loose wire blog

Broadbangladesh

 
Illustration IHT, by Felipe Galindo

I wrote a piece for the IHT on a company of expats bringing wireless broadband to their native Bangladesh. Would love to have gone there to have a look, but budgets aren’t what they were (love the illustration):

In Bangladesh, where less than 1 percent of the population has Internet access and where the rare broadband connection is prohibitively expensive, bridging the digital divide may require new approaches.

A group of Bangladeshi expatriates think they have found one that could work - a plan to bring affordable Internet access to their homeland through a blend of high-end wireless technology and social entrepreneurship.

Bringing Bangladesh into the Internet age - International Herald Tribune

Why Social Network Sites May Fail

Accused of spamming: Prerna Gupta, founder of Yaari.com

Look at a social networking site lie Yaari and you can see where the social networking phenomenon may fail, simply by abusing the trust of its users.

Sites like LinkedIn, Plaxo etc rely on expanding quickly by offering a useful service: trawling your address book to find friends and contacts who use the same service. We’ve gotten used to this, and it’s a great way to build a network quickly if you sign up for a new service.

But any service that uses this needs to stress privacy, and put control in the hands of users. Plaxo learned this a few years back. Spam a user’s contact list without them realising and you invite a firestorm of opprobrium on your head.

But surprisingly some services still do it. And in so doing they risk alienating users from what makes Web 2.0 tick: the easy meshing of networks—your address book, your Facebook buddies, your LinkedIn network—to make online useful.

Take Yaari, a network built by two Stanford grads which has for the past two years abused the basic tenets of privacy in an effort to build scale.

What happens is this.

You’ll receive an email from a contact:

 

It’s an invitation from a “friend” which

• gives you no way to check out the site without signing up. The only two links (apart from an abuse reporting email address at the bottom) take you to the signup page.
• neither link allows you to check out your “friend”  and his details before you sign up.

If you do go to the sign up page you’ll be asked to give your name and email address:

Below the email address is the reassuring message:

Your email is private and will stay that way.

But scroll down to below the create my account button and you’ll see this:

By registering for Yaari and agreeing to the Terms of Use, you authorize Yaari to send an email notification to all the contacts listed in the address book of the email address you provide during registration. The email will notify your friends that you have registered for Yaari and will encourage them to register for the site. Yaari will never store your email password or login to your email account without your consent. If you do not want Yaari to send an email notification to your email contacts, do not register for Yaari.

In short, by signing up for Yaari you’ve committed yourself, and all the people in your address book, to receiving spam from Yaari that appears to come from your email address. (Here’s the bit from the terms: “Invitation emails will be sent on member's behalf, with the 'from' address set as member's email address.”)

You should also expect to receive further spam from Yaari, according to the terms:

MEMBERS CONSENT TO RECEIVE COMMERCIAL E-MAIL MESSAGES FROM YAARI, AND ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT THEIR EMAIL ADDRESSES AND OTHER PERSONAL INFORMATION MAY BE USED BY YAARI FOR THE PURPOSE OF INITIATING COMMERCIAL E-MAIL MESSAGES.

In other words, anyone signing up for Yaari is commiting both themselves and everyone else in their address book to receiving at least one item of spam from the company. Users complain that Yaari doesn’t stop at one email; it bombards address books with follow-up emails continually.

Needless to say, all this is pretty appalling. But what’s more surprising is that Yaari has been doing this for a while. I’ve trawled complaints from as far back as 2006. This despite the company being U.S.-based. I’m surprised the FTC hasn’t taken an interest.

 

So who’s behind the site? This article lists two U.S.-born Indians, Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia, and quotes Gupta as saying, back in 2006, that to preserve the integrity of the network access is restricted to the right kind of Indian youth. I’m not young, I’m not Indian, and I’m probably not the right kind, so clearly that goal has been abandoned.

Here are some more details of the two founders.

Gupta, who is 26, is an economics major who graduated in 2005, was working for a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley called Summit Partners until 2005. Her facebook profile is here; her LinkedIn profile is here. According to this website she once won the Ms Asia Oklahoma pageant (her hometown is listed as Shawnee in Oklahoma, although she lives in Atlanta.

Chordia, chief technology officer at Yaari, has a PhD in computer music, and is currently assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, according to his LinkedIn profile. His facebook profile is here.

There’s a video of them here. An interview with Gupta last year indicates that they’re going hell for leather for size:

We are focused on growing our user base and becoming India’s largest social networking site within the next two years. Our goal for the next year is to become one of India’s Top 10 Internet destinations.

What’s interesting is that nearly every site that mentions Yaari and allows comments contains sometimes angry complaints from users. In that sense Web 2.0 is very effective in getting the word out. Unfortunately if Yaari and its founders continue to commit such egregious abuses of privacy, we can’t be sure many people will trust such websites long enough for the power of networking sites to be properly realised.

(I’ve sought comment from Gupta, which I’ll include in this post when received.)

del.icio.us Tags: yaari,social networking,spam,privacy,networks,plaxo

The Way Chat Should Be

Great to see that Google Talk is adding improvements. I just noticed this one, for example: Drag a photo into a chat window and it appears in the chat itself. Click on the picture and a little progress bar lights up on the right as the recipient accepts the picture.

Resize the window and the picture resizes:

This is good stuff, especially when you compare it with Skype, which for some reason no longer allows dragging of files or links into a chat.

Chat, in short, needs to fit the conversation. And conversation involves sharing things, looking at things together, and generally connecting to each other.

Switch to Google Talk. Skype, get your act together.

