broadstuff

Game theorists differentiate between strong and weak "tells" in human interactions - ie if someone wants to persuade you to do something but you see they are putting very little into their side of the bargain, its a good idea to step away. I leave you to guess what it means if the persuading one is doing the opposite of what they want you to do....

Which of course brings us neatly to Google Streetview, which is taking pictures of everyone's houses to put up on Google for viewing by the global billions. Except for Google's UK boss, as the Times reports:

Google boss Dennis Woodside’s West London town house is not one of them. His residence is situated in a private gated development in Kensington, where the 40-year-old American lives with his wife and two children.

Last night a Google spokeswoman, Laura Scott, said Woodside’s house had not been omitted on purpose but was not included because it was on a private road, and no private roads were included.

One wonders if Google will take the pictures anyway and then challenge the attempts by residents in such private roads to remove them via court action. After all, they did in the US and even won their case.

Hmmm....but perhaps not in this case

Google also claims it uses face-recognition technology automatically to blur most faces and number plates captured by its cameras. This is bollocks, a number of friends went on Google yesterday and were busily counting unobfuscated number plates. We found our car with its number plate gloriously unblanked, along with others on our road. I note that now I've complained, much more blanking has occurred up and down the road. They are seemingly hoping that only a few people notice / care enough to make a noise and are relying on user generated discontent to drive takedowns.

We also await with interest as the London Newspapers and Privacy organisations dig up the residences of the Google UK CXO's and UK politicians and publish them, because they will as:

- Google can't sense it but I can - there is a growing sense of anxiety on this as people learn about it, especially among the (non geek) women I've spoken to. The British have a desire for privacy that Americans probably just cannot grasp. (They've reluctantly bought into CCTV for safety reasons, but Streetview does not promise that - the opposite in fact)

- The tabloids love a good scare story, and the whiff of hypocrisy is always an extra turn on

- It is a great drum for an aspiring politician to bang, and the UK is not (yet, anyway) quite as completely run by lobbyists as the US.

The Times notes that Richard Thomas, the information commissioner is considering an investigation into the new service if images [of kids] are found and that Google is facing threats of legal action in Germany as its image mapping threatens privacy laws.

Mr Thomas, if I were in your shoes and wanted to be seen to be pro-active and look relevant, (unlike certain banker watchdogs one could name) I'd probably start now. The European Privacy Law (Article 8 ) is suitably general, and there are enough examples (phone directories, copyright of owned, branded goods) to make going after Google in the UK a distinct possibility. And I suspect that if you don't, others will and will set the agenda.

Prediction - by late May this is going to get all very heated.

Post by Jeremiah Owyang on The Future of Twitter: Social CRM (abridged):

Manually tracking a large brand within Twitter isn’t scalable

It’s important to first realize that managing a large brand on Twitter isn’t scalable, with hundreds –maybe thousands of tweets about a marketplace a day, individuals will have a very difficult time managing, Brian Solis has some relevant stats on growth. The next challenge? determining who these people are, and if they are a potential customer is important, who are these people, are they important, where do they live? Lastly, responding in near real time is going to be key –as some users may ask their peers for product recommendations during point of sale, right in the store.

Twitter has two of the three key features of a CRM system

First, let’s break down why Twitter is going to be a Social CRM, let’s start by analyzing what entails Customer Relationship Management:

1) Customers: Yes, they got that. More than that, they have prospects, which to some marketers is far more valuable. However the challenge is mapping which Twitter ID is which customer –many don’t use their real names.

2) Relationships: Got that too. Now I realize that the intended definitions of CRM meant the relationships between customers and employees of a brand, but now you can see how people in Twitter are connecting to each other, and those that follow a brand, their indicating affinity towards them. The interesting thing is they don’t just offer affinity towards your brand, but also competitors, which helps in segmenting your market, and can help with poaching.

3) Management: Here lies the opportunity Twitter has no management tools to support this, as a result, their data is being whisked away in the API and being aggregated by two types of companies.

