broadstuff

So, the kids' XBox 360 gets a 3 lights error, after 18 months ownership. We go through the online diagnostic, this basically means there has been a complete hardware #Fail on the system, and is a well known fault with the earlier XBox and has been since 2007. The Microsoft website tells us:

Solution: Submit a console repair request

Your console is in need of a repair. There are no additional troubleshooting steps. To begin the online repair process, click one of the following links:

- I am a U.S. customer (http://support.xbox.com/support/en/us/nxe/registerdevice.aspx?step=repair)
- I am a customer outside the U.S (http://www.xbox.com/support/)

So, being the dad wot owns it, I go online (from work). And this is when the sh*t starts:

Firstly, to sign in for your repair, you have to sign in with your Live ID. This is your ID as an online XBoX gamer. You don't have a Live ID? - well, to get your machine repaired you need a Live ID. I don't have a live ID, and I can't for the life of me see why I need a Live ID, invent a gamer tag, get a picture for my avatar, and hand over all that other personal data just to get a tin with a known #Fail repaired.

Microsoft says that they are doing this to "enhance my experience" - but as far as I can see all they are doing it to make it hard to get a machine with a manufacturer's fault repaired.

So, I decide to email them instead, I just want the tin, serial No 1234567890, address 1 Broadstuff Towers, fixed after all. That what I do with PCs when they fail. I duly find the the email system, write the email, and get the promise that I will hear in 48 hours. 24 hours later I get the response:

Kindly note that we have received your inquiry, we would like to inform you that the only ways to create repair order are through our web site or through our agents on our support line. So, if you it is not possible to create it online, please give us a call on our support line and we will be more than happy to assist you.

Keep in mind, dear reader, that this is the dreaded "3 Ring " fault - a well known design fault on XBox's, akin to the sort of thing that forces Toyota Pious recalls etc. It is not an exotic hardware problem. Nor is this a build to order supercomputer, its a bog standard game console.

Anyway, the email suggests I call Customer Service (at my cost of course, if you use a mobile which I have to do as I'm doing this at lunch time on a client site).

Well!

The ACD system leads me through a series of steps, essentially it keeps on trying to get me to go back to the website and log on. I doggedly hang on till I get to an agent, after 1 dropped call, and a lot of frustration with the voice (un)recognition system.

The agent wants me to do a diagnostic first, as described on the website. I tell him the kids did that, thats why I'm emailing/calling etc. (Is it unreasonable to want a process that can handle a paying parent phoning from work?)

The next gambit is to get me to to log in on the website and do it all that way. I say the reason I am calling is that I am not an XBox Live gamer, don't want to be an XBox Live gamer - thats the kids' schtick, I just want my sodding tin, with a #factory fault #fail, Serial No 123456789, fixed Now! Please. (I say Please because I'm still being polite)

Then we have a discussion about whether the XBox is with me at the time, can we run some tests. At this point my politeness becomes extreme (I do that when I'm cross) as it becomes clear they are just trying to avoid getting my tin in for a repair. I point out that we know what the problem is, they know what the problem is as its common and featured on their own help sites, and I just want the bloody box fixed without all this crap.

Silence

Then, after a delay for backroom conflab, they finally agree to take it back and we agree to hand it back, and go through it all. It will cost £100, they say, as it is out of warranty and because I haven't logged in on the website, and can't therefore write down the fault, and can't do the diagnostic online there and then and answer in detail some questions about power lights etc (I can't promise that its 3, not 4 lights that go on, and that the power light is green, not orange etc), they seem to want to treat it as a "daft customer caused error". In essence, its my system's fault, my system is out of warranty, if I want it fixed, I need to pay to fix it.

Thoughts of irreparable psychic damage to kids if I don't return with a "fixed XBox" story that evening fills my guilty conscience - besides, I have a conference call in 10 minutes, its taken nearly an hour to get to this stage so I agree, and the credit card number is duly handed over.

