May 2010
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Books As Social Objects
Verlyn Klinkenborg makes some astute observations about his use of iPad and Kindle as a reader of books, in particular the role that books play in social intercourse and how this is diminished because of the restrictions that digital book tools place upon us:
The entire impulse behind Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks assumes that you cannot read a book unless you own it first — and only you...
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True/Slant Is Now Forbes Platform
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A strange twist: just as I start writing for True/Slant again — I had a short hiatus following my mother’s death — the company announces it is being acquired by Forbes, one of it’s investors. Lew Dworkin is assuming the Chief Product Officer role at Forbes, and detemining which contributors will remain with...
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Why Facebook Is Doomed
Bruce Nussbaum nails a criticism of Facebook’s pathological business model, basically saying that strip-mining user’s social relationships will not work. Users will reject this as an affront.
Facebook’s Culture Problem May Be Fatal
Facebook is wildly successful because its founder matched new social media technology to a deep Western cultural longing — the adolescent desire...
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Twitter Won't Support Third-Party Sponsored Tweets
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Twitter is basically closing the marketplace for sponsored tweets:
Dick Costello, Enduring Value
As our primary concern is the long-term health and value of the network, we have and will continue to forgo near-term revenue opportunities in the service of carefully metering the impact of Promoted Tweets on the user ...
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Zuckerberg's Washington Post Piece Is Pure PR
Theoretically, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a piece for the Washington Post responding (at last) to the privacygate furor that has been raging for weeks, since the latest turn of the screw when Facebook revised their terms of service once again. I don’t think so: this looks like a very crafted PR piece.
Mark Zuckerberg, From Facebook, answering privacy concerns with new settings
The challenge...
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Yammer And The Federation Of Work: Going The Wrong...
Yammer has decided that they are going to go down the old Basecamp path, and force people who work with different companies to have separate logins:
via email
Dear Stowe,
We want to make you aware of a change to Yammer that will have an impact on you. You currently have more than one email address registered to your Yammer account. We’ve decided to move to a one-email-per-account model....
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Is Open Dead? No, But This Metaphor Is.
Virginia Heffernan conflates a number of trends into some sort of funeral march to the ‘open web’. This is confused by the fact that she doesn’t start with any sort of definition of the open web, but instead launches into a tumbling metaphor:
Virginia Heffernan, The Death of the Open Web
The Web is a teeming commercial city. It’s haphazardly planned. Its public spaces are...
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Facebook In Yet Another Privacy Snafu
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I am fairly late to this story, which I guess broke late yesterday, but once again Facebook is in a privacy mess, this time along with MySpace and other social networking sites.
Emily Steel and Jessica Vascellos, Facebook, MySpace Confront Privacy Loophole
Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been...
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Thought Leadership: Beyond Marketing
I had a short conversation with the CEO of a European software company at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco a few weeks back. He was explaining his plans for increasing his efforts to compete in the US. I suggested a slightly oblique approach, which motivated me to write this post.
Marketing Messages And Product Features: Fail
The rise of the social web has meant that a growing proportion...
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Microstreams In Business: Scenarios For Product...
As part of the Microstreams In Business project, I want to evaluate the leading 12 or 15 products that provide either a dedicated or integrated microstreaming (microblogging) solution for business use.
You can imagine a wide variety of approaches to doing this sort of analysis. In my case, however, I have rapidly down-selected to a three part approach to evaluating each of the tools:
...
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Time For 'Information Wants To Be Free' To Die
Cory Doctorow says it’s time to drop the now timeworn — and generally misunderstood — ‘information wants to be free’ aphorism. It was never what the nay-sayers thought it meant, and its misleading even when considered judicioiusly.
Stewart Brand actually said “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right...
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Short Takes for 19 May 2010
Dave McClure stirs the pot at Google I/O conference, stating ‘Open Is For Losers’. Looks like he was just taking one side of an argument as a rhetorical device, though.
Maybe McClure was channeling Steve Jobs, because Apple was completely absent from Google I/O, the elephant in the room no one was talking about, according to Louis Gray.
Mark Zuckerberg just can’t get out of the...
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Tweeting Brands
Brian Solis reports on the top brands mentioned on Twitter. Big surprise: #1 is…. (drumroll)…. Twitter!
The Top Brands on Twitter: April 2010
For more analysis, see Report: Top 20 Brands on Twitter – April 2010
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We Aren't Facebook Customers, But Its Products
Andrew Brown, Facebook is not your friend
Anyone who supposes that Facebook’s users are its customers has got the business model precisely backwards. Users pay nothing, because we aren’t customers, but product. The customers are the advertisers to whom Facebook sells the information users hand over, knowingly or not.
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Short Takes For 18 May 2010
Alex Payne leaves Twitter to co-found banksimple, a new web bank business based in NYC.