Jeremiah's argument is that this is a good opportunity for CRM companies to import twitter data into their listening platforms, and then offer simple workflow and task management (no doubt this article is written to tie in to the Salesforce.com announcement of Twitter support). He suggest they go down Facebook's route:

Twitter can go further than this, they could be their own CRM system, by perhaps offering their own analytics system to brands, that will help them to track and manage the conversations within the 140 sphere. This has tremendous opportunities for Twitter should they create their own brand management system that they can resell to the world’s companies to monitor, alert, track, prioritize, triage, assign, followup, and report on the interactions with brands.

I'm not sure this is a Good Plan, as Facebook has been involved in some pretty noisy episodes regarding doing various flavours of this, as has Phorm, and even Do-No-Evil Google is increasingly distrusted for just this sort of thing.

I wonder if a better play might be for Twitter to reverse this and build tools to let users manage their own data, a la VRM principles. In many ways Twitter facilitates this as:

- Asymmetric following goes both ways, users can as easily follow brands they want

- The 140 character limit is a great tool for semantic ontologies - initiating easily understood coded convos in this solution space would be relatively easy and lightweight

- you could put in lightweight clientside apps to manage customer / server interactions automatically

- Its realtime, so when required one can step up to conversation in an instant

- It should be possible to complete a transaction (and take a %) via the platform or a proxy service

VRM is also a less intrusive and potentially a more valuable system as:

- in this case there are a variety of business models (from producer pays to consumer pays, with various inbetweens)

- the "endgame" for VRM is to reduce the spend on unnecessary advertising and stock to mitigate demand uncertainty. This requires trust built over many lightweight "moments" of truth.

Realtime Unified Comms is a nice platform to run these sort of services off.

One of the interesting social network effects of SXSW was the hub that became the BritPack. It's designed aim was to function as a way of showcasing the 30+ startups who came over as part of the Chinwag/ UKTI Digital Mission, and to allow UK Trade & Investment staff to talk to interested people from the US (and elsewhere) at SXSW.

However, it had two interesting secondary effects of network expansion and enrichment:

- Expansion: By dint of being there, it became a home from home for all the "Rest of the Brits" at the conference (British power plugs were a great boon for example) and thus created a larger British social network at SXSW as we all met each other, and which was further expanded at the second order as all of us Other Brits introduced our Non Brit friends to the delights of the various events. I think this larger secondary network provide the impetus for the #Kebab NonConference sessions as well as many smaller things

- Enrichment: The events - the BritBash (music) and British Breakfast (hangover cure) especially, fostered lots of interesting conversations with the many non Brits who attended them. I think some of these will reverberate into lots of (unpredictable, unmeasurable but useful) actions over the following months

In addition, we hijacked the site for 2 hours on Sunday to do "Tuttle does Texas", introducing as many non Brits to the delights of Tuttle style social networking (get a coffee and sticky, and talk to interesting people without trying to stuff a bizcard down their gullet in 5 minutes)

Fascinating article on the Future of Advertising in TechCrunch yesterday, from Wharton Professor of Operations Eric Clemons. In essence he is arguing that Advertising will change radically in the online world as it is no longer fit for purpose:

...my basic premise rejects this, suggesting that simple commercial messages, pushed through whatever medium, in order to reach a potential customer who is in the middle of doing something else, will fail. It’s not that we no longer need information to initiate or to complete a transaction; rather, we will no longer need advertising to obtain that information. We will see the information we want, when we want it, from sources that we trust more than paid advertising. We will find out what we need to know, when we want to make a commercial transaction of any kind. The conventional wisdom is that this is exactly what paid search helps us to do, but all too often they are nothing more than a form of misdirection, as I explain further below. Instead, we will use information that we trust, obtained at the time that we want to see it.

