What Does Innovative Social Engagement Look Like For Businesses and Governments?

by Mark Drapeau | @cheeky_geeky | comments: 26

I've been thinking about the topic of Government 2.0 a lot lately. Part of this topic deals with the multi-directional engagement between government and citizens. This is what the White House and others have termed a more transparent, collaborative, and participatory government.

Unfortunately, the engagement for the most part is not very authentic nor meaningful. Boring "fan pages" on Facebook are one example I've written about, but there are many others. Often, engagement, when it does happen has so many rules associated with it, or such a high barrier to entry, or such a limited window as to be practically meaningless.

It seems to me that everyone can celebrate the fact that government entities merely have a YouTube channel here, a Twitter account there, or a Blogger profile some other place (the so-called "TGIF revolution"), or we can think a little harder about what the goals of citizen engagement really might be, and how to go about achieving them. But first, a personal example of responsiveness and engagement from the private sector.

On the evening of Nov 2nd, I tweeted from my phone about a local DC restaurant, Co Co Sala, just as I was leaving. We had a nice experience, but the hostess had been a little, shall we say, disinterested in helping us? So I commented as much.

Less than a week later, the co-owner of Co Co Sala sent me an email and cc'd his general manager. He apologized for the treatment I experienced, assured me it was not policy, introduced me to the manager, and said he'd talk to his staff. It was a four-paragraph email. I've never met him before, and furthermore, my personal email is discoverable but not the most easy thing to find.

This is what real social innovation looks like. This is what customer service looks like. This is what true engagement with stakeholders looks like. I want to give this great lounge Co Co Sala a hearty shout-out for not only having a great product, but also really caring about their customers.

Now, imagine we weren't talking about a restaurant here. Imagine we are talking about the Department of Motor Vehicles, or the Patent and Trademark Office, or your Congressman. If you tweeted, would they see it? Would they care? Would they react in any way? I think the answer in many cases is no. And when was the last time you gave the DMV a shout-out for a job well done?

Let's look at a sliver of data. According to TweetStats.com, the people behind the White House Twitter account reply to individuals less than 2% of the time, and seem to have never @ replied to any single more than once (i.e., they have never come close to a conversation). They re-tweet others' tweets about 6.5% of the time, but they only seem to re-tweet other government accounts and the New York Times. Granted, there are more people tweeting about White House issues than Co Co Sala, but does the above data represent any caring in any way, shape or form?

The terrific techPresident blog recently noted that actor Vin Diesel is the single most followed living person on Facebook - and that he recently passed up President Obama. Perhaps that's because Vin Diesel's Facebook fan page is awesome. He is engaged, his fans are engaged, and the tone is informal and fun. There are also many other high-profile people who have taken the plunge into innovative social engagement; my favorite at the moment is Alyssa Milano.

So when exactly did "serious and formal" become a substitute for "informative and meaningful" in government circles? And why is everyone scared of letting their guard down in public? People and entities that innovate and use new social networking tools to engage with stakeholders will be winners. The ones that don't will be losers in the long run. It's that simple.

If a goal of Government 2.0 is to provide citizens better services, and a strategy towards reaching that goal is to use social media tools to communicate better with citizens on multiple channels, it seems to me that listening and responding better to comments and complaints would be a great tactic.

The reason why people still cite the TSA's blog as a good example of citizen engagement is because few other outstanding examples of federal government social media engagement seem to have emerged in 2009. What does 2010 have in store?

It is somewhat outside the scope of this post, but my guess is that more and more local government responsiveness and engagement is happening. We heard some of those stories at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase in September. What are some new ones that the feds should hear about?

Following Lists

The Twitter Lists Feature is a Game Changer

by Brian Ahier | @ahier | comments: 5

Guest blogger Brian Ahier is a City Councilor in The Dalles, Oregon, and he works in Information Systems at Mid-Columbia Medical Center. He is passionate about healthcare reform, government 2.0 and health IT.

One of the interesting things about the new Lists feature is the expansion of the asymmetrical nature of relationships on Twitter. I use Twitter Lists to control the flow of the fire hose of my data streams into manageable list streams. But another important aspect is the ability to create lists composed of accounts I don't follow. This is radically changing relationships and the way we build communities on Twitter.

As Mark Drapeau pointed out it will become more important which lists you are on than who is following you. You could actually follow no one at all and have lists for each group of accounts you want to follow. You can create listreams to follow rather than following individual people. This is also going to add a new dimension to some of the social aspects of twitter. People will share lists, recommend lists, and get bent out of shape when they are not included on certain lists.

