loose wire blog

Facebook Wants to Be Twitter, While Twitter May Have to Be More Like Facebook

Here’s another appearance on Radio Australia’s Breakfast Club which is pretty much every Friday—around 1.15 GMT—and here are some links to the things I talked about this week.

Here’s the audio of the segment (about 10 minutes’ worth).

• Facebook’s move to be more like Twitter. As I said on the show, Facebook fears that its network lacks room for growth; when was the last time you added a friend?
• Marketers find Twitter. Australian company uSocial will go out and get followers for you, for a price. This isn’t underhand, but already twitter is becoming a place for spammers (from Habitat to the sleazeballs who won’t get out of my twitter stream.) As I mentioned on the show, Facebook is going to try to be more like twitter, while twitter may have to be more like Facebook.
• Meanwhile Rupert Murdoch sees Facebook as a directory, MySpace as a place to share common interests. If that’s the case, then twitter actually trumps them both because it’s a real time search engine for both. (I didn’t have time to talk about this, but it’s an interesting point.)
• (From last week) Researchers in Italy have been going around nightlcubs in Chieti asking people for cigarettes. Turns out if you ask them in their right ear, you’re more likely to be successful. It’s called the right ear advantage (via the Daily Telegraph.)

Into the Light

Part of my job is explaining the world of new/social media to old media veterans. It’s not easy, either because they’re very resistant to change, or because they tend to see the changes  being wrought on their industry as somehow different to the much bigger changes taking place.

It’s not a bunch of separate revolutions—it’s one revolution. For want of a better description, it’s not unlike the transition from the Dark Ages to the High Middle Ages. That’s perhaps overstating it, but compare, if you will, this small vignette.

I was chatting with a friend on Skype just now; he had returned to Canada to be with his ailing dad. I enquired more, and he told me his father had been at the Battle of Ortona, and still suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I know something of PTSD, but I was ignorant of Ortona, so I looked it up while we chatted. There’s a great Wikipedia page on it, so I quickly got a sense of what his father had been through, back in 1943.

Then my friend sent me links—to a book written about it, which I could thumb through on Amazon and search for his name.

I was able to quickly learn a bit about the battle, about my friend’s father, and about his wounds, both external and internal. Then my friend sent me another link, this time to a YouTube page that showcased a movie about the battle.

Within a few clicks I was much, much more knowledgeable about what this man had gone through, made more personal by my friend’s messages that dropped through Skype:

All of the officers he trained with were killed. He was the only one left.

He has one pal left who is still alive from those days.

It’s easy to dismiss this all as just bite-sized knowledge, without depth or perspective. But nevertheless what we have at our finger tips is so much more than was possible a few years ago—so much so that it’s no exaggeration to say that the Internet offers wisdom over darkness to those who came before it.

And for the media? Well, it’s not really about news anymore. It’s about wisdom. Information grabbed when needed to assemble an insight. The dividing line now is not between those who have access to information—everyone, more or less, has access—but between those who have the skill and interest to be able to know what they’re looking for and to find it. And then, of course, digest it.

That has huge implications for media because it transforms the market for information. It doesn’t remove it—it transforms it. We haven’t figured out how.

But we have already reached, without really making a big fuss about it, a great point of leveling, where we all can claw our way out of ignorance, topic by topic, surprisingly quickly. Whether we want to is something else entirely.

Image from SDCinematografica.it

Technorati Tags: socialmedia,newspapers,journalism,information

Making Networks Do the Work

I don’t get overly excited about plug-ins but I think Xoopit may have shifted us into a new gear.

As part of a course I teach on journalist tools I do a demo of Gmail. I talk about it being the new desktop. But I’m only showing the bare bones of the thing: labels, filters, colors, stars.

For a lot of them, that’s an eye-opener in itself.

But it’s once you start talking about gadgets where you can access your calendar, your documents, your chat, then it really makes sense.

All good, but not really anything different to Outlook. Just lighter and accessible from anywhere.

But the arrival of an updated version of the plugin Xoopit, I think, really pitches webmail, well Gmail, into a new zone.

It has some basic stuff which is kinda useful. At the top is a row of picture attachments from recent emails:

Not that useful for me, but useful.

There are also links to videos and files: click on one and it takes you to a full listing of attachments, listable by type, date received, etc. You can even search by sender: 

But still that’s not what impressed me, and convinced me we’re on the threshold of something brand new.

