Stowe Boyd

The Flipboard Dilemma: Who Owns User Experience?

Flipboard burst on the scene this week like a Rodriguez movie trailer, or a new diet drug, and everyone rushed to download (following Scoble’s recommendation). Now that the dust has settled, and the controversy about Flipboard being unready to handle the surge of signups has started to abate, some larger issues are starting to arise from Flipboard’s modus vivendi:

Joel Johnson, Is Flipboard Legal?

Social news app Flipboard was yesterday’s hot new app, despite—or perhaps because of—technical problems that prevented some features from working. But there might be a bigger snag: Is Flipboard scraping content it doesn’t have the rights to?

Flipboard, the new iPad app that renders links from your Twitter feed and favorite sites in a beautiful, magazine-style layout, has a problem: it scrapes websites directly rather than using public RSS feeds, opening it to claims of copyright infringement.

Unlike some similar news apps like Pulse, Flipboard appears to eschew the older syndication standby RSS to instead grab URLs from Twitter and Facebook feeds. While news sources that maintain their own automatic Twitter feeds tend to link the same stories as they do in their RSS feeds, there’s one critical difference: RSS also allows content to be included in the feed, whereas Twitter provides only the URLs that link back to the full website. (Unless, of course, the site only writes 140 character news stories.)

Back in the ancient days of the mid-aughts, there was a healthy debate online about whether or not news outlets should provide full content feeds or simply headlines and excerpts. Rather than rehash that debate—one that’s still ongoing—just remember this: whether a company chose to publish “full feeds” or excerpts, the choice remained theirs.

The fact that publishers have some explicit means of controlling the use of their published materials through RSS (as well as devices like the robot.txt files used to control indexing by search engine robots) has not actually always provided strong enough controls for publishers. Said differently, publisher have still blocked or threatened services like Pulse and Flipboard even when they are only serving up what has been published in their RSS feeds. Murdoch has made the case that search engines ‘bots don’t have the right to index his sites even when robot.txt files indicate that those sites are open for indexing.

This suggests the need for some other mechanism to define what sort of reuse or aggregation rights that publishers care to allow. Creative Commons suggests an example, but it is likely to be considered too coarsely grained, and it doesn’t delve deeply enough into the nuts and bolts of actual reuse.

The rise of tools like Flipboard may represent a new day. Tools that intentionally sidestep RSS, and instead reach through the URL and spider the websites themselves, like search engines do. Search engines build indexes and return snippets clipped from the myriad sites they have visited based on the search queries users enter. But Flipboard is tapping into our social networks — like those that I follow on Twitter — by reaching through the URLs in the Twitter stream, and aggregating what they point to, and rendering it in a magazine-like UX.

But the presentation in Flipboard poses some real business problems. Where’s the ads? Publishers make their money on ads (and pay walls), and so they are going to start to howl if people are viewing their stories with all the ads parsed out.

Perhaps even more contentious will be the response of Facebook and other social services like Twitter. To the extent that Flipboard replaces their UX, they may lose revenue as well. Twitter recently has moved into the realm of building its own clients and does so with the explicit goal of making ad revenue. These social network giants could block access to Flipboard and other tools of this sort, simply because they will resist being treated as a dumb pipe of social messages. Facebook will certainly move aggressively if Flipboard ‘dumbs down’ what Facebook does for users, treating it just as a messaging bus with URLs, pictures, and social gestures embedded in it.

It is relatively simple to extrapolate to a near future in which Flipboard, or some other entrant with similar aspirations, has ginned up a superior user experience, one that involves its own layers of sociality. Imagine that Flipboard can offer its users greater benefits by communicating directly through Flipboard, and not through underlying services like Twitter or Facebook — for example, being able to share Tumblr like reblog capabilities, or some other dimension of sociality that naturally falls out of the iPad experience.

I am certain that Twitter and Facebook would consider this course of events — however hypothetical — with some alarm.I believe that these companies must retain control of their user experience, and they must resist being commoditized by a richer layer of sociality superimposed above their offerings.

Related articles

• Flipboard (coolhunting.com)
• Too Successful, Flipboard Flops At Launch (thenextweb.com)
• You: Flipboard iPad app goes from fascination to mockery in a snap (washingtonpost.com)
• Flipboard hype crashes iPad app’s servers (money.cnn.com)
• Flipboard for iPad gives Facebook, Twitter a magazine-style makeover (thaibrother.com)
• Flipboard for iPad app review (engadget.com)
• Flipboard turns social network content into a virtual magazine (tuaw.com)

PC World: 10 Blogs To Boost Your Social Netwook Savvy

Kristin Burnham posted a lists of 10 blogs she thinks will help others understand the world of social networking

Kristin Burnham, 10 Blogs to Boost Your Social Network Savvy

Keeping tabs on the evolving world of social media isn’t easy. Facebook, as we’ve seen, has endured several privacy fiascos and consequent criticisms. LinkedIn has made impressive progress in making the site more social by rolling out important updates to its site. Meanwhile, Twitter continues to struggle with simply handling its increasing traffic.

To better understand the changing landscape — and to discover how it can help you and your business — you need expert help. I’ve compiled a list of my 10 favorite blogs (in no particular order) from practitioners, experts and thinkers. Follow these blogs for the latest news, tips, insights and case studies that will keep you at the top of your social media game.

She included me in the list, which is great, since it includes Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan, and Carol Rozwell.

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 is how a network like ours facilitates sharing and innovation, offers control and choice, and makes this experience easy for everyone. These are issues we think about all the time. Whenever we make a change, we try to apply the lessons we’ve learned along the way. The biggest message we have heard recently is that people want easier control over their information. Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.

We have heard the feedback. There needs to be a simpler way to control your information. In the coming weeks, we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use. We will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services. We are working hard to make these changes available as soon as possible. We hope you’ll be pleased with the result of our work and, as always, we’ll be eager to get your feedback.

We have also heard that some people don’t understand how their personal information is used and worry that it is shared in ways they don’t want. I’d like to clear that up now. Many people choose to make some of their information visible to everyone so people they know can find them on Facebook. We already offer controls to limit the visibility of that information and we intend to make them even stronger.

Here are the principles under which Facebook operates:

— You have control over how your information is shared.

— We do not share your personal information with people or services you don’t want.

— We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.

— We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone.

— We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.

“We have also heard that some people don’t understand how their personal information is used and worry that it is shared in ways they don’t want.” and “Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.” just demonstrate that they aren’t really listening.

The statements made above are counterfactual: Facebook users do not have full control over their information, since a lot of it is shared with the world and there is nothing users can do about it at present.

A number of people are taking the tack that Facebook is too ingrained in our web lives to be dropped (see danah boyd’s most recent piece, for example), or that the benefits outweigh the negatives (like Tim O’Reilly’s Contrarian Stance on Facebook and Privacy). I don’t buy it. If enough people howl, and enough of Facebook’s partners begin to question their motives and policies, things can be changed.

I don’t think Facebook is the future but it may take a few years for that to be obvious.

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 that is completely unfair. It gives users the illusion of choice and hides the details away from them “for their own good.”

