FriendsReunited, At a Price

By | November 22, 2011
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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

Hi, I’m Sheila from Phishers ‘R’ Us

By | November 22, 2011
2 Comments

It amuses me that banks talk about security but rarely apply it in a consistent enough way to save people like you and me from getting scammed. Take what just happened to me this morning:

My bank rings me up (the number is a private number so doesn’t show up on my screen, but that doesn’t seem to be unusual anymore; nearly half of the people who call me seem to withhold their number these days. In any case, it’s not hard to fake a callerID.)

The woman on the phone tells me there’s been a problem with my last phonebanking transaction. Before she can tell me more, she asks me to key in my six-digit phonebanking ID, she says. I’m just about to do so, eager to sort out the problem, when I realize that I’ve not confirmed that she is who she says she is. So I ask her:

“Sorry, but I need to confirm who you are first.”

“Yes, I am Sheila and I work for the phonebanking division.”

“Yes, but how do I know you’re Sheila from the phonebanking division, and not Sheila from Phishers ‘R’ Us?”

Clearly Sheila hasn’t faced this kind of situation before.

“Er, well, if you key in your phonebanking ID, I can tell you details about your account, and that will confirm it.”

“Well, it may do, or else it would tell me you’d already succeeding in hacking into my account and were now just toying with me.”

A pause.

“Yes, but the PIN number goes straight into the computer,” says Sheila, a bit nonplussed now.

I try to explain that a) I’m not personally accusing her of being a scammer, only that I have no way of confirming whether she is a bank employee or a clever social engineering fraudster because she called me first and b) that technology makes it eminently possible that someone could capture my six digit PIN if I key into my phone. (A simple decoder attached to the phone will grab the DTMF signals (the beeps when you press a key) and figure out what digits they represent. I didn’t tell this to Sheila because she was already beginning to sense I was a ‘difficult customer.’)

In the end I tell Sheila I’m going to call her back, to which she politely agrees. When I later explain to her that the bank should think about plugging the hole in their security fence, she listens politely, thanks me for my feedback, and says:

“One last thing, Mr. Wagstaff. I don’t know if you’ve been told but we’re running a promotion at the moment that for every customer you’re able to bring in you get a $200 gift voucher for redemption at Takashimaya Department Store.”

A bank with its priorities right, it seems.

What amazes me about this is that banks don’t seem to have learned from past mistakes. A few months back I wrote about a scam in Hong Kong which uses exactly this tactic. Fraudsters stole wallets and handbags at a sporting event, removing only the ATM and business cards. The victims then got phone calls the next day pretending they’re from the bank informing them they’ve lost their card, and asking them to approve cancellation of the card by keying in their PIN number.  Voila. If Sheila was Sheila the Scammer, someone would be at least half way into my account by now.

I wish banks would be smarter about this. I wish in particular the banks I use would be smarter about this. Scammers are clever, particular about social engineering — the art of lulling people into a sense of false security. We ordinary people want to please, and we want to help solve a problem, especially if it’s connected to us, so we’re easy prey for someone at the end of the phone offering both.

The lesson is the same as the one I’m always trying to pass on: Don’t give anything to anyone just because they ask you to. Find out first whether they are who they say they are. A realtor asking for a deposit? Show me the documents that prove you are authorized by the landlord. Here to check the meter? Where’s your badge? Valet? How do I know you’re not just a guy in a red jacket and jaunty hat about to steal my car?

Authenticate, authenticate, authenticate. And if it’s someone like a banker, a real estate agent or an official, be hard on them if they seem impatient with your efforts. It’s your money, not theirs.

When Old Media Buys a Community

By | November 22, 2011
7 Comments

MSNBC, owned by MSN and NBC, has bought Newsvine, a sort of citizen journalism, blogging and news-sharing site. But who stands to lose from the deal, and what does it tell us about the equity of Web 2.0?

One commenter on the page that announces the news hits the nail firmly on the head:

In the end I feel dejected, sad and I guess just a little like we should have seen this one coming. What, pray tell is going to happen to OUR huge sums of ad revenue? I mean you guys are making mad loot out of this deal, what about our money?

The deal was cash, but terms were not disclosed.

It’s one of the unresolved paradoxes of Web 2.0 (and citizen journalism): How do you reward those who make a website like Newsvine what it is? Or at least, how do you avoid making them feel hopelessly exploited?

This from Calvin Tang, a co-founder of Newsvine:

I personally would like to thank all Newsvine users who have helped make Newsvine what it is – the most vibrant and active community of users on the digital news media landscape. In addition to being one of the most powerful and unique publishing platforms on the web – the open dialogues, the free and creative expression of ideas and the genuine manner in which all of you participate on the site are some of the foremost reasons that msnbc.com found Newsvine to be an attractive company to partner with.

To be fair, Tang does point to the possibility of “an adjustment to the way contributors are compensated based on suggestions from users.” It’s not clear what this is: At the moment anyone with their own “column” on Newsvine gets 90% of ad revenue derived from visitors to that page. And all content is owned by the person who creates it.