Read an email thread and Xoopit will pluck out those people involved in the conversation. It will display them on the right hand side of the thread. Not only that; it will try to grab their Facebook profile and image—even if you’re not connected to them on Facebook:

 

At a stroke I can now see who I’m talking to (in this case avoiding the catastrophe of misidentifying a woman as a man) and also see who we have in common:

To me this raises all sorts of possibilities. Suddenly my networks are beginning to talk to each other, to mine each other for data and work to close the gaps in them. I’m suddenly much better informed about the people I’m dealing with, without having to do lots of legwork.

Of course, this would be better if it was also searching LinkedIn (or maybe instead searching LinkedIn, in that I’d rather connect that way to a professional contact first.)

But it’s still the first time I’ve seen leveraging like this done in such a simple and unobtrusive way. It fits into my way of working rather than a lot of these network leveragers I’ve seen, which add to the clutter or try to automate things which should  be manual.

More on that anon.

For now, congratulations Xoopit. I count this as the first step in a bright dawn of social networks and contact lists working for me rather than the other way around.

And I think it’s further proof that Gmail—or Yahoo! Mail, or any of the rich featured webmail offerings—are actually a workplace in themselves, around which can be built all sorts of useful tools mining our other networks.

Radio Australia Topics, Feb 6 2009

What I talked about on the Radio Australia Breakfast Club today:

• Everyone, it seems, is writing an iPhone app. Including a Singaporean 9-year old. Not surprising since half a billion apps have been downloaded since the app store went live six months ago. iPhone apps get security conscious: Bank Info lures the thief with juicy bank data but in fact transmits locational information to the owner. FoneJac will make your iPhone go off like a car alarm if someone picks it up.
•  Google launches Latitude: Now you can see where your friends are, not where they say they are.
• Pew Internet and American Life Project finds teens preferring SMS and instant messaging over email (d’oh) but also over social networks and virtual worlds. (Emily of textually.org points out that email was out from about 2004 in South Korea.)
• A big step: Microsoft offers, not just a list of steps to fix a problem, but to do the steps for you, with its Fix It program. Good idea, or thin end of a dodgy wedge?

Still Sneaky After All These Years

I still retain the capacity to get bummed out by the intrusiveness of software from companies you’d think would be trying to make us happy these days, not make us madder.

My friend Scotty, the Winpatrol watchdog, has been doing a great job of keeping an eye on these things. The culprits either try to change file associations or add a program to the boot sequence, without telling us. Some recent examples:

Windows Live Mail, without me doing anything at all, suddenly tried to wrest control of my emails by grabbing the extension EML from Thunderbird:

This was unconnected to anything I was doing, or had asked. I didn’t even know I still had Live Mail installed. Shocking. Imagine if I hadn’t been asking Scotty to keep guard? Or that I didn’t have much of a clue what I was doing? (OK, don’t answer that one.)

(Just out of interest, launching Outlook Express will do the same thing:)

Still, I suppose the Microsoft defence is that everyone else is doing it. I installed WordPerfect Office the other day and found that, without asking, it tried to take over handling DOC files without asking first. Luckily, Scotty woofed a warning:

No wonder users are baffled about what is going on with their computer and end up heading off to the Apple Store for some TLC. Software companies have got to stop doing this kind of thing. (And no, I’m not saying that Apple are any better at this. It’s just they reduce the choices so people feel their computers behave more predictably. This, after all, is what people yearn for.)

Likewise with starting programs. Once again it’s about predictability: If software starts loading without the user being asked first, then a) the computer is going to slow down and b) the user will have a bunch of new icons and activities to figure out. A couple of examples:

Windows Live forces its Family Safety Client to boot without asking:

as does eFax, the online faxing service:

These companies need to stop this. They need to stop it now. Consumer confidence is low, but so is user confidence. I am inundated with letters from readers of the columns who talk about their bafflement and sense of alienation from their computer. (Meanwhile, I read love stories from those who switch to Macs.) The point is this: Not that people believe Macs are better computers—although they may well be—but they are simpler to use, more predictable, more understandable, more, well, user-friendly.

What’s user-friendly about changing the settings on someone’s computer without asking them? Would a company try that with someone’s car, fridge, or dishwasher?

