broadstuff

Two Facebook stories today were gloriously ironic:

Do unto others...then sue!

Facebook has sued Power.com for setting up a Meta SocNet and coming between them and their users by allowing Power users to access all their multiple web media interests (their socnets, photos etc etc) via giving their various passwords to Power's "one Site to bind 'em all" website. Facebook's play is akin to asking music lovers to buy a music playing device from every label they buy music from. The irony of course is that this is the same company that, with Facebook Connect, is trying to do much the same with many other services.

I await with interest the surfeit of MetaSocNets that will now predictably emerge in 2009, but without making Power.com's main error of having an office in the US - fighting the lawsuit in their native Brazil would have been far more entertaining.

A Tale of Two Titties

When is a breast a porn pic and when not has been exercising the fevered minds of the Facebookers over the last few days, as they banned pics of women breastfeeding their babies if the areoles were exposed and thus started a major run in with the Breast is Best groups (the baby feeding groups, not the Big n Bouncy adult special interest ones that is .

Apparently its all to protect the sensitivities of the youngsters who access the site. As if they have to go to pix of Facebook mums breastfeeding to get their boobfixes?

I was reading Louis Gray's 10 Tech Predictions for 2009, and while I think they are all very reasonable ideas (especially real time systems) , they are really (and sadly) relegated to sideshows by another event.

The big thing that happened this year was The Crunch, and just about all Tech events next year will be driven by the impact of markets and cash drying up!

But, as Om Malik notes, the only solid outcome we have seen so far is an almost reckless use of citizen's money to prop up businesses that really, but for the (alleged) mass impact on the global economy, should be left to fail and let the devil take their hindquarters. As Om writes.

In offering money to bailout failed bankers who couldn’t bank, car makers who couldn’t make good cars and chipmakers who have seemingly no business acumen, we stood on the top of the roofs and said: Mediocrity is OK. In the meantime, not one person has been held accountable for bringing fiscal, moral and social Armageddon to our doorstep.

And, I am told by several little birds, that many of these bankers (typically below CXO level, where the public gaze falls) are still rewarding themselves with bonuses this year for this failure.

So how are We the People, whose future income is now being taken and "redistributed" right now to the same people who made all these mistakes, going to control this; to oversee the clear beginnings of - well, lets still call it non-optimal distribution, rather than pork barrel corruption and incompetence?

Social media, in all its guises, has proven itself in 2008 to be very good at fighting for causes - many of them specious causes, it is true - but very powerful nonetheless.

So to my mind, the real challenge for social media in 2009 is to show how it can be used to help We The People manage our own money to the extent that it isn't p*ssed down the same drains where (our) good money went!

If all its good for is organising Frat Boy parties and recording photos of drunk people, or 140 character haikus of your lunch time diet, then what - in this post Crunch world - is its point exactly?

You may feel the above statements are somewhat unfair, but my main point is that we are in post bubble times, so my big prediction is that the frothy bits of bubblenomics will start to unwind in 2009.

Or, put it another way - for Social Media, given that in the Post Crunch world there is much less Adspend and speculative capital around, where will it create sufficient value for people to want to pay for it in one way or another? And if its no good for the big socially mediated issues emerging, then what good is it?

Update - Social media used for responsible applications - what was I thinking

How much leisure time do you spend on the internet? In the UK, its the housewives that are on the net the most, reports the BBC:

A survey of more than 27,000 web users in 16 countries has shown that the Chinese spend the largest fraction of their leisure time online. (see below)

However, UK housewives spend even more than China's average - 47%.

In the UK, a breakdown by occupation shows striking differences in the responses; students spend 39%, more than the unemployed (32%) but still far less than housewives.

There are some other nuggets:

However, when asked the question "Have you ever arranged to meet in person people who you've met through the internet?", Germans came out on top with a whopping 76% saying yes.

The Chinese were at the bottom of the 16-strong list, at 40% - still a reasonable fraction reporting they had crossed from online life into real life.

The average across all countries was 60% having met online friends face-to-face; the UK was just below that figure at 58%.

Unfortunately, the one missing piece of data is how much leisure time a Chinese vs say a British Housewife has in net hours.

Did a quick analysis of the Techmeme Top 10 Stories for 2008, split by companyt type (Old Co's New Co,s) and what they were doing (Old tricks, New Tricks).



