Digital ID Coach » friends/family

PII 2011: Social Sharing and the Data-Driven Economy

coach — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 21:48:59 +0000

On this panel: Kara Swisher, All Things D, moderates panel with Jim Adler, Chief Privacy Officer, Intellus, David Glazer, Director of Engineering at Google (Plus), Roger McNamee, musician and Elevation Partners, and Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures.

Kara: We’ll be talking about implications of social sharing for business. Where is the business of social sharing? Fred: Facebook plus, FB is the largest platform but not the only. There will continue to be lots of important social platforms outside of FB. Roger: period of rapid adoption for first 2 years, FB has won the largest share. Cost of entry is high, social is everywhere. David: once things are that way they tend to stay that way? We didn’t name Google Plus “new, now, here” – two things we wanted to do: existing products could be done better, we saw a lot of our products would be better with baked-in sharing. Wanted to improve overall connected state. Jim: things swing from open to closed and back. Fred: top things include Tumblr, wouldn’t be in the picture but for… Mobile is really important. It’s not game over. FB is dominant but market is not devoid of opportunities. Roger: web as an app, number is going to 70% (of what?). Who is going to control the user experience? Things are not shipping on mobile. FB for many people is going to be the platform; connect then identity. Jim: we’re in the process of mapping humanity online. This is a big one. It really does a disservice to say it’s done. How are we mapping? What’s appropriate? rights? mapping social rituals. Of course there will be platforms, and we’re just getting started.

Kara: what are the key critical trends? Jim: we’re going through a new reality, reputation online, a 360 view. You can now reach across time/space. It takes a village, and we’re doing this one hut at a time, building intimate connections. David: I agree with mobile, always on. Shift to living in a world where we’re always on, leaking and sharing, what do we do with that? Kara; continuous partial attention? David: yes, how subconscious should we be? Shift to assuming the camera is always rolling. Jim: this is something we need to get use to. David: there are “many publics” (Kevin Marks said this first). Fred: Tablet is interesting. People are starting to build natively for tablets. More companies are coming to us where FB is the only login experience. This will accrue tremendous value to FB, that’s not really a good thing, especially for the developer (or the users!).

Kara: mobile platforms? Roger: Facebook and Yelp as mobile. Time to market. The thing that really scares me: we’ve lived in a world where people have not been honest with each other for too long. Income gap based on proprietary access to opportunities. Big corps (including telcos) are absolutely using our data. Jim: we’re moving through a threshold. FB is assumed to be public but it’s mostly private. (?) Social media has been like Lake Wobegone, was powerful but there’s going to be interesting consequences: what do people know about me? New product where people can know what we know about them. Too voyeuristic, not narcissistic enough.

Kara: what is sharing now? Fred: when you go out on Friday night, there’s a tremendous amount of sharing going on. Social media is doing the sort of the same thing. This morning was sad about Zucotti Park, human nature to want to share. My kids are much more aware of how to use the technology. David: the way my kids use “stalker” has become a casual term. Fred: I stalk my kids on FB every day, they know it. Jim: Kids know the difference between public and public/private spaces, they’re much more nuanced about how they approach the world. Fred: we’re doing this hire, looking at all of the social media resources of potential candidates. Next generation is using tools to make “resumes” more interesting.

Kara: If FB is the main stalking platform, what are the main business opportunities? Roger: social is today what “new media” is in 1987. My sense: new environment (half cell phones, half computers) is “hypernet” with totally different economic players. Running out of wireless bandwidth, need to replace infrastructure in cellular. Apple’s position is really unstable, capturing the value through hardware. HTML5 has opportunities to change the rules of the game. Safari gets 100% of development today, but notion of one company capturing all the value needs to change. Gigantic change wave of the hypernet, based on whitespace and digital TV spectrum. Instagram is fun but not important.