[…]

What pisses me off the most are the numbers of people who feel trapped. Not because they don’t have another choice. (Technically, they do.) But because they feel like they don’t. They have invested time, energy, resources, into building Facebook what it is. They don’t trust the service, are concerned about it, and are just hoping the problems will go away. It pains me how many people are living like ostriches. If we don’t look, it doesn’t exist, right?? This isn’t good for society. Forcing people into being exposed isn’t good for society. Outting people isn’t good for society, turning people into mini-celebrities isn’t good for society. It isn’t good for individuals either. The psychological harm can be great. Just think of how many “heros” have killed themselves following the high levels of publicity they received.

danah’s rant is right on, except she should adopt ‘publicy’ instead of ‘publicity’. I also didn’t follow the departure at the end of her piece when she veers into a discussion about the privileged v. underprivileged:

Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what’s best for the privileged class. And I’m terrified of the consequences that these moves are having for those who don’t live in a lap of luxury. I say this as someone who is privileged, someone who has profited at every turn by being visible. But also as someone who has seen the costs and pushed through the consequences with a lot of help and support. Being publicly visible isn’t always easy, it’s not always fun. And I don’t think that anyone should go through what I’ve gone through without making a choice to do it. So I’m angry. Very angry. Angry that some people aren’t being given that choice, angry that they don’t know what’s going on, angry that it’s become OK in my industry to expose people. I think that it’s high time that we take into consideration those whose lives aren’t nearly as privileged as ours, those who aren’t choosing to take the risks that we take, those who can’t afford to. This isn’t about liberals vs. libertarians; it’s about monkeys vs. robots.

I guess she suggesting that some people can be harmed by surprises that Facebook may spring in the never-ending privacy policy follies, while others may seemingly benefit by being made prominent in some way. But her logic seems sort of convoluted to me.

Facebook Apologists Are Missing The Point: Facebook Isn’t The Future

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 has taken; for example, Michael Arrington [my comments are italicized.]

Michael Arrington, The Media Attacks On Facebook And Mark Zuckerberg Are Getting Out Of Hand

Friday is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s 26th birthday. My guess is he’s won’t be enjoying it as much as he should, given that the top tech story of the day is a look at a private instant message exchange he supposedly had six or seven years ago at Harvard. The messages show a callous disregard for personal information added by early Facebook users. Given that Facebook is in one of its regularly scheduled privacy scuffles right now, the connection is just too juicy. The press has gone wild.

It’s completely out of hand, and it’s just another example of an online mob getting out of control. I’m embarrassed to see people I respect stopping one step short of calling for physical violence against Zuckerberg. And they certainly aren’t stopping short of calling him every nasty thing they can think of. The Huffington Post actually compared Facebook’s privacy issues to the BP oil spill. Shameful.

Why are you ashamed of your colleagues, who are justifiably incensed by Facebook’s actions and their ham-fisted response to the controversy? Just because a large group of people share similar concerns about Facebook’s policies doesn’t mean that this is ‘mob justice’ — some unthinking swarm of torch-bearing Jacobins hoping to murder anyone better off than them. It could simply be a growing awareness of serious problems; ones that need careful reflection and discussion by our tech pundits.

The Facebook privacy issue is a reasonable thing to debate. Whether or not Vice President of Communications and Public Policy Elliot Schrage gave a reasonable defense of the company’s privacy policies to the New York Times is also a reasonable thing to debate. Even a high profile person saying they’re going to close their Facebook account, obviously for competitive or for promotional purposes, isn’t going too far.

A more investigative analysis of Schrage’s Q&A on the NY Times by Dan Tynan shows that he is either misinformed as to how Facebook’s privacy system works, or he is intentionally misinforming us about it (“lying”). Even leaving Schrage’s Q&A aside, Facebook has clearly not done as much as it could to clarify their privacy position and what it means for users. And considering their market position, they have an obligation to do so.

This is one of the major issues: that Facebook seems determined to not be open and honest about privacy, and they are obviously not making it easy for users to understand the privacy system and the changes they are making, and most importantly, how a user should proceed to get they privacy they want.

One simple observation is that users will not be able to get the privacy they want (or think they already have, or at least had in the past) in today’s Facebook.

But what Mark Zuckerberg said or didn’t say six years ago isn’t relevant to anything. It isn’t an indication of his character, or how he views privacy today. It’s nothing, a snip of a private conversation without context and certainly without the benefit of knowing more about him as a person.

Who here hasn’t said something stupid when they were 19? Who here hasn’t done something dumb when they were 19? None of you. If you’re getting all self righteous, you’re lying to yourself.

On the other hand, Zuckerberg’s nefarious dealings with his former partners at UConnect, the actions he took to squelch the discourse about that, and so on — all actions that took place at the founding of Facebook — do reflect on his character and the company’s DNA.

Six years ago Zuckerberg had no idea what Facebook would become, or how much he’d have to change and mature to handle it. He’s the CEO of one of the most powerful corporations on the planet. He is leading a team that is recreating and redefining our culture as a society.

This line of argument just doesn’t make sense. On one hand, he was a young kid, who didn’t know he would one day be a powerful CEO, and he was unaware of how much he had to grow to handle that responsibility. Ok, granted. But now he is that CEO, and he must be judged on the actions he has taken as CEO of Facebook, even going back in time.

And frankly, none of what Facebook is doing privacy-wise should be a surprise to anyone. At a high level anyway. Facebook is trying to invent, on the fly, an entirely new way or organizing the Internet. 500 million people a month visit the site. They can’t do anything at all without angering some portion of them. And since the service is growing and evolving so fast there’s no way change won’t happen.

Facebook’s privacy misadventure may not be much of a surprise to market-watchers like you and me, Mike, but it is a surprise of some 17-year old in Poughkeepsie or a 35-year old secretary in Los Angeles who still don’t know about the privacy changes, and who are operating under the assumptions they had last year. And while those of us in the bubblicious tech world accept the nosebleed-inducing future shock of incessant and radical change on the web, most people do not. It is completely inadequate to say something like ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’ when the eggs in question are people’s lives.

I am no fan of threatened violence (although I have yet to see any of that in this Facebook flare-up), but I believe that Facebook’s users have a solid basis for being seriously pissed off. Even though I am an advocate for publicy — living life in the open on the web — I am by no means an advocate for having it jammed down our throats by a unilateral change in the Terms Of Service agreement by a powerful corporation.

Facebook has shown a studious and callous disregard for the impacts that the company’s decisions are having on people’s lives. What Arrington never really addresses is the fact that Facebook is obviously involved in creating a business model that is strip mining information about users who believed that info would be kept ‘private’, where ‘private’ is a very slippery concept. The only recourse for users at this time is to stop using Facebook altogether, if they want to live a truly private life. This is exactly the fear that Zuckerberg and company are banking on: that users get so much from socializing on Facebook that they will not quit the service, even if they feel that they are being exploited.

Others (like Scoble and Venturebeat ) are softsoaping the flare-up and offering advice to Zuckerberg to get over this public relations hiccup and get back to conquering the world. Meanwhile, aside from the stories about the old IMs, new figures about dropping growth rates by Danny Sullivan suggest that Facebook defection is rising and that the furor may be stopping newbies from signing up.

It’s clearly a turning point for Facebook and the social revolution on the web.

