broadstuff

Been invited to the Activate Summit 09 (programme here), the Grauniad's conference on Politics, Economics, Technology and Society – strapline is "Building a better future through the internet".

Apart from the opportunity to (i) listen to some interesting people and (ii) talk endlessly and bore the pants off anyone who bothers to listen to me, it also gives an opportunity to argue with Umair (Haque), which should of course always be taken

Looks like a good lineup and some good topics overall. Also, they will be talking in one of the sessions about:

The means of production in the hands of the many: Will the internet lead to a rewriting of the rules of civilization?

Aka Socialism 2.0 - something I've been mulling over since I was in Berlin last year for a conference next to Karl Marx square in the autumn, just after capitalism shot its bolt. In may ways the "transaction costs" of socialism as a system are higher than capitalism (the invisible hand being a cheap organising system), but as the 'Net has massively reduced these costs it is now much easier to act in "social" ways of self organising which is arguably a more natural human way of structuring things (witness the rise in social networking).

Anyway, no one can argue that Social Nets haven't already had an impact on Society - now we await the impact on Politics, Policy, Regulation etc...... interesting times methinks.

Oh dear - it seems but a few short weeks ago that the media could not pour enough scorn on Twitter, and as for government, well it had a few fans.... but all has changed this week, and the Twitter Bandwagon has a horde of new joiners.

Firstly, the mainstream media has gone totally overboard about Twitter's role in the Iran election (the US Government even asked them to delay system downtime), but as Ethan Zuckerman and others remind us:

Social media is probably more important as a tool to share the protests with the rest of the world than it is as an organizing tool on the ground....

....One of the reasons MSM outlets are so focused on social media is that they’re not able to deploy reporters to cover these protests. In some cases, the majority of reporting from the ground is coming from social media. It’s worth asking what the biases might be in amplifying those social media reports.

But this is mild compared to our Politicos - today, our Prime Minister has over-reacted in the most astonishing fashion:

"You cannot have Rwanda again," he said. "This week's events in Iran are a reminder of the way that people are using new technology to come together in new ways to make their views known."

"You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken."

Well no, because Social Media needs Social Networks - ie it still needs the underlying networks and computers, which Africa has far less of than Iran - hence Zimbabwe, Somalia, Congo etc.

Very interesting article in ComputerWeekly about use of Social Media in Financial Services. A private meeting was held a few days ago where:

A behind closed-doors meeting of bankers, social media experts and technologists at The Financial Services Club last night revealed how the sector which traditionally leads technology innovation views social media technology. The event, held at the Lloyds building in London, delivered a clear message that banks must embrace social media. But work needs to be done by banks to work out how and where to use it.

There are some interesting quotes from it, I've tried to group the comments under the issues we see most commonly:

How Futureproof are the current tools:

- "Websites like Twitter and Facebook are just blips but it's what comes after that matters,"
- "Twitter is interesting but I do not know why. It is interesting because people are using it."
But banks know that what follows the likes of Twitter and Facebook will depend on how businesses develop the technology.

Rationale for Adoption.

- "Social media is the plumbing of collaboration."
- "Most businesses in this country are one-man bands and most of these are online. They would like to be able to run their businesses online including dealing with banks and the tax office for example."
- "Banks will have to get used to the idea that there will be some customers will want to use the web."
- "There will be a bonus for banks that experiment early with social media."
- "Social media is a good way of engaging with employees as well as customers."
- "A lot of it is total bollocks."
- "Once a customer question has been answered by a corporate through a social media site it doesn't have to be re-answered again and again."
- "In 1923 the head of the Post Office said he could not see any uses for a telephone apart form calling servants."

Barriers to Adoption

- "If you want to adopt social media you need to listen to what people are saying about it by monitoring online discussions."
- "Businesses can facilitate customer services through social media but it is not the answer to everything."
- "If the way to make money out of social media was obvious Facebook would be doing it."
- "Banks can't experimented because of heavy regulations."
- "I am not certain [banks] are in a position to use social media credible."