Technorati Tags: chat, google talk, skype, instant messaging, IM

Facebook is Dead. I'm Not Being Facetious

Either there's a glitch in Facebook, or else it's dead. Well, not dead, exactly, but I noticed that, at nearly 10 pm, none of my friends have done anything today to merit appearing on the News Feed of stuff (see above).

(The News Feed, for those of you with real lives, lists recent activity by your friends in adding little widgets, updating their photos, tagging other photos, and all that sort of thing that merits an evening at home.)

(And no, I'm not filtering my News Feed at all:)

(And yes, I do have some friends. Well, Facebook friends. They're like fairweather friends except they don't even hang around when the weather's good:)

Now, this could be a glitch. A glance at one of my most active Facebook chums indicated she's accepted flowers, a caveman and a fire in the past hour.)

And we should distinguish between activities and updates. Status updates are still going fine: 22 of my chums have updated their status in the last six hours. But none, as far as I can work out, have added an application, tagged photos or done anything that merits being put into the News Feed (indeed a lot of the activity in the News Feed seems to be a couple of days old.)

To me that's kind of significant. If my friends have tired of Facebook as a place to hang out and do stuff, then how long has it got left?

Technorati Tags: facebook, networks, status, presence, lifestreams

The Revolutionary Back Channel

A tech conference appears to have marked yet another shift in the use of social tools to wrest control and flatten the playing field.

Dan Fost of Fortune calls it Conference 2.0 but I prefer the term (which Dan also uses): The Unconference Movement. (I prefer it because anything with 2.0 in it implies money; calling it a movement makes it sound more like people doing things because they want to.)

Dan summarizes what is being billed as a pivotal moment: an 'interview' session where columnist Sarah Lacy faces a growing discontent of the audience for her interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg. (You can see the interview here, and the comments are worth reading.)

Jeremiah Owyang pulls it altogether and tags it as a Groundswell, which happens to also be the name of a forthcoming book by his Forrester colleagues. A Groundswell, he says, is "a social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions."

Shel Israel sees it as "revolutionary in the same way that American colonists wrested power from the British; that Gandhi did it with homespun cloth and boycotting British-supplied salt and in the same manner that students attempted to do it in America of the 60s."

Tools used: twitter, meebo.

What's interesting here is this:

Twitter has changed, at least for some people, from a presence/status tool ("doing the ironing in my underwear") to a communication tool ("@burlesque you were right to slap him. where's the altavista party?")

I must confess I haven't caught up with this trend. When I complained to a geek friend that tweets were no longer entertaining and now more likely to feel like eavesdrops on other people's conversations, he said that was the point. But it's not eavesdropping: these conversations are public and, by definition, open to including others.

Indeed, that's how, at SXSW, a lot of the parties and gatherings evolved: one tweet offering a party in an empty bar attracted 100 participants in minutes.

But we need to recognise this isn't for everyone. Twitter tools work great for people who share the same interests, or inhabit the same area. And the difference with Facebook here is instructive: Status messages are just that, while postings on friends' walls can be seen by other friends, which makes those messages social (while messages can't).

Which is more social? Facebook is a walled garden of trusted friends; Twitter is an anarchic network that allows users to hunt down new friends based on what they're talking about. In a way it's more like music taste-sharing sites like Last.fm than Facebook: I join a service like that not because I only want to hang out with the people I know, but to meet people I'll draw value from via a shared taste and interest.

So what else is worth noting from this 'Groundswell'?

Is this revolutionary? For those of us who have nodded off in presentations and dull panel discussions that could, for all the lack of connection with the audience, be on another planet, this can only be a good thing. Allowing the audience to participate is clearly a must, and any interviewer or moderator in that format who denies that is wasting a key resource: the audience.

That was always true, but the audience is not passive anymore: They have the tools to discuss and organize among themselves, and, in the case of the Facebook session, to fight back. It can get ugly (at times the video felt more like a mob lynching than a 'Groundswell', but after 45 minutes of poor questions, maybe my patience might have snapped too.)

I am not sure this is a revolution on the par of Shel's comparisons, but there are lots of things happening here. Destructive as it may appear on the video, this is actually an example of collaboration, however chaotic, and alliance-making, however brief, that is social media at its best. A group shared a technology that allowed them to communicate, and they collaborated. The mood of the room could be felt by those present. But the mood defined itself on the backchannel chat ("Am I the only one here who is finding the questions boring and irrelevant?") and then expressed itself vocally--one individual, initially, but supported by the applause of others in the face of the interviewer's defensiveness.

I'd love to think that audiences, with their collective knowledge, enthusiasm and, let's face it, investment in being there, can turn the traditional format of dominant speaker/moderator and appreciative but docile mass on its head. If that's a revolution then I'm up for it.

Technorati Tags: sxsw, twitter, meebo, groundswell, conference 2.0, social networking, web 2.0, shel israel, forrester

My First LinkedIn Spam

 

Got my first LinkedIn spam today:

Hi Jeremy,

[name deleted], here... we are linked on LinkedIn

I know you're interested in earning an in~come on the internet. I also know you probably wouldn't mind if 'understanding it' was made easier for you.

Well, I've been notified about a new F.REE report by internet marketers, [etc ad nauseam]

I logged in, and it's true: We are linked on LinkedIn. Or were; I've deleted him as quickly as I could. Or at least I tried to: There's no easy way to do it. (I found the answer, not in LinkedIn's answers or help page, but on Ask Dave Taylor, who points out that "with so many different social network sites cropping up, it's pretty amazing to me how few actually let you edit the connections you establish."

