Augemented Social Networking

June 10th, 2009

In The Dirty Little Secret Of The Twitter Elite Mitch Joel writes, “Just because they’re following you on Twitter, it does not mean that they are paying attention to you. ” His conclusion, in the form of a rhetorical question,

The bigger question is this: how much longer can we continue to use the words “Social Media” if every day, the majority of the power users are doing everything they can to filter out and aggregate their personal preferences – essentially rendering them less social?

Stating a conclusion as a rhetorical question certainly shows a lack of commitment to a position, and that is a good thing. Mitch’s point that social media platforms are being used for marketing is not incorrect, what he fails to remember is that these platforms still have, at their very core, a set of one to one connections.

It is very true that Ashton and Oprah can not possibly have a personal relationship to each and every follower, however it is entirely possible that the Ashton and Oprah brands could. This is accomplished via what I will call Augmented Social Networking, and it is still in its infancy. As corporate marketing progresses from a mass media, print and broadcast mode, through intermediate steps, email and finally into social networking the tools that it uses to manage its customer relationship have similarly grown to adapt to the capabilities of social networks. At the very bottom end are the tools like CoTweet currently available to allow companies to share the responsibilities of managing a single Twitter account. At the top end of that spectrum would be a tool like Toucan that allows the integration of Twitter with a customer relationship management platform like Salesforce.

Whether its intelligent agents working in conjunction with existing systems or office assistants using simple tools, Augmented Social Networking allows companies and individuals to establish many meaningful one-to-one personal relationships in place of the former one-to-many relationships. So, in response to the rhetorical question above, social networks will reject power users who do not establish personal relationships. While, for the time being, it may seem productive to have a one-way conversation over a social network, over time those that follow this paradigm are doomed to be filtered themselves.

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Technology Bill of Rights

May 18th, 2009

Paul Venezia of Infoworld has proposed a Bill of Rights for Technology. When naming something a “Bill of Rights” you are attempting to piggy back onto the authority of the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The Bill of Rights was intended to protect individuals from tyrannical governments. As we take a look at Paul’s six Bills let us see if we can figure out who he is protecting us from.

Article 1. Any individual shall be able to choose anonymity when posting to Internet sites

Similar to ensuring Freedom of Speech, yet it doesn’t guarantee the right to speak and anonymity is not a right in the real world. Paul says, “Let’s be straight — if someone absolutely wants to post anonymously, they will find a way do so, whether allowed or not. Thus, the right to basic anonymity should be maintained. Besides, in the vast majority of cases, an anonymous post will still be traceable to some degree by the site admins, but not by the casual reader.” So we don’t really need this right, right?

Article 2. No network provider may constrain or restrict access to the Internet in any way, shape, or form other than agreed-upon access speeds

OK, so a wireless provider can’t block services like video or VoIP that are in direct competition with paid services. This may be OK for common carriers who operate government granted monopolies, but in a free market you should be able to contract for the services you want and not be forced to pay for services you don’t want. Network neutrality is a smokescreen to restrict the rights of the consumers, especially the less tech savvy ones who have no use for the Internet beyond web browsing and email.

Article 3. No individual shall be held liable for effects of malware or malicious code unknowingly run on a personal computer

OK, so the user, the administrator and the malware writer are all exempt from the damages caused by malware. This makes no sense and leads to the situation we are in today where zombies run rampant and email is almost all spam. Let’s start holding people accountable and see if that doesn’t help the situation. If I own a pool I am expected to take reasonable precautions to ensure someone doesn’t accidentally drown, having a computer connected to the Internet should carry the same responsibility. ISPs should be forced to turn off network connections to infected machines.

Article 4. A company that produces and sells closed source software for use on computers shall be responsible for the security of that product, and a user has a right to seek damages in the event of a failure to secure their product

Ignoring for a moment that we just exempted individuals in Article 3, I do not significantly disagree with this statement. We have exempted software providers from ensuring a reasonable level of quality in favor of innovation. Beta products are now released to the public and remain in beta for years. However, the effects of this article could be chilling. The cost of writing software for health and safety related devices is orders of magnitude higher than that of typical software products. Certainly this cost increase would end the availability of computers in the home. The loop hole non-closed source software is clearly anti-business and thus this article clearly denies people the ability to make money by writing software. This article alone if enacted could bring to an end the age of the computer.