Concerns

"We do not deny that this technology will be used by us but to do this will require things we do not know."
- "In financial services we are still in the educational phase."
- "The designed for purpose of technology in banks is never the purpose it is put to."
- "We might make a product designed for loans and it could end up being used for payments."

Options for Small Acorns (starter projects)

- "Banks could start working with third parties for technology because it is hard to change legacy systems."
- "Corporates are already monitoring data feeds to see what people are talking about through mechanical scanning of social media feeds."
- "How does social media transfer to the corporate context is what banks are trying to understand. There has to be a new way found for doing this."
- "Two banks ask me to build a community for them every week."

We have put in a major social media strategy for one Financial Services company already, and would reflect that many of these concerns are very valid - it is not a simple transfer from the low security, non transactional consumer world to a financial service environment with its much more stringent requirements. (Twitterers are the first to call #FAIL on banks that are perceived to have made a mistake, that should convince you of that).

Also, quite bluntly a fair bit of the consumer technology is just not up to the thrashing / hard conditions it will get in a business environment (or struggles to integrate etc). You need serious Open Source gear like Drupal, and sometimes need to build your own on top of the LAMP stack unless its fr fairly low risk usage.

And, of course as any person with systems implementation experience in the last 30 years will tell you, the technology is a minority sport compared to data integrity, workflow rationalisation, people change management and training, and management support. Social media doesn't escape any of these social problems.

Also, many of the metrics that you can get digitally do not easily transfer to business value - quite a lot of work required (Its not just us that found this, MeasurementCamp in London was set up for this exact reason)

The benefits are quite wide reaching though, from higher customer acquisition and lower churn, improvement in SEO, better ability to acquire advertising and get better rates (lots of work, though). But its non trivial to get this and needs time, its not a plug and play thing.

Two events sent the Twitterverse abuzz this week.

Firstly, the sublime. Twitter, owing to is unique architecture - Unified Comms across multiple device types and networks, and an asymmetric, asynchronous, dispersed pub/sub system - was key to getting news in and out of Iran and (to a lesser extent) allowing opposition to the Iranschluss to combine and collaborate. It was seen to be so key that the US government asked them to delay system maintenance downtime till Iranian midnight.

Secondly, the opposite extreme - $1,000 a head for a 2 day conference on Twitter in NYC (or equity in your startup up to $500 if you were too poor to pay). The twitterstream (#140conf) has the occasional sparkling nugget in a sewer of sludge, not a river of data. I'm sure it was a fine conference, but thems big bucks for such a small thing....do I hear the words "hype curve"? (Contrast that with the 1/2 day UK one which was a small contribution to charity).

It has already been roundly lampooned by the Great White Snarks of the chatterati, Loren Feldman and Paul Carr, so 'nuff said. ( Careful boys - the Hudson is close and concrete boots are cheap.... ) .

Actually I have to pass on Loren Feldman's sage advice on the Secret of Success in Twitter:

Just post links to your shit, the occasional fake motivational bullshit, and then post more links to your shit. The end.

That'll be $1,000 please

Still, as Jonathan Zittrain noted, It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.

And as an added bonus you can shade your avatar green to show your solidarity with the Iranians as theirs turn red with their blood. (Quick quiz - how many of you know that green was the colour of the Fatimid Caliphate, and what it stands for....)

More worrying though is that one session in the latter event has an impact on the former. The Israeli's were originally out-twitted in the recent Gaza conflict but rapidly came up with countermeasures, as the Jerusalem Post explains:

For their part, the Israelis began using Twitter in the early days of the conflict in Gaza, when Saranga logged onto Twitter and found, he said, "incorrect information" from anonymous sources. "The official voice of Israel and the voice of the Israelis should be put out there so people will get the entire picture," he said. Today, the Israeli Consulate has more than 6,400 followers on Twitter.