I am an outspoken advocate for social connection and the rise of social tools to help us accomplish that. On the other hand, I am concerned about the centralization of too much control in the hands of a single company; and most especially, in the hands of a single company that seems to be uninterested in the needs of users, and completely motivated by a corporate and financial agenda.

At this point, I would suggest that Facebook’s management and Zuckerberg in particular are not equal to the challenges that confront them, and that even if they get this particular mess behind them, things will start to unwind. Large corporate partners who may have been heading down the road to integrate Facebook into their websites or applications will start to reconsider. Users will opt to spend more time in smaller, more specialized social networks, rather than a single, all-encompassing social context. Application developers will want to create more distance between themselves and Facebook, which increasingly looks like a competitor, not a platform.

And in the final analysis, the next generation of operating environments may turn Facebook into a quaint oddity (and tools like Twitter, as well), because the next generation operating platforms from Google, Apple, Microsoft and others will have sociality built in a fundamental level.

We will be able to ‘follow’ friends — where they are, what they are watching on TV, and what they think we should be reading — across all devices, applications, and contexts — obviously, subject to our own notions of privacy and publicy controls. But this advance — which will be as fundamental as the rise of the web has been to date — cannot be sparked by a player like Facebook. This will come from those who are busy on the foundations of the next generation web, which is not Facebook, despite its dizzying market valuation. Look to interoperable social standards — the future equivalent of HTTP, XMPP, and email protocols — to be forged by competition between Google, Apple, and other foundational players.

We are headed for a time when files and directories are all tidied up, and buried in the gearbox of operating platforms, but where social connection and social networking will be treated as a first class element of the web. This is the social revolution, at last. And Facebook will become a footnote in that history, like SixDegrees.com, Friendster, MySpace and, yes, even Twitter.

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 for others.

I think that efforts by apologists like Mark Ingram fail: trying to assert a balance between the aspirations of an aggressive company and the need for users to remain aware of changing privacy policies is pseudo rational:

Matthew Ingram, The Relationship Between Facebook and Privacy: It’s Really Complicated

The tension between Facebook and its users — and governments, and advocacy groups — over privacy is one of the biggest thorns in the company’s side right now, as it tries to balance the demands of the network (and of advertisers) with the desires of users, and with the law. And all of this is taking place in an environment where the very meaning of what is “private” and what is “public” is being redefined, by Facebook and other online giants such as Google, and even users themselves sometimes can’t decide what information they want to share with the world and what they don’t.

Over the past few weeks, the social network has been caught at the center of a privacy maelstrom, with consumer groups attacking it — 15 of them filed a formal letter of complaint with the Federal Trade Commission late yesterday — senators sending threatening letters, and growing numbers of users canceling or deactivating their accounts over privacy concerns. The company has been struggling to respond to security holes that expose private data such as chats, and a survey released yesterday by Consumer Reports says that more than 50 percent of people engage in what it calls “risky behavior” on the social network. Another survey of Facebook users finds that their use of the network is inherently shallow and largely unfulfilling.

Even as he is being hailed as a billionaire genius akin to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the empire Mark Zuckerberg has built seems to be taking fire from critics on all sides. But is all of this criticism fair? Probably not. It’s true that Facebook’s launch of recent changes involving “instant personalization” and the creation of community pages related to users’ profile interests has been badly handled. And it doesn’t help that many people are confused by how to adjust their privacy settings, how to control what information is displayed, and how to disable applications (we put together a comprehensive guide to the new changes and how to disable them if you want to).

But it’s also true that Facebook exists, and has accumulated almost half a billion users worldwide, because it makes it easy for people to connect with their friends and family and to share things with them: photos, thoughts, social games, goofy gifts and yes, even birth dates. Plenty of people clearly want to do this, even after they have been repeatedly warned about the risks, because they believe the trade-off is worth it. And perhaps Facebook doesn’t make it as clear as it could what is involved, or how to fine-tune its privacy controls — but at the same time, some of the onus for doing these things has to fall to users.

Except that the behemoth in this case specifically doesn’t care about the implications of privacy policy changes in the lives of individuals: they have a mass relationship with the millions of users who are being treated like cattle.

So Matthew’s arguments — and others — just don’t cast a lot of light on the issues here, because they are too narrow and too specific to Facebook.

Let me lay out a few threads that I think frame this situation.

The Rise Of Publicy

Facebook’s shifting policy from private as default to public as default is a reflection of the open web. Twitter, in particular, has always been based on a public model, where the default modality is that all information is public unless you go to great lengths to conceal it. Executives of Twitter have gone so far as to say they wanted to publish a publicy policy instead of a privacy policy, but couldn’t because of legal requirements (see A Publicy Policy, Not A Privacy Policy).

So, we have seen a very rapid change in people’s thinking about how and how much to share with others. Perhaps that’s why Matthew Ingram thinks we have to lay some of the ‘blame’ on the users.

However, because Facebook is in a sense trying to track a general shift in the web, it is such a large player — and with so many users that aren’t at the forefront of this trend — a lot of innocent fingers are getting crushed in the machinery.

I think Jarvis is onto something when he says that Facebook has lost the difference between the Public and Publics:

Jeff Jarvis, Confusing *a* public with *the* public

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg seem to assume that once something is public, it’s public. They confused sharing with publishing. They conflate the public sphere with the making of a public. That is, when I blog something, I am publishing it to the world for anyone and everyone to see: the more the better, is the assumption. But when I put something on Facebook my assumption had been that I was sharing it just with the public I created and control there. That public is private. Therein lies the confusion. Making that public public is what disturbs people. It robs them of their sense of control—and their actual control—of what they were sharing and with whom (no matter how many preferences we can set). On top of that, collecting our actions elsewhere on the net—our browsing and our likes—and making that public, too, through Facebook, disturbed people even more. Where does it end?

Facebook has been playing this tension since its early days. Remember the hubbub over News Feed: When Facebook aggregated our updates into feeds, it freaked users, even though Mark Zuckerberg pointed out that all these updates were already visible to us among our friends on their pages. Zuckerberg’s vision was right in the end; the News Feed is critical to Facebook’s utility, value, and growth and it presaged the appeal of Twitter. But even in the public Twitter, even though we are publishing to the world, we still have a measure of control; we decide whom to follow—that is, which publics to join.

So let me repeat: In Facebook, we get to create our publics. In Twitter, we decide which publics to join. But neither is the public sphere; neither entails publishing to everyone. Yet Facebook is pushing us more and more to publish to everyone and when it does, we lose control of our publics. That, I think, is the line it crossed.

Jarvis confuses things a bit with the various uses of ‘public’, but to restate: when I share things with connections on Facebook I don’t think of it as publishing the NYTimes. It is a social sharing with a specific social network of friends. But Zuckerberg and Co want to imagine everything going to everyone, thus obliterating social scale and tearing down any notion of socially afforded privacy.

Facebook As A Tonedeaf Velociraptor

The comparisons of Zuckerberg with Bill Gates are apt in one regard: he could care less that he is taking policy steps that benefit him to the detriment of users. Gates and Microsoft fought court cases for decades about monopolistic and illegal practices, and we can expect the same to be the case with Facebook, starting with the 15+ suits brought against them in recent weeks.