Article 5. Any software or hardware used to conduct or support laws and public policy shall be open-source

This article arises from flaws in devices used to produce evidence against them in criminal matters, whether they are brethalyzers or speed cameras. Certainly these devices can be flawed, but is a radar gun inherently less accurate than the estimate made by a patrolman or vice versa? Voting fraud went on before voting machines were invented and why we can hope to minimize it we can’t realistically expect that it is entirely preventable. Calling for open-source is overkill, merely allowing an audit by a certified independent auditor should be sufficient.

Article 6. Any media content legally purchased by an individual shall be available for private use on any device, at any time

Fair use currently gives you the right to make a copy. This does not force the media provider to make it easy for you to make that copy. If someone sells you a book he is not obligated to provide you a digital copy. If he sells you a DRM protected song so that he can make it available to you via the Internet but protect the copyright holders right to unauthorized distribution he is not obligated to give you an unlocked version. If you do not like these terms then you do not have to buy the product. Legal elimination of content protection would kill the innovation of delivery models.

Paul’s bills do not apparently protect us from some overarching government authority. Rather they seem to be designed to strip away the rights of companies to do business as they please. They seem to favor the elite technophiles at the cost of the ordinary user. Tyranny of the geeks is not something that we should welcome, even if the geeks are well meaning they don’t have the moral authority to make decisions for the rest of society.

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When fancy graphics lie…

May 14th, 2009

Take a look at the heat map of proposed Chrysler dealer closures posted by the Wall Street Journal. The graphic is titled “Hardest Hit States”. What States will be hit hardest by this closure? If you included California, Texas or Florida in you analysis then you would probably be mistaken. But it is likely that you missed at least 3 of the top 5, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.

The problem with the WSJ map is that it doesn’t account for either population or availability of other dealers nearby. Something that Chrysler surely considered when creating the list. Simply by factoring in population, a method itself not perfect, we see that the areas losing the most will be rural areas and the rust belt. Areas that will have the least ability to cover the job losses with other industries. A real analysis of the problem should address not only population, but driving time to the nearest alternative dealership and the economic impact to the local community and it’s ability to absorb the losses.

As the Chrysler reorganization moves forward the question to be asked is: “Is Chrysler and, through its approval, the US abandoning a whole segment of the country”? The specific question I am asking now is, “Was the poor use of statistics by the Wall Street Journal intentional to shape opinion or was it merely laziness”?

Below are the top 15 States ranked according to dealerships lost per 1 million people (2008 population numbers):

State Population Dealers Lost Lost/M
ND 641481 8 12.47
WY 532668 5 9.39
WV 1814468 17 9.37
SD 804194 7 8.70
IA 3002555 22 7.33
KS 2802134 16 5.71
MO 5911605 27 4.57
NH 1315809 6 4.56
NE 1783432 8 4.49
PA 12448279 53 4.26
MT 967440 4 4.13
OH 11485910 47 4.09
MI 10003422 40 4.00
LA 4410796 17 3.85
UT 2736424 10 3.65

My thoughts are with those who have learned that their jobs are at risk today. They join many of my friends and some family members who are struggling to find and hold onto employment. We need to pull together and make the best of this situation, our best days are always ahead.

I also have data tables suitable for use with Google Map gadgets if you need them.

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The State of Rich Internet Application Platforms

May 14th, 2009

The following was an internal response to an email about: Times abandons WPF & Silverlight and how it affects Total Training’s plans for delivering video content over the web. It should be noted that Total Training partners with both Adobe and Microsoft and produces training products for the products being discussed. We do not currently offer any Oracle, Java or JavaFX training. I welcome your comments. – Steve

—

The Times is abandoning the WPF & Silverlight because they have to maintain two different code bases, one native application and one browser based. As AIR applications aren’t really native apps in any sense of the concept (security, performance, functionality) they aren’t really getting a better product out of the mix except in the one mentioned area, font rendering.

The Times because it is primarily a text rendering application is less relevant than two other examples, Netflix and MLB. Both Netflix and MLB provide applications that are primarily video and require continuous connection to the Internet.

MLB abandoned Silverlight because it failed to deliver technically. The primary reason that they moved to Flash is because Flash can be installed on the typical workplace desktop without administrative privilege, not so for Silverlight. MLB also got a black eye with their launch that was plagued with problems. However that launch occurred prior to the Olympics. Both MLB and the Olympics really helped MS wring the bugs out of high performance video streaming.

Netflix’s experience has been nearly the opposite of MLB’s. Netflix is, of course, forced into Silverlight because of the DRM capability. Yet they laid off 50 people in their customer support department specifically crediting Silverlight for a reduction in support calls. Netflix had some recent quality issues (now fixed) that the community blamed on Silverlight. Netflix never admitted what was causing those problems.