LazyFeed *finally* follows a recommendation I gave them a year ago, and have reconfigured their app to allow users to publish streams, or ‘channels’, of information. Louis Gray has a more detailed write-up. Looks like they are trying to compete with Tumblr?
Jason Calacanis and a group of other...
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Glenn Beck Says Obama Is A Satan Worshipper
Right-wing demagogue, Glenn Beck, was in fine form recently, when he suggested that President Obama is attempting to push Network Neutrality as a means of censorship:
Nate Anderson, Glenn Beck’s war on the FCC (and Satan worshippers)
“We are dealing with people who think they should rebel until they get their little kingdom like Satan did,” said Beck. “You know what?...
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Web Regrets
With a bazillion options to stick a digital foot in our mouths, it comes as no surprise that people sometimes share far, far too much online, and subsequently regret it:
via Retrevo, Preserve Your Facebook Privacy, Post Cautiously
Over 1/3 of our respondents admitted to having poster’s remorse and iPhone users rank slightly higher than other smartphone owners. Are smartphones making it too easy...
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Are Blogs Dying?
Marshall Kirkpatrick recently griped about Ask.com’s blog search service closing down.
Marshall Kirkpatrick, R.I.P. World’s Greatest Blogsearch
Searching the blogs, scanning the posts, feed-powered search: there used to be more startups offering blogsearch than there are characters in a Twitter message today. But no more. Today blogsearch engines fade away all the time and almost...
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How Do I...
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Facebook Privacygate Continues
The furor about the Facebook Privacygate continues, with all sorts of people making grand pronouncements:
Henry Blodgett, Ignore The Screams—Facebook’s Aggressive Approach Is Why It Will Soon Become The Most Popular Site In The World
Facebook often shares way more information with the world than its users know, expect, or want. It consistently approaches innovation and privacy...
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“The health effects of social isolation are of the same magnitude as people...”
– - Robert Putnam
via NYTimes
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danah boyd On Facebook Privacy Follies
danah boyd, Facebook and “radical transparency” (a rant)
The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being duped, tricked, coerced, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but...
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Zuckerberg Doesn't Get Publicy
One aspect of online identity, especially in the open web, is that people can have multiple identities: I am a somewhat different stoweboyd on Last.fm than I am on Twitter than I am on Tumblr. This is normal and sensible, since identity is strongly influenced by who we connect with and increasingly tied to the affordances that these services provide.
Michael Zimmer is reading the new Marshall...
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Techmeme's Algorithm Is Weird
So, I write a longish post (see Facebook Apologists Miss The Point: Facebook Isn’t The Future) in which I spend the first 50% discussing a piece by Mike Arrington (see The Media Attacks On Facebook And Mark Zuckerberg Are Getting Out Of Hand), and then in one paragraph I mention posts by Scoble, VentureBeat and Silicon Alley Insider.
Somehow, when my post shows up in the Techmeme stack...
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Facebook Apologists Are Missing The Point:...
As the Facebook ‘privacygate’ affair swells and swells, most recently fed by the leaking of Zuckerberg instant messages from years ago, various members of the tech commentariat are starting to come forward to defend Zuckerberg and suggest that the media have gone too far.
My sense is that these apologists are going too far in supporting Zuckerberg and the actions that Facebook...
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Facebook Privacy Mess
I think Liz Gannes of GigaOM does a good job of laying out the mess that Facebeek has stumbled into with the recent revisions of its privacy policy, although characterizing it as needing to ‘find its voice’ makes it sound like mere marketing spin. The reality goes much deeper:
Liz Gannes, Facebook Needs to Find Its Voice on Privacy
First of all, the relationship between privacy and...
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Phones Used More For Data Than Voice
via Jenna Wortham, NYTimes
The number of text messages sent per user increased by nearly 50 percent nationwide last year, according to the CTIA, the wireless industry association. And for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls,...
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Web 2.0 Expo: Open web, content strategy,...
[This is a guest post by Deanna Zandt, author of the forthcoming Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking.]
Web 2.0 Expo wrapped up in San Francisco on Thursday last week (see my coverage of the opening days with this post), and while the depth I was longing for still never quite manifested, breadth of topics were aplenty. Keynotes covered everything from culture shifting...
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Social Media Blur: Blogs, Networks, Streams
So much has happened in the past ten years under the title ‘social media’ that it is nearly impossible to determine what is going on. Add to that all the so-called social media experts, who blur the picture more than clarifying it, and it’s obvious we need to cut through the chatter to try to figure out what has happened, and where this is all headed.
I would like to offer...
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Lions, And Tigers, And Bears, Oh My!
President Obama decides that digital distraction is a political issue. Is he kidding? We have a world in chaos — ecological mess, wars, a wounded economy, unemployment — and he decides to warn college seniors about overuse of shiny mobile devices?
via AFP
US President Barack Obama lamented Sunday that in the iPad and Xbox era, information had become a diversion that was imposing new...
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“It’s one thing to make money, but Facebook is making it by something like...”