Zuckerberg wanted to buy Twitter because he was convinced that the open follower model was better than the Facebook architecture in the long run, and he has been pushing to rework Facebook into a system based on publicy rather than privacy ever since. To Zuckerberg, the users aren’t even pieces on the chess board, they are dust underneath the pawns. He’s playing against Ev Williams and Google: he doesn’t give a fig what other people think of him.

As a result, he will continue to delight with Asberger-ish interviews and one liners, like ‘Privacy is dead.’

Facebook Is Not The New Microsoft

So, Facebook might be the new Microsoft, except they don’t have a monopoly on something we absolutely need, like Windows or Office. (Well, we actually didn’t need those either, but it took a long time to get there.)

So a lot of people are simply bailing out. I stopped using Facebook for all intents and purposes several years ago, although I still have an account. My social needs are met by Twitter and blogging, so I haven’t gone through the disruptions of the past few turns of the wheel at Facebook.

We can simply say no. Facebook isn’t essential to life. It’s not even the same Facebook you were using a few months ago. Facebook is betting on people not leaving. Well, that’s what MySpace thought, too.

Open and Governance

There has been no credible open source alternatives to any serious social tool. There has been no open source, wikipedia-like music site, photo sharing site, or video sharing site: the bandwidth and legal issues are too large. There have been attempts for open source movements — like Identica — but they have made little progress in a market dominated by for-profit players. So I don’t think calls for an open Facebook (like Ryan Singel’s) will catch fire.

Perhaps the real question isn’t about ownership, or even privacy, per se: perhaps the real issue is governance. What rights do users have when they are using a service that is owned and operated by a private company? Can the company make policy changes at will? Do the users have recourse if such changes are perceived as harming the users?

Consider the unilateral decision of Twitter to change the sematics of @mentions or the way that retweet (RT) works: many were upset by these changes, and Twitter responded with more grace than Facebook, but that’s a low bar to set.

I think it would behoove any major player to create a user oversight board, made up of users, to help thrash out these sort of issues in advance of any launch of controversial features on an unprepared user community. I don’t believe Facebook will do that, but Twitter and other players might.

Last Word

Publicy is here to stay. It’s just too bad that the fall of privacy will forever be associated with Facebook’s maladroit market moves instead of the benefits of an open web largely built on publicy.

Facebook Changes Social Contract, Once Again

A new set of changes to Facebook privacy system is being proposed. Jason Kincaid at Techcrunch zooms into the most questionable change: Facebook shifted a few months ago into making ‘everyone’ the default sharing option (see Facebook Wants To Be Twitter). Now, they are shifting the definition of ‘everyone’ to include third party apps that you haven’t explicitly opted into.

Jason Kincaid, Facebook’s Plan To Automatically Share Your Data With Sites You Never Signed Up For

In short, it sounds like Facebook is going to be automatically opting users into a reduced form of Facebook Connect on certain third party sites — a bold change that may well unnerve users, at least at first. Here’s how Facebook is describing the change in its blog post:

Today, when you use applications such as games on Facebook.com or choose to connect to Facebook on sites across the web, you are able to find and interact with your friends. These applications require a small set of basic information about you in order to provide a relevant experience. After feedback from many of you, we announced in August that we were moving toward a model that gives you clearer controls over what data is shared with applications and websites when you choose to use them.

In the proposed privacy policy, we’ve also explained the possibility of working with some partner websites that we pre-approve to offer a more personalized experience at the moment you visit the site. In such instances, we would only introduce this feature with a small, select group of partners and we would also offer new controls.

So what does that mean? We’ve heard that select Facebook partners will now be able to look for your existing Facebook cookie to identify you, even if you never opted into Facebook Connect on the site you’re visiting. Using that, the third party site will be able to display your friends and other key information. It’s possible that these sites will also be able to display any data you’ve shared with ‘everyone‘, which is of course now the default option on Facebook.

Facebook’s draft privacy policy states that you’ll be able to opt-out of these sites, and you’ll also be able to opt-out of these ‘pre-approved’ experiences entirely. But by default, you’re all in. How convenient.

I looked over the proposed privacy document. In short: a great deal of stylistic modifications, and what appear to be substantive changes to the sharing section, among others. Here’s the proposed language, with my comments:

3. Sharing information on Facebook.

This section explains how your privacy settings work, and how your information is shared on Facebook. You should always consider your privacy settings before sharing information on Facebook.

Name and Profile Picture. Facebook is designed to make it easy for you to find and connect with others. For this reason, your name and profile picture do not have privacy settings. If you are uncomfortable with sharing your profile picture, you should delete it (or not add one). You can also control who can find you when searching on Facebook or on public search engines using your search settings.

Remember, this defaults to ‘everyone’ and the only other options are ‘friends’ and ‘friends of friends’. Not a lot of fine grained controls.

Contact Information. Your contact information settings control who can contact you on Facebook, and who can see your contact information such as your email and phone number(s). Remember that none of this information is required except for your email address, and you do not have to share your email address with anyone.

Personal Information. Your personal information settings control who can see your personal information, such as your religious and political views, if you choose to add them. We recommend that you share this information using the friends of friends setting.

Posts by Me. You can select a privacy setting for every post you make using the publisher on our site. Whether you are uploading a photo or posting a status update, you can control exactly who can see it at the time you create it. Whenever you share something look for the lock icon. Clicking on the lock will bring up a menu that lets you choose who will be able to see your post. If you decide not to select your setting at the time you post the content, your content will be shared consistent with your Posts by Me privacy setting.

Connections. Facebook enables you to connect with virtually anyone or anything you want, from your friends and family to the city you live in to the restaurants you like to visit to the bands and movies you love. Because it takes two to connect, your privacy settings only control who can see the connection on your profile page. If you are uncomfortable with the connection being publicly available, you should consider removing (or not making) the connection.

Gender and Birth Date. In addition to name and email address, we require you to provide your gender and birth date during the registration process. We ask for your date of birth to verify that you are 13 or older, and so that we can better limit your access to content and advertisements that are not age appropriate. Because your date of birth and gender are required, you cannot delete them. You can, however, edit your profile to hide all (or part) of such fields from other users.

Other. Here are some other things to remember:

• Some of the content you share and the actions you take will show up on your friends’ home pages and other pages they visit.

And if those pages are public, so is the information your published ‘only to friends’?

• If another user tags you in a photo or video or at a place, you can remove the tag. You can also limit who can see that you have been tagged on your profile from your privacy settings.

How will you be notified about the tagging? Do you have to discover it on your own?

• Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users.


• You understand that information might be reshared or copied by other users.


• Certain types of communications that you send to other users cannot be removed, such as messages.

I think the list of communications of this sort — that can’t be deleted — should be fully enumerated.

• When you post information on another user’s profile or comment on another user’s post, that information will be subject to the other user’s privacy settings.


• If you use an external source to publish information to Facebook (such as a mobile application or a Connect site), you should check the privacy setting for that post, as it is set by that external source.