My policy with LinkedIn has been to add more or less anyone who asks to be linked. This is highly irresponsible of me, of course, but I figured it wasn't going to do any damage since I don't really use the tool. Now, after this bit of spam, I'm not so sure. If people see I'm connected to a spammer, maybe that could do me some damage. As I've never received a job offer, or even an indecent proposal, via LinkedIn I'm frankly not quite sure what it's for. But if it's a way for people to spam me then I'm all for tightening the guest list a bit.

So I'm going to start weeding out my LinkedIn contact list, which currently stands at about three gazillion people, only four of whom I've actually met.

Technorati Tags: linkedin, spam, networks, social networking, business networking

Who Needs Enemies When You Have Facebook Friends?

It might be time to remove a) all your data and b) all third party apps from your Facebook profile. Here's why.

Add a Facebook app -- SuperPoke, all that kind of stuff -- and you're required to agree to "allow this application to...know who I am and access my information." Disagree and you can't install it.

Now this may be fine for you. But what the application doesn't say is that the application is also now able to access the private data of your friends. To be clear about this, I'm not talking about friends who also agree to install the app; I'm talking about all your friends, period.

And most applications do access this data, without really needing to, according to research by the University of Virginia. In other words, by accepting someone's friendship on Facebook, you're agreeing to allow all the third party apps they install to access your private data.

What is private data? Well, think your name, your profile picture, your gender, your birthday, your hometown location...your current location...your political view, your activities, your interests...your relationship status, your dating interests, your relationship interests, your summer plans, your Facebook user network affiliations, your education history, your work history,...copies of photos in your Facebook Site photo albums...a list of user IDs mapped to your Facebook friends. (from Facebook's Application Terms of Service, via Webware.)

This is not good. Especially when you consider that this data is stored, not on Facebook's computers where you and they might be able to keep an eye on it, but on the computers of the third party apps. And this is where it gets tricky.

Facebook's response to these revelations, detailed and explored by Chris Soghoian over at Webware, is that it's basically up to us users to gauge whether a Facebook app is kosher and going to be careful with our data. But who are these third party developers?

I explored this a bit last November, when I tried to find out who was behind one app called ATTACK! I eventually was able to, but it wasn't easy, and it definitely wasn't just a question of visiting their homepage (they didn't have one, although the developers have since posted a comment there saying they hadn't had time to set one up, and have changed certain features. It still doesn't have a link to any webpage that might give a user any insight about who is behind the app, though the developers do provide links to their Facebook pages.)

The points are twofold:

• Our data is vulnerable to the weakest link in the chain, which will be a friend we've given full access to who installs every third party app there is. Do you know who all your friends are, and can you trust them not to install every app they come across?
• We're endangering our friends' security by installing third party apps.

For me the bigger issue is this. Facebook is already facing investigation in the UK for making it too hard to delete one's personal data. So, if these third party apps are storing our data without our knowledge on their own computers, what happens to that data if we decide to delete our private data from our Facebook account, or our Facebook account entirely? How do we know what is deleted and what isn't?

Exclusive: The next Facebook privacy scandal | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone

Technorati Tags: facebook, privacy, third party developers, webware, social networking, data issues, data

Jaiku's Presence Absence

I'm nearly always disappointed when news comes out that one of the big four (Man U, Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool  Google, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo!) buy out a company I like. Nothing is ever the same again; usually the product just disappears into the ether. Is Jaiku, the Twitter-like presence tool bought by Google a few months back, destined for the same scrapheap?

ReadWriteWeb suspects so:

While [Jaiku co-founder Jyri] Engström's blogged response disputes that Jaiku is being neglected, there is no doubt that the service has lost considerable ground to Twitter -- ground it can't afford to lose. According to Compete, Jaiku's traffic peaked in October 2007, around the time of the Google acquisition, but has fallen steadily since (off nearly 30% last month). Twitter, meanwhile, has continued gaining, up over 10% last month. Though Jaiku's traffic is still way up on the year, it is off since the Google purchase and the service still attracts just a tiny fraction of the visitors that Twitter does.

But the usually astute ReadWriteWeb may have missed the point about why Google bought Jaiku:

What really sets Jaiku apart from Twitter, is that it can aggregate and automatically republish stories from your other activity streams: blog posts, del.icio.us links, Flicker photos, even Twitter updates. In this regard, it is a lot like Tumblr (another service that has a huge lead on it traffic-wise). I think this is the part of Jaiku that Google was interested in when it purchased the site -- Jaiku as an activity stream aggregator, not Jaiku as a presence app.

With respect, I don't think so. As I wrote back in October, I think it's Jaiku's mobile development and potential that Google wants. To quote myself (appalling, I know):

The point here is that Jaiku is one of the first of such tools to shift the social web to the mobile social web.

Jonathan  Mulholland puts it well in this November post:

Why Jaiku then? I think the answer lies in mobility, specifically location and mobile integration.

Let’s look at location first. Jaiku is I think unique in combining micro-blogging AND user location awareness. For the uninitiated, when posting status updates Jaiku has the ability to capture and share the location information (neighbourhood, city, country) of the poster in real time. So in addition to a message post Jaiku can provide real time location awareness of users. Hmmm that’s interesting…

And how does Jaiku do this? An integral part of the service is a client application for Symbian S60 platform mobile phones. The client uses location APIs within S60 devices to triangulate the handset (and the users) location based on nearby cellular network towers. The Jaiku client was in fact originally conceived as a ’status aware address book’, and as such integrates into compatible S60 phones to the extent that it also shares the phones (and again the users) status availability ( - General, In Meeting, Outdoor etc).