On Google's model, he argues this is misdirection and is eventually doomed to fail:

Misdirection, or sending customers to web locations other than the ones for which they are searching. This is Google’s business model. Monetization of misdirection frequently takes the form of charging companies for keywords and threatening to divert their customers to a competitor if they fail to pay adequately for keywords that the customer is likely to use in searches for the companies’ products; that is, misdirection works best when it is threatened rather than actually imposed, and when companies actually do pay the fees demanded for their keywords. Misdirection most frequently takes the form of diverting customers to companies that they do not wish to find, simply because the customer’s preferred company underbid. Misdirection also includes misinformation, such as telling a customer that a hotel is sold out when, indeed it is still available, if the hotel has chosen not to pay a promotional fee, and then allowing the guest to choose an alternative property. Misdirection is, regrettably, still a popular business model on the net, although for reasons I explored in an earlier TechCrunch post on Google it seems ultimately to be unsustainable. More significantly from the perspective of this post, it is not scalable; it is not possible for every website to earn its revenue from sponsored search and ultimately at least some of them will need to find an alternative revenue model.

He must be onto something, judging by the outrage and ad hominem attacks from the SEO brigade. I also feel in my gut he's right, as I know i get cross when I'm "suckered" into clicking one of those sponsored Ads, and Google is observably getting less relevant as a search engine, I suspect partly (largely?) because of SEO keyword Ad-gaming..

The question is, what will replace it - or more accurately, what will it morph into? That $50bn and (probably still) growing Annual Online Adspend is required for the industry in the short term. In addition, Advertising is one of the most friction-free types of micropayments going right now. He envisages 2 emergent models to replace Ads:

- Selling Virtual Things: People will pay for superior, timely, original content and for superior online experiences.

- Selling Access. Misdirection will fail totally and completely. I use a Mac, but I have abandoned Safari for Firefox.

We've been working on our Future of Online Advertising report the last 2 month or so, and from our research I can imagine three types of alternative "New Ad" models.

- Sponsorship - as in "This Impartial, Trusted site is brought to you by ACME Co.

- Back End Analytics - you don't see Ads, your attention is monetised by analysing your actions (think Google, Phorm, etc). In theory this will lead to Ads so useful that you will think they are information - I think the short term $$$ from dataphishing will seduce the players though.

- Display 2.0 - better metrics around the impact and brand building capability of Display Ads - our hypothesis is that they are still more effective than believed online, its just that the metrics are very poor today.

All in all a great article, give it a read.

Chris Messina takes issue with TechCrunch:

Arrington has a post that claims that Facebook is getting wise to something MySpace has known from the start - users love vanity URLs.

I don’t buy it. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the omission of vanity URLs on Facebook is an intentional design decision from the beginning, and one that I’ve learned to appreciate over time.

From what I’ve gathered, it was co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s stubbornness that kept Facebook from allowing the use of pseudonymic usernames common on previous-generation social networks like AOL. Considering that Mark Zuckerberg’s plan is to build an online version of the relationships we have in real life, it only makes sense that we should, therefore, call our friends by their IRL names — not the ones left over or suggested by a computer.

Hmmm....brand names no, but Facebook is still full of nom de plumes, false names, name squats etc - its just that they are more subtle, so you just have to keep your eye out for them. When we were kicked off for being Broadstuff on Facebook, I gathered all the Julius Caesars, Attila The Huns, Sue Donnem's etc and showed this to them as evidence of the widespread (ab)usage of names.

Answer got I none.......I was told that Facebook rigorously polices pseudonyns, but 120m users+ is a big beat....

Our research shows heavy users on nearly any Social Net going (Linked In may be an exception) typically have multiple ID's.

The second half of the quote from Ecclesiastes used in this posts' title reads....."There is Nothing New Under the Sun". I suspect it applies to Facebook too......

An interesting statement of intent, less for the Slebs and more for the Webs - the Grauniad :

The BBC Trust has sanctioned a 27% increase in the corporation's online budget, to more than £145m per year, over the next three years. It has also approved director general Mark Thompson's extra £400m savings package which includes pay freezes and will cut the salaries of some of the corporation's biggest stars.

BBC web ventures will benefit from a £30.7m increase in the BBC Online budget, a 27% increase over its current £114.4m-a-year budget over the next three years subject to conditions set out by the trust chairman, Sir Michael Lyons, to make sure the corporation does not abuse its power in the market.

Not all will be happy of course......