“Everyone” Information. Information set to “everyone” is publicly available information, just like your name, profile picture, and connections. Such information may, for example, be accessed by everyone on the Internet (including people not logged into Facebook), be indexed by third party search engines, and be imported, exported, distributed, and redistributed by us and others without privacy limitations. Such information may also be associated with you, including your name and profile picture, even outside of Facebook, such as on public search engines and when you visit other sites on the internet. The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.” You can review and change the default settings in your privacy settings. If you delete “everyone” content that you posted on Facebook, we will remove it from your Facebook profile, but have no control over its use outside of Facebook.

Minors. We reserve the right to add special protections for minors (such as to provide them with an age-appropriate experience) and place restrictions on the ability of adults to share and connect with minors, recognizing this may provide minors a more limited experience on Facebook.

So: it looks like there is a very murky area here. You have control over who can access your information (in part), but once your friends or others have access to the information, there are limited controls on what happens to it. Certain information — communications — can’t be deleted. And so-called ‘general information’ name, photo, and the list of your friends is publicly available no matter what you do.

And the second bit of murkiness: what can third parties do?

4. Information You Share With Third Parties.

Facebook Platform. As mentioned above, we do not own or operate the applications or websites that use Facebook Platform. That means that when you use those applications and websites you are making your Facebook information available to someone other than Facebook. Prior to allowing them to access any information about you, we require them to agree to terms that limit their use of your information (which you can read about in Section 9 of our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities) and we use technical measures to ensure that they only obtain authorized information. To learn more about Platform, visit our About Platform page.

These third parties agree to fairly stringent terms, but the tough question is always ‘how do we know that they are in fact not using this information for other, nefarious purposes?’

Connecting with an Application or Website. When you connect with an application or website it will have access to General Information about you. The term General Information includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting. We may also make information about the location of your computer or access device and your age available to applications and websites in order to help them implement appropriate security measures and control the distribution of age-appropriate content. If the application or website wants to access any other data, it will have to ask for your permission.

We give you tools to control how your information is shared with applications and websites that use Platform. For example, you can block specific applications from accessing your information by visiting your application settings or the application’s “About” page. You can also use your privacy settings to limit which of your information is available to “everyone”.

You should always review the policies of third party applications and websites to make sure you are comfortable with the ways in which they use information you share with them. We do not guarantee that they will follow our rules. If you find an application or website that violates our rules, you should report the violation to us on this help page and we will take action as necessary.

Ok, they are giving third party apps access to general info, location, and public information. Seems benign.

When your friends use Platform. If your friend connects with an application or website, it will be able to access your name, profile picture, gender, user ID, and information you have shared with “everyone.” It will also be able to access your connections, except it will not be able to access your friend list. If you have already connected with (or have a separate account with) that website or application, it may also be able to connect you with your friend on that application or website. If the application or website wants to access any of your other content or information (including your friend list), it will have to obtain specific permission from your friend. If your friend grants specific permission to the application or website, it will generally only be able to access content and information about you that your friend can access. In addition, it will only be allowed to use that content and information in connection with that friend. For example, if a friend gives an application access to a photo you only shared with your friends, that application could allow your friend to view or print the photo, but it cannot show that photo to anyone else.

We provide you with a number of tools to control how your information is shared when your friend connects with an application or website. For example, you can use your application privacy settings to limit some of the information your friends can make available to applications and websites. You can also block particular applications or websites from accessing your information. You can use your privacy settings to limit which friends can access your information, or limit which of your information is available to “everyone.” You can also disconnect from a friend if you are uncomfortable with how they are using your information.

Here it states that third party apps when used by your friends won’t have access to your friend list. But those apps do have access to the info that you are connected to your friend, so that datum *is* available.

And then, the indigestible part: Pre-Approved Third-Party Applications.

Pre-Approved Third-Party Websites and Applications. In order to provide you with useful social experiences off of Facebook, we occasionally need to provide General Information about you to pre-approved third party websites and applications that use Platform at the time you visit them (if you are still logged in to Facebook). Similarly, when one of your friends visits a pre-approved website or application, it will receive General Information about you so you and your friend can be connected on that website as well (if you also have an account with that website). In these cases we require these websites and applications to go through an approval process, and to enter into separate agreements designed to protect your privacy. For example, these agreements include provisions relating to the access and deletion of your General Information, along with your ability to opt-out of the experience being offered. You can also remove any pre-approved website or application you have visited here [add link], or block all pre-approved websites and applications from getting your General Information when you visit them here [add link]. In addition, if you log out of Facebook before visiting a pre-approved application or website, it will not be able to access your information. You can see a complete list of pre-approved websites on our About Platform page.

These pre-approved apps *do* have access to your friend list, and other general information, without you agreeing to it in advance. You may only discover this when you visit some website — while still logged into Facebook — and all of a sudden the site is telling you about your friends, or recommending stuff that is suitable to someone of your age, location, and with this particular groups of friends who like karaoke or bowling.

The social networking equivalent of a shotgun wedding.

Does the ‘complete list’ never change? How will I be informed when new third parties may have access to my information? Do I have to visit that site frequently?

Exporting Information. You (and those you make your information available to) may use tools like RSS feeds, mobile phone address book applications, or copy and paste functions, to capture, export (and in some cases, import) information from Facebook, including your information and information about you. For example, if you share your phone number with your friends, they may use third party applications to sync that information with the address book on their mobile phone.

Advertisements. Sometimes the advertisers who present ads on Facebook use technological methods to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content. You may opt-out of the placement of cookies by many of these advertisers here. You may also use your browser cookie settings to limit or prevent the placement of cookies by advertising networks.

Oh, and advertisers can use their own cookies to maintain a dossier on us.

Links. When you click on links on Facebook you may leave our site. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of other sites, and we encourage you to read their privacy statements.

***

So, a slippery slope.

Facebook’s privacy policy is a strange hybrid of a bunch of contending forces, where none is the defining modality, and the result is a goopy quicksand. Those forces?

Private, Personal Relationships — Facebook was originally conceived of as a way for individuals to connect with other people that were likely to be, or could possibly be, real-world, face-to-face contacts, like two students at the same college. In this way, much of the base platform was — and still is — based around an intuitive notion of friendship, and the transitive relationship of ‘friend of friend’. Even the original notion of ‘everyone’ seemed like it meant other people who use the service as private individuals, not third partie apps, advertisers, or people standing in for companies or brands.

Corporate Strip Malling Of Social Networks — When corporations create accounts and build facebook pages and groups, which we can ‘friend’ or follow we are dramatically shifting the social contract around private, personal relationships into something very very different. And it changes everything.

Publicy Eroding Privacy — When Facebook changed the default sharing option to ‘everyone’ — where ‘everyone’ includes all entities now and in the future that are allowed to operate in the system, in essense the trend is toward full openness and the end of privacy. It is not happening all at once — because of the pressure of governments and watchdogs — but the likely end state is somewhere at the other end of the proavcy/publicy spectrum from where Facebook started.

Preapproved Third Parties — Facebook has created a class of third parties — presumably using Facebook Connect to augment their own websites — who have access to a greater degree of your ‘general information’, which is a synonym for information that you don’t control unless you delete it. This includes your friends list, so a wide variety of third parties will be able to socially market to us (if we use Facebook).