So in addition to a message post AND location awareness you also have deep mobile integration sufficient to identify the status of a user as well. That makes things really interesting, and its this combination that I think is the clever part. Consider this thought:

Post + Location + Status = Value

In short, Jaiku was built by former Nokia developers frustrated that Nokia didn't get the real power of mobile phones. Presence/Location/Status is powerful because mobile phones are with us all the time. Google ain't dumb: it realises the future is on the mobile phone. So it needs to make sure it dominates that. Jaiku, in theory, gets them there.

In theory, because right now Jaiku is withering on the vine. If Google is interested only in the guys behind Jaiku, that's good, but a smarter move would be to keep building a critical mass of early adopters around Jaiku so that when the time comes for it to enter the mainstream, it's our default presence/location/status tool of choice. Right now nearly all my Jaiku friends have stopped using it, and I can't imagine they're going to be interested in going back.

Besides, Facebook has come along in the meantime and threatens to make Jaiku (and to a certain extent Twitter) meaningless. Facebook has succeeded in attracting the attention, and time, of millions of people for whom social networking was an alien concept. It's going to be easier for Facebook to come along with a Twitter/Jaiku killer and move that prepped audience to the mobile phone (yes, in some ways it's already happening, with the Facebook mobile app) than it is for Twitter and Jaiku to persuade more users to commit to their tools. If I can find all I need to know about what my friends are doing on Facebook Mobile, why do I need Jaiku? 

Google may not understand this particularly well, because it's not been in this kind of business before. Google has not really been in the sticky community building business before (except Orkut, I guess, which has long suffered/thrived on benign neglect). In short, you don't leave something like Jaiku lying around with outages and feature doldrums if you don't want to lose your evangelistic early users. By the time it's ready for Google's attention, there may not be much of a user base left.

What is Google's Plan for Jaiku? - ReadWriteWeb

Technorati Tags: jaiku, twitter, google, nokia, presence, symbian, mobile, cellphones, mobile networking, social networks, facebook

Google Talk as a Contact Database

 

(This is a shorter version of a longer post at my sister blog, ten minut.es, which take a 10 minute look at new and old products, services and websites.)

One of the most undersung corners of the Google empire, in my view, is Google Talk, the search giant's chat application (non Windows users can launch its gadget browser version.)

For one thing, it's so uncluttered it makes every other chat application look like the aftermath of Christmas dinner. It's smooth, fast and the sound quality is good. But what I think it's best for are the features that aren't really features. (Most of these won't be useful if you don't use Gmail.)

For example, searching for a contact's email address is faster in GTalk than other applications I can find. Outlook is so slow it's horrible and Google Desktop won't really help you since the email address you're looking for, if it appears at all, will be via an email address or something, even if you've set Google Desktop to index your contacts:

Google Talk does this much better. So long as you've selected the Add people I communicate with often to my Friends List (Settings/General)

GoogleTalk will add these names to its list, so that when you start typing their name in the search line their names will appear below, even if they're not a Google Talk user:

Move your mouse over one of the entries and their contact details will appear:

Clicking on the email address (in blue) will either create a new message in Gmail or a new message in your default email client, depending on whether you've selected Open Gmail when I click on email links or not in your Settings:

Now you have a quick way of scouring your contact book and creating emails. It's possibly only marginally quicker than clicking on Compose Mail in Gmail, but I find Google Talk so fast it works well for me.

I feel Google could go further with this. What I'd love is if it could include in its search not just names but towns and other fields stored in your Gmail contact database. If I could quickly trawl through all my Gmail contacts for specific interests (who should I chat to about satellites and medical emergencies, for example) Google Talk would become a sort of first stop for organising my otherwise untamable contact list. (At the moment the best solution for this is my old favorite, PersonalBrain, which I've written about before.)

It's not perfect, by any means. The built-in Chat within Gmail seems to have features that aren't replicated in Google Talk, which would make this a better tool. Allowing you to include your AIM contacts inside Chat is one (unless I'm much mistaken this won't work in Google Talk). The other is that when you add extra detail to your address book in Gmail -- adding a photo, say -- this information appears nicely inside the Gmail Chat:

but not in Google Talk:

I'd like to see Google improve on this.

Technorati Tags: google, google talk, chat, IM, contacts, email, gmail

FriendsReunited, At a Price

 

Before Facebook, we had to find our friends on FriendsReunited, a very successful UK site that achieved critical mass but had one flaw: users had to pay to communicate with each other. It only struck me now that there's something a little unethical about that.

Take, for example, what just happened to me: someone I haven't seen or heard from in more than 35 years just got in touch via Friends Reunited (one advantage of the site is you can list the schools you attended right down to primary level).

Needless to say, it's great to hear from him and I'd love to reply, but now I balk at the £7.50 ($15) I have to pay to do so. FriendsReunited lets you list your details there, but controls the communications between you, a little like LinkedIn.

But whereas with LinkedIn the communications are not controlled in a way that leaves the other person hanging; this old school chum now has no idea whether

• I've received the message
• I have any interest in communicating with him

unless I cough up the $15.

Of course, you could argue there's no price on getting in touch with old friends. To which I would say, why should a company tell me what that price is? Now my old school chum is hanging there, uncertain whether I want to get back in touch.

Needless to say, I've tried to find out an email address or contact number through other channels, and maybe I'll get lucky. So far nothing; FriendsReunited, like Facebook, both helped to extend the social networking model beyond the normal early adopter range, so not everyone on it has a big web footprint outside those walled gardens.

But if Facebook has changed nothing else, I suspect it's altered our perception of community websites: from now on we expect to be able to find and connect with old friends on them, and if we have to pay to do that our interest wanes. Have to pay to contact a friend? Isn't that a bit Web 1.0?