But you don't have to go out and find all the accounts to create great lists. You can subscribe to lists created by Twitter superstars such as Robert Scoble's fascinating lists, Tim O’Reilly's great resources, or Muck Rack’s list of journalists lists. A new service called Listorious will point you to some useful lists to follow. I have created some lists and my best so far contains most of the Twitter healthcare community. Companies will create lists of employees like the Twitter employees list and you can follow their tweets without having to follow every employee.

Twitter Lists also eventually means the death of the Suggested User List. At the Web 2.0 Summit Tim O'Reilly asked Ev Williams if it wasn't time to move past SUL. Tim admitted that he has benefited from being on the list, but implied that it did not reflect actual authority and suggested it may be time for it to die. Ev Williams said, "It has been time to retire suggested user lists for a while... once we get lists rolled out we can retire the Suggested User List and make that, as we like to say, much more Twittery and democratic." Since you can follow other people’s lists, others can follow yours, and you do not have to actually follow an account on your list, Twitter Lists is a game changer.

In Defense of Social Media (At Least Some Of It)

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 11

Scott Berkun just posted a great rant titled, Calling Bullshit on Social Media. I suggest everyone read it. Berkun raises good points - and I agree the hype around social media warrants taking a critical look. Despite being in general agreement, there are a few areas I can't abide, starting with this statement:

social media is a stupid term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way.

Railing against the popular lexicon is always a losing bet. Language is formed by collective agreement and it sticks because it resonates and serves a purpose. The words we use to assign to concepts can reveal quite a lot. Rather than dismissing it, we should try and learn from it. I have written before that I believe the term "social" is a new metaphor for understanding how we will transact business and conduct government. As Lakoff and Johnson so aptly pointed out in Metaphors We Live By, metaphors play a crucial role in shaping our very thought and action. We should take the "social" in social media seriously.

Next Berkun writes:

We have always had social networks. Call them families, tribes, clubs, cliques or even towns, cities and nations. You could call throwing a party or telling stories by a fire “social media tools”. If anything has happened recently it’s not the birth of social networks, it’s the popularity of digital tools for social networks, which is something different. These tools may improve how we relate to each other, but at best it will improve upon something we as a species have always done. Never forget social networks are old. The best tools will come from people who recognize, and learn from, the rich 10,000+ year history of social networks.

Well yes and no. The problem is this. Communication is the foundation of economies, government and business. When you scale up communications you change the world. It is that simple. When you radically accelerate or democratize a means of communication (I would include physical transportation in this category too) it is not a change in class (as Berkun argues) it is a change in kind.

By analogy, the railroad did not invent the wheel nor did it invent locomotion or steam power. In fact the train did not create anything particularly new. What it did was massively accelerate the ability to move people and goods across land. That acceleration changed everything… In the U.S. it standardized time, it nationalized commerce. Around the world it broke the lock of power on maritime cities that used to control commerce… and on and on.

Similarly the Internet, and social technologies in particular, do not create much that is new in the way of content (or even human interaction as Berkun notes) but the medium massively accelerates our ability to create, share, connect and collaborate. That acceleration of our innate capacity and desire to be social is exactly what makes social technologies transformative. Where I agree with Berkun's statement above is that the same rules of social etiquette will apply in this media. That is exactly what stuns so many corporations believing they can migrate essentially antisocial behaviors (hack PR blogs, social media gimmick campaigns etc.) into "social" media.

Lastly Berkun writes,

Be suspicious of technologies claimed to change the world. The problem with the world is rarely the lack of technologies, the problem is us. Look, we have trouble following brain dead simple concepts like The Golden Rule.

Agreed. People can really suck. But "change" is a value neutral term. It doesn't imply good or bad and while it is true that many negative human traits will accompany these technologies, it is hard to overstate the magnitude of the changes that are taking place as a direct result of social media - new ways to communicate, stars (including academics finding an audience) born from YouTube, bloggers redefining journalism and science, open source software dethroning traditional players, the demise of established industries like publishing, music and entertainment, with other industries like telecommunications and manufacturing, retailing queuing up for their turn. We see social technologies organizing spontaneous rallies in California, Moldavia and most recently Iran. That is change. I would also argue that the democratic promise of these tools - the promise that people can connect with each other without an intermediary (I know all of the ways that this may not turn out to be the case - but still...) holds the possibility of distributing power more evenly. If there is one root problem in much of this world - it is the concentration of power wielded by a small minority. We should celebrate any technology that lowers barriers to communication. caveat: Scott Berkun is an O'Reilly Author and in my defense, I owned his book Myths of Innovation long before I joined O'Reilly.