The Top 10 are (to precis):

1. Microsoft: Microsoft Proposes Acquisition of Yahoo! for $31 per Share

2. Apple: Apple Announces Its Last Year at Macworld

3. Philipp Lenssen / Google Blogoscoped: Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project

4. Apple Developer Connection: To Our Developers - Apple revised its developer terms to rescind a cumbersome non-disclosure agreement

5. John Markoff / New York Times: Google Is Taking Questions (Spoken, via iPhone)

6. Charlie Demerjian / Inquirer: Google to buy Valve (games maker)

7. Wall Street Journal: Music Industry to Abandon Mass Suits

8. Michael Arrington / TechCrunch: Google, Microsoft Said To Be Preparing Bids For Digg

9. Mike Nash / Windows Vista Team Blog: Introducing Windows 7

10. Jesusdiaz / Gizmodo: iPhone 3G Launch Date Confirmed

As you can see - mainly big old dogs trying to get into new tricks.

Just to echo something Fred Wilson noted that on his blog, the commenting is getting almost salon-like:

....there's this great back and forth between two frequent commenters about the bank panic of 1907 and JP Morgan's role in it. That's the kind of conversation that just didn't exist for most people pre-Internet. You could get it in college dorms, bars and coffee shops in the right towns and cities to some degree, but certainly not late at night in your pajamas in your studio apartment.

I think we are becoming a more literate and conversational society because of the internet. And the tools aren't there to fully leverage this activity.

Now Fred named his post "Correspondence Is Making A Comeback" and I wanted to note two other things I've read recently:

- Letter writing is making a comeback in this digital age
- Written CV's are seen as more valuable han email ones by some head hunters

(This maps to the Return of Vinyl in an mp3 world)

The game theory would argue that this is so as actually writing something has a higher transaction cost than banging off some digital text and hitting "send", and game theorists are keen on seeing "strong tells" - signs of strong commitment - in signalling intent.

The other thing I'd note, in London anyway, is that UK bloggers have been drawn to meet each other in person in te Coffee Shops of London (hence the Tuttle Club) and now even Micro-Bloggers are getting together (at Twinterval, hardly a micro-bash)

Fascinating debate raging on Techmeme about whether Twitter should be able to search by number of "follows" (as a proxy for authority). At first glance its a "what's the issue here"?. After all, Google pretty much runs its page ranking off links, and Technorati uses links to a blog over a last 6 month period to rank its authority.

So why all the fuss, why so many coming out against it?

Firstly, its worth looking at why its being propesed - Loic leMeur organised a major conference (Le Web), the reaction to which was, well, controversial - and he clearly wanted to search Twitter to find the individuals who were the most followed and try to neutralise them where news was bad. Problem was, sifting through 6,000 odd comments is non trivial (though I must say it can't be that hard to build a routine that would map identity of commentators in a particular stream by number of followers*.)

He gives away the Web 2.0 game a bit when he says:

“We’re not equal on Twitter, as we’re not equal on blogs and on the web”

Ooops - the Kool Aid packet preaches that the Web 2.0 media is Democratic, not Feudal. Shame on you for giving the game away Loic

The key arguments against this sort of search are fundamentally that:

(i) People who have little knowledge on a topic, but high overall authority, will win out over those with real knowledge (an issue we pointed to in this article about the risks of User Generated Content drowning in its own noise) to the eventual detriment of the overall ecosystem

(ii) This sort of dynamic in search will drive more "super user" wannabees to attempt to add more users - ie the system will be more gamed than before, reducing the experience and its democratic ethos.

(iii) The service is locked into early adopter highly linked users - ie its the old "rich get richer" issue in social nets - the hit head gains, the long tail is irrelevant.

Realistically, since Twitter is increasingly being seen as email 2.0, PR/Marketing people will write these sort of routines, its arrival is inevitable. And judging by the jostling that goes on every time a new status list on Twitter is shown, the number of players will be huge, despite pious declarations to the contrary.

However, this should not be the only way to search people on any system. The endgame will be the ability to search across a wider number of user volunteered parameters (location, people you follow, as examples), not just followers.

* And indeed, 24 hours later, there was one.....

Thanks to the dwarves under the mountain at NORAD and assiduous filming by faeries globally using modern mobile video systems, it is possible to see Santa Claus in flight. Proof to all children that the story is real!

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year (We'll all need it!)

Friendfinder Networks, owner of Penthouse and web properties such as Adult FriendFinder and various other social media type sites, is filing for a $500m IPO.

Why now? This can't be the best of times to tap the equity markets!

It would appear - reading the prospectus for the IPO - that they have a rather large lump of debt that needs paying off.

As one of the TechCrunch commentators observes, when Penthouse bought FriendFinder etc, they funded it mainly with Notes. Now the company is looking to go public to raise money to pay off the previous owners. In addition there is a $60M+ hole because the previous owners did not bill or pay VAT in Europe.

As best I can work out from a quick once over of the numbers, they are slowly bleeding money to service the debt, and there is not a lot of cash to provide a runway. Not good medium term.

But hey, why go for an IPO while the US Govt. is giving bailouts to industries in real trouble (and boy is the porn industry in real trouble - user degenerate content is really stripping its revenues!)