PS: Simon, if you're out there, email me :-)

FriendsReunited

Technorati Tags: friendsreunited, social networks, facebook, web 2.0, ethics

Face it: Facebook is all about you

This is my weekly column for Loose Wire Service, a service providing print publications with technology writing designed for the general reader. Email me if you're interested in learning more.

I can hardly make my way to the drinks table at parties these days without someone accosting me, pinning me to the sideboard and impaling me on the question du jour: What is with all this Facebook stuff?

"It's a good question," I usually respond, determined to get something liquid inside me before answering. The truth is that the Internet is changing so fast, and changing us so fast, it's hard to keep up.

Loyal readers of this column (hi, Colin!) will be familiar with my twitterings on social networking tools like Twitter, Jaiku etc, while the rest of you will remain bemused at best, at worst, tossing the paper aside, comfortable in the knowledge that none of this applies to you.

Well, I've got one word for you and it's this: Skype. To understand why Facebook is so hot at the moment, and why those of you who think you can skip reading this column shouldn't, we need to look at Skype, the free or cheap Internet telephone service.

From that we'll see that technology, the Internet, all that stuff affects us all, and surprises us with its ability to change our habits without us really noticing. Or complaining.

Skype, you see, was nothing in 2004. Into 2005 it remained a sideshow. But then people realized it worked. Voices at the other end didn't sound like frogs in a well. Suddenly everyone was using it to make calls, especially those people in parts of the world where phone calls were ridiculously expensive.

Then the Network Effect kicked in: The more people on it, the more people who weren't on it felt they were missing out -- if not financially -- and they signed up.

And signing up didn't just mean saying yes; It meant buying a headset, downloading software, installing it, signing up for Skype, and, if they wanted to make calls to ordinary telephones, buying credits, which meant using a credit card online.

For a lot of my friends, all of these were firsts. It was a delightful shock to behold. And once they had done those things, they were then ready to do the same thing with other services.

This was a big leap, one that is consistently underestimated by nerdy types who do them casually. Sadly, it was also underestimated by Skype and its new owners eBay, both of whom have failed to leverage the Skype revolution into anything more substantial.

When earlier this month Skype was down for a few days, there was only muted complaints from ordinary users -- not because they don't use Skype, but because they haven't yet come to rely on Skype. (For what it's worth, they should, and eBay should ensure that they do, by a) making it super-reliable and b) adding cool features that real people really want.)

Don't be left out

Anyway, back to Facebook. Facebook was until recently -- September 2006 -- a social networking/homepage type tool for college folk in the U.S. Now half of its users -- in other words, more than 17 million people -- are outside college. (These figures are from Shel Israel, a consultant and writer who asked Facebook for stats.)

What's interesting, though, is how most of these users aren't techie types. While I've been trying to get friends of mine (those friends who aren't techie, which means most of my friends) to sign up for these kinds of services for purely selfish reasons (there are only so many Twitter messages like "Restoring my computer to WinXP SP1 just for fun today! Wildness!" you can take) it's only with Facebook that that actually happened.

And it didn't happen because of me. Most of them signed up anyway, and were already there when I arrived. All sorts of people -- friends from different walks of life, different continents, colleagues, ex-colleagues, readers (OK, reader), age groups, denominations and interests, genders, etc., etc.

Even journalists, not usually known for their hunger for the technologically new, are signing up. Facebook has tipped, in the timeworn phrase, in the same way Skype did. But why?

Well, the obvious answer is because everyone else signed up, so no one wanted to be left out. But I think that happened later. What happened first was that Facebook's developers made it pretty easy to get started -- add a photo, list the schools you went to, find a few friends who are also Facebook users.

Then there are compelling reasons to stay or come back -- joining an interest-based group (there are 47,000 of them), loading a third-party application to do silly extra social things (more than 2,000 of them, including maps showing where you've been, your favorite movies, that kind of thing.)

The biggest reason, however, is that you find all sorts of people you hadn't seen for a while, lost touch with, worked with or knew only indirectly; once you're Facebook friends, the ice is broken and you're sharing again, comfortable in a network of mutual friends.

All of this would sound quite so-so were it not for the fact that Facebook is geared towards social interaction. Not necessarily of the direct kind, upon which business networking sites like LinkedIn are built ("Please introduce me to Joe Bloggs in your network as I want to sell him my idea of Flying Underpants") but the indirect kind: "Anyone seen Ratatouille yet?", "I can't believe there's no English soccer on TV", "My wife just left me for a lumberjack."

Such utterances -- posted on your Facebook page, but easily visible to friends in your network -- invite comment and response, but don't intrude in the way a direct message would.

I call it "displaced chat" -- partly because I have pretensions to academia, and partly because I believe it describes a way for people to interact with others without directly approaching them.

Of course, we shouldn't get too excited about this. Something will come along to dethrone Facebook soon enough (I give it six months; once everyone has basically hooked up with everyone they know or want to know, there's not many places to go.)

But, as with Skype, it doesn't matter. The gates have opened. A whole new bunch of people have embraced a technological innovation -- social networking online - and found that it's easier than they thought. And more rewarding.

I have no idea what the next big thing will be. But the biggest thing now is not Facebook: It's that ordinary people are using it.

Technorati Tags: networks, skype, facebook, social networks

Stoop to Congoo?

Is business networking site Congoo resorting to spam to build its user base? I suspect it is.