As I look at the scoreboard now I see the following:

- The promise of WPF/Silverlight combined applications was not realized. Nor has Silverlight brought the power of .NET to web applications.
- The lacks of a Mac native WPF application capability or a supported wrapper for Silverlight leave MS at a disadvantage to Adobe AIR.
- Silverlight’s installation issues are temporary until MS forces Silverlight in through Windows Update, but until then Flash has an advantage for workplace desktop penetration.
- Silverlight is still the only viable DRM platform, this means it should be the de-facto first choice for any video subscription service. MLB is already having piracy issues even with live games, but since these games are broadcast in the clear the need to protect their Internet streams is not critical.
- Flash has a maturity edge over Silverlight on the application components and has closed the gap in terms of media presentation.
- Microsoft will signal full support of Silverlight as it begins to cut all of its applications and services over to it to compete head to head against Google Apps. Once this is done Silverlight will gain significant credibility for use inside the enterprise and will then gain acceptance for outside facing applications, especially at MS primary development shops.

I should also mention that it appears that the Oracle purchase of Sun is likely to kill JavaFX. Even if Oracle doesn’t actually kill it the months of uncertainty during the acquisition will likely prevent any adoption of the platform.

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Interactive Video

May 7th, 2009

What is interactive video? Veeple has a demo marketing video that shows how you can use clickable regions to allow the user to interact with your video. While I think they have a solid product and strategy I think their term clickable video is more appropriate than interactive video.

A truly interactive video would be one that itself changed based on your choices. There have been rich internet applications that have done this previously, specifically I recall a FIOS or U-Verse campaign that linked out to video from different props on a Flash stage. The fault here is that it is not a continuous story and the actors on the Flash stage typically repeat a very lame loop waiting for the next selection.

True interactive video, in my opinion, would be more like the adventure books I read as a child that had a choice at the bottom of each page. The story would continue in a different direction based upon the choice made. This would be an incredibly useful tool for a product selection wizard for example, the video would allow a comprehensive explanation of feature choices and the customer selections would tailor the video presentation to the consumer’s needs. I am excited to think about the possibilities for how that interaction could be implemented. The videos could easily respond to eye tracking or other mechanisms to transparently make decisions.

In the end I wonder if interactive video isn’t an evolutionary dead end. The basic problem with video is that it needs to be recorded and once it has been recorded it is difficult to change. As we move towards realistic digital actors on virtual digital stages, true interactive video will be the ugly stepchild to the video-like rich application.

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Google Voice at work?

May 7th, 2009

Now that I have started to get a handle on using Google Voice for my personal calls I am trying to identify how I can use it for work as well. Integration with our existing PBX has some interesting challenges. I am hoping that other people can provide some insight into how they are using GV to manage both business and non-business voice communications.

Some things I would like to accomplish.

  • Elimination of my work voicemail.
  • Ability to filter out cold sales calls and provide a distinct message.
  • Notification of critical after hours calls
  • One button and scheduled GV forwarding from my office

Some current issues with what is available.

  • GV has no scheduling options for work/non-work hours.
  • If I can’t make my work PBX pass through caller ID then there is no way to differentiate business callers.

So, in Google’s (Grand Central’s) vision you hand out your GV number to everyone and you don’t deal with your internal PBX at all. It’s possible I could reroute my current extension into GV permanently and create a new unlisted extension for myself, but then I have issues with in office calling and transferred calls not to mention losing some of the PBX scheduling functionality.

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Metered Internet Billing

April 23rd, 2009

In a past life, when I computed Internet costs for hosted customers based on their usage, I wrote a paper explaining how 95th percentile billing worked. This type of billing is used for commercial customers and bills for near peak volumes. It is unique in that it allows for a certain amount of unbilled usage spiking. At the time, and I expect even now, few customers truly understand it or know how to tailor their business processes to reduce their Internet bills.

Internet billing is a funny thing. Very few people have an intuitive feel for the units of measurement used, but this in itself is not that unusual. Do you really know how much water your washing machine takes to run a load of laundry or how much electricity your DVR uses when you aren’t watching TV? But the idea that everyone should pay the same amount for electricity and water is clearly not accepted. So why should Internet billing be different?