Conference call over, I am thrown back into work and that takes over my day - and so today, 24 hours later, I am closing down the XBox website tabs when something catches my eye - a Wikipedia entry, from 2007, saying that:

On July 5, 2007, the Vice-President of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business division published an open letter recognizing the console's problems, as well as announcing a three-year warranty extension for every Xbox 360 console that experiences the "general hardware failure" indicated by three flashing red LEDs on the console.

What! A 3 Year warranty for this fault. Waiddaminit - I have had to hand over £100 to get it fixed and Microsoft offered a 3 year warranty 3 years ago! And my machine is only 18 months old. Where on the Microsoft site does it say this? (I still can't find it...)

And so, dear reader, I am back on the phone service, trying to get my £100 back. Will keep you updated. Watch this space! (Update - phoned up customer service - I read that if you just say "agent" to the ACD, it goes straight to the call centre, which worked). The rep said yes, it is a 3 year warranty and then disappeared for various periods as they conflabbed as to what to do at each twist and turn of the complexity of all this. Result - cancel original works order, set up new one, refund money, time taken - 1 hour 04 minutes - money to be paid within 30 days (hold on to that money for a month for the interest, why dont you....).

But is this any way to "enhance my experience" via Customer Service? It created total frustration as it is:

- clearly designed to create roadblocks to getting things sorted, I had to hang on to teh phone for an hour twice
- designed to extract as much unnecessary customer data in the process, and probably to bump up reported XBox LIVE users
- attempts to extract £100 repair fees unless you are switched on and know what's going on. How many non-Geek parents have been nailed like this - the guys at the local game shop said lots of parents choose to buy a new tin (c £130) rather than shell out £100 for a repair, so clearly its not just me who took awhile to work out its a free repair - in fact seems like many never do

Surely, if one wanted to delight one's customers, you would have a big webpage, easy to get to, with a "Hey, we have a manufacturer's fault, it works like this, we've extended the warranty to 3 years and here is a fast track to getting it fixed" or somesuch.

Surely?

This is a product design fault, remember. Do they think the labyrinthine support process they have implemented is designed to make me a faithful XBox customer? To shout about my delight of how they sorted it out from the rooftops, and enthuse others? If so, let me tell Microsoft this:

- No way are we ever buying another Microsoft Game console - ever! And as for any other consumer product - forget about it..... (I contrast this to our Nintendo and Sony devices which have survived all sorts of ignominies for far longer)
- I am blogging it, here - we get nearly a million hits a month on this blog, so that's the impact of p*ssing this customer off.
- It reduces my willingness to use other Microsoft PC products - the same Dad who is frustrated with this process for avoiding repairing his kids' game console also owns a load of PCs professionally and domestically, and advises clients on IT architectures.

To be fair, Microsoft business support is better than consumer support, but that just increases the irritation if anything.

Microsoft isn't the only one to do this, of course - don't these companies get the interconnected knock ons that the same person looking for support here is a customer for future purchases? Why do companies do this?

An update from Nic Butler sheds some light:

"...your experience is 100% opposite to mine. I had the problem (18mnths) and in the same day I got the paper work in to get it fixed.

heh, well I did use my live account via the web filled out the details made 1 10min call and it was all in progress."

It seems therefore that the only repair use case is a gamer, with Live ID, sorting it out with console in front of them. A non gaming parent sorting it out from work is bad news. Here is what we don't understand though - from the Twitter conversation:

- @edent: why didn't you just take it back to the shop & get them to fix it under SOGA?

- @loudmouthman: my PS3 experience was even better. GAME just swapped it out and gave me a 80g in place of my 40gb ! So I was even happier.

Well, we did take it back to the store initially (Game as it happens) who said that it was out of the 12 month warranty so we had to go direct to Microsoft. As Nic notes, service from a retailer is much better, so given that Microsoft had already extended warranty to 3 years for this fault, why not let the retailers handle it and delight the customer?