– Stowe Boyd
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A Richer Experience Of Time
Virginia Heffernan, The Demise of Datebooks
In 1994, Nicholson Baker published an essay, “Discards,” lamenting the destruction of library card catalogs. “Nobody is grieving,” he wrote. I know I wasn’t. Even when he compared the card catalog to a literary agent’s Rolodex — bulging with cards that should be entries in literary history — I was unmoved. Catalogs and address books seem made to...
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More Privacy Fears
More logs for the privacy pyre:
Laura Holson, Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline
Mistrust of the intentions of social sites appears to be pervasive. In its telephone survey of 1,000 people, the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California found that 88 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds it surveyed last July said there should be a law that requires Web...
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“If you decide to do open-source projects, you have to be open all the way.”
– Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, Google
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“Online privacy is the new programming a VCR.”
– Gregory Galant, Business Insider
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Facebook Fail: Publicy Backlash
The recent furor about Facebook’s privacy policy changes is the outcome of several factors, the most glaring of which is Facebook’s apparent venality. They seem to consider the formerly private information that users squirrel away on their servers the way the energy industry looks at oil underground: a resource to be mined and exploited for their personal benefit, with little regard...
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“The era of mass is over.”
– Charles Whitaker, research chairman in magazine journalism at the Northwestern University school of journalism, in regard to Newsweek’s sale
“It’s the interaction among users that informs design.”
– Adrian Chan
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Web 2.0 Expo: Giraffes, hippos, mafias and making...
Good day, Stowe’s edglings! A quick introduction: my name is Deanna Zandt, and I’m the author of a forthcoming book called “Share This! How You Will Change the World With Social Networking.” I’m attending Web 2.0 Expo this week, and I’ll be posting a daily summary of what I’m seeing and hearing. It’s my first time attending this conference, and...
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Initial Straw Poll On Microstreams In Business
I have been testing out various email tools to get folks involved in the research we’re doing this summer, and one of the tools has a survey capability. So I asked a handful of questions to a group of about 150 contacts, and getting about 35 responses. I intend a more rigorous survey in the coming weeks — with a larger base of contacts once I have settled on the tools to do that...
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Tim O'Reilly: Fishing With Strawberries
Max Chafkin, The Oracle of Silicon Valley
Tim O’Reilly is Silicon Valley’s leading intellectual and the founder of O’Reilly Media, a steadily growing $100 million company. His life is a vivid demonstration that interesting things can happen when you are working for more than money.
[…]
Over the years, O’Reilly has written many influential essays, which are...
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Liberal Blogs Are, Well, More Liberal About...
Study led by Yochai Benkler, Aaron Shaw and Victoria Stodden shows that liberal blogs use more modes of open collaboration and are more likely to have moultiple authors:
Ari Melber, New Study: Liberals More Open Than Conservatives Online
[…] liberal blogs provide audience participation options at triple the rate of conservative sites. That means visitors to progressive sites are more...
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David Carr on The Lost iPhone Affair
David Carr, A Lost iPhone Shows Apple’s Churlish Side
More broadly, Apple’s behavior and choices in the Gizmodo affair threaten to interrupt the séance between the company and an adoring press, who have looked past all the frantic secrecy and reverently stared in wonder at what was eventually revealed behind the curtain.
The media’s crush on Apple has always been an unrequited love affair. The...
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Profile Of Betaworks
Jenna Wortham, In New York, a Tech Incubator Becomes a Hub of Collaboration
The company was founded by John Borthwick and Andrew Weissman, who worked at AOL in the ’90s.
“I was there when AOL bought CompuServe and Netscape and did the first content deal with Amazon,” said Mr. Weissman, chief operating officer. “You could start to see these new ways pieces of the Internet were coming...
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A New Front On The War On Flow: Kid's Connections...
I have been writing a long time about the war on flow: How the media and other members of the commentariat will denigrate the sociality that we are investing ourselves into at the edge, and the forms that it takes through streaming media, social networks, and mobile devices.
Stowe Boyd, Nick Carr and Scott Karp: Is The Web Making Us Stupid?
[…] the inherent conservatism of the mass media...
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A Publicy Policy, Not A Privacy Policy
Randall Stross, When History Is Compiled 140 Characters At A Time
Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel, said, “From the beginning, Twitter has been a public and open service.” Twitter’s privacy policy states: “Our services are primarily designed to help you share information with the world. Most of the information you provide to us is information you are asking us to make public.”
...
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They Are Recording Everything
Natasha Singer, Shoppers Who Can’t Have Secrets
In a recent documentary called “Erasing David,” the London-based filmmaker David Bond attempts to disappear from Britain’s surveillance grid, hiring experts from the security firm Cerberus to track him using all the information they can glean about him while he tries to outrun them. In the course of the film, the detectives even obtain a...
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WatchVenessa Miemis
Social Business Edge, NYC, April 19 2010