Radio Australia stuff, Jan 23 2009

For those listening to my slot on Radio Australia’s Breakfast Show, here’s what I was talking about:

• Inauguration fever: How it may have tipped the way we use the Net, just like the election did. (People who weren't there weren't googling, they were twittering and facebooking.)
• 'Dark ages' White House:The White House runs on 'six year old versions of Microsoft software'; press office officials use Gmail. Website doesn't get updated until evening of first day. Or is it a case of Macopia?
• Shock, horror: Windows 7 might actually be quite good

and some stuff we didn’t have time to talk about, but which tickled me:

• Brits find setting up a mobile as tricky as moving bank accounts
• Booty calls: Entourage’s Jeremy Piven is offered a $1 mln spokesman deal after mass messaging (‘massaging’?) for company

Clint, Veganism, and Maligning the Net

Great interview in the International Herald Tribune/NYT with Clint Eastwood, but once again, it’s old media slagging off new media and ending up looking the worse for it.

The interviewer, presumably, asks Clint to confirm that he’s a vegan. Turns out he’s not.  Apparently the writer did his research on Wikipedia, because that’s what he cites as a source:

Despite what you might have read on Wikipedia, Eastwood is not a vegan, and he looked slightly aghast when told exactly what a vegan is. "I never look at the Internet for just that reason," he said.

Trouble is, the source is not Wikipedia. As anyone who uses Wikipedia knows, any information on there must be sourced. A glance at the actual Wikipedia page would reveal that the source for this ‘fact’ about Clint is, in fact, a fellow old media source, The Los Angeles Times:

People ask him to autograph rifles, but Eastwood is no Charlton Heston. A vegan, he was distressed to hear Hillary Rodham Clinton boast recently about bagging a bird.

This piece was subsequently run in the San Jose Mercury News, the Providence Journal and PressDisplay.

In fact, you won’t be able to see this on the Wikipedia page anymore because it’s been removed. That’s because some new media moves faster than old media: on December 11, the day the NYT piece was first published, a Wikipedian spotted the reference and prompted a discussion, and the removal of the reference on the grounds that a direct denial from Eastwood trumps an LAT piece. (You can see the discussion here.)

In other words, from what we can judge, the journalist involved researched Clint on Wikipedia, and was ready enough to accept that as a source on which to base his questions. When the fact in question turned out to be wrong, he allowed Clint to make a familiar sideswipe at the Internet, and not further research the origin of the myth.

But the story doesn’t stop there. The LA Times doesn’t cite a source. But there are plenty of them—apparently. Clint is quoted on dozens of sites as saying

"I try to stick to a vegan diet—heavy on fruit, vegetables, tofu, and other soy products."

Sites like GoVeg.com have been happy to include him in their Animal-Friendly Celebrities (although, to their credit, they seem to have removed him. Compare this page with this cached version.)

What’s perhaps most intriguing is the source of this quote. I’ll admit I can’t find it. But it’s been bouncing around the net for a couple of years; this forum cites it in September 2006. I found a  piece in Glasgow’s Daily Record on May 23, 2006 that also listed Clint as vegetarian, although the web site does not seem to contain a record of it. The oldest reference I can find is in the Miami New Times, on October 13 2005, which lists Clint among a number of (supposed) vegans.

In other words, a myth arose on the net, without any straightforward way of establishing its provenance or authenticity, which was then happily picked up by websites, businesses, and organisations whose purpose it served, then found its way into a mainstream news article, before finally being authoritatively quashed.

So yes, in a way Clint and the NYT reporter are right. The Internet isn’t reliable. But Wikipedia is. Or at least, it’s no less reliable than the sources it cites. Which in this case, happened to be old media itself.

Lesson? As a journalist I guess I might too have fallen into the trap of trusting the LA Times. But it’s a timely reminder that there’s no fact too small or apparently established that it can’t stand to be fact-checked.

Just don’t blame the net if you get it wrong. It’s cheap and it’s old wave.

The veteran power of Clint Eastwood - International Herald Tribune

Technorati Tags: wikipedia,msm,journalism,newspapers

The Undignified Death of Social Networks

I’m intrigued, and slightly depressed, at how social networking sites deteriorate so quickly into what are little more than scams. I think it started about a year ago, when a number of sites started pulling the stops out to build up membership.

Now, it seems, it’s all about the money. Take Quechup, for example, which has never had a very good reputation, though some say it’s undeserved. I don’t think anyone would try to argue that now.