More interesting though is the raft of data about the operations of what is an early day social networking system - and interestingly for our times, an early day online Freemium play. Roughly 77% of the money comes from various paying members grades, which - reading the prospectus - seem to comprise of about comprise of about 950,000 users of a total of 270m (of which a high proportion are probably defunct say 27m, gives about 2-3% of members generating the bulk of the revenues).

Payment gives you a higher level of visibility (as it were) of other members' (as it were) details and access to more site functionality. The probable model for today's SocNet crop to follow in fact.

One of the prime tenets of the Web 2.0 movement has been the democratisation of content creation, leading to Time Magazine's declaration of 2006's Personality of the Year being YOU! However, two years on I have been reflecting on what this means, and if one looks at it empirically, there seem to be two major trends:

- An expansion in the copying of copyrighted works
- An expansion in the amount of cr*p content

I suspect that one begets the other.

YOU! are the problem.

Just as all Welshmen can sing, but not all should, we get to the situation where although all people can blog / twitter / etc, when it comes to many things not all should either - it merely fills up the bandwidth with noise, reducing the signal. (This, we suspect, explains the increasing use of purloined copyright content - it is higher quality and thus more likely to be consumed, but by and large costs nothing to copy and send today)

Our hypothesis is that in essence, UGC is an inefficiently structured system - it is manageable when small as its benefits (free form expression) outweigh its problems, but as it grows and takes over more and more of the output, its inefficiencies eventually prove its undoing.


Peak UGC

Being of analytical bent I was playing with a way of modelling the Future of User Generated Content and how it may turn out. In effect the "thought experiment" analysis presented here as a result implies that we will probably reach a period (soon?) of Peak UGC, to the point where the signal is lost among the noise. The next development we will probably see is vigorous filtering. The How and where is the interesting thing.

A Hypothetical Model Part 1 - all Commenters are Equal

Firstly, imagine that in this Democratised Media (the mix of mainstream, blogosphere, PR puff, and whatever other media that is Google-able - aka the Goog-o-sphere) that a communication split is such that about 1% of these (User & Other) content Generators will Create and Communicate (aka make a lot of noise), that a further 9% will Comment (aka make some noise) and that 90% will Consume - aka say nothing. ( Ratio follows the emerging rule of thumb for Social Media of 1:9:90 Creator/Commentator/Consumer)

Secondly, imagine also that on any topic you may care to name, this same 1:9:90 split applies to Knowledge - between those who Know a Lot (1%), those who Know Something (9%), and those who Know Nothing about it (90%).

We now assume the total output in the Goog-o-Sphere on any matter is distributed equally according to probability, thus it means only 1% of the Creators know anything about the given topic, but all will Create, Communicate etc.

This gives the following truth table, if we assume All Men(/Women)'s postings Are Equal, in this most Democratic of Media



But let us assume that the vast majority - the Consumers - remain a silent majority and their posts are never made. Thus, ignoring the content theoretically produced by the consumers and summing that of the Communicators and Commentors gives a total of 10% of all possible output is posted. Unfortunately, most of it is by the 90% who know nothing, and 9% by those who only Know Something. Now, if you weight the Know Somethings as being on the button 2/3 of the time, and knowing nothing 1/3 of the time, then you get a Signal to Noise Ratio of 8%

A Hypothetical Model Part 2 - factoring in the A Team

But, I hear you say, this is patently untrue. Being of noble spirit and collegiate mind, surely those who Know Nothing will indeed refrain from holding forth on this Topic du Jour. In a spirit of seasonal generosity I grant you this, though insist that - empirically - it is my observation that some - say about 1/3rd of those who Know Nothing - will weigh in anyway. Assume similarly that not all those who Know Something will also weigh in, but about 2/3rd of them will

Also, we have to factor in the bigger voices the Creators and Communicators have vs the Consumers - so, if we assume the average Consumer has 1 volume point (where this is the reach of their view), then let us assume the Commenter - via twitter, small blog or whatever has 10 x the volume, and the frenetically Communicating Creators Pumps it up a mighty 100x. But given that the Consumer mainly says nowt, we will focus on the Great Communicators and ignore Les Autres. The silent majority will stay that way!

(In other words, Media - even Democratic Media - is more accurately termed Feudal Media - a small number of extremely media rich nobility at the top, a larger group of media bourgeoisie in the middle, and the media peasantry tugging virtual forelocks on the bottom)

This amended Feudal Media truth table is shown below, adjusting the likelihood to comment in the column 2nd left and the Volume of the commentary on the row 2nd from top. We see that the Signal to Noise ratio has doubled to 16%.




(There is, by the way, a lesson to be learned about why heirarchies came about - they are potentially better information processing systems)

Essentially, what user generated content does is to take the workload from the editor, and puts it on the end user in the form of a lower signal to noise ratio that reqires the user to do the filtering and editing. There is a limit to how much time people can spend doing this, however. Attention time has a hard stop.

