broadstuff

I read this earlier today

Five journalists plan to lock themselves away in a French farmhouse with access only to Facebook and Twitter to test the quality of news from the social networking and micro-blogging sites.

......

...how would the world look if viewed only through the prism of these sites, whose phenomenal growth has been fuelled by smartphones and, for Twitter, online bursts of 140 characters?

Are these social media -- which between them have nearly 400 million users -- really the serious threat to established media they are often said to be?

Those are the questions the five reporters hope to answer when they retire for five days from February 1 to a farmhouse in France's southern Perigord region.

Journalists playing Big Brother style entertainment to test Social Media?. This is MSM meta-entertainment methinks. The daft thing is that they will only use Twitter and Facebook, thus they won't be allowed to follow the links that people put up on Twitter or Facebook through to the Web pages they are pointing to (no other media exposure allowed), which shows that they totally miss the point - certainly of Twitter style news.

Matthew Ingram thinks it won't help for another reason, in that its an experiment designed more to "prove" that they are no substitute for old media (thank heavens) - which is true as:

The reality is that no single source is ever enough, whether it’s Twitter or a phone call from a source at City Hall. Social media hasn’t changed that. And the most important aspect of new media is that it is (to use an overused word) an ecosystem. News can begin on Twitter, make its way through Facebook and other networks to blogs and then meet up and merge with reports from the traditional media.

For this to be work they need to be able to see the story where the links go (or maybe their real role is to prove that Twitter won't work if Paywalls go up )

The other thought I had - untested - is that if you had good enough filtering systems Twitter just may give you all the news. Now that would be a scary thing for journalists trying to confirm Big Brother style media in a Big Brother House

Here is an interesting realisation on the personal economics of LBS:

Simply: too much work and risk, too little reward.

All I got were quite a few stalker like experiences grouped with a shift of my thinking about location based services from expression of physical identity to needless ego boost.

One specific interaction really bothered me to look at the benefits of these services. I had someone look up historical data on my checkins and put themselves in places so they would ‘run into me.’ Once I switched my habits, they did as well (that is when I figured it out).

Their response: ‘well, you put it out there.’

I did. I opted in to getting stalked. From a stalkers point of view, this is a goldmine. Foursquare for example lists the picture and location of recently crowned mayors on their homepage. Here is a picture of someone, with the address of the place they usually hang out. I find that troubling, especially for someone just wanting to share with friends.

So Whoddathunkit? Well, us for a start - we predicted it (see here) and the diagram we drew at the time (see above) shows why - the top right hand corner is the best for the service providers but not for users.

Quid Est Demonstratum.

Now what annoys me is that this sort of stuff is fairly trivial to predict (Human nature + low cost access to voyeuristic levels of private data), so one can't pretend that it came out the blue as a total surprise. And this example is pretty mild re its outcome - if you take what you can do with pervasive LBS to its logical conclusions you can get some far more risky behaviours.

To be clear - I am not against Location Based services, just the types designed to operate in the top right corner which really are a "stalkers charter". As Stowe Boyd points out, you can use services with lower resolution. And as our chart above shows, the best services for their users lie in other quadrants, but of course these are harder to monetise via Ad-serving and datamining.

My greater concern is that the next generation of LBS will be game based, which will tempt (typically younger and naive people) to disclose even more information, as no doubt these games will reward people for behaviour that hands over more and more personal data (see analysis here).

Our privacy is being sold down the river, I am coming to the view that the only way to sort these abuses out before they go too far is via pre-emptive legal restrictions.

Piece on GigaOm saying "Video changes everything" by the CEO of Skype:

It’s easy to slip into hyperbole. So take it with a pinch of salt when I talk about entering a place of virtual presence that mimics tangible reality, saves time and deletes distance through live video links. Take it with a pinch of salt, too, when IFTF says this new oral society creates a new public sphere. Let’s not forget that it’s still early days. But video already allows Skype users to transcend place and time, whether on the desktop or on a Skype-enabled TV, and some 4 percent of all international calling minutes are now video calling minutes, on Skype.

Video "allows Skype users to transcend place and time" not slipping into hyperbole eh . And what have all those webcamming aficionados being doing since 2003 or so on IM then?

Of course, if you had been reading Broadstuff you would have known all this 18 months ago when we reported on our Broadsight research for Telco 2.0 (if not before as we wrote a few earlier articles suggested by the research program). It was only a matter of time before increasing Bandwidth allowed major VoIP services where V stood for Video.