The Iranians were taken by surprise, but tinpot despots around the world have taken notice, next time there will be far more Twitter Counter Measures in place, and its is not the be all and end all, as the article refernced above notes:

"I think the idea of a Twitter revolution is very suspect," says Gaurav Mishra, co-founder of 20:20 WebTech, a company that analyzes the effects of social media. "The amount of people who use these tools in Iran is very small and could not support protests that size."

Went along last night to the Bafta 3D TV event last night, showcasing the latest in 3D television and screen technology as well as a discussion session. Absolutely fascinating stuff. As far as the technology, I am going to show my deep admiration of Roo Reynold's writeup of the technology (and my deep lazyness) by copying it wholesale. The main technologies on display were:

1. Active LCD shutter glasses darken one eye, then the other, in sync with the alternating image being shown on a standard display. This halves the effective frame rate by sharing the display across both eyes, and being an active system requires power to operate the shutters and also to be in sync with the display. Expensive glasses, but off-the-shelf (though high-end) screens or projectors.

2. Passive polarised glasses work much like the old red and green glasses, but using polarised filters rather than red/green means you get a full colour experience. It means cheap, passive glasses but complicated and expensive screens and projectors. If you’ve seen a colour 3D movie, this was probably the way it was delivered.

3. Autostereoscopic display is a stupid name for a screen which displays 3D without needing glasses by use of a lenticular or ‘parallax barrier’ layer in front of a specialised (usually LCD) display, presenting a different image based on viewing position. No glasses, but a very limited viewing angle.

On the discussion panel were:

- Andrew Oliver (CTO and founder, Blitz Games Studios),
- Colin Smith (Technical Analyst, ITV),
- Brian Lenz (product design and innovation, Sky),
- Chair: Guy Clapperton (Freelance/Guardian journalist).

I'm afraid I didn't take many notes (Roo has some notes, read his post too) so will just give you the headlines as I saw them, along the good old 4 box media value chain:

Content Creation

Firstly, the amount of captured 3D content available is tiny today - but, it is possible to reprocess 2D digital content for 3D. There are 2 main axes of complexity:

- Content complexity - simple pictures where not a lot moves - eg cartoons - require far less reprocessing. A movie with lots of detail and lots of shot angles changing takes far more processing.

- Output size - The bigger the required screen, the more reprocessing required, so the cost of reprocessing for Web TV and home TV will be lower than for Cinemas

Secondly, it appears that capturing 3D images in essence resolves itself to strapping 2 cameras a distance apart and processing the 2 streams, thus getting binocular vision. This will be possible for pro-amateurs to do in fairly short order I suspect.

Thirdly, the most compelling content in my view was computer games and sport - both big markets for paying customers so I think the economic impetus is there

Aggregation

Different players are using these systems as ways to re-open the Set Top Box (STB) wars, ie 3D TV is an ideal way to force out the current STB and get your one in. Unfortunately there is a good old standards war (see 3 standards above) with different players promoting different systems, which will confuse the market. (In this case my hypothesis is that the home market will go with a system that means not replacing the existing TV set - option 1 above - which also seems to be the preferred option for computer gaming )

Distribution

Can be broadcast via TV, Internet or Mobile ad will be shipped on CD and DVD, so 3D will occur on all platforms. Thus any hope that this will allow Broadcast TV or Cinema to differentiate itself from IPTV/WebTV is in my view misplaced.

Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) market

I delved into the economics of the various approaches - for both the cheap glasses options you need to buy new TVs, whereas getting the complex glasses is sub £100 even today and will go down, but you get to keep your £600+ TV so option 1 looks best. Conversely for cinemas you probably want to have cheap glasses so option 2 or 3 are best. Killer question therefore in my view is what will work best on Web TV on laptops, will people be OK to spend heaphone sort of money for complex glasses.

I saw PC, XBOX and PS3 engines doing 3D rendering, the Wii has not go the oomph apparently (but imagine some of the Wii games in 3D).

