxpayers will give you 20 percent of the investors’ upside and keep 80 percent for themselves.

This drew ire from Silicon Alley's Fred Wilson:

But the venture capital business, thankfully, does not need any more capital. It's got too much money in it, not too little. Just ask the limited partners who have been overfunding the venture capital business for the past 15-20 years what they think. You don't even need to ask them. They are taking money out of the sector because the returns have been weak.

And the top 20 firms in the venture capital business are the least in need of a bailout of any group I've ever thought about. These firms, the Sequoias and Benchmarks and Accels and Kleiner Perkins etc etc can raise a fund anytime they want. Accel raised a ton of money last fall in the midst of the worst global financial meltdown in my lifetime.

He continues with the view that its the crap VCs that wll take the money, and instead it should be used as way of stimulating the Angel sector:

The worst firms, on the other hand, will gladly accept government money. And that is what is going to happen with all of these government efforts to pour more money into the "innovation sector". That money will go to bad investors and weak entrepreneurs and management teams for the most part. It's a problem of adverse selection.

If you take a look at all of the economically targeted investment programs that have been built and managed over the past twenty years in the venture capital industry, you'll see this plain and clearly.

There are some good ideas out there. My friend Brad Feld told me about a new legislative effort in Colorado to give angel investors a 50% tax credit for making investments in early stage companies. That makes better sense to me. Let the market work but lubricate it a bit with tax credits, particularly for the angel sector which has been the most hurt in this downturn.

I'd second the need to get the Angel sector back in the saddle. Anyway, adding froth to Fred's Latte day saintliness comes Sarah Lacy:

What’s more, there was never a shakeout in venture firms after the year 2000 crash—it’s only now working its way through the system. So the firms that may be finding themselves short of cash? Those are our own version of the “loser” firms – to borrow Friedman’s phrase—that should be shaken out of the venture economy. Not only do the top 20 venture firms have plenty of money, the top 100 firms could find a way to raise more capital if they needed to. But odds are they don’t, because funds work in multi-year cycles, and not everyone is forced to fundraise in 2009.

In short: The core assumption to Friedman’s argument just isn’t reality. And call me crazy, but if you are throwing my tax dollars after an industry, shouldn’t the so-called “need” be based on– oh, I don’t know– an economic reality?

Leaving aside just who is calling whom on "economic reality" here, methinks this article is indirectly pointing to the real issue behind the reluctance - government money coming in would break the cosy world, in 2 ways:

- Firstly, VC's make money by rejecting a whole bunch of startups that don't meet their criteria but are still perfectly viable businesses. Government money would let many more of those see the light of day........and thus reduce the value of their own bets by introducing more competition

- Also, we suspect the "top 20" et al are very pleased by the thought of the weaker ones going to the wall....last thing they want is more VC competition in a downturn

A possibly valid argument that the industry could make is that there are just not enough good ideas to back - but as neither of the above authors make the point, I suspect the VC industry is probably aware that there are far more backable companies to invest in than they do back, but that would of course reduce the potential multiples on their backed ones.

Nonetheless, its still probably a bad idea to "bail in" VC's, as they are probably using the wrong models and as pointed out above, such programmes do not have a great history. As Fred suggested, co-investing or subsidising - ie risk sharing - at the Angel "next level" down is possibly a more useful way to stimulate innovation and employment.

Update - I see Don Dodge has had some similar thoughts to mine.

Update 2 - it would see, according to PE Hub, that those top 20 VC's may not be that well sorted after all - which makes Mr Wilson & Ms Lacy's calls even more interesting...

Update 3 - surprisingly for SAI they indulge in cr*ponomics, arguing that because most small companies bomb, there is no point investing in the sector overall. In that case, one wonders how the VC's afford their mansions, Mercedes and mistresses Also, it is well known that nothing produces jobs per $ like small companies.