In fact, we've racked back on Video Futures research for a bit now as its a "given" in our opinion, and are focussing more on other areas like Real Time, Location Based and Smartphone services. Still, nice to see that the mainstream tech blogs have run with it

(Actually, I must say the Liz Gannes from GigaOm is pretty much on the pulse)

Broadstuff - Always Firstest with the Bestest

(this has been an in-blog commercial announcement, usual terms and conditions apply)

About a year ago the Long Beach Civic Hall was full of people chanting "Raw Data Now" - it was Sir Tim (Berners Lee, not Rice) at TED making an evangelical case for the freedom of data that the taxpayer essentially funds.

Well, clearly crowd sourcing like this works, and those of us who were there from the UK must have shouted loudest - as today the UK government opens a fairly impressive raft of data - BBC:

A new website, data.gov.uk, will offer reams of public sector data, ranging from traffic statistics to crime figures, for private or commercial use.

The target is to kickstart a new wave of services that find novel ways to make use of the information.

Its on www.data.gov.uk

A beta version has been going since September, which has a number services - it will kick off today with 2,500 datasets. One of the main barriers is to get geographical location from the Ordnance Survey (OS) free. This is still paid for and thus prevents a number of location based mashups, the darling of the day.

London Mayor Boris Johnson has also announced the city's authorities will open an online data warehouse on 29 January with more than 200 data sets relevant to life in the capital.

This is a Good Thing, and hopefully more will become available - its my view that if this is done a whole lot of services -unimaginable today - will emerge to remove many frictions in our life today. I hope it also helps sort out the many small contradictions in the various systems.

From a WSJ article on VC spend, it would seem that capital intensive technology such as networking equipment, telecommunications, semiconductors, solar and alternative fuels are not getting any money - two snippets:

"We're preoccupied by capital efficiency," said Bob Ackerman, a venture capitalist at Allegis Capital in Palo Alto. "You look at the capital requirements and risk-reward ratio [for areas such as clean technology] and it becomes very, very difficult."

Preoccupied by the low spend and quick buck in other words. Not sure the risk/reward ratio in easy-to-reproduce services is any better though, but I guess you fail quicker so can redeploy any capital left faster. Fred Wilson had an interesting post on the changes in VC economics a day or so ago.

Then there is:

Navin Chaddha, a venture capitalist at Mayfield Fund, said his firm was interested in investing in online education, online health care and cloud computing this year, but was shunning capital-intensive industries such as biofuels. And he is being choosier in areas like networking, storage and telecommunications. "You have to be selective" and look for disruptive innovations in those fields, he said.

Cloud computing not capital intensive? Somebody's been selling Snake Oil to those nice VC chaps again I suppose if its only defined as Free-to-use-and-f*ck-all SLA consumer presentation layer web services sitting on top of the big iron then it isn't, but last time I looked Cloud Computing of any form of industrial quality had big transport, hosting and middleware requirements that ain't solved yet.

Update - good counterpoint by Ovum's Vuk Trifkovic pointing out that Cloud is capital intensive, but not as capital intensive as some of the others mentioned.

Whjch prompts a further thought - In theory capital intensiveness raises barriers to entry, reducing competition and lengthening the time a market leader has in the sun. Also, when all is said and done the patents are easier to protect. Perhaps that explains Cloud's popularity for "WebTech" VCs, despite it being pretty ephemeral right now as fa as deplyability is concerned - its the affordable face of capital intensive infrastructure industries.

And that prompts a further aha - its mainly large companies (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) that are building the infrastructure layers right now.

Update II - but, on my side of te argument, note that Facebook is now building its own datacentres. That, dear reader, is Capital Intensive!

Extraordinary amount of economic rationality breaking out in January 2010 among the stories I see on Techmeme right now are:

The New York Times will charge for frequent usage:

Verizon cutting off service to multiple offenders:

Boxee making users pay for some of the content

YouTube starting to charge for some videos.

Hulu - moving to "Fee", not "Free"

Its not summer yet, but that's a lot of swallows. With respect to the End of FreeConomics, we hate to say we told you so, but...well, we told you so Till the next rush of dumb money hits the Tech market, of course....

There are two developing trends emerging in social networks, both trying to solve the problems that the current ones like Facebook have - ie they cannot get enough information about your high value behaviour to make for high value Ad serving, nor is mining your data really worthwhile as the really useful stuff isn't really there. Flying Sheep and so on don't really cut it.