Spent quite a lot of time asking about re-prpcessing existing content - my take is its early days, but ultimately this is like compression - its about getting good algorithms and then crunching them on bloody great engines, so I'd expect on-they-fly 3D reprocessing of simple graphics like games fairly soon commercially and then up the scale with more and more complex content on bigger and bigger screens.

A word on the Cinema market - watching sports or concerts in a cinema will be far more realistic with this sort of gear, but whether this will allow them to charge any form of premium for long is unclear.

At any rate, last night persuaded me that 3D TV in various forms is a 1-2 year not a 3-5 year event, unless the commercial wranglings make it profoundly economically uninteresting.

So, we've been a bit busy here at Broadstuff Towers but have had a quick scan of the Final Digital Britain Report. We will reply in more detail in our more in depth analysis next week in our Digital Britain Retort, but headline thoughts are that not a lot has changed from the much criticized interim report, despite a lot of feedback. The Big Lobby Battalions seem to have largely got their way, despite all the work of the Unconferences of the Great Unwashed up and down the land. Our overall impression is that all remains much the same except:

(i) The "how shall we fund the last 1/3rd" question is going to be by a £6 per consumer copper line Next Generation Network Tax (aka a Stealth tax) rather than telling BT/Virgin to fund it as part of their remit, or the government moving money from elsewhere (like public bankers bonusses)

(ii) Continued pandering to the File-sharing Clampdown lobby (or at least an unwillingness to grasp the nettles).

(iii) Raiding the Licence Fee funding to pay for other dodgy "prop em up" plays like local TV news, failing commercial TV models etc. There is a risk of this being a slush fund open season without some form of strategy, as the BBC Trust has rapidly pointed out.

(iv) There are a few oddities, like the digital radio push - odd, as this is a miniscule part of the pie and would cost a fortune to re-equip every household with new radios < ah, light dawns - electronic goods lobby 1, consumer 0...

Much of the execution of all this seemingly falls to Ofcom, a regulator with little skill or experience in provisioning, never mind implementing, such projects. This is not the equivalent of building the motorways, railways or canals, its more equivalent in ambition to taxing the peasants another groat a year to pay the tollbooth keepers to tidy up the cart tracks a bit. (Ovum comes to a similar conclusion)

But to us the real question is what happens to the report - with Lord Carter gone, and the UK in the dog days of a lame duck administration, its hard to believe much will happen this side of an election. (Scarier still in a way if it does, as an exhausted government will have no stomach for a fight with the big lobbies)

About the turn of the year in 2007/8, Twitter turned from being a network for the vapid self obsessed to one talking about interesting stuff. It is now turning again, into a sort of digital hawking and pimping service. Here, in no particular order, are the 10 Twitterquette deviations most likely to get me to unfollow you:

1. Awesome abuse. The second coming will be awesome, the Concorde standing on its tail and climbing straight into the sky is awesome. A cupcake, quote from your personal social media guru or next release .01 of your tinpot company's software (or even worse, the one you are flacking) is not awesome. Get a f*cking thesaurus and learn the English language.

2. Tweetorrhea - you are quite welcome to twt as often as you like if you have something new and interesting to say. Your latest beverage, lunch, banal observation or whinge about the other people on the plane/train/bus/planet/etc is not interesting, unless it is helpful too.

3. Retweetorrhea - retweeting every saying of the people you want to ingratiate yourself with is not interesting to your readers, who would follow that person themselves if they desired.

4. Retweet Self-Abuse. Dont retweet yourself or what someone has said about you. Evah.

5. Constant low rent pimping - telling me X is ...awesome... and I have to try/support it/you/him/her is the equivalent of door to door hawking. Gratuitous self promotion is the worst sin. The next time you do it its a guarantee you will be avoided.

6. "Everybody follow X, he/she/it are...awesome". I am a dumb sheep who is incapable of deciding who to follow. I need this help, oh yes I do. Unfollow.