The Digital Panopticon

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 16

This post is part three of a series raising questions about the mass adoption of social technologies. Here are links to part one and two. These posts will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27. (special guest to be announced shortly)

In 1785 utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed architectural plans for the Panopticon, a prison Bentham described as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example." Its method was a circular grid of surveillance; the jailors housed in a central tower being provided a 360-degree view of the imprisoned. Prisoners would not be able to tell when a jailor was actually watching or not. The premise ran that under the possibility of total surveillance (you could be being observed at any moment of the waking day) the prisoners would self-regulate their behavior to conform to prison norms. The perverse genius of the Panopticon was that even the jailor existed within this grid of surveillance; he could be viewed at any time (without knowing) by a still higher authority within the central tower - so the circle was complete, the surveillance - and thus conformance to authority - total.

In 1811 the King refused to authorize the sale of land for the purpose and Bentham was left frustrated in his vision to build the Panopticon. But the concept endured - not just as a literal architecture for controlling physical subjects (there are many Panopticons that now bear Bentham’s stamp) - but as a metaphor for understanding the function of power in modern times. French philosopher Michel Foucault dedicated a whole section of his book Discipline and Punish to the significance of the Panopticon. His take was essentially this: The same mechanism at work in the Panopticon - making subjects totally visible to authority - leads to those subjects internalizing the norms of power. In Foucault’s words “…the major effect of the Panopticon; to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary” In short, under the possibility of total surveillance the inmate becomes self regulating.

The social technologies we see in use today are fundamentally panoptical - the architecture of participation is inherently an architecture of surveillance.

In the age of social networks we find ourselves coming under a vast grid of surveillance - of permanent visibility. The routine self-reporting of what we are doing, reading, thinking via status updates makes our every action and location visible to the crowd. This visibility has a normative effect on behavior (in other words we conform our behavior and/or our speech about that behavior when we know we are being observed).

In many cases we are opting into automated reporting structures (Google Lattitude, Loopt etc.) that detail our location at any given point in time. We are doing this in exchange for small conveniences (finding local sushi more quickly, gaining “ambient intimacy”) without ever considering the bargain that we are striking. In short, we are creating the ultimate Panopticon - with our data centrally housed in the cloud (see previous post on the Captivity of the Commons) - our every movement, and up-to-the-minute status is a matter of public record. In the same way that networked communications move us from a one to many broadcast model to a many to many - so we are seeing the move to a many-to-many surveillance model. A global community of voyeurs ceaselessly confessing to "What are you doing? (Twitter) or "What's on your mind? (Facebook)

Captivity of the Commons focused on the risks corporate ownership of personal data. This post is concerned with how, as individuals, we have grown comfortable giving our information away; how our sense of privacy is changing under the small conveniences that disclosure brings. How our identity changes as an effect of constant self-disclosure. Many previous comments have rightly noted that privacy is often cultural -- if you don't expect it - there is no such thing as an infringement. Yet it is important to reckon with the changes we see occurring around us and argue what kind of a culture we wish to create (or contribute to).

Jacques Ellul’s book, Propaganda, had a thesis that was at once startling and obvious: Propaganda’s end goal is not to change your mind at any one point in time - but to create a changeable mind. Thus when invoked at the necessary time - humans could be manipulated into action. In the U.S. this language was expressed by catchphrases like, “communism in our backyard,” “enemies of freedom” or the current manufactured hysteria about Obama as a “socialist”.

Similarly the significance of status updates and location based services may not lie in the individual disclosure but in the significance of a culture that has become accustomed to constant disclosure.

Captivity of the Commons

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 25

This post is part two of the series, “The Question Concerning Social Technology”. Part one is here. These posts will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27.

In January 2002 DARPA launched the Information Awareness Office. The mission was to, “ imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness (emphasis added)” The notion of a government agency achieving total information awareness was too Orwellian to ignore. Under criticism that this “awareness” could quickly migrate to a mass surveillance system the program was defunded.

Fast-forward to last week and my near-purchase of Libbey Duratuff Gibralter Glasses (the perfect bourbon glass one might speculate). Over the course of the next few days I was peppered with exact-match ads for Libbey Duratuff glassware on several other websites; A small example of information awareness at work.