As we noted in our review of Buzz, one of the worrying things it does is expose your email contacts list for all and sundry to see. As others are tumbling onto this one the buzz about Buzz being a buzztard is growing. Evgeny Morozov has put it very eloquently:

It's business decisions like this that make me very suspicious of Google's highfalutin speeches about their commitment to defending the freedom of expression. From a business perspective, such decisions do make some sense -- how else, after all, can Google Buzz compete with Twitter and Facebook, who are already light years ahead of Google in terms of building up their user base -- but the ethics of such business decisions is extremely shoddy, to say the least. If Google executives are really committed to defending the freedom of expression, then they must be inhabiting in a dream world, where freedom of expression somehow always survives despite horrendous attacks on privacy.

I am coming to the conclusion, after listening to David Cameron last night, that drinking the Social Media Kool Aid produces a cognitive dissonance in which you have to believe that all people are good, all the time (or at least you profess to believe that while you build your service out with minimal privacy safeguards, as that is where the money is)

But watching the emerging kickback on this one, I think Google has - despite no doubt studying the Social Graphs of all the other networks intensely - f*cked up big time in its desperation to link up people's information for its own benefit.

Up to now their social media services have just been lame, this one looks like giving them the sort of rap that Beacon did for Facebook, and this will rebound far wider in my view - for example, I am increasingly looking at Google on my iPhone and thinking - do I want them on my device?.

I predict a few more days of bluster about this being "what we want", then an apology, and a shift to a default no show of email contacts by Sunday evening.

(Update - it's started as of Friday morning - Google is "responding to customer feedback" already! )

And then an attempt to back-door reintroduce it all in 6 months.

(By the way, did you know Buzz works on all iPhones but not on most Android phones, only those with v 2.0. Nothing like supporting your own mobile developers' efforts eh

Last night David Cameron spoke at the TED event, in London. It was in the stream dealing with Behavioural Psychology and Economics (I covered it here) and his talk was essentially a thesis in how this may be used by a future administration. My notes during the talk:

He started off very well - "politics is showbiz for ugly people"

Then moved to the first point - the central debate of the 21st century is..... global public debt - $32 trillion and counting. So how do we make things better without money?

- Give power to the people
- Go with the grain of human nature
- Use digital technology

There was then the regulatory discussion about the view that people get happier until income hits $60,000 (there must be a UK equivalent, quoth he) and then increased happiness tails off. He actually said that the differences between the middle class and the very rich therefore didn't matter, and took the view that the critical thing was to help poorer people who earn less than this to earn more. He didn't seem to get that if he did that, all that happens is that the "$60,000" number will go up, because its a relative difference.

I also think he's wrong re rich not causing envy among the middle class, but there are clearly Tories who want to believe this one.

There were quite a few other references to Happiness Theory, Behavioural Economics, especially Nudge etc

He also reckoned we have gone from pre-bureaucratic ages local power to industrial age, central power (bureaucratic stage) and we are now moving to ..... People Power.

As part of this, we were going to get Transparency, Accountability and Choice

Also, all government contracts above £20k were to be published online. I delight to see what will happen when We The People see how much they are spending on consultants

He then showed examples of potential mashups of government data, with true Government 2.0 fervour ...which prompted the first concerned Twts:

[Cameron] reveals he plans to publish live crime maps. Won't this lead to vigilantism, panic,fear?

Kevin Anderson has live blogged the whole thing over here.

So, All Good Stuff - Happiness, Nudge, Equality, Government 2.0 - what's not to like?

Here's what:

Firstly. he is picking and choosing his Behavioural Economics - one person picked him up on too much focus on Choice, pointing out that BE also shows too much choice is bad.