7. Enthusiastically promoting every Good Cause du Jour. You only get to change your avatar to black, red, green etc once a year, or I will suspect you of being far more interested in the bandwagon than the band. You will be banned. (Its amazing how its always the same people....)

8. "Take this quiz/test/survey for @someoneyouneverheardof" to find out something they can make money/whuffie/cupcakes from. Doubly insulting if there is some piffling reward dangled.

9. Platitudes, Pretentiousness and Persistent "Right Thinking" propaganda posts. I know it when I see it. And saying "morning all" *, om nom nom nom, kittehs, woo hoo, w00t and suchlike. Bah Humbug!

10. Spam. When I opine on X, I don't expect "@broadstuff, check out our offers on....". Spampool for you.

Any I've missed?

*except @loudmouthman, whose good mornings and goodnights are awesome. Follow him....

Tried out Hunch, the new service from Flickr's founder Caterina Fake. In essence its 20 questions meets Myers Briggs - tries to suss out your personality, and then recommends things like cars, holidays, music you may like based on further decision trees. Now these sorts of tests are viral, every so often one comes along and everyone rushes off and does it. But I'm not sure there is a long term viable business there....unless the aim is to garner user data and sell it on - so picking holidays, music and cars pops up straight away, but there is a bit of a search for favourite philosophers for example.

But this is fine, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people (as P T Barnum noted). However, in the tests I did on Hunch it:

(i) Was very slow in its response times, but I assume that's launch-load

(ii) Was very slow in coming to a decision - 20 questions then N more to tell me which car or holiday I liked.

(iii) Unimpressive conclusions - eg holiday 1st choice for Euro beach holiday with a bit of culture - "Italy"

Now, I am sure if you create an account and go through multiple choice strings, it will get better and better at knowing what I want and (possibly) telling me that x% of others also like Y with X, but my big takeaway from all the User Experience experience of these sort of consumer systems is that they have to get to the point fast as most people can't be bothered to spend the time. Still, it is fascinating to think about how one would architect these sorts of systems.

Techcrunch UK's Mike Butcher reckons it should be integrated with Twitter. I reckon I could get a better answer than "Italy" by asking where I should go for a European beach holiday in 140 characters, and dispense with Hunch altogether.

Still, it is funny to see all the SV Echo Chamber desperately trying to be nice but damning it with not quite so gushing praise.....Search Engine Land, having gone through the same holiday steps (see them all on their blog...) notes this ain't going to fly just yet:

After testing a range of different topics and questions I found the results or answers to be uneven. But the process is very interesting and useful, forcing you to consider priorities or criteria at each stage. Caterina Fake told us that she saw Hunch getting better over time. Matt McGee quotes her in his article saying, “It might take five years for Hunch to reach maturity. Right now, it’s like Wikipedia circa 2002.” As more people contribute and become involved questions will become more refined and improve.

As more people contribute..... now that will be interesting, because some people may just be tempted to take the p*ss (shock ) or game it where there is money involved. Wonder how they will screen that sort of activity? Still, they took $2m so one assumes they have quite a runway yet to try and take off on.

However, by and large, anything consumer-ey that I don't like is usually bound to do well so there is hope

The original Anschluss was the Nazi German takeover of Austria:

a well-planned coup d'état by the Austrian Nazi Party of Austria's state institutions in Vienna took place on 11 March, prior to the referendum which was cancelled. With power quickly transferred over to Germany, Wehrmacht troops entered Austria to enforce the Anschluss. The Nazis held a plebiscite – asking the people to ratify what had already been done – within the following month, where they claim to have received 99.73% of the vote. No fighting ever took place and the strongest voices against the annexation, particularly Fascist Italy, France and the United Kingdom (the "Stresa Front"), were powerless or, in the case of Italy, appeased.

(from wikipedia, but it is roughly correct....)