The approved increase is almost 42% below the £52.7m a year the BBC wanted. Regardless, cash-strapped commercial rivals will balk at the ability the BBC has to ratchet upspending in such economic conditions.

...especially given that alternate sources of funding - Ads and Risk Capital - are drying up.

So today Google Streetview started up, and I look at my place, and there, lo and behold, is my car - with my number plates purely legible for all to see - WTF!

So I look at the option that says "report", and - aha - I have to give it an email address and admit to it being my car if I want it removed. (luckily I keep an anonymised one for just such things).

And it would seem its not just me - the BBC notes there have been "dozens of complaints".

A spokesperson for Google told the BBC that anyone could have their images removed if they asked.

"We've got millions of images, so the percentage removed was very small," Google's Laura Scott told the BBC.

"We want this to be a useful tool and it's people's right to have their image removed.

I suspect there are many, many thusands of number plates etc visible, as one Twitterer noted:

It's quite easy to find unblurred reg. plates and faces isn't it?

I will also predict that there are actually tens of thousands of people who would ask for their images to be removed if they knew they were on Google, but are not aware yet - and maybe never will be. At the very least I think Google should be obligated to conduct a public information campaign to every private householder in the UK informing them that:

- their property appears on the Google database
- they have the right to take it off

But I'm still scratching my head as to quite why this is a "useful tool", and for whom - and more importantly, how come Google has the rights to display stuff I own, for its own profit, without either:

- my permission
- paying me for the usage of images of my property for onsale.

Somehow this has to contravene some rules on privacy already? I need to get my Law-o-Pedia down the pub for a quiet drink and report back.

(Update - another lawyer friend pinged me and said its worth looking at the principle of going unlisted as was established for Phone Directories)

Big picture on a "useful tool" also is this - I can see the mischief that can be done with this - for example here are the houses and addresses of known people in X (choose the movement you hate ) for all my Tribe to, um, consider discussing our disagreements with. And I'm not clear I can see the commensurate public good, unless property voyeurism is considered a good thing?

Ironic vignette of SXSW:

Techfluff.tv's Hermione Way goes to the SXSW Facebook party, takes photos of the erotic art on the walls, post them on her Facebook profile and consequently gets herself banned from Facebook for putting up dirty pictures.

Somehow you just knew it would be Facebook that would do this. The National Geographic had better beware......

Update - got a Letter from Hermione in the comments to say she used her charms on some Facebook friends and got re-constituted

Back again in the UK, after some time to reflect on SXSW. This is not so much a conference as a fully immersive experience. Downtown Austin is pretty much taken over by the Internet Tech crowd – and the not inconsiderable PR circus that surrounds it. In addition, as broadband becomes another distribution channel for artistic media, the line between the rest of SXSW – film and music – is increasingly blurred.

Anyway, here for what its worth is an impressionistic view, a series of points that, when viewed at a distance will, like a Seurat painting, hopefully come together into a whole picture.

Jumping Sharks

Before I came, a number of people opined that SXSW had jumped the shark, and passed its sell by date. I don’t think that was the case – SXSW as a festival of interactive digital technology is merely a stage on which the never ending dance of internet evolution is played out.

But have some of the individual dancers jumped the shark – absolutely! There were panels that were just dire. These were often by “A List” people who, although still having great reputations, are really living off past laurels and need to be retired and put to grass. It was often exacerbated by them using comfortable crony corroborators on the panels, forming mutual admiration societies up on the said sad podia.

But can you blame the organisers for this? Partly, to get the punters in they have to pimp the stars. But just remember, the punters voted for those panels as well. And we could have booed those people more actively.

And when it came to questions, were these panelists put in their place by some sharp retorts from the floor – no, all too often some dickhead would basically use the “question” time to pimp their company, or launch into a presentation of their own. It’s at the point the panel chair should have been far more sharp - If you haven’t asked a question in 30 seconds, get off the microphone. Guy Kawasaki charging $20 a question was a way of acknowledging that this was just Ad serving. (Incidentally, given the universal loathing of the company pimps, I’m surprised that they carried on much past the first day, but they did )

One of the pities was that the discipline of hashtagging individual sessions was lax, so its quite hard to split and define the Twitterstream to get a better idea on which panellists should be quietly dropped from next year, no matter how much they huff and puff about their whuffie.