If we look at common thought at the beginning of the nuclear power age, many experts predicted that electric meters would become extinct. The cost of Nuclear power would be so cheap on a per unit (KWh) basis that measuring it would be pointless. Sadly this vision was not realized. However, it is true for today’s Internet service. The cost of Internet bandwidth is in creating and maintaining a total capacity. The 95th percentile billing used for commercial Internet billing reflects this reality, in its own limited way so does our current residential billing practice. At the lowest tier dial-up providers are still providing low-cost, low-capacity service. As you move up the chain you can find different rate plans from broadband providers for different levels of service. So why has there been a backlash against metered billing plans? Robert Charette offers insight into the issue.

Time Warner’s plan would have charged usage not on their peak consumption, but on their total consumption. This means that Time Warner would not be billing on what it cost to deliver the service, but would be profiting excessively from their most dependent customers. Additionally, at a time when margins are still good on broadband service, their plan was to make more money off the heavy demand customers without passing the savings down to the casual usage customers.

We need to understand that metered billing can be very useful. By aligning metered billing with the true cost of delivering a service we can shape customer behavior through self management instead of using artificial means. Take as an example telephone billing in the past. Usage costs for residential long distance were higher during business hours but cheaper in off peak time. This resulted in users moving their personal calling to off peak times freeing up network capacity for business calls. In this case, the metered billing accurately reflected the age old business principals of supply and demand.

Metered Internet billing should only be applied in the same way. Currently some ISPs use traffic shaping to artificially constrain use during peak demand time. They are forced into this because the user’s have not been induced through the rate structures to either limit their bandwidth usage or to move their activity to off peak time. It is fairly easy to create tools to measure usage and display costs in real-time taking into account peak and non-peak rates. Once presented with that information it would be fairly easy for the users to alter their behavior, moving their file sharing to off peak hours for example. The biggest reason this is not done, in my opinion, is because the 95% of the users who are currently subsidizing the 5% who use 50% of the bandwidth would find out they are being overcharged for their service.

I would ask you to remember the “web hog” commercials of the early 2000′s and the implications that the network didn’t have the capacity for all the activity. With the age of Internet video having arrived it is important that we provide a monetary incentive for ISPs to provide adequate bandwidth yet avoid the pitfalls of the network neutrality mess and ensure that people are paying their fair share. Correctly implemented metered billing accomplishes all of these goals.

In conclusion, a backlash against Time Warner’s plan was a good thing, however metered billing can be a good thing and the correct implementation should be welcomed. However, such billing needs two things to be successful. It needs visible metering so that user’s can conceptualize how their consumption is related to their cost and it needs to be structured to provide an incentive to modify behavior and thus optimize overall network usage.

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Email: No, Disqus: Maybe

April 7th, 2009

I thought I would highlight some new developments in the area’s online news delivery sites. First though some follow up to some previous issues. Back on March 31st I wrote about how both the North County Times and SDNN had implemented widgets for sharing stories. At that time I pointed out some drawbacks in how they worked. Kevin Hall at SDNN responded that they had implemented a temporary workaround for the obscured widget issue and were working on a long term fix. They haven’t yet addressed the long title issue which is certainly a more complex problem. The North County Times has not improved the quality of the content for their AddThis widget either. Both widgets are very similar and vastly superior to the TweetThis WordPress plugin I was using. I have upgraded my blog to use the ShareThis widget based primarily on an evaluation by Vlad Zablotskyy. [Update: Please read Vlad's comment below.]

Previously I reported that pingbacks were not showing up on the SDNN site. After manually posting a link to my blog in a comment and griping about the function not working admin responded that they had been unaware of the issue and would work on getting it fixed in an upcoming release. In the meantime I would like to offer for consideration the solution employed by TechCrunch. They separate comments from pingbacks and trackbacks by placing pingbacks and trackbacks in a section titled Responses. I like this solution for media heavy sites though not necessarily for dinky, unread personal blogs like mine.

In current news, SDNN announced you could sign up to receive a digest of the days most important stories via email. My response was to immediately check http://time.gov to ensure that I hadn’t somehow traveled back in time to 2002. I am certain that their email feature will be useful to a great number of readers. However I believe that their efforts would be more productive if, instead of an email, they provided the next generation of tools. Specifically I think that SDNN needs to get their RSS feeds in order as they are the standard for syndicating content. In that vein I would like to recommend 10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks For WordPress via @miketempleton.

On a more positive note SignOnSanDiego implemented a new comment system from Disqus. I liked the concept so much I followed suit and implemented it here. This comment system allows you to create an account with Disqus that can be used to comment on multiple separate sites. I will be interested to see how this works going forward. I have one major complaint, the same complaint I voice with Twitter. By having an account rather than an open solution there is only a single provider, Disqus, who controls the market. If I can find an open solution, especially one that attempts to be interoperable, I will switch.