Congoo is on one hand a good idea -- a place to gather and monitor content on your industry, including content that is usually subscription only (like WSJ.com, who publish my weekly Loose Wire column.) But it's also a networking tool -- indeed, its blurb emphasizes that over the content:

But I don't like being spammed, and I think Congoo may be doing that. Of course, they're not alone in being accused of spamming -- the likes of Plaxo, Zorpia and other networking services make it overly easy for a new recruit to send an email blast to everyone in their address book without them realizing it. To me that's spam. Even Facebook isn't entirely blameless: Add any application to your profile and you're usually within a whisker of spamming all your friends unless you're alert and scout around for the "skip" button.

But Congoo seems to be taking a different, and in a way more openly spammy, approach. It's emailing non-subscribers -- apparently at random -- inviting them to join the network -- with no apparent invitation from an existing user, or even a personalized email to indicate the recipient is being chosen for a specific reason. Here's part of what I got this morning, from someone called Rebecca Simpson, identified as "Manager Network Development":

We would like to formally invite you to add your professional profile on Congoo. You may recognize many of the professionals already featured:  Media & Advertising  Healthcare  Internet Finance Technology  Politics  & Law

Rebecca's Congoo profile says she has "specialized in working with press and media outlets to distribute information. I have also organized and executed guerilla marketing campaigns as well as developed proprietary systems and methods for measuring ROI on Web buzz."

That may be so, but frankly I'm not impressed at this particular pitch. No attempt is being made to categorize me, as I've shown only an amateur's interest in healthcare, and my grasp of law goes no further than thinking 'tort' must be in some way related to the word 'retort'. And I've had no prior dealings with Congoo that I can recall aside from several pitches from their (somewhat, er, insistent) PR company, whose own contact database could do with some consolidating.

It appears I'm not alone in thinking this might be a bit too spammy to be decent business practice. The net-abuse mailing list last week collected four examples of an identical message from one Heather Faulkner, who also happens to carry the title of "Manager Network Development" (how many managers of one department are you allowed? I'm not really up to date on that kind of thing), while the spam manager at AKBK Home captured more than 50 in a few hours.

And then there's Congoo's own policy on spam, of which this seems itself to be a transgression:

Congoo is concerned about controlling unsolicited commercial e-mail, or "spam." Congoo has a strict policy prohibiting the use of all Congoo mail accounts to send spam.

I've asked Congoo for more information on this, and on their policy about emailing people. At best, I've got it all wrong and it's all a big mistake. At worst, it's a pretty poor display of a networking site trying to build its base through tactics that make it little different to those of a Viagra salesman. Times may be tough amidst the runaway success of something like Facebook, and the critical mass of LinkedIn, but stoop low and there's no way back to standing straight.

Technorati Tags: spam, networks, social networks, business networking, congoo, facebook, plaxo, zorpia

Cellphone Spikes and Disaster Management

Steven Levitt makes a good point on the Freakonomics blog about the spike in cellphone usage after the Minneapolis bridge collapse which alerted at least one carrier to an emergency before the news hit. His conclusion:

This would seem to hints at strategies that could be useful for coordinating quick emergency response more generally, as well as military/intelligence applications.

One commenter suggests that this may simply throw up lots of false positives, while another says the real problem is in identifying the cause of the spike -- disaster, or a radio station offering $1,000 to the 26th caller?

Seems to me that you should be able to tell pretty quickly where the spike originates -- lots of people calling from stranded cars on a bridge are unlikely to indicate a phone-in competition. Perhaps if cellphone masts and base stations also included cameras and/or two-way communication devices it would be possible for cellphone engineers to be able to not only assess the situation but open their communications up to rescue services, who could then monitor the situation and convey instructions and information to those in the affected area.

Technorati Tags: disasters, cellphones, minneapolis, bridge, networks

The Rise and Fall of Blogging, Twitter and Facebook

A lot of people ask me whether they should blog. Usually I give them the stock answer: blog because you've got something to say, because you feel you've got to write, and because you want to connect to other people on the same subject. But now I think I'd add another suggestion: don't bother.

Here, in a nutshell is a history of blogging: a few years back someone invented the idea of software that would make it really easy to add text and links to a website. It could also add them atop the existing material, so the fresh, new stuff was on top, not the bottom. Blogging was born.

Geeks were of course the first bloggers, and while political blogging is now hugely influential, it's geeks who have led the pack, adding innovations like voice, video, and mobile blogging (where you can blog from lots of different devices, like phones.) Geeks define the way blogging is going outside political blogging, for the simple reason that geek blogging tends to branch out into other subjects, whereas political blogging is mainly political (more like pamphleteering, I'd say.)

Which is why blogging is now changing. In the past year it's started to morph into something else. There's been a rise in something called microblogging (sometimes called tumblelogs), where services allow you and me to post and share little snippets of information about ourselves, whether it's what we're doing, thinking, reading or listening to, where we are or who we're talking to. The best known of these is Twitter, but there are others: Jaiku, Pownce, for example.

These microblogs may not look much like blogs - they're just streams of 150-character consciousness, from the mundane to the slightly less mundane, to which other users subscribe -- but for a lot of people they perform the same function: link them into a broader social network where they can both broadcast their doings and find out what others are doing too. As we in Asia found with SMS, North America has found that an enforced limit on the number of letters you can use in a message is a blessing, not a curse.

Twitter et al have not been for everybody. But as with most technology, its usage has evolved into a new medium. Technology rarely replaces another in direct succession, but creates a new category of its own, as users make it their own (or reject it.) Old technologies might fall by the wayside, but rarely because another technology replaced it overnight.)