Where will this lead? Facebook is engineering a social setting where it has the rights to use all the public information and the general (uncontrollable) information you provide, however it wants. It is selling access to the information that it captures about our social networks to preapproaved third parties, and it allows corporations to mingle with us, in ways we don’t exactly fathom but which are some strange mutated version of friendship. Advertisers can gather all sorts of click data, or snoop on what pages we visit and when.

My recommendation is to operate on a full publicy mindset, even if Facebook seems to be safeguarding various sorts of privacy in very convoluted ways.

Just pretend this is the Facebook privacy policy, and you can’t go wrong:

There is no privacy on Facebook. Everything you create, access, or share is public. The fact that you looked at a page, created something or deleted it, and any relationship you agree to is public. We reserve the right to do anything with any information we can capture about you, or any information you offer about yourself or any of your ‘friends’ on the system. We reserve the right to make anyone or any corporation a user of the system, and they can conceal their reasons for being there or their intentions for how they will use any public information about you or your friends, which is all inforrmation on the system because nothing is private, even when we use the work ‘private’. Private is public.

While I am an advocate for, and a believer in a more public, open, and transparent web, I am concerned at the Orwellian overtones in Facebook. There is so much potential revenue in the gray between real privacy and this intermediate model,  where various sorts of snooping into our social relationships are attractive to advertisers and corporations. But the only way this can be monetized is to sell seats at the peephole, to let them peak in on things that feel private, but aren’t.

So just pretend it’s all very public and merchantile; but ask yourself if you want to live life in a mall under the security camers and the fluorescent lights.

I am happy to be public, myself, but I would rather do it in a setting that feels like a bustling plaza, a place that seems dedicated to the principles of open social discourse, rather than a place that is strip-mining our social connection and selling it off to hucksters by the truck load.

Umair Haque Is Another New Spatialist

Umair Haque makes an economist’s argument about the devaluation of relationships because of social media, suggesting that what is going on, here, online is not as cool as the social media gurus would have us believe. He compares this to the real estate bubble:

Umair Haque, The Social Media Bubble

On the demand side, relationship inflation creates beauty contest effects, where, just as every judge votes for the contestant they think the others will like the best, people transmit what they think others want. On the supply side, relationship inflation creates popularity contest effects, where people (and artists) strive for immediate, visceral attention-grabs — instead of making awesome stuff.

The social isn’t about beauty contests and popularity contests. They’re a distortion, a caricature of the real thing. It’s about trust, connection, and community. That’s what there’s too little of in today’s mediascape, despite all the hoopla surrounding social tools. The promise of the Internet wasn’t merely to inflate relationships, without adding depth, resonance, and meaning. It was to fundamentally rewire people, communities, civil society, business, and the state — through thicker, stronger, more meaningful relationships. That’s where the future of media lies.

I think, first off, Umair is undervaluing the utility of weak ties, which is what the socializing online largely creates. Mark Granovetter and others have shown that it is through those that we are weakly connected to that we are most likely to get a job or meet a future mate. Likewise, they are extremely important for the transmission of ideas across different social groups.

But the central point that Umair is making is that social media — or social tools in general — are not doing a great job in certain areas:

• Making strong ties stronger — He suggests that because we are creating and expending time on a growing number of weak ties then we are diminishing our involvement with intimates. I think this is debatable. While the time I spend writing this blog or twittering could in principle be applied to talking to loved ones directly, in reality many of my closest friends read this blog and my twitter stream to remain in contact with me, at no extra cost (here I am adopting Umair’s economics jargon). This in no way weakens my strongest ties, and certainly is the wellspring of thousands of weak ties.
• The power laws lead to popularity contests — Umair skews the logic of the power laws that underlie influence online. Yes, it is true that a small number of social media participants have exponentially greater influence than the rest, but this does not necessarily mean that what they are talking about is unimportant. It is not just Casablanca v Farmville, as he styles it. Thinkers like Larry Lessig and David Weinberger (and Umair and me, by the way) are sharpening their axes everyday, and having an impact. It isn’t all ‘10 tips for packing’ or Farmville.
• The social revolution is bigger than this — Maybe Umair is standing too close to the SxSW hoopla, and can’t see the changes that are going on. We are being changed, as individuals, as a society, and particularly mainstream media. But the largest impacts are still ahead of us.

I do agree with the shadow of his argument though, which is the fact that social tools don’t go far enough, and certain critical areas in social theory just haven’t percolated through at all.

I wrote several posts last year based on talks I gave on this theme: see Better Social Plumbing For The Social Web, and The New Spatialism. In the second, I advanced the idea that we need the equivalent of the new urbanism movement for social tools. Based on the (flawed) metaphor that we are creating something like a shared space online, I suggested that we need to be new spatialists. Just as the new urbanism movement rejected the massive and dehumanizing architectural approaches of the ’60s and ’70s, which led to the destruction of vibrant although noisy and messy neighborhoods, and replaced them with concentration camp-like highrise tenements and inhuman urban cores designed to streamline traffic instead of walking your dog.

Maybe that’s what Umair is hinting at: our existing social tools are making some things easy, but the hard things aren’t being done at all, or at least, not enough. Maybe he’s a new spatialist, and he wants more Kivas. Me too. But there are things like Ushahidi emerging, too.

***

Here’s a very different take on this, the talk I gave several times last year, but never wrote up. The notes accompanying each slide are included, and I have only updated them a little.

What? Yet another call to action?

I am going to intentionally push a metaphor a bit too far. However, in the past, whenever I created metaphors and overdid it, it has worked out. I suggested years ago that email would die off; there is more email than ever, but a generation has grown up that distrust it, and use it only as a last resort. I had an insight in 1999 that social tools would emerge as the dominant form of communication media, as we actively sought to shape culture, and today the most important advances in the web are deeply social.

Now, I am suggesting that what we think of as social has first of all, not gone far enough: it’s really not very social at all.

Second, I am afraid that the corporate types have moved in and commoditized the little bit of social that we got right.

And lastly, I end worrying about the governance of this social space we’ve emigrated to, on the web.

I am calling for a return to the basic principles of social tools, and a movement of web denizens — designers, developers, and the lowly, lowly users — to push hard to reclaim the web.

We may have to stop thinking about this using the mercantile model — software ‘products’ that we ‘use’. Social connection on the web is nothing like buying and ‘consuming’ kleenex or ketchup. The fact that we have repurposed the concepts of buying Excel or choosing an O/S on our computers may be leading us astray when we talk about and think about social software on the Web.

Ten years ago, when I started blogging, it wasn’t called blogging yet. I thought I was writing an ‘e-zine’ although it had all the characteristics of a blog: reverse chronological entries, categories, and so on.

We were like pioneers, fooling around out in the wilderness, cutting crude roads, building villages.

Relatively soon, however, this personal publishing by the fringe lunatics became big business and old media arrived. Now the leading ‘blogs’ are either run by old media giants, or bloggers who have become new media giants. Social media has been strip-malled. The funky soulfulness of the early days has been replaced by SEO, ad networks, and ersatz earnestness.