Newsvine is actually hugely popular among those who use it: about 1.2 million unique visitors per month, according to Read/Write Web, and growing at an average rate of 46% per quarter. The site, R/WW says, gets about 80,000 comments and 250,000 votes a month. That’s pretty good traffic in a couple of years.

But still there’s the nagging feeling that money is being made on the backs of others. If all those producing the work were interested only in wider exposure, then the MSNBC deal is good — lots of opportunities for their writings to be read by a wider audience.

From the comments a lot of Newsvine users feel a sense of loyalty and protectiveness towards the site and its founders. And although it’s obvious that the best exit strategy for a site like this is to be bought out by a bigger player, probably one in old media, the illusion that something like Newsvine is an antidote to old media is an important one to maintain; how many, otherwise, would expend effort and time contributing for free if they felt the primary goal of the site was to get bought out?

Money is probably of little consequence to most of those using Newsvine. They’re more interested in the satisfaction that comes from “owning” a community. But inevitably money changes the equation: it is that very community, not the site per se, that has attracted MSNBC’s dollars. Should not the community, therefore, be entitled to some of that money?

Of course, the community itself, by not being party to the discussions with MSNBC nor beholden to the deal, can just up sticks and leave if it doesn’t like the outcome. And that’s where the other illusion kicks in: MSNBC can’t buy the community, although it may feel it has. It can buy the site where that community has built its camp. Make the wrong moves, not make enough moves, or fail to spread the wealth, and it may wake up one morning to find the camp has faded away in the night.

Newsvine – Msnbc.com Acquires Newsvine

The Real, Sad Lesson of Burma 2007

By | November 22, 2011
4 Comments

Reuters

I fear another myth is in the offing: that Burma’s brief uprising last month was a tipping point in citizen journalism. Take this from Seth Mydans’ (an excellent journalist, by the way; I’m just choosing his piece because it’s in front of me) article in today’s IHT:

“For those of us who study the history of communication technology, this is of equal importance to the telegraph, which was the first medium that separated communications and transportation,” said Frank Moretti, executive director of the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning at Columbia University.

or this, from Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project and an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, quoted in the same piece:

“By shutting down the Internet they show themselves to be in the wrong, that they have something to hide,” he said. “On this front, even a closed-down blog is a powerful blog. Even silence on the Internet is a powerful message.”

There are a couple of things here. None convinces me either of the above is true.

First off, the first Burma uprising, back in 1988, was not conducted or repressed in a media blackout. Journalists were able to get in, and get out extraordinary, iconic images. One still sticks in my mind, and I wish I could find it: a photo splashed across the cover of Newsweek of an impossibly beautiful female demonstrator, blood soaking her longyi and her face a mask, as she was carried by comrades through the wet streets of Rangoon. The junta took its time in closing down the media, but 1988 was no different to 2007: when they did pull down the shutters, they did it completely.

It’s true that there have been a lot of images, videos and information finding its way out via both the Internet and sympathetic agencies and embassies. This is not greatly different to 1988. People had cameras back then, and were extremely inventive in how they got information out. I would get calls all the time in Bangkok from people smuggling out cassettes, photos and other material. When I visited Rangoon in 1990 the NLD headquarters was a mine of printed and other information of strikingly high quality.

Burma’s generals are cleverer than the image they portray. Back in 1988 they bided their time, allowing all those who opposed them to show themselves, from students and monks to government departments and even soldiers. Their parading in the streets, watched by spies and plain clothes officers, made it easy for them to purged later. The same thing, it seems, is happening today: As another story in the IHT on the same day by Thomas Fuller wrote, loudspeakers on trucks and helicopters are telling terrified citizens

“We have your pictures. We’re going to come and get you.”

They may lack the sophistication of a more civilized form of repression, but Burmese leaders understand the importance of photographs and videos as evidence, and I fear all those pictures posted on blogs, on YouTube, on television, in emails sent out of the country, will all resurface in show trials in months to come.

Xiao Qiang’s point about the blackout showing the world who these generals really are is to me naive. No one, I believe, was under any illusion about what these people were like, or the lengths they were prepared to go to preserve their position. The ‘democratic’ process that was underway was a fig-leaf as old as 1990, when the NLD won the election I witnessed. In other words, 17 years old.

More importantly, as far as technology is concerned, I don’t think that silence on the Internet is any different to a news blackout. It’s the most effective way for people to stop paying attention. Initially there’s outrage, then people shrug and move on. Soon Burma will be back to what it has been for the past 19 years — a peripheral story, a sad but forgotten piece of living history. Soon the Facebook groups and red-shirt days will fade.

I would love to think it was and will be different. I would love to think that technology could somehow pry open a regime whether it pulls the plug or not. But Burma has, in recent weeks and in recent years, actually shown the opposite: that it’s quite possible to seal a country off and to commit whatever atrocities you like and no amount of technology can prevent it.

By holding the recent uprising as an example of citizen journalism and a turning point in the age of telecommunications we not only risk misunderstanding its true lesson, but we also risk playing down the real story here: the individual bravery and longtime suffering of the Burmese people who had, for a few heady days, a flickering of hope that their nightmare was over.