Secondly, he seemed to believe that moderation will be done by We The People being vigilant - as questioners pointed out, thats not the way it works now so why would it work online - "the only people who have the time to do this are the media, so we will have rule by media mob" as one questioner put it. (This by the way had many social mediarati grumpy when I twittered it, but I think the worriers may have a point, watching the way Social Media Mob Rule works)

Thirdly, he was dreadfully optimistic (naive?) about the sorts of things people will get up to with all the public's data out there - his approach to all the questions about how to control cheating behaviour, miscreants etc was to believe all people were Good Citizens at heart and to play the "shame on you for believing people are bad" card.

Fourthly, and most worryingly, overall I got the very strong impression that they (the Tories) do not have the inclination to take on the financial sector to get any of the $32 Trillion back. He made no reference to the Robin Hood Tax video that had just been shown before (see above YouTube video), suggesting that 0.05% tax on bank transactions could pay back a lot of what we had given them and solve global warming and poverty to boot. His thesis seemed to boil down to the approach that we should do all this low cost Government 2.0 / BE stuff to keep us happy in our new-found poverty while we rendered the loot unto the Bankers.

In fact, Government 2.0 looked like it was just a way of introducing Feudal 2.0 and BE will Nudge us towards Happiness, which will be the new opiate of the masses. Get ready to tug your virtual forelock to the New Barons Rothschild

(By the way, I am fairly apolitical - "don't vote, it only encourages them" seems as good a motto as any these days, anarchism without bombs works for me - but I got a very strong Brave New World feeling last night, and it would worry me, except of course I believe in the Wisdom of the People to resist it......ummmm )

Speaking of voting, by the way - it looks like Goldman Sachs rigged up a huge campaign to vote against the Robin Hood Tax proposal.

It would seem that the e-Book industry has taken a good, hard look at what happened to the music industry in the Noughties - and decided to follow down the same road - NYT:

In the battle over the pricing of electronic books, publishers appear to have won the first round. The price of many new releases and best sellers is about to go up, to as much as $14.99 from $9.99.

Like all good plans in this space though, this one will probably not survive contact with the enemy - that is, us:

...there may be an insurgency waiting to pounce: e-book buyers.

Over the last year, the most voracious readers of e-books have shown a reflexive hostility to prices higher than the $9.99 set by Amazon.com and other online retailers for popular titles.

When digital editions have cost more, or have been delayed until after the release of hardcover versions, these raucous readers have organized impromptu boycotts and gone to the Web sites of Amazon and Barnes & Noble to leave one-star ratings and negative comments for those books and their authors.

It is totally daft - as with digital music, the punters know it doesn't cost as much to produce so are buggered if they can see why they should pay top hardcover whack. And on the Kindle there is no discounted shelf, no second hand eBookstore, no paperback version (though it will probably come).

In other words, the publishers have calculated that the margin on selling overpriced eBooks to the suckers who bought Kindles etc will more than make up for the smaller volumes. Trouble is, the suckers know this too.

And of course, as has been proven over and over again, if the public don't like the price, they opt for Piracy.

My prediction - this is yet another market full of F*ckwits (sorry, professional managers) who, by their short sighted behaviour over the next 2-3 years, will guarantee that an Apple iPod type play with the iPad or something like it, and a decent media pricing plan, will take them out.

Like the Medieval French nobility who charged English longbowmen in three battles with the same sad result, the Publishing industry seems to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the slings and arrows of their past misfortunes.

The BlogoPimposphere of course is besides itself, but if we may take a more long term view:

Orkut begat Jaiku begat OpenSocial begat Wave begat Buzz.....

In other words it cannot fail. But lo - despite the hype, I see the reasonable people I know saying things like:

- Its just added an order of magnitude to my inbox, I was trying to cut it down by that
- its just another inbox
- really didn't enjoy having my contacts exposed by google buzz

And so on.....

I predict another bird that won't fly, at least not without without a lot of mods - which if the past is anything to go by Google won't do.

But of course its job is not to work, its job is to disrupt the economics of fledgling competitors like Facebook trying to get to profitability.