Personal data is the currency of Web 2.0. Knowing what we watch, buy, click, own, what we think, intend and ultimately do confers competitive advantage. Facebook possesses your social graph, your personal interests and your full profile (age, location, relationship status etc.) not to mention your daily (or hourly) answer to their persistent question, “what’s on your mind?”. Reviewing the “25 Surprising Things Google Knows About You” should give anyone pause. And it’s not just the Web 2.0 set. Credit Card Companies, Telcos, Insurance , Pharma… all are collecting vast stores of personal data. If you watch the trendline it is moving toward more data and more analytic capability - not less.

So why is it that we seem to have more comfort when the capacity for total information awareness lies with corporations as opposed to government? Experience shows that there is a very thin barrier between the two. To wit, the release of thousands of phone records to the U.S. government - and, conveniently, government immunity for those same corporations after the breach. Google and Yahoo! and Microsoft have all been accused of cooperating with the Chinese government to aid censorship and repression of free speech. What happens if/when we encounter the next version of the Bush administration that sees no problem abrogating civil rights in pursuit of “evildoers”?

What's more, when we deliver our personal information over to corporations we are giving this data over to an institution that is amoral. Companies are not yet structured to deliver moral or ethical results - they are encouraged to grow and deliver “shareholder value” (read money) which is a numb and narrow measure of value. Do I want my data to be managed by an amoral institution?

To be clear - I want the convenience and miracles that modern technology brings. I love the Internet and I am willing to give over lots of data in the trade. But I want two fundamental protections:

First, change the corporation. The structure of the corporation continues to be driven by 20th century hard goals of efficiency and scale - not by more complex measures of environmental sustainability, value creation and the commonweal. These are simply not adequately factored into any structural, organizational, incentive or taxation systems of business today. Profit and profit motive are fine - but hiding social and environmental costs is no longer acceptable. I want to deal with institutions capable of morality. This is no small task - but if we can build the Internet….

Second. We need a right to privacy that matches the 21st century reality. As a friend of mine likes to say, “privacy is now a responsibility - not a right.” While it is pithy (and perhaps true), the reason we grant rights - and laws to enforce those rights in society is the simple fact that people do not generally have the wherewithal to protect themselves from large, institutional interests. In the same way that regulatory structures are needed to keep a financial system in balance (alas even the Ayn Rand acolyte Greenspan finally agrees with this truism), we need new rights and regulations governing the use of our personal data - and simple sets of controls over who has access to it.

The true work of the 21st century lies not in refining our technology - this we will achieve without any political will. The work lies in re-imagining our institutions.

The Question Concerning Social Technology

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 12

I am an evangelist of social media and an active participant: on Linked In (business), MySpace (music) and Facebook (increasingly my online identity), I blog on several sites and I am a daily user of Twitter. I also make my living speaking to companies about the value and operating principles of these more open, participatory technologies.

I have read the proponents that abound (Why I Love Twitter, Groundswell, Here Comes Everybody etc.) and found much to agree with. I have read the detractors (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” …, Facebook Addiction is Real etc.…) and found little to agree with.

So over the course of the next few days I will post a series of questions on the value and function of social media (a.k.a. social technologies). I will not be arguing that social technologies are a bane or should be stopped. I don’t believe the former is true and I believe the latter is impossible… I will not be arguing against technology. Rather, I will raise questions about the potential abuse of social technologies and the steps we might take to remedy them. The more discussion this prompts within the Radar community the better. I will also be leading a webcast on May 27 at 10AM Pacific to discuss these topics in detail.

This is the first of these posts: The Evangelist Fallacy, Social Media and The New Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment swept through Europe in the eighteenth century, upending the notion of a divine right (religious and monarchic) to rule over the population. Its tenets centered upon the idea that humans were capable of reason and could seek governance that accorded individuals liberty and some semblance of equality. Western society still embraces principles and speaks the language of "freedom," "democracy," and civil rights born during The Enlightenment.

There is another side of the historical record. While the public dialogue of The Enlightenment was centered on freedom, equality and human progress, institutions of the age were rapidly developing sophisticated means of control over individual movement and action; from highly structured factory work and military regimentation (the true birthplace of modern management theory), to isolating deviant segments of society (the birth of prisons, debtor’s prisons and asylums) and an emphasis on police surveillance and the “dossier” to track behavior. In fact many of the same political and social theorists of Enlightenment (Montesquieu, Bentham etc.) were the architects of detailed studies on how to subject individuals to institutional control. These tactical manuevers were often cloaked in the more lofty rhetoric of The Englightement.

This is not an isolated reading of history. Knowledge is almost always being produced in service of power - not as a liberating force from it and there is always a gap between what a society proclaims about it’s goals and aims - and the functional outcomes of its institutional policies and procedures (the “War on Drugs” being a quintessential modern example).