Kara to David: Google Plus? Tried to have a quiet debut. “We shipped plus, now we’re shipping the Google.” Two things we want to solve: one is how can we make YouTube, Blogger better by making it more social. Fred: Socialization of Google and mobile apps: eventually they’ll get it right but it’s crazy to think of it as a Facebook killer. Roger: maybe a Twitter killer, because they captured the “twitteratti” early on. Costs zero to add a Plus button. Jim: the big opportunity is what you can do with data. Focus on private data becoming public: more frictionless sharing. Understanding data is hugely disruptive. Use cases, danger is in inappropriate use. How do we use the public data to infer amazing things about each other?

Kara: Are you investing in data companies? Fred: we like to invest in platforms that have a lot of data and can use it to do things natively on the platform. We’re not investing in capturing data for 3rd party things. Kara: How do you look at Twitter? Fred: my favorite platform of all, but not as an investor–I connect to people there (@FredWilson has over 200K followers). It’s all public, everyone knows that.

Roger: two things that Apple did wrong: 1) fight with amazon over one-click, 2) if they get AppleTV right, all they have to do is in-app purchases back. Fire is not a great tablet. Fred: it’s a Kindle with the web on it. Roger: yeah. Nook is much cooler.

Questions.

Trust, and Using You

coach — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 20:29:40 +0000

Click for Steve's tutorial

Steve Woodruff brings us a quick tutorial on how to reset LinkedIn’s new “Social Advertising” setting:

Apparently, LinkedIn has recently done us the “favor” of having a default setting whereby our names and photos can be used for third-party advertising. A friend forwarded me this alert (from a friend, from a friend…) this morning.

Since Facebook has been such a good model of creative “reuse” of our personal information, and consequent destruction of personal trust in social settings, it seems corporately fitting that LinkedIn would try the same.

Coaching moment: Doesn’t it bother you when people make self-serving assumptions about what you want to share with others? True, you did voluntarily share this information, but shouldn’t you be able to express clear limits on how this shared information is used—before it’s misused? I think so!

The Challenge of Identity

coach — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 18:28:57 +0000

Eye See You (peasap)

Professor Michael Wesch (The Machine is Us/ing Us) wrote a thoughtful post in which he reflects on where we’ve been over the last 20 years and where we are now. In reflecting on familiar themes over time, he noted “authenticity” is the core challenge that we continue to struggle with. “The ethic of authenticity was born in the late 18th century and persists to this day. Being “authentic” requires us to “find ourselves,” “get in touch with our inner lives,” and act from our “core,” says Wesch. Our world, our culture, and our technologies are not yet rising to assist with this challenge. He continues,

But there are tensions at work within this quest for identity and recognition. Authenticity demands an entirely original creation – which frequently involves opposition to society. Yet at the same time our creations cannot be meaningful without being open to the meaning systems created and sustained by society. We never quite feel like we have “found ourselves.” Just when we think we know who we are the doubts start to creep in: Is this really the real me? Or have I been duped by society? Or we find ourselves so on the margins that we feel a loss of meaning and purpose. Most of us sway between these poles, always struggling to find who we really are. The “technologies of saturation” only amplify these issues by providing us with countless options, so that each self we portray or become “cries out for an alternative, points to a missed potential, or mocks the chosen action for its triviality … the postmodern being is a restless nomad” (Gergen).

The road ahead is no less fraught with mysterious and confounding perils. The “user-driven” movement that I am an active supporter of will, possibly by necessity, start out as a not-yet-meaningful collection of data bits, evidence of our connections and directions. We will still need to find a way to step back and take it in, as we do a striking piece of art. The reverberance, our inner feelings and priorities, are not a common language between us or even secretly to ourselves.

Coaching moment: What’s the most important thing that you want people to know about you? What are your top five? List them on a piece of paper. Tomorrow, review your list. Think about ways in which you support or undermine these messages. Think about ways in which technology supports or undermines your messages. What could be different, and how?

Real Names

coach — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 08:01:54 +0000

Danah Boyd is an insightful researcher. She just wrote a post called “Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power in which she takes Google to task for their changing policies and rather abrupt practice of kicking people off of Google Plus. I agree that being arbitrary is an abuse of power when it affects people so strongly (disabling an account removes the use of all services, not just Google Plus). However, there are two kinds of power: shared, and proprietary.