What will it be in 6 months time then?.

attended the TED first morning screening in London this evening. David Cameron gave his talk live and we patched into Long Beach for the rest of the session. I will cover Cameron's talk separately as it has Government 2.0/Social Media implications. Two of the other three talks were on behavioural economics & happiness (which also featured heavily in Cameron's talk), these are my notes:

Daniel Kahneman

Happiness is the new black, but it has a number of cognitive traps:

- failure to admit complexity, happiness covers too many areas
- confuse experience and memory (happiness about vs happiness in life)
- focus delusion - exagerrate importance of anything thought about

There are two types of self - the rembering and experiencing self - that have different happiness optima
- experiencing self has very short lived units of memory, 3 seconds or so, happiness is now.
- the remembering self stores memories of happiness which drives choices
- thoughts of the future are an anticipation of memories

Thought Expereriment - if your memory afterwards was destroyed, would you go on the same vacation vs if your memory stayed?

Because of the 2 selves, there are 2 happiness states - different optima - can't reconcile

- Can measure happiness of experiencing self physiologically
- Much harder to measure satisfaction of the measuring self eg about your life

Satisfaction differs between the 2 selves so optimizing them differs
- money (doesn't impact experiencing self, does impact remembering self)
- goals
- spending time with people you like

0.5 correlation between the two statistically for any one "happiness" vector, for example:

- climate is not important to experiencing self but is to memory self
- Gallup survey - feelings vary with income - above $60k pa flatlines experienced happiness, but remembering self likes reflecting on wealth

My Thought - So what will be optimized by policy wonks? David Cameron started to lay out his stall, but I will deal with it separately

Michael Shermer Global Sceptic

Belief is the natural state of things, science/scepticism is uncomfortable - we have evolved this way by natural selection. We have two cognitively dissonanent traits:

1. Patternicity

- We find patterns with random rewards
- Lion in the long grass evolutionary choice

- false positive (rustle in grass, assume since as Lion is unlikely, that there is no lion until evidence)
- false negative (every rustle in grass is a Lion - run).

We are designed to opt for Type 2 ie all patterns are real until proven false

Some behavioural psychology:

- Studies show that people who are more disposed to believe in ESP, UFOs etc are more likely to see patterns where there are none.

- Corporate environments study - people who feel they are out of control are more likely to see patterns in things

- More significant patterns seen by RH side of brain

2. Agenticity - the tendency to assume that its not chance or inanimate objects that do things

- We infuse patterns we see but don't understand with active agents eg angels, conspiracy theories, etc.

It is literally all in the mind - for example if you stimulate temporal lobe and you get Oot Of Body Experiences

Anyway, those are the notes.

Gave a talk last night at the Online News Association session "Who cares about the page views, show me the money!", along with William Higham, writer and trend forecaster, Next Big Thing (@williamhigham) and Katie King, Creative and Development Editor, MSN UK (@ktking).

This post details shows the slides (above) and the commentary (below).

The Communication Value Chains of Yesteryear

Castles on the Rhine and Fleet Street office blocks are frequented by tourists today, but in days gone by were the headquarters of powerful barons of communications businesses, made powerful by their control of a par of the distribution system. They remain as witness that in communications and media value chains, things do change.

The Value Chains of Yesterday

TV, Print Media, Radio, Music and Film empires all existed as aggregators because they had control of their supply chains - either licence granted, or owned a very expensive to reproduce distribution network. That these would end was predicted at least in the mid 90's - in excruciating detail, to my personal knowledge - so the only real surprise is that these behemoths have sat on their a*ses for so long.

The Value Chains of Today

Cometh the 'Net, cometh the disintermediation of the distribution networks, and new aggregators interposed themselves on the new distribution channels. The first generation of these were the "Portals" - Yahoo etc - but the winning game at present is Google, a search function serving low rent classified Ads (but maximising their value via auction) at very low cost.