The idea of social technologies as a liberating force echoes the Enlightenment language and, just as with the original, there are good reasons to view this discourse with some skepticism. This knowledge about the value and meaning of social technologies comes from industry champions (Cisco’s Human Network), industry analysts and corporate consultants. This discourse is good for business - I know because I speak regularly on the topic in boardrooms and at conferences. Proponents have a personal stake in seeing the positive side of the equation (and there is a positive side) and encourage participation as a means of personal empowerment (“the customer is now in charge” “the end of command and control hierarchy” etc.).

Social media is cloaked in this language of liberation while the corporate sponsors (Facebook, Google et al ) are progressing towards ever more refined and effective means of manipulating individual behavior (behavioral targeting of ads, recommendation systems, reputation management systems etc.). As with the enlightenment the tactics of control are shielded by a rhetoric of emancipation. Let's not forget that the output of all of this social participation is massive dossiers on individual behavior (your social network profiles, photos, location, status updates, searches etc.) and social activity.

How do these corporations intend to use these vast records of our behavior? The next post, Captivity of the Commons will explore the risks associated with personal data being collected at the behest of corporations whose main motivation is not in service of “customer empowerment” but on the traditional goals of manipulating behavior to grow their share of wallet.

2 Years Later, the Facebook App Platform is Still Thriving

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 8

In a few weeks, the Facebook application platform will mark its second anniversary. While it garnered lots of press coverage in the months after it launched, the arrival of the iTunes app store shifted attention away from Facebook's vibrant ecosystem. The media glow is understandable: among other things, the younger iTunes platform is adding apps at a much faster rate than Facebook or Myspace.

Games comprise a sizable chunk of app revenues in all three platforms and recent stories suggest that 2009 has been a great year for developers. The substantial revenue generated by popular Facebook (and Myspace) apps has been the subject of articles in VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and Inside Facebook. There have also been recent estimates for the revenue generated by iPhone apps (see here and here). Game developers in particular are benefiting from having a multitude of platforms: Games are the largest iTunes category, and the second largest category in both Facebook and Myspace. In addition, 4 of the top 10 most successful Facebook app providers are Game developers.

(continue reading)

Four short links: 6 Apr 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

Baby nerds, evil URL shorteners, reasoned discussion, and the Government straps its Web 2.0 on:

1. Books for Wee Nerds -- Forget Pat the Bunny -- your baby wants to Pat Schrodinger's Kitty! Help baby search for subatomic particles and explore the universe. (via Tim's tweets)
2. On URL Shorteners -- Joshua Schachter and Maciej Ceglowski on the downsides of URL shortening services like bit.ly et al.
3. Mending The Bitter Absence of Reasoned Technical Discussion (Alex Payne) -- We’ve come to accept that trying to have a reasonable discussion on the Internet is like insert any number of increasingly offensive metaphors here. Usenet, IRC, forums, blogs, and now media like Twitter have all been black-marked as houses unfit for reason to dwell within. And so we roll our eyes, sigh, and quietly accept the idiocy, the opportunism, and the utter disrespect for our peers and ourselves that is technical discussion on the Internet. This need not be the case. It is possible to have a reasoned technical discussion on the Internet. People do it every day, particularly in smaller online communities where social norms are easier to enforce. We can do it. (via SarahM
4. GSA signs agreements with Web 2.0 providers -- Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, and blip.tv get agreements that make it legal for federal agencies to use those tools. Followup to my earlier cite of roadblocks to Web 2.0 tools for government use. (via Fiona's delicious links)

Clay Shirky's "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 37

Sometimes Clay Shirky astounds us by articulating something we've never thought of, and sometimes he astounds us by telling us something many have thought, but never so clearly and so compellingly. But always, he astounds.

Into the first category falls the claim that he made in his keynote at the last Web 2.0 Expo that "the critical technology of the 20th century...was the sitcom." Who would have thought that so penetrating an analysis could hinge on such a preposterous assertion! (If you haven't already done so, read the transcript or watch the video.)

Yesterday's piece, Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable, falls into the second category. When I said the other day that "Twitter is the most minimal newspaper," or when I talked to the New York Times about rediscovering what is essential in what they do, I was speaking to this same topic, but like so many others, I was still framing the dialogue around "saving the newspaper." By contrast, Clay cuts the Gordian knot:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place....

And so it is today. When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.

This is a piece that anyone concerned with the future of publishing simply MUST read.

That being said, when I speak to this topic myself, I offer this hope: that while institutions may be overwhelmed by the tide of change, new institutions do arise. The deep needs that newspapers serve aren't going away. We will find