Over the last few days we have watched as the Iranian election initially returned statistically "interesting" results - as commentators on the FT note. The main ones that have me scratching my head are:

- The percentage of the voting was [nearly] the same in all places. It means all the votes cast in various provinces, average tribal, rural and urban votes were almost the same. Such thing is impossible not only in Iran but also in the world. It is amazing that percentage of the vote cast for all four candidates was the same in all over Iran.

- Reformists had total votes of more than 20m in the past three elections. How come they had only 12m in this election, when many of those who had never participated in elections before voted this time for the reformists?

- The filtering/crunching down on all forms of media as elections started.

At any rate, the fascinating thing to watch over the last few days is how the social media that are not purely centralised are still sending a lot of details out of Iran. The lesson is that it is now very hard for good old Anschluss tactics to work, as a plethora of digital media systems capture media and push it out (see the BBC list here or search #Iranelection on Twitter).

But a big difference compared to the previous big breaking stories like Mumbai etc - the Mainstream media were on the story pretty fast, a sign that they are monitoring user generated and real time media services far more closely than a few months ago. (Except for CNN of course, which is now (in)famous for fiddling with a stories discussing Twitter's relevance while Tehran was burning (well, there were a few fires...) - makes bloggers look good in comparison

And this does not mean that Social Media will usher in a new democratic world in and of itself as one overoptimistic article very nearly argued - but, as that article noted in one of its more down-to-earth paragraphs:

My perspective is that the technology we deal with today is a chisel which allows us to chip away at the walls placed between ordinary citizens and those that enjoy positions of power. The previously unassailable press institutions can no longer hide behind veneers of objectivity and accuracy when fact-checking is just a Google away.

I have a sense of foreboding though. Wailing on Social Media is one thing, but the Anschluss was carried out because no one could do anything to stop it in real life. Information is power, but its a slow burn type.

Now I originally wrote about this dynamic effect here - but here it is again, following my realisation from the Great Social Media Expert debate that some of the hard economics underpinning (and even contradicting!) the Social Media evangelical fluffiness may be worth exposing, even for other - ahem - Experts (Part 1 is over here).

Firstly, its a fairly well know phenomenon that the average user puts a huge amount of effort into setting up their social network in the early days, but that - for the majority - the usage decays over time. (Twitter stats suggest that about 10% are superusers, the rest are extremely occasional. Anyway, the first graph below shows an estimated mean tailoff curve with c 10% being very active. (Yes, its a power law.....)



Now transpose this onto a standard growth S curve (see blue line below). What happens is that as growth of users rises and their activity is at its highest. the red curve - tota transcation son the network - goes through the roof. This has 2 impacts:

- The cost of operations rises geometrically faster than the user base increases (especially if its a high transaction system like say Twitter, so there is huge early pressure on ite infrastructure) - see he beginning of the Red curve
- The temptation is to think that the opportunity to monetise by putting Ads on all those transactions is exaggerated, as once growth starts to level out and the existing users start to drop off their initial peaks, transactions decline rapidly

In parallel with the levelling off of user visits comes the realisation that pure social net Ad revenue CPMs are in the pennies, as so many other SocNets create more inventory than the existing budgets could possibly fill. Initially there is a rush to the Big Beasts - say Facebook, but that creates all sorts of problems - see Beacon, travails of.....

I have an new hypothesis therefore - that walled garden pure play SocNets will prove to be uneconomic, and will shift to open "pure play" - think web, email - to get low value commodity scale benefits, and also to niche higher value plays.

By the way, the time to sell one of these f*ckers is just before the red line peaks - ie when new user growth is starting to tail off but traffic is still going strong so the buyer is bamboozled into continual massive growth projections. At the time I wrote the original article I was commenting on the Bebo sale, and I noted that:

There's a deja vu here. Time Warner bought AOL at the peak of the Web 1.0 bubble , AOL has bought Bebo at the top of this one. Soon after the Time Warner purchase the dotcom game collapsed, I suspect that buying Bebo has marked the top of the silly SocNet valuation season.

Was true re Facebook, but with all the hype re Twitter, I now wonder........