Bear in mind that Yahoo et al ruled the roost for about 7 years, Google is in its year 6, so its quite likely that by 2015 it will be something other than Google in this space - we are already seeing attacks on their aggregation model by competing search engines and new aggregators suc as social networks.

Media Value Chains - Future Scenarios

In our work for the Telco 2.0 Initiative, we identified 3 sets of players going forward:

- Old Media - they will suffer a collapse in their existing revenues, mainly because....

- ...Pirate World is giving away things for free today, by playing fast and loose with other people's IP and being funded by VC's and Other People's capital, and...

- ...some New Media Players (eg Google, Apple) are making money at one point in the value chain and using it to subsidise and disrupt others (eg Google funding YouTube)

The issue the New Media Playesr face is that in the early days they don't make a lot of money, event though they disrupt the Old Media (especially if they indulge in pirate tactics). The risk they face is that after the "Freeconomic giveaway" stage, if there is not a viable cashflow positive business there then they die when VC etc funding stops (or in the case of something like a YouTube, if they grow too large to subsidise).

Media Value Chains - Predicted Actions

The Old Order will use its muscle to maintain control of its stream of value:

- Re-establish content rights
- Maintain control on sources of funding (Ads, Subscription)

The Pirate World will attempt to push its advantages to teh Max

- Argue for No control of rights, Free wins
- Obtain as much Offset-based funding as possible

The New Order will try and reset the game in its favour by lobbtying hard for things like:

- New copyright model allows pricing control by new aggregators / creators
- Migrating control on sources of funding (Ads, Subscription)

FreeConomics must #Fail

"Free" is a great way to grab market share and disrupt incumbents, but its a lousy way to keep a sustainable business going. Those that rely on FreeConomics but are then unable to wean themselves off it must fail when they get too large to support, as noted above

The Apple Play....

Apple, with the iPod and now iPhone, uses control of the customer distribution device to control the upstream players and dictate its terms. Planet Mobile did this but was cr*p at giving its customers what they wanted, allowing Apple to enter. Planet Internet cannot do this as the CPE devices are relatively open by comparison. Not only that, but people are used to paying for Planet Mobile content but not for Planet Internet content.

....and the Bandwagon

Of course, every media and technology company on the planet saw this and now we have devices in profusion, from Kindles to iPads, all praying that they can be the next iPhone and persuade the punter that they are really mobiles and that said punter should pay again for the content and services.

The problem with this is it dilutes value to the customer - if I have to have a Netbook, Kindle, iPhone, iPod, Whatever to get bits of content then that is a lousy value proposition. That is the flaw in teh Planet Mobile argument for example - because there are so many incompatible platforms, content production is costly, ergo there is little delightful content.

Winners will thus be the ones who can aggregate and integrate across a number of these channels (did someone say Apple?)

Endgame, This Game

The Print Media is now attempting to re-establishing control by erecting gateways to its content. Some will success, some will not, depending on the content and what value can be added

So what about Print Media?

This is the standard 2x2 of our view on media future - essentially value is created in media in 2 ways - either content is inherently valuable (read: unique) or the organisation can add value to the data in some other way (archives, speed, metadata etc). So, the 2x2 says that:

- Generic, No value add - the data the only real choice is to grab a large audience (typically by aggregating a smorgasbord of stuff, as Newspapers and Portals do) and try and make money by a combination of Ads, Datamining and attracting offset funding.

- Generic, but value can be added - in this scenario some benefit can be gleaned from the added value and its probably here that Freemium models will work (ie a small % pay a prtemium for teh added value content). Typical of this is a social network giving higer levels of access or permissions to paying users (FriendFinder and other dating sites do this), or a newspaper giving access to archives.