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Computers haven’t changed our life significantly

April 3rd, 2009

Arthur Salm, columnist for SDNN, argues that after a period of rapid growth from the early 1800s until 1955 we haven’t made any forward progress. Computers he says, “hadn’t altered the way we live all that much”. Arthur unfortunately appears to have missed that we transitioned from the industrial age to the information age.

He does add a postscript to the story recognizing the societal change that has occurred in that time. I would like to make an argument that computers have had a massive effect on our everyday lives in many different ways. And in fact provided some of the very underpinnings that fomented the changes he does recognize.

Healthcare: Computer modeling is used discover causes and cures of many diseases. We now have access to computer based diagnostic tools such as CAT scans, MRIs, ultrasound. We have reporting systems that allow us to create flu vaccines that get it mostly right months in advance of the flu season. We have sequenced the human genome and should start reaping the rewards of both genetic and stem cell research very soon. Two of the biggest problems we face currently are directly related. Our population is living longer and our healthcare costs are skyrocketing.

Finance: Black Tuesday in 1987 has been blamed on computerized trading. And indeed it probably played a partial role. Computers allowed a massive expansion of our stock markets allowing individuals to become a greater part of the stakeholders in the ownership of business than ever before. Arthur pooh-poohs the move from paper to electronic currency, but that change allowed a wide array of financial products to be created that vastly change the way we work and play.

Media: My sons, born in 2002 and 2003, have never known life without TiVo. Arthur dismisses the progress in television from several channels of black and white to color, three digit channel numbered, high definition TV. But DVRs, and TiVo in particular, offer something different. They supply access to media from multiple sources, on demand, filtered for appropriate content. When we stay in a hotel my son, who was able to work a TiVo at two and a half, can not grasp the concept of traditional television. He has only recently accepted that I have no ability to replay a song when I am listening to it on the radio. The choice and selection of media affects us greatly. From a young age the programming shapes our views and values and when we are grown we can limit our exposure to just the views and opinions we want to hear.

Communication: The near free, instantaneous video communication offered by the Internet has released a generation of knowledge workers from the bonds of family and freed them to travel the world, most often to arrive here, to make their fortune. Those that stayed behind or who are returning are shaping the most significant change of our generation, globalization. Business began to be able to send faxes in the mid-1970s. Now just in time delivery systems make construction of the 777 a worldwide team effort.

Turning the world into a single close knit community is perhaps the single biggest advance, and the single largest challenge that still awaits us. Today’s newspapers are failing and are starting to rally around cries of hyperlocalism and geographic community. Unfortunately they continue to show how, even at a supposedly technologically forward outlet like SDNN, they just don’t get it. Yes, I am interested in local stories, but my geographic community is just one definition of local. Things that happen in my workplace, even if it is global, are local to me. The same goes for my family and my friends from high school and college all now spread across a continent, they are a local community to me. There are past coworkers and people who I meet at professional meetings who form yet another local community.

All of these local communities are served by today’s social media technology. Whether it is video conferencing, social networks, blogging or micro-blogging. There is a place for the local geographic media in all of this too, however don’t try to define for me what community is. Just offer me the tools and content and allow me to assemble my community as I see fit.

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Google Should Build, Not Buy Twitter

April 2nd, 2009

I am sure by now you have heard the rumors, Sources: Google In Late Stage Talks To Acquire Twitter (Updated).

Google should take a lesson from the IM wars and build their own microblogging platform. By building a microblogging platform from the ground up, it could be easily integrated into existing services, gmail, gtalk and Google Apps. By taking advantage of the current open microblogging efforts they could make use of, and give back to the open source community. It could be tightly coupled to services like Picassa, BlogSpot, Google Groups and Google Latitude.

Google will spend more than $250 million to acquire Twitter’s users. They could easily acquire these users, especially the valuable commercial ones, simply by featuring their microblogging search on the front page of Google.

Breaking the monopoly on microblogging and promoting an interoperable solution would be good for everybody except Twitter. Twitter could even benefit. Instead of selling out it could strive to become a provider of interoperable microblogging software rather than being a provider a closed service.

But you say, Google already had their own microblogging platform, Jaiku. They abandoned it and open sourced it. I can’t imagine that Google put anywhere close to $250 million into Jaiku. Of course, Google could certainly purchase Twitter and then seamlessly transfer all of the users to Jaiku. Then we could have the best of both worlds.

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