So with Twitter. Twitter did lots of things, but probably its most lasting impact was to push blogging away from writing and more into connecting. Most people read blogs because they wanted to feel connected to other people by reading what they were thinking. But it's time consuming, and as blogs proliferated, and as blog posts tended to get longer, readers had less and less time to read these things. Twitter made a perfect alternative: a palatable buffet of updates, without the indigestion that comes from having to read blogs.

The next step in this process (and all this is happening within the space of a few months) has been the rise of Facebook. Facebook started out as U.S. college yearbook type application in 2005, but last year opened up to all users of he Internet. In the past couple of months I've noticed a big jump in the number of new users, at least in my little neck of the woods.

What's interesting about this is that Facebook, among many of its features, focuses again on what I would pompously call the "networked awareness" aspect of blogging and twittering. The most important part of Facebook is becoming someone else's friend, which then allows you to see what the other person is saying (whether in their blog, or in a one line 'status message' on their homepage.) There's nothing new about this -- the music-oriented MySpace does it, the business-oriented LinkedIn does it - but Facebook revolves around the something we all have in common: a past.

In other words, we build our Facebook address book around people we used to work with, people we went to school with, people who are already in our other address books. Enter your previous jobs and schools and you can easily find familiar faces and names, and add them to your buddy list. As I'm sure you have found, it's much easier to connect with someone you already know than someone you don't.

Not that Facebook is a sort of gallery of the past -- it also allows you to connect to people via shared interests, or shared friends, or people you worked with but didn't know at the time. All of the communication involved in this can be done publicly or privately, and can be done individually or as part of a group. Facebook occupies a middle ground between MySpace and LinkedIn because it's restrained in design (something that could not be said for most MySpace pages) and because it's not too businessy, which is what LinkedIn is all about.

So Facebook finds itself sharing part of a wave with Twitter, which in turn shared part of a wave with blogging. In a year we've found ourselves moving on from simply blogging to make ourselves heard, to building Facebook pages to reach out to those we'd like to connect to more closely. I'm not a huge fan of Facebook but it does connect me to way more interesting people (and long lost friends) than blogging ever did.

So is blogging dead? Some bloggers like Shel Israel, who co-wrote blogging's defining book "Naked Conversations" have noticed a fall in readers in recent months, and his comments have quickly led to another blogging "meme" (an idea that spreads, which is what blogging does well). The truth is that more people are blogging, more people competing for attention (leading to a terrible rise in Shameless Self Promotion, where instead of commenting on other posts in the space provided, a lot of folk simply try to point readers to their own sites.) Blogging long ago reached critical mass: Now it's reached saturation point, and something has to (to mix a metaphor) give.

So expect things to evolve further. I'm not saying there aren't some great blogs out there -- blogs aren't just about social networks, they're also about great writing, and about information, both of which blogs also do very well. But blogs will continue to branch off into new areas as our needs, and the devices we use, evolve.

Blogging in short, never dies: It's just the start of a road that goes we know not where. So if you're thinking of blogging, ask yourself why you want to do it, and whether you might not be better off twittering, powncing, jaikuing or facebooking. Or waiting until the next Big Thing. It shouldn't be long.

Technorati Tags: facebook, twitter, microblogging, jaiku, social networks, pownce, naked conversations

The Shift to a Mobile Web

This more than anything else, probably, will push the shift from desktop browsing to mobile browsing. The more restrictions workers face on their office computers from blinkered employers, the more natural it will be to turn to their mobile:

A nationwide study by T-Mobile UK has revealed that over a quarter of the UK's workforce, still deprived of web access, are now turning to the Internet on their mobile - as employers enforce blanket bans on net usage.

A few points worth making here:

• It’s an umbilical thing: offices misunderstand the use of the Web, which is probably why they ban it. It’s no longer just about surfing for information, shopping or football scores (although it’s still that). It’s about staying connected. The Internet is no longer just a resource of information (and, cough, images) but of “checking in” with one’s network, whether it’s on FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Skype, or wherever. Offices need to cope with this somehow, or they’ll lose the attention of their workers.
• A different screen, a different app: the shift to the mobile web because of this negative pressure from the work place will create huge demand for mobile web apps that work quickly and efficiently. Indeed, it’s not the only pressure: Browsing is a quite different experience on the mobile phone. Browsers are already developing ways to reshape information to fit on a screen, but a smarter way would be to find new ways to deliver the information via the mobile phone (Widsets have made a start in this direction.)
• Toilets: the unsung productivity hive Techdirt rightly points to the part of the survey which shows that 15% of users “resorted to hiding in the toilet just to get online.” Working from home, I do this with my laptop, frankly. But it’s not really about resorting to anything: it’s what the mobile world is. We used to read the newspaper on the john; why not a mobile phone?

History will find it weird, not that we connect to the Web on the john with a device once designed to make phone calls, but that for 15 years we had to do that via a big hunk of metal, plastic and wires sitting in the middle of what used to be a big open space called a desk.

Tags: mobile+web, toilets, browsing, offices, restrictions, UK

Escape to Streetlevel

Next up: cities you can drive through, and not from above, or fake worlds where everyone has big chests. Real cities, from all angles. It’s called EveryScape.

The company calls it “the world’s first interactive eye-level search that offers Web users a totally immersive world on the Internet.” A “virtual experience of all metropolitan, suburban and rural areas in which visitors can share their stories and opinions about real-life daily experiences against a photo-realistic backdrop ranging from streets and cities, communities, restaurants, schools, real estate and the like.” Yes, I’m not crazy about the lingo, but the idea is a cool one: Just try the preview of San Francisco’s Union Square.