- Unique, but No Value Ad - I would class teh WSJ and Financial Times basic reporting here - it is unique, its worth something, so some sort of paywall for some of the content will exist but it can't be too high as the stuff is not that valuable. One could argue its the same as a Freemium model but I think in this case the proportion of free-payers is much smaller (eg FT only gives 10 articles a month for free)

- Unique, with Value Add - this is the world of subscription economics. The Lancet is in here, as is Bloomberg etc - but these are few and far between.

The real skill going forward will be to create valuable services from less rareified data. Thanks also to Skillset for hostiing it.

This is the script - Google's Android takes the place of the IBM PC/MS-DOS play (DOS, for the yoof, was the first Microsoft PC Operating System*, wot came before Windows) in the emerging Smartphone market, knocking out the others and pegging Apple back to its typical 15-20% of any computing market (of the highest margin gear, of course). Figures recently released show Android has doubled in share from 2.7% of the market to 5%, against iPhone's 25% and Blackberry's (read CP/M) 42% (see above)

Is this possible? Well, one person who I trust reviewed his experience of the AndroidoPhone on Twitter:

cluttered ui which punishes mistakes. forces you to learn new non- obvious interactions. screen doesn't work in daylight. no apps

Which he followed up with:

Not an android developer? get an iPhone

However, according to the article quoted above Android is the second most desired platform after the Apple now. So can it play the IBM/DOS role? PR spin or reality? Three things here:

- it seems the Android OS/UI is as user hostile as DOS ever was, so no barrier there . The difference was that compared to what came before you could do a lot more, on more powerful kit, with DOS. IBM's killer play was the PC with (gasp) 10Mb Hard disk at a decent price. Everyone had to have it!

- in the DOS/Apple wars, the DOS platform was open, Apple was closed so the developers flocked to DOS and unseated Apple, groovy Rip-Off-The-Wall Ads or not. This time round, Apple has learned the lesson so it has a massive community of developers building Apps already.

- Early DOS machines were sold by retailers with lots of support, which punters loved. Google has used more of a BOFO approach (Buy One and F*ck Off) which has not won friends and influenced enemies as much

- Microsoft were not The Borg at the time, they were seen - believe it or not - as quite groovy people. And everyone moaned about Big Blue but respected their ability to build good hardware. Who is the Groovy Guy in the Googlecamp?

In short, for Google to play IBM/MS-DOS and take centre stage this time round is going to be lot harder, as Apple has learned its lessons. If anything, Google seem to be behaving a bit like Apple did in the 1980s - Arrogant attitude, Average kit and no Apps.

Update...and 2 days later, the story hits Techmeme - again, from Ars Tech this time.

*Well, technically DOS belonged to someone else, but MIcrosoft convinced IBM they had it - its a long story of intrigue and so on.....

They say that if Facebook was a country, it would be 350m people and the same size as the USA. Interestingly though, it's social networks break down into a number of regional ones, as noted in the diagram by Pete Warden (see above). He defines 6 distinct regions:

Stayathomia

Stretching from New York to Minnesota, this belt's defining feature is how near most people are to their friends, implying they don't move far. In most cases outside the largest cities, the most common connections are with immediately neighboring cities, and even New York only has one really long-range link in its top 10. Apart from Los Angeles, all of its strong ties are comparatively local.


Dixie

Probably the least surprising of the groupings, the Old South is known for its strong and shared culture, and the pattern of ties I see backs that up. Like Stayathomia, Dixie towns tend to have links mostly to other nearby cities rather than spanning the country. Atlanta is definitely the hub of the network, showing up in the top 5 list of almost every town in the region. Southern Florida is an exception to the cluster, with a lot of connections to the East Coast, presumably sun-seeking refugees.

Greater Texas

Orbiting around Dallas, the ties of the Gulf Coast towns and Oklahoma and Arkansas make them look more Texan than Southern. Unlike Stayathomia, there's a definite central city to this cluster, otherwise most towns just connect to their immediate neighbors.