This, we also contend, is what a Google Search increasingly looks like today - the algorithms reward vessels making a lot of noise, but are unable to discern if those vesels are empty or not. In gfact, much SEO wizardry is essentially trying to portray empty vessels as half full. If you observe the blogosphere you will quickly understand that noisy, empty vessels may gather links as well or even better than those who are In the Know, as they are often playing more populist - aka linkbaiting - cards.

Anyway, at some point the effort involved in deciphering the signal gets too high. Simply stated, a 16% S/N ratio means only 16% of your time spent is gaining useful signal - the rest is wasted.

In other words, at low Signal/Noise ratios, we are not looking at a "River of News" - we are looking at best at a stream of clear signal mostly lost in a vast Sewer of Sh*t. Its not so much a firehose as an effluent outlet pipe.

Now I don't know the exact estimated productivity improvement Google etc has brought in real terms, but lets assume that at some reduced S/N point the average punter says "f*ck this" and goes and does something else. We would contend that 16% S/N ratio is pretty close to that point. (12.5% S/N means for every day worked a useful 1 hour is signal - that, we contend, is roughly equivalent to the world Before Search).


How Shall we Filter

By observation, the forces driving self-moderation by the Know Nothings are being outweighed by the desire to Say Something Anyway (gets googlejuice), to say nothing of the increasing intrusion of PR, commercial blogs, reflecting media (eg FriendFeed etc) and all sorts of other new entrants to the Goog-o-sphere. Thus, we contend, the Signal to Noise ratio is by definition increasingly getting worse, not better.

Hence the urgent need to filter - now the interesting thing about this truth table is it gives some clues as to how to filter. That small % of Very Noisy Know Nothings are easy to identify and a big part of the Noise, and thus culling a small group of voices produces a near doubling of the signal to 29%, as shown below:



This is more like it. Communications theory likes signal to noise ratios of 100%+ (Analog gear likes 400%+, humans are remarkably good filters so need much less, but, as we argue above, eventually the wasted effort is just too large and they will try another way).

One can argue that Social Media is part of the filtering process too, especially of the harder-to-filter remaining know nothing commenting group - but it only really works for incoming stuff, when you go and do historical searches its all there back in the cesspit.

(In)Conclusion

Clearly this is just some (hopefully Know Something) input to the discussion, but what we are showing is this:

- Left to itself and humanity, User Generated Content will kill itself by drowning in its own output.
- Democratised Content is not democratic - a small number of empty vessels create most of the noise
- The "Publish, then Edit" model is eventually unsustainable

The only way to get some form of benefit from the "river of news" is to filter out the cr*p.

- The easiest stuff to filter are the small number of very noisy empty vessels.
- After that, it gets harder to filter - moderation, algorithms, social media are all partial solutions
- It is probably easier at that point to pre-filter the Sewer of Crap - Asymmetrically Subscribe, only go to trusted, edited sites etc
- This is hard enough to do for real time media, but far harder with searched historical media searched via Google etc as it can't - today anyway - Asymmetrically Search
- But it will have to tomorrow. The hard limits to our attention and time to be productive will force this.

Funnily enough, this is good news for edited media - ie good old mainstream media and similar - because one way of "asymmetrically searching" is to not search the whole Sh*t-o-sphere, but just subsectors which have been edited for signal, then published.

Thus, we contend, the UGC "explosion" is an aberration, is probably a temporary phenomenon, and will subside again to a far smaller piece of the pie- largely because the load it puts on the average user is too high for it to be productively sustainable.

Next Installment - Part II - what does User Generated Video look like

I read Seth Godin's Tribes this week. I must admit I couldn't get into it, more because the style of writing (high on emo, low on ano) sends my critical antenna through the ceiling. I enjoy his early work and blog a lot by the way, and he is no fool - so you just know there is something in it. Enter Ian Hughes, who has distilled the core messages here in a form analytical wonks like me prefer - and they are:

Things to do

1. Publish a manifesto (it does not have to be written just known)

2. Make it easy for follower to connect with you

3. Make it easy for followers to connect to one another

4. Realize that money is not the point of a movement, it exists to enable it. The moment you cash out you stunt your movement

5. Track your progress, publicly


Principles

1. transparency is the only option

2. movement needs to be bigger than you

3. movements that grow thrive

4. movements are made most clear when compared to the status quo i.e. when they are noticebly different not the same as another movement

5. exclude outsiders (a powerful force is who is not part of the movement)

6. tearing others down is never as helpful as building followers up

Finding a summary like this is one of the great things about the blogosphere. Saves time and frustration. And you'll never look at some Web Manifesto in quite the same way again