The game in Free-to-use Social Media is to be able to estimate your near future Net Present Value and intentions, for Advertising and datamining purposes. So they need to get a better handle on your more valuable transactions (throwing sheep is not where it is). The ways out of this dilemma are fairly obvious:

(i) Get more data about you

But we believe Location based social networks get a whole lot more data about you than a pure social network or search engine does, as it can cross reference your location to a whole lot of other datasets rather than just your social net, Also, real time movement data allows a whole lot more valuable projections and predictions to be made about you.

Of these sorts of systems, we believe games based ones are the most powerful at extracting user data as:

(i) They reward users for data disclosure with in-game treasures - status promotion, electronic goods, privileges

(ii) By involving users in a game type environment, we hypothesise they can override natural caution and rational reluctance on data disclosure

This combination of reward and breaking down barriers will be able to get people to share far more personal data than any other type. Also, games are seen as "good" or at least harmless - witness the Foursquare/Harvard deal - as Blown to Bits notes:

Having spent many an afternoon over the past year in information security meetings, where the University has been developing policies and standards for how information about our students may be accessed, stored, and moved, I immediately started wondering whether Harvard had somehow signed onto a deal to encourage students to surrender their privacy, and if so, who was the commercial beneficiary. The Gazette story doesn’t mention data privacy at all. It simply has a Harvard spokesman echoing foursquare’s utopianism.

We believe that Harvard’s participation will allow our community to engage with friends, professors, and colleagues in new ways. We also hope visitors and neighbors will benefit from the platform as it grows through use.

So visiting high school students and Chinese tourists are apparently also the intended “beneficiaries” of this “service.”

As Hal Roberts of the Berkman Center pointed out when I asked him about this story, foursquare’s privacy policy is pure boilerplate:

We receive and store certain types of information whenever you interact with our Service or services. Foursquare automatically receives and records information on our server logs from your browser including your IP address, cookie information, and the page you requested.

It goes on to explain how they aggregate this data and analyze it, and how they won’t disclose it in a way that would identify you personally. Only problem is, the privacy policy doesn’t mention the really private information foursquare collects—the location information. That simply isn’t covered by any of the boilerplate. So they can do what they want with it, without asking.

The interesting thing, as he notes, is that they have managed Harvard to use it despite all the internal work on student privacy and the lack of any protections in the T&As.

Games are also a better way of selling online goods, espaecially if they help you perform better in the game and thus win even more prizes and status.


(ii) Go for the jugular - get you to share your financial data online

There have been personal savings services that have done this for quite a few years, but they have been "first generation" - ie they aggregate and anonymise all the data and there is very little "social" in the network. But more recently, a number of services are launching persuading you to share your purchases with your friends and neighbours in a more social way - Bundle for example, which to get you started wants (From ReadWriteWeb):

To get started, you just enter your location, age, income and whether you are married, single or have kids. Bundle will then create an infographic that represents the spending habits of similar households in your neighborhood. From there, you can drill down deeper into the statistics. At its most granular level, Bundle displays where people are spending their money. My neighbors, for example, buy their electronics at Best Buy, Apple and Fry's.

.....

...the team also plans to allow users to enter their exact spending habits by either entering the data by hand or by giving users the option to upload credit card statements directly. This will make it even easier for users to compare their spending habits to those of their neighbors.

So what does a Facebook or a Google do? Google's strategy is mainly the former, hence their advance into more and more areas of your data trail. Clearly they cannot afford to leave Location to others, so we expect lost of location based operations across all their assets, and a lot of promotion of mobile smartphone systems which are the main method for picking up location data.

Facebook, Twitter etc clearly rapidly will need to accelerate a mobile application strategy will that drive Location based usage.

But the sweet spot will be Location Based gaming, one wonders what Google, Facebook et al will launch in this space.

With respect to financial data, its interesting that Google has already launched its own payment service (Checkout). I would not at all be surprised if Facebook starts to offer (or acquires) financial advice sharing capability in a far more structured way (there are people who offer this via Facebook already) especially as their user demographic ages.

Its a harder game to play as one needs some form of existing credibility, and there are regulatory issues to be skirted (the rise of non-bank banks - sorry, social loan services - online is very interesting here.