I opened an account at Quechup about a year ago, and left it, with no friends. no connections, no activity (a bit like my real life.) I didn’t get anything until last month. In the past month I’ve received more than 30 messages. All of them from people I don’t know; all of them, from the subject line, spam:

So what’s the scam, then?

Well, if you’re fool enough to open one of these messages, that’s your limit. Suddenly your inbox looks like this:

The message is basically that you can’t open any messages until you upgrade your membership:

 

Upgrading, of course, costs. Not a lot, but if you’re curious to find out who’s been scamming you, sorry, flirting with you, you have to cough up:

My question is this: Who is behind the spam in my inbox?

Admittedly, my profile is a bit provocative:

Still. One can’t help feeling that either the spam is being allowed by Quechup as a money-making exercise, or, the only other explanation I can think of, it’s spamming its members with silly messages in the hope they’ll be curious enough to upgrade and read them.

Either way, it’s a social network that’s dead from the neck up.

Sad, really.

The Lost World of Yahoo

This piece was written for a commentary on the BBC World Service Business Daily about Jerry Yang’s decision to resign as CEO.

Back in the early days of the World Wide Web there was really only one name. Yahoo. You could tell it was big because it was what you’d type in your browser to see if your computer was connected to the Internet.

Without fail: Yahoo.com. It’s been around since 1994, since Jerry Yang and David Filo, two grad students at Stanford, built a list of interesting websites, a sort of yellow pages for the Internet. They called it, first, Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web, and then Yahoo. By the end of 1994 it had a million hits. By 1996 it had gone public.

And, I reckon, it’s been slightly lost ever since.

Not that you’d know that from the figures. It’s the most popular website in the world. Nearly half that traffic is actually email, according to Alexa, a website that tracks this kind of thing. Nearly everyone on the planet, it seems, has a Yahoo email address.

But there’s also other stuff: search, news, auctions, finance, groups, chat, games, movies, sports. And Yahoo has been pretty consistent for the 14 years of its life: If you look at its homepage, the place where you’d land if you typed in yahoo.com, it wouldn’t look that different in 1995 to what it looked like in 2005. The familiar red Yahoo logo at the top of the page, a little search box, and then some links to directories.

But since then things have got more complicated. The guys at Google made a better search engine, so much so that their name has become a verb, a shorthand way of saying “look up something or someone on the Internet.”

That kind of left Yahoo behind. So far, I’ve not heard Yahoo used as a verb, or a noun, at least in a positive way. And Google also figured out how to make money from it, which stole another bit of Yahoo’s thunder.

But it hasn’t stopped there. Internet speeds have got faster. We’re now connected most of the time, via computer or cellphone. Upstart bloggers have toppled big media conglomerates. So now all the big players—Microsoft, Google, Yahoo—are not quite sure what they are: Media companies? Advertising companies? Software services company? A mix of all three?

So it’s no surprise that Jerry Yang has been unable to articulate what, exactly Yahoo itself is. If you’re not sure what your company is, never mind that you founded it, you shouldn’t be sitting in the CEO’s chair.

The truth is that there are two Yahoos. Ask an ordinary user and they’ll know about Yahoo. The email program. The instant messenger. The news portal. To millions of people Yahoo is comfortable and familiar.

Ask a geek and they’ll talk about another Yahoo: all the cool stuff the company engineers are doing. Pipes, which lets you mash data together in interesting ways. Fireeagle, that blends together information about where you are. And there’s the stuff they’ve bought that most people don’t even realise belongs to Yahoo: delicious bookmarks, for example, or Flickr photos.

People may be down on Yahoo right now, and the share price isn’t pretty. But it’s still a big brand, known around the world. And, despite their frustrations, beloved by many geeks.

One day someone will come along and find a way to package all this stuff together, or sell bits of it off. Then Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web will find its way again. It just doesn’t look like that person is going to be Jerry himself.

The Freshness. and T-Shirt Worthiness, of News

(cross-posted from a Loose Wire sister site, ConvergedMedia.net)

CNN.com has a good way of informing readers of the 'freshness' of news by adding notes in red to indicate when the story was added or updated. (In the example above it also adds a 'developing story' label.)

This kind of thing is helpful in that the site can still order stories by their importance, but also flag those that are being updated:

(It also adds a rather cute touch to its whacky stories, allowing readers to order a T-shirt with the headline on it:)

Click on the T-shirt logo and you're taken to a page where you can order the shirt:

Technorati Tags: cnn,news,presentation,visualization,monetisation