Mormonia

The only region that's completely surrounded by another cluster, Mormonia mostly consists of Utah towns that are highly connected to each other, with an offshoot in Eastern Idaho. It's worth separating from the rest of the West because of how interwoven the communities are, and how relatively unlikely they are to have friends outside the region.

Nomadic West

The defining feature of this area is how likely even small towns are to be strongly connected to distant cities, it looks like the inhabitants have done a lot of moving around the county. For example, Boise, ID, Bend, OR and Phoenix, AZ all have much wider connections than you'd expect for towns their size:

Socalistan

Sorry Bay Area folks, but LA is definitely the center of gravity for this cluster. Almost everywhere in California and Nevada has links to both LA and SF, but LA is usually first. Part of that may be due to the way the cities are split up, but in tribute to the 8 years I spent there, I christened it Socalistan. Californians outside the super-cities tend to be most connected to other Californians, making almost as tight a cluster as Greater Texas.

Pacifica

The most boring of the clusters, the area around Seattle is disappointingly average. Tightly connected to each other, it doesn't look like Washingtonians are big travelers compared to the rest of the West, even though a lot of them claim to need a vacation!

I guess Amishia doesn't make it as they don't have the Interenetz

Update 6 April - the guy who did this is being sued by Facebook but that doesn't solve the problem - Fast Company:

Facebook was none too pleased: They first requested a thorough scrubbing of the data, to eliminate any personal info that might be used by spammers. And eventually, they simply threatened to sue Warden, unless he deleted all the data. They were alleging a terms of service violation. Warden didn't have any money to fight the suit, so he deleted the data.

......

"To the many researchers I've disappointed, there's a whole world of similar data available from other sources too. By downloading the Google Profile crawling code you can build your own data set, and it's easy enough to build something similar for Twitter. I'm already in the middle of some new research based on public Buzz information, so this won't be stopping my work."

Not only can one tell a lot about you by the searches you make, seems a lot can also be deduced from the search engine we use, as a WPP survey of 17,000 US internet users shows - Ad Age:

What does your search engine say about you? Well, if it's Bing, you're probably an early adopter, but you also visit, shop and ultimately make purchases from Walmart more than other search-engine users. Google searchers, on the other hand, are partial to Target and Amazon, and Yahoo searchers have a strong preference for wireless service from AT&T and Sprint.

Google users are more likely to book a flight online at JetBlue or make a reservation on Hotwire. They are also more likely to do research on a Lexus, while Bing users tend more toward Toyota. Aside from uncovering the research and purchasing habits of consumers, the study claims to have identified a host of demographic and psychographic information on search-engine users.

For instance, AOL customers feel less intellectual than their peers, are 55 and older, spend their money more responsibly, want to blend in to the crowd, feel like they've gotten a raw deal out of life, expect less from their future and, believe it or not, still use dial-up modems. Bing users are middle-aged, highly educated tech-savvy individuals who consider themselves to be average and spend more than 10 hours a week online.

Googlers tend to be the average internet Joe, according to the study. The search leader's loyalists are conventional people yet open to trying new things, believe in following rules and don't consider themselves any smarter or less intelligent than the person next to them. Yahoo users tend to be 55-plus, reserved and a less-independent group with little faith in imagination. They feel they have little control over their future and are skeptical and cautious of new or untried ideas.

Fascinating. I've used Dogpile for nigh on 10 years, it searches all the other engines and aggregates their result for you. I love the "parasite search engine" design (I wonder what that says about me ). Interesting that it hasn't really taken off though.

Update - realised there is a bigger story here. In an age where we see Google moving to mainstream advertising at the Superbowl (while Pepsi eschews it), clearly which search engine you use is becoming as much a branding battle as for any other commodity product - ie there is little inherent technical differentiation left. Increasingly search engines will try and identify demographics they want for Advertising purposes, and set out their brands to recruit them. Next step is diversofoed brands for different segments - Google Lite, Bing Premier etc - and celebrity sponsorship. Oh joy.....