So (in) conclusion, I am hypothesizing that this location/gaming/financial data service based social network structure will be the next generation of Social Media. Messrs Schmidt and Zuckerberg have done a superb job of parting users from their privacy scruples, but Google and Facebook may not be the ones to profit.

I wondered how long it would take someone to build a system that obfuscates your data from Google. We looked at how to do it a few years ago, but the best short term default seemed to use Dogpile, a "parasite" search engine, or similar - yes, they have your data but its a far smaller operation. But that was just search. . However, a smart hacker has come up with a way of doing it. Forbes:

Now an independent security researcher who goes by the name Moxie Marlinspike is making Web users a counter-offer: Take Google's ( GOOG - news - people ) giveaways and keep your privacy too.

On Tuesday, Marlinspike launched a service he calls Googlesharing, a plug-in for Firefox designed to give users access to Google's online offerings while cloaking their identity from the company's data collection tools. By hosting a proxy server with a collection of Google "identities," the privacy software, which can be accessed at Googlesharing.net, will allow users to temporarily route their traffic through another computer that masks their identity by mixing their online actions with those of other users.

"Each identity looks like a normal user, but everything is mixed up between identities so Google can't track any individual," says Marlinspike. That means users can exploit any of Google's offerings that don't require logins, such as search, maps or news, without allowing Google to assemble a profile of their activities that can be used for advertising targeting--or, as some users might fear, information that could be subpoenaed by government investigators.

You can get the Firefox addition here. Marlinspike is offering up his code so you can build your own, so well worth a look methinks. I predict a large increase in Google services that have to be signed in for. I wonder if the Open ID people may have looked at this, but they have a different gig right now - but maybe we have a bigger need for Private rather than Open ID.

Clay Shirky recently wrote an analysis of why women struggle in the enterprise/executive role. It's quite strongly worded, so worth a read but may have some people gnashing their teeth. Anyway, one of his points was that :

I’m not concerned that women don’t engage in enough building of self-confidence or self-esteem. I’m worried about something much simpler: not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.

One of those, errrm, "self aggrandizing jerk" skills is speaking out in public, something which nearly all the professional women tell me they don't like. However, it is a necessity to be able to project your ideas. Thus when Laura North told me last night at the soft launch of our Innovation Manifesto (of which more later) that she was organising a soiree for women to work through this public speaking angst, I felt I had to blog it. Here is the session:

Does the idea of speaking in front of an audience make you nervous? 'Speaking out - public speaking made easy' will show you how to feel comfortable speaking in public.

Whether you want to make a presentation, contribute to a group discussion or just ask a question at a conference, we'll give you some easy ways to help you share your thoughts and ideas effectively.

Speakers include Katie Streten, Head of Digital Strategy at design agency Imagination, Christian Heilmann from Yahoo!, and Dave Bell from Merrill Lynch, who has been helping young women in Tower Hamlets make public presentations. All the speakers share the same aim of helping participants to communicate in a more relaxed and informal way.

The event is open to all, but women are especially encouraged to attend and subjects include speaking in public from a woman's perspective.

Drinks will follow the event.

Its on Wednesday, February 10, 2010 from 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM (GMT). You can sign up here on Eventbrite

We have pointed out before that women are a bigger economic force online than men, especially on Social Media. Now, as Copyblogger notes, if you want links, you gotta do Lurve - most especially use the words that Women Want. These are:

- Love

- Secret

- King, Queen, Princess, Prince (or some other honorable title)

- Temptation and Forbidden

- Cloud, Moon, Stars (and other celestial bodies)

- Heaven, Paradise

- Kiss

- Virgin

- Magic, Enchanted, Bewitched (and other references to the supernatural)

So, for example, here is how you may write copy:

Plain: “Solve Email Problems”
Heroic: “Battle Your Email Overload”
Romantic: “Love Your Email Inbox Again”

Plain: “Stop Procrastinating”
Heroic: “Defeat Procrastination”
Romantic: “Kiss Procrastination Goodbye”

Plain: “Advice to Help You Do Better”
Heroic: “Advice to Help You Win”
Romantic: “Advice to Make You a Star”

Plain: “Ditch Your Bad Habits”
Heroic: “Conquer Your Bad Habits”
Romantic: “Make Your Bad Habits Disappear Like Magic”

So - thats a little magic secret you'll love - send you over the moon in fact. Of course its tempting to be the Queen of Feminine Copy at once, but you're still a virgin here, so take it slow.

(Update - Charlotte Cooper notes that they forgot to add Unicorn)