Using a Flash-enabled browser you move through the terrain and ground level (in the middle of the street), and then can tilt your view through all angles. You can click on certain markers for more information, or enter certain buildings. You “window shop storefronts as well as tour the inside of those stores, see their offerings, and access published reviews and other information.” You can add content such as “relevant links, personal reviews, rankings” and things like “a “For Rent” sign and an apartment tour.”

Putting the stuff together doesn’t sound as hard as you would expect. EveryScape’s HyperMedia Technology Platform means anyone with an SLR camera can take pictures and upload them; EveryScape hopes to tap “into local communities and users to assist in building out a visual library of content that will cover the entire world.” A sort of Google Earth at ground level.

Great idea, though of course you can imagine there’ll be a lot of commercial elements to all this. It’s hard to imagine ordinary Joes allowed to plaster streets with their virtual graffiti or anything else that gets in the way of advertising opportunities. The only other concern I have off the top of my head is that Google Earth made some of us wonder whether, after seeing every corner of the globe from a bird’s wing, we’d feel the same urge to travel. Now, after wandering the virtual streets of San Francisco, would we lose our wanderlust?

EveryScape plans to launch 10 U.S. metropolitan areas this year.

Tags: everyscape, google+earth, googleearth, maps, visualisation, virtual+worlds

The Connections Our Buttons Make

Once we create all that attention data, think of the whacky things we can do with it.

I’ve been banging on about attention data for a while now, and I apologise. (For an explanation and a bit of background, go here.) But I can’t help seeing stuff through that prism nowadays. Like this camera called Buttons that doesn’t take pictures but times, and then searches the Internet for photographs taken at that second:

It is a camera that will capture a moment at the press of a button. However, unlike a conventional analog or digital camera, this one doesn't have any optical parts. It allows you to capture your moment but in doing so, it effectively seperates it from the subject. Instead, as you will memorize the moment, the camera memorizes only the time and starts to continuously search on the net for other photos that have been taken in the very same moment.

Basically the camera is a phone inside a sort of camera case. Press the button and the phone searches Flickr for photos taken at that moment. (Of course, this may take a little time.)

A lovely idea and a fascinating one. I seem to recall a photography project here where individuals were given cameras and told to take photos at the exact same moment around the city. Danged if I can remember what it was called. But as Tim O’Reilly points out in the comments on a post by Nikolaj Nyholm, it has even greater potential beyond the variable of time:

I imagine that with geolocation, you could potentially go one better. Imagine a camera that does take a picture, but also initiates a search for all other pictures taken at that same location (and optionally at the same time of day/year.)

Less poetic a vision than that of Sascha Pohflepp, creator of Buttons, but possibly more relevant to many users. I’d certainly love to see Google Earth etc use time more in their layers, so that it’s possible to get historical changes in a place (say 3D models of old buildings that no longer exist, or photos like those extraordinary collections created by the UNEP which depict changes in the environment.)

But the main idea here is to use the metadata embedded in attention streams (in this case, when or where a photo was taken) and match it with metadata from other streams. A bit like Last.fm, et al, where similarities are found between what music two quite separate people are listening to. The goal is as Sascha puts it, to subordinate the device to the bigger purpose of connecting people:

Even more so, it reduces the cameras to their networked buttons in order to create a link between two individuals.

The possibilities are endless, but it’s too early in the morning for me to think of any.

Tags: attention+streams, attention+data, attention, attentiondata, attentionstreams, lifestream, connecting, photos, google+earth, googlearth, time, space

The Power of Morse

Watching BBC correspondents and analysts poring over footage of the British sailors being ‘interviewed’ by their captors on Iranian television reminds me, as it must others, of the Vietnam war, and how captured American pilots were wheeled out for propaganda purposes.

What has this got to do with technology? Well, if you recall, one Jeremiah Denton, a co-resident of the Hanoi Hilton with John McCain, managed to subvert the propaganda value for his captors and also convey important information to his superiors by blinking the word ‘torture’ in Morse Code. According to his official biography:

Throughout the interview, while responding to questions and feigning sensitivity to harsh lighting, denton blinked his eyes in morse code, repeatedly spelling out a covert message: "T-O-R-T-U-R-E". the interview, which was broadcast on American television on May 17, 1966, was the first confirmation that American POWs in Vietnam were being tortured.

Independence Day made some homage to this when it had survivors of the alien attack communicating around the globe via Morse Code. The point? It wouldn’t make much sense, in this era of sophisticated communications, to teach British soldiers Morse Code. But as a survival tool an old technology like Morse Code might prove invaluable.

Lesson? We shouldn’t ever reject old communications technologies because we never know when we might need them.

Tags: morse+code, iran, kidnapping, communications

Twittering in the Forest

I was a bit rude about Twitter in my last WSJ column (subscription only, I'm afraid), about the Web 2.0 satire Useless Account:

I can't have an online conversation these days, for example, without someone telling me to use Twitter, a fabulously popular way to broadcast your current activity (and I mean current, as in "ear cleansing while waiting for YouTube to load") to anyone interested, via your blog or cellphone. (Yes, I have signed up. No, I don't use it much. Frankly, I don't know what I'm doing most of the time, so the idea I'd actually be in a position to tell anyone else is unlikely. But how long will I hold out from using it? Probably not long.)

Of course, I'm probably on the wrong side of history here. Scoble et al love it. He has 469 followers (in case you have better things to do with your time, Twitter allows you to 'follow' other people's twitterings, to basically see everything they write in their twitter account.

In fact, the 'follower' moniker is somewhat apt -- Web 2.0 has become very religious, what with all these A list bloggers and product eva