Hunting Snarks

In fact, if I had a criticism of the audience, they were just too darn polite. Crap questioners should have been booed and lame panellists heckled (OK, it happened on the Twitterstreams, but there was surely something that could have been done more assertively.)

And of course behind every Old Time A Lister is a coterie of worshippers (and in some cases PR Ho’s ), filling the air and aether with their worshipful comments when the actual situation on the ground was dire.

In a way the 2 Hash-Kebab NonConferences organised by the Britpack were a reaction to all this, with people voted on or off the panel by the audience depending on the strength of their contribution and questions. I recall with pleasure Tom Coates being hounded off the panel - “Off! Off! Off!” they cried when he went on and on ad nauseam, and Danah Boyd getting a toilet roll hurled at her when she too hit the upper reaches of academic gobbledygook to explain some fairly simple stuff. Nothing should be sacred

In this world of User Generated Content, it is our responsibility to generate the discontent too. In short, SXSW needs less respectful listeners, and far more snarks

Punting Sparks

The thing is, SXSW is a huge stage, so quality will out - despite the whiff of entrenched Whuffie, there was a lot that was new, fresh and fascinating. There were other panels which were superb, often (especially I’d argue) those hosted be relative unknowns, who are those now pushing the envelope. Also the discussion groups by and large worked well, again often relative unknowns driving fascinating topics, members of the audience contributing enthusiastically and furious debates breaking out.

In terms of sparks of the New, here are some more observations:

- Real Time (or, strictly speaking Near Real Time) systems – the ‘Net is speeding up, the Next Web is going to be about far more real time transaction messaging systems

- Faster Client systems, especially browser based – much of today's client software was architected for a slower web, this will change dramatically over the next few years

- Fast means filtering – the experience this year of trying to use #sxsw to schedule anything, given its high volumes, showed graphically that search is not the issue, filtering is.

- Increasing blending of media and broadband distribution. The old business models are in collapse, the new ones still emergent, but this trend is not going to stop. The sheer number of people I met staying on for the film and music festivals, because that was what their startups/apps dealt with, is testament to this, never mind the one man (or girl) Web TV stations roaming around.

- The Great Privacy fight is gearing up – this was one of the most heavily argued areas, between the Ad-pros and Privacy pro’s.

- Location is a White Elephant – it will be sucked in to the above privacy arena, processed, and spat out as part of a broader emergence of profile management.

- Wholesale restructuring of the startup funding industry – in downtimes, things change! The reduction in cost of company startup vs the non reduction of dealmaking transaction costs has been hanging in the air in the gogo times, but now we will start to see major restructurings emerging.

- The emergence of Not-For-Profits as a new type of structure in the space – these enterprises will take money from governments and foundations and enjoy higher public approval (aka free marketing) and lower oversight, at least until the first Fund-The-Founders-Follies scandals emerge

- Not all Markets are Conversations. This was really brought home to me when selecting a seat flying home, and it was a $10 upgrade for a nice seat with legroom. My conversation was with a computer booking-in machine. (This is poignant, as Airline Seat Choice is a favourite example used by Conversation Marketeers, who believe that having a conversation will allow one in some mystical way to have these better seating outcomes without paying more)

- Not all Conversations are Markets - the adulation of Zappos was, to an old school business strategist like me, very odd. There are very few barriers to entry or sustainable competitive advantages to what they are doing (flogging shoes over the web with better customer service from the average). What they are doing however is using new media to PR themselves as a “More than this” show as hard as possible, and “PR’ing the PR” (to quote Ben Ellis) , by using others to amplify the message very cleverly. But this, too, will be copied. The question is will they have established market dominance by then?

- Social Capital is too important to leave to the Social Capitalists. Whuffie et al is just the first step, the systems at present are woefully inadequate in their feedback loops, operating currently to amplify the early-in players without being able to moderate for their defection (eg resting on laurels, as noted above).