The reality is that so-called social media — even in its earlier, Birkenstock and granola days — wasn’t very social. We didn’t call it that until much later, anyway. We thought of it as personal publishing, and it adopted the basic dynamics of publishing. Most notably, there was a publisher or author and then there were readers. It seemed more egalitarian since anyone could be a publisher, but still there was a broadcast media dynamic despite the fact that anyone could argue or agree with someone else’s posts on their own blog. Then for a few years, we just called it blogging. Rhymes with slogging, because, in the final analysis, most people didn’t blog: too hard, too much work, not rewarding enough.

And the problem may be the publishing metaphor, itself.

But the format is perfect for publishing companies, which is why the largest ‘blogs’ now are generally corporate media machinery. And as the blogosphere has become an increasingly corporate neighborhood, people are moving out.

Sprawl = developer’s decisions in the face of a zoning system based on an earlier reaility, not taking into account the impacts dowstream, and which leads to way way suboptimal results.

Developers own the land, zoning doesn’t require sidewalks: ergo, no sidewalks.

I visted Noida, a suburb of New Delhi in India. I couldn’t understand why the streets did not meet at the same height at intersections. There was very commonly a gap, filled with sand, and the streets were of different heights. Turns out the developers of different blocks were building the streets, and there is no master plan. So there is a chaotic mess, which is sort of workable, but which is a hassle for hundreds of thousands of drivers everyday.

Using an analogy from city planning and architecture, we need a rethinking of the basics: something like the New Urbanism movement, that tried to reclaim shared urban space in a way that matches human needs, and moved away from gigantic and dehumanizing cityscapes of the mid and late twentieth century, where garbage trucks seemed more at home than a teenage girl walking a dog.

Note: this was a response to urban ‘renewal’, which led to the inhumanification of shared spaces: towering housing projects where diverse and active communities stood. And also to suburban sprawl and the rise of edge cities as many fled the ‘inner’ cities, and distanced themselves from their problems.

New urbanism is utopian because it (at is core) operates on the assumption that caring can be built into cityscapes, or dehumanizing behaviors (like ignoring the man bleeding on the sidewalk) can be avoided by getting the streets and parks right.

So, we need a New Spatialism movement, to rethink web media and reclaim the social space that is supposed to be central to so-called social media. Some web media may just remain what it is, like an industrial district at the edge of town. But at least some parts of web media should be reconceptualized, and reconstructed to get back to human scale. Just as New Urbanism is about organizing streets, sidewalks, and plazas to support the growth of social capital, New Spatialism would help us channel interactions on line to increase sociality, and thereby increase the growth of social capital.

New Spatialism is based on the idea that our primary motivations for being online are extra-market drivers: we are not online for money, principally. We have created the web to happen to ourselves: to shape a new culture and build a better, more resilient world, for ourselves.

And we need better media tools than we have at present, to make that a reality.

Deconstruction may be more important that new planned communities.

Now we are having an economic reset, and malls are being repurposed all over America. Many cities are being ‘rewilded’ where entire neighborhoods are being deconstructed and turned back into wilds, instead of block after block of abandoned residences.

(There’s real opportunities for urban food belts, too.)

I noticed a few years ago that comments seemed to be moving from blogs into faster paced social tools, like Facebook and then streaming apps like Twitter. (Twitter has become so popular that most of the competitors have closed shop). People are moving to where things are more social, where the author/audience divide is less sharp, and where the scale of interaction is human-sized. This is the new loft district: social networks.

Social networks are truly social, where web media isn’t, very.

Social networks are really about individuals and their personal relationships with others. So, if web media is to really become social — which it isn’t at present — we need to take what we have learned from other, more social tools, and take another run at social media.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common;
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

as Twitter has become the bedrock underlying a growing and dynamic neighborhood of the web, how will it be governed?

Side story about instant messaging interoperability — which we still don’t have. A world where Jabber — an open source standard — did not make real headway against AIM (and later Yahoo and MSN). The justice department failed at the AOL / Time Warner merger to force this. And we have all been disadvantaged as a result.

From one point of view, Twitter is an application owned and operated by Ev and his colleagues, and our use of the app is controlled by the terms of the service agreement we all checked ‘OK’ to. From this point of view, they are free to do whatever they want, and we have the freedom to take a hike if we don’t like it. Or gripe, or write a petition. But otherwise we have little recourse if in fact Twitter Inc. decides to screw up replies (the #fixreplies mess has *not* been resolved yet, by the way), or makes other changes to functionality that degrades our experience.

It may seem that we have no grounds for any sort of complaint. After all, it can be argued that we aren’t paying anything, just freeloading on their largess, and they have borne all the costs.

On the other hand, their astronomical valuations — what they are using to pull in hefty amounts of paid-in capital from investors — is directly related to our participation. Without us using Twitter, by the millions, Twitter would just be a bunch of software cogs in a cardboard box. It is our animation that makes Twitter worth a billion dollars, not just the cleverness of the developers and the openess of their APIs.

To a great extent, Twitter is ours, like the air we breathe.

So, how will Twitter be governed? As a tool owned by a company that is owned by the inventors and some wealthy investors? Or as a world in which we live, and in which we have inalienable rights?

The entertainment business tried to say they owned all art, all music, all movies. We know they are artifacts produced by our culture, which we share with the artists, and the controls that the entertainment business thought they had — copyright and DRM — have failed with the digital and web revolution.

So, here we have the same revolution, come home again. Twitter’s world — its conventions, meaning and use — is our artifact: we have built it, 140 characters at a time, just as the Twitter developers have been building the platform underneath our feet. But it is our dancing that makes the house rock, not the planks and pipes. It is us that makes Twitter alive, and not the code.

***

I hope I can persuade Umair to think of this in new spatialist terms, not just looking at it through economics. It is the extra-market aspects that are the most interesting, and ‘quiet enjoyment’ of a city is not just about what it costs to live there.

If we want social tools to be more humane, to help us to be more human, we should talk about it in the broadest possible terms, and for me that’s anthropology, not economics.

It’s Betweenness That Matters, Not Your Eigenvalue: The Dark Matter Of Influence

Let me explain, before you think I have been gargling alphabet soup.

Recent research suggests that the most important people in social networks, relative to actually transmitting ideas, viruses, or moods, might not be the folks with the most followers, but instead might be people that are connected to a large number of individuals through shorter paths than others have.

- ARVIX blog, Best Connected Individuals Are Not the Most Influential Spreaders in Social Networks

The study of social networks has thrown up more than a few surprises over the years. It’s easy to imagine that because the links that form between various individuals in a society are not governed by any overarching rules, they must have a random structure. So the discovery in the 1980s that social networks are very different came as something of a surprise. In a social network, most nodes are not linked to each other but can easily be reached by a small number of steps. This is the so-called small worlds network.

Today, there’s another surprise in store for network connoisseurs courtesy of Maksim Kitsak at Boston University and various buddies. One of the important observations from these networks is that certain individuals are much better connected than others. These so-called hubs ought to play a correspondingly greater role in the way information and viruses spread through society.

In fact, no small effort has gone into identifying these individuals and exploiting them to either spread information more effectively or prevent them from spreading disease.

The importance of hubs may have been overstated, say Kitsak and pals. “In contrast to common belief, the most influential spreaders in a social network do not correspond to the best connected people or to the most central people,” they say.