There is nothing funnier on Sunday night than watching who will fall for a piece of trollware (Oscars - Bah Humbug!). Here we have the Sunday Times having a go at Twitterers:

The Good:

“Tweets are really just a series of symbols,” says Lewis. “The person writing it just wants to be in the forefront of your mind, nothing more.” Which makes it very appealing to marketeers.

Jonathan Ross is a fan of Twitter for different reasons. He recently asked followers to nominate a word he could use in his Bafta script. He went with “salad” and dropped it in 45 minutes into the show. For him, using new technology confers status. [And helped his recent re-entry from disgrace in no small way]

“It makes us look young. And that is a high-status position in this society,” says de Botton.

The Bad (or at least somewhat pop-psychologically overblown)

For Alain de Botton, author of Status Anxiety and the forthcoming The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Twitter represents “a way of making sure you are permanently connected to somebody and somebody is permanently connected to you, proving that you are alive. It’s like when a parent goes into a child’s room to check the child is still breathing. It is a giant baby monitor.”

Not so much Ambient Intimacy as Ambient Infatility - and then there is....

The clinical psychologist Oliver James has his reservations. “Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It’s a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity.

Nor use email groups, nor, we presume, talk on the phone.....

The Ugly (as in OTT but with a grain of unpleasant truth):

“To ‘follow’ someone is to have a fantasy of who this person you’re following is, and you use it as a map reference or signpost to guide your own life because you are lost,” says James. “I would guess that the typical profile of a ‘follower’ is someone who is young and who feels marginalised, empty and pointless. They don’t have an inner life,” he says.

and.....

“The primary fantasy for most people is that we can be as connected as we were in the womb, a situation of total closeness,” says de Botton. “When people who are very close are talking, they ‘twitter away’: ‘It’s a bit dusty here’ or ‘There’s a squirrel in the garden.’ They don’t say, ‘What do you think of Descartes’s second treatise?’

and....

“We are the most narcissistic age ever,” agrees Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist and director of research based at the University of Sussex. “Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognise you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won’t cure it.”

Much harrumphing in the Twitterverse of course - see this list here

Is the article a troll post, over the top and full of pop psychobabble - heck yes. Does it land a few telling shots - yup! Is my post trying to capitalise on it - of course not 0:-)

Big picture of course is that the Sunday Times would not have run a story like this, or the Grauniad one on the legal/libel aspects, if Twitter wasn't mainstreaming.

(Hat tip Drew Benvie for links to articles - seen on Twitter, of course)

From paidContent:

The news cycle spins fast and flimsy these days. Late Friday night, TechCrunch posted an unsourced rumour that CBS-owned Last.fm handed a “giant dump” of user data to the RIAA. The music org was said to have requested the data, which could be used to find users who are listening to as-yet-unreleased tracks, after U2’s upcoming album was leaked two weeks before release.

But Last.fm came out fighting. After its New York-based CBS (NYSE: CBS) spokesperson told TechCrunch “To our knowledge, no data has been made available to RIAA”, Richard Jones (pictured), one of the remaining three co-founders in London, wrote in the site’s comments after midnight: “I’m rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue. As far as I can tell, the author of this article got a ‘tip’ from one person and decided to make a story out of it. TechCrunch is full of shit, film at 11.”

Two interesting possible angles:

(i) The ability of "irresponsible bloggers" to ruin people and companies with poorly researched stories plays to all the biasses of the mainstream press. Online Libel law is still poorly developed, it will be interesting to see what CBS (Last.fm's owners) do, as a lot of people are threatening to turn away - and with other systems coming up (see graphic above), its not good timing.

(ii) The worrying amount of data possessed by various social networks, in the wrong hands, can be very dangerous - and its not clear that these companies will not hand it over for lucre, legal relief or other largesse.

No doubt the truth will unfold over the next few days - but as one of the commentators on the post notes, at real issue here is the core tenet of "whose data is it anyway?" Until users control their data, this will be a perennial issue.

Update - Second Set - Ars Tech notes the RIAA says that they have received no such data. Ball now in TechCrunch court....