- The Future of Mobile is, for now anyway, the iPhone as it is the only system in the West that allows a DoComo-like value chain to emerge for upstream application development at present. And everybody has one, where everybody is about 1.1% of all mobile owners! (Update - nice article on this by El Reg's Andrew Orlowski)

- Algorithm systems increasingly have curation limitations (I tried to get Techmeme's Megan McCarthy to talk about why she needs to exist, but she kept schtum and scuttled off sharpish!*)

(I'll add more as I go through my notes too)

Something Stark

Guy Kawasaki did a masterful laceration of Chris Anderson’s FreeConomics thesis (Quote of the Week – 20th century Freeconomics was economics, the 21st century's is Semantics). As readers will be aware, we think much of Freeconomics is more akin to Voodoonomics (Update - as does the Economist), but we will respond to this in more detail in a following post.

But in summary even though the Dumb Equity Funding Party is over for now, much of SXSW's panels still seemed to be a last Hurrah for the Good Old Days. I’m not sure its all beer and loathing in Austin, to me it seemed more that there was still widespread denial of The Crunch, with only a few panels dealing with such grubby terms as Returns on Investment.

Bruce Stirling noted that many of the people at SXSW would not be around again next year. He meant those that would not be able to afford to go, but I think we will also see many of this years’ panelist has-beens and mountebanks also cruelly exposed by the crunch of the next year. In tough times you get the Reverse Machiavelli Effect, as supporters of the old orders start to abandon it and adopt the new in more than a lukewarm manner. Just as real capital values have fallen, I suspect so will some social capital over the next year.

* Thats the end of our career on Techmeme I guess

So, 4 days out of 5 in and I think its time to reflect on how to get the most out of SXSW - this is what works:

Firstly, most of the panels I've attended are fairly mundane - in my experience the panellists either won't, or can't, say much that is new in this instant feedback world. The frustration with this is part of what I think drove the Britpack to do 2 impromptu UnConference sessions, and twice I've seen audiences start to question/heckle. All is not lost, however - the tricks are:

- Listen to the smart questioners (not the ones who get up to pimp their companies or deliver a rambling diatribe) and either chat over Twitter or even better chat over coffee - people who ask smart questions know whats going on

- go to the Discussion groups instead - you get a lot out of these as there the people with the smarts start to contribute, the gasbags are shut up fast and you get some amazing conversations afterwards.

- there are a number of special interest group breakfasts etc that are not too hard to get onto (the VRM one in my case), for example

- If you think they are a**holes on the panel, Twitter it - you can get good conversations zipping along off the backchannels

Secondly, the Evening Parties - it seemed to me that there was an entire self-promo crowd at SXSW who never went to any talks but camped out in the blogger's lounge writing about the stuff they weren't attending by reading the Twitterstream (or if attending, it was for but a few minutes so they could twitter they were attending such and such an AWESOME talk by some Web-Sleb), and then in the evenings spent the whole time trying to find and then Twitter about the AWESOME party they are at.

The truth is that all the parties are much of a muchness, the trick is to get enough space/time to talk to the really smart people who are doing interesting stuff - and the best way to do this is to grab lunch or dinner or a drink in one of the quieter bars.

What you are trying to do is get enough time to actually really talk to people about the Real Stuff (assuming, of course, that you are here to learn). Its hard to get to the A listers through their coteries of acolytes, but if you do they are surprisingly genuine - if they know their subject and are not just mediahogs. I'm sure you can identify which are likely to be which.

Thirdly, make your own SXSW - want to know about X, go and find people and talk to them.

Also, go with the flow - some of the most interesting conversations have been totally serendipitous - in a taxi, at a table while typing stuff - there are a lot of smart people doing interesting things here.

To an extent one can say "and how does this differ from any other conference" but I think the less structured nature of the talks is a strength if one can make it work for you. The BritPack unconference is an extreme example, but many smaller scale sessions are do-able. Also, its is more fully immersive than any other conferences I've been at except maybe TED.