At first glance this seems somewhat counter-intuitive but on reflection it makes perfect sense. Kitsak and co point out that there are various scenarios in which well connected hubs have little influence over the spread of information. “For example, if a hub exists at the end of a branch at the periphery of a network, it will have a minimal impact in the spreading process through the core of the network.”

By contrast, “a less connected person who is strategically placed in the core of the network will have a significant effect that leads to dissemination through a large fraction of the population.”

The question then is how to find these influential individuals. Kitsak and co say that the way to do this is to study a quantity called the network’s “k-shell decomposition”. That sounds complicated but it isn’t: a k-shell is simply a network pruned down to the nodes with more than k neighbours. Individuals in the highest k-shells are the most influential spreaders.

(via @karllong)

In network theory, these two cases are both example of centrality: ways of assigning values to individual nodes in a network based on how each node relates to the others.

The most connected people in a social network — those with the highest number of incoming and outgoing connections — have high eigenvalues. These eigenvalues can be calculated — like Google’s PageRank algorithm — by weighting the value of each connection based on the eigenvalue of the originator.

But this research suggests that a different way to measure the centrality might be more useful in determining how much throw weight a person actually has. Betweenness is a measure of how short are the chains that connects a person to the totality of the network. Like PageRank, betweenness is recursive: the people with the highest betweenness are likely to be connected to other people with high betweenness.

This means people are influential because they are connected to many influential people. But influence doesn’t seem directly linked to how many people you are connected to. It’s a function of being connected to others who have short chains to many other people with high betweenness. Or, looked at differently, betweenness is a measure of how many social circles, or social scenes, a person is connected to.

So, it’s not who you know it’s where you know. It’s where you are situated in the network, and not just in the limited sense of how many immediate contacts you have.

The subtle, dark-matter mystery of social networks is that influence is oblique, and not easily determined by the sorts of tools we have today.

It is not your follower count, or who you follow, per se. But, instead, do you have short paths into other social scenes, both incoming and outgoing? That is the deep structure of being truly connected: bridging over different social scenes, acting as a conduit, a vector, a filter and amplifier for ideas good and bad, the best insights, and deadly viruses.

The Rise Of Networks, The End Of Process

The industrial influence in business management and theory is profound. In essence, for the past hundred years business has been objectified as a machine, divided into various components, like a clock or an electric generator. Components are composed of subcomponents, and so on, until you get down to nuts, bolts, and flywheels. People are — in the industrial scheme of things — gears in the machine, and their purpose is to perform a defined role in the assemblage.

This is the unexamined premise of how many businesses are ‘designed’ — to the extent that they have been consciously designed, instead of unconsciously shaped by decades of 19th and 20th century management dogma. First, the rise of assembly lines, vertical integration, and the rise of business processes. Then, the emergence of new communication technologies (telephones, email, web), that spawned the reengineering and knowledge management patterns of thinking about business, each with fatal flaws. 

And now the social web is happening, and acting like a solvent on these business constructs: not just superficially, or metaphorically, but at the very core of industrial beliefs. Note: this isn’t just a bunch of humanist rhetoric: the social society is exploding, and new ways of interaction that were unaffordable or impossible before are not only cheap and possible but being adopted widely because of a long list of reasons, not the least of which is simplicity and effectiveness. People are thronging on social sites like Facebook and Twitter because they are a straightforward way to stay connected with others, and this in turn shapes our worldview.

As these new realities percolate in the open web and in the new web-influenced culture, people carry these experiences into the world of business. Indirectly, based on their experience in the open web, which leads them to consider how the social tools could work in the business context. And more directly, some pioneers are dragging social tools into the business context, and seeing where it all goes.

And some, a few, are trying to think through a new model for business, reconstructed around what we have learned in the open web, balanced with what we know about the conduct of business. A new hybrid, intentionally devised to keep the best of the old (or at least the parts that will still work) and fuse that with the new, social models that dominate the web revolution.

From a social viewpoint, the architecture of business seems all wrong. People aren’t really designed to do one thing, like a cog in a watch. They have various relationships with other people, and through these relationships they have influence on the work going on all around them. They are not alone, like a moth in a bell jar. We are not alone, in our work. Even the most repetitive of work — screwing bolts on an assembly line, or delivering the mail — happens in the context of other people, and is made more valuable by their exertions.

Increasingly, people’s work is being viewed as a shared aspect of social relations. Time is a shared space, where we cooperate toward shared ends.

One casualty of this large-scale shift in business doctrine may be the hallowed business process. The notion of a process — a defined series of steps in the production of goods or the delivery of services — subordinates individuals to the their roles in the process.

For decades, business planners have made a distinction between repetitive, lock-step processes, where very little variability is involved (think pharmacy), and more free-form, unstructured processes where a higher degree of variability is expected (think emergency room). Taking the abstraction of a process out of the world of chemistry, manufacturing, and logistics, and treating the people involved as so many chemicals, gears, or trucks seemed like a good idea in the past, but is not going to be workable, going forward.

We will have to devise a new, richer way to think about people’s interactions — via social networks — and our connection to mechanical processes and devices. In effect, we will need to model work with two layers, one where people are communicating with each other in a very fluid and flexible way, and machinery communicates with us and other machinery in less fluid ways. Some of these communication paths will be very limited, like a copier blinking to represent it is out of paper. But increasingly, even machinery is becoming much more communication-rich, and the way that machines respond to the world is surprisingly humanlike: coke machines that signal their internal state, like temperature, and the fact that there are only two Sprites left, or cars that will automatically start to brake if they sense no hands on the steering wheel.

More importantly, the customers in the emerging social world will have new expectations about their role in business ‘processes’ and may be significantly less willing to be treated like pigeons pecking at levers in exchange for pellets. Consider the Jetblue customer snowstorm service disaster of a few years ago, or the not-so-subtle pressures of a discerning public leading to higher and higher levels of customer support based on the ability to gripe online, and to rally widespread support, like Jarvis’ Dell Hell campaign.

We will still get some value out of thinking through business models structurally, and choreographing steps in production or the delivery of service. But the sophistication of machines and customers means that more and more of the steps will have a wider range of alternatives, which leads designers to have to focus more on putting the right information into people’s hands — both workers and customers — than minimizing choice. For example, provisioning checklists for various well-understood medical procedures — like putting in an IV — supports medical practitioners in tense situations, and increasing the likelihood they will not omit a simple step when hurried. This has lead to significant decrease in infection and other side effects. However, it does not seek to replace the interaction between the doctor or nurse and the patient. Instead, the checklist makes it easier for the practitioner to use the time available to learn more about the patients status, because they are freed from having to recall from memory the appropriate six steps in establishing an IV.

But the major shift here is conceptual. Processes, like the IV checklist, will still be with us, but they will have a lowercase ‘p’, and be understood as being secondary to higher business priorities, like the humane treatment of the medical patient, or the rights of travelers, or the need to superachieve customer satisfaction with consumer electronics. These goals will always trump the rote step-by-step rules and roles of a inflexible business process. Connectedness should always take precedence over efficiency, especially where the efficiency comes at the cost of customers, but even in the interactions between workers, the process should be secondary to the strategic principles of the firm. And, in the final analysis, this is the final evolutionary step away from the excesses of industrial management thinking, into a social way of structuring work.