Google, along with Facebook, Twitter, and in fact nearly all Internet-based services (Amazon, eBay, your Internet service provider, etc.), are proprietary. These services are run by companies that:

are private or beholden to shareholders (their “business model”),
have one-sided Terms of Service and Policy documents that users are required to agree to, and
are based on the selective delivery of their user base to their customers (usually advertisers).

A striking characteristic of these businesses is that they have a practice of reducing things to black and white. Our chosen (registered) name “is” or “is not” really us. See Doc’s post A Sense of Bewronging for more thought on this. In a simplified (business) sense, it is an abuse of social power to declare that many of us are not who we say we are, even if we’re known to many others by our chosen registered name.

Contrast this with a shared power model, like a commons, or services that are implemented according to open standards. The underlying Internet protocols (the apache web server, sendmail, TCP/IP, etc.) are not owned by anyone, everybody can use them, and anybody can improve them. These resources are shared—no terms of service is required to use the Internet or email with any device you choose, with any compatible software, from any location that has access. “Commons” is where you can be who you are, no matter what name you go by.

Coaching moment: This may be a non-issue for some. I have friends that use their name to create a “brand” for themselves—so people will recognize them everywhere, and know what they’re about. However, that’s not an option for people in sensitive situations. Think of it this way: Everyone has a moment when they choose not to disclose some bit of information to the world. Sometimes it’s a name. That’s not a bad thing, and it should be a choice.

Platform vs Relationships

coach — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:32:39 +0000

A little while ago, Scott Adams wrote his thoughts about FutureMe and how it might become a Facebook killer. Adams pointed out that information about our past–what we’ve already done–is useful, but less so than what we’re looking to do in the future. He suggests a new fourth party (user-driven) service:

The interface for Futureme is essentially a calendar, much like Outlook. But it would include extra layers for hopes and goals that don’t have specific dates attached.

For every entry to your Futureme calendar, you specify who can see it, including advertisers. If you allow advertisers a glimpse of a specific plan, it would be strictly anonymous. Advertisers could then feed you ads specific to your plan, while not knowing who they sent it to. The Futureme service would be the intermediary.

Now imagine that you never have to see any of the incoming ads except by choice. If you plan to buy a truck in a month, you would need to click on that entry to see which local truck advertisements have been matched to your plans. This model turns advertising from a nuisance into a tool. You‘d never see an ad on Futureme that wasn’t relevant to your specific plans.

The biggest benefit of the system could come from your network of friends and business associates. Suppose you post on the system that you would like to see a Bon Jovi concert sometime in the next year. Now your friends – the ones you specify to see this specific plan – can decide if they want in on it. Maybe someone you know can get free tickets, and someone has a van and is willing to be the designated driver. Maybe someone has a contact that can get you backstage passes. By broadcasting your plan, you make it possible for others to improve your plan.

Conversely, if you plan to do something stupid, your contacts have time to talk you out of it or suggest a superior alternative.

The great thing about Adams’ plan is that it shows how our data and online presence can be user-driven–meaning we make choices about who gets to see what. Moreover, by identifying Futureme as an intermediary on the user side, Adams has described a fourth-party service. (I’m guessing that Adams is intending this to be on the user side, or it can’t really live up to the promise of being a “Facebook killer.” I don’t know of any way at this time to be a perfectly neutral intermediary, so he likely has to fall on one side or the other.)

Coaching moment: I’d like to point out a significant distinction here between platforms and relationships. Adams is apparently describing a platform for social interaction and commercial services. This is also the Facebook model. On Facebook, someone else (the shareholders of Facebook) owns your user data and service usage logs. Facebook is in control. As we’ve seen before, it’s one thing to set your privacy wishes, but if Facebook is calling the shots, the rules can be changed anytime. Moreover, you’re always under surveillance whether you knowingly agree to that or not.

Now consider the idea of personal data stores where you control your data in any way you wish, using software tools that you choose, on hardware that you own (or not), at any time or under circumstances that you want. Nobody gets access that you don’t authorize. Wouldn’t that be something?

On public & personal manipulation

coach — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 21:07:27 +0000

Social networks are great places to share links, photos, status updates, and more. It often appears that we are the beneficiaries of our personal information sharing. However, we are not the only ones. A much greater benefit accrues to an industry that is, at its core, about public manipulation. Whether we want or need something that they’re pushing is not the point; this is about moving goods, selling units, enhancing commerce and the GDP.

What does this industry see in us (besides our wallet)?

Coaching moment: As a culture, we’ve never been in a position before where we needed to be so self-aware about our communications. We’ve never been so open and vulnerable to the slings and arrows of others. Like any profitable middleman, the Advertising/Marketing Industry justifies its existence in ways that extract a value from our shared information. Their efforts target us with more effective and personally customized messages, but at many different costs to us.

Does advertising make us better people? Does it contribute to more enlightened culture? A better world? All arguable points.

How does it benefit you? What personal information are you willing to give away in support of this industry? Have you found a balance between your personal interests and the influence of others? Do you like television and magazine ads, or highway billboards?

Yes, there are tradeoffs with advertising. I’m just asking if you like these things as a mode of communication. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Creative commons photo credit: x-ray delta one on flickr. Thanks!

I Shared What?!?

coach — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 18:09:04 +0000

Voluntary personal information sharing comes naturally to most of us. When given an opportunity, a few tools, and a community in which we can share our most intimate details, many people don’t hesitate to document their every movement and mood. We readily identify our friends and our preferences, and even document our vices.

Facebook is the place right now where a great many people share the most detailed information about themselves. Are you on Facebook? If so, you might be interested in a new site called I Shared What?!? that will open a window for you into what Facebook sees–and lets others see.

Coaching moment: Did you know you were sharing this much information? Do you know who has access to it, for how long, and for what purposes? Does this make you uncomfortable? Why?

Agreeing with Maureen’s Manifesto

coach — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 06:04:56 +0000

Now and then I run into someone’s thinking and notice that I’m nodding and laughing while I’m reading it. So it goes with Maureen Johnson’s Manifesto: I Am Not a Brand. I find that her message of being yourself, not being there to sell yourself, is what’s uncommon in many “social media” conversations. It’s not about turning the whole connected world into one huge commercial interruption. Read the whole post. It’s much more than this little bit:

I think the divide is pretty basic. I think there are people out there who see the Internet as a way of employing the same old techniques of SHILL, SHILL, SHILL. A hundred years ago, they would have rolled up to you in a wagon, shouting about their tonic. Fifty years ago, they would have rolled their vacuum cleaners up to your door.

The other side, the side I am on, is the one that sees an organic Internet full of people. Sure, when I have a book come out, I will often say, “Please, could you buy a copy? I need to buy food and Post-it notes and hamsters.” But in reality, I wouldn’t suggest it if I didn’t think you would like it. I have a lot of fun writing my books, and hey, if you can buy one, great! I think it’s just as great if you take it out of the library. I write because I actually like doing it, and through some miracle of science, I get paid, so wayhay!

Coaching moment: It’s important to take a minute and think about what great things computers, networks, social media, and other interactions with technology bring to you. Is it about being more of who you are? Well, yes it is. It’s also about who your friends, family, and colleagues are. It’s a shared environment. Not very many people will stand for others who don’t listen or hear, where the conversation is only one way. How long would you put up with it?

Creative commons photo credit: [puamelia] on Flickr. Thanks!

Update: Love Doc Searls post on this too.

IIWX: The Videos

coach — Wed, 19 May 2010 14:12:03 +0000

This year I’ve been scrambling between sessions that start and end with no break in between. Many of the videos are missing the first few minutes; the whole of the sessions are here. I’ll be uploading these over the next couple of days as my net access is severely constrained. One might reasonably think that the Computer History Museum–in the heart of Silicon Valley–would have good wireless connectivity, but I’ve seen too many jokes about their connecting a 300 baud modem to the wireless router. After all, it is history.

Here are my video archives.

My thanks to TubeMogul for distributing these videos, and to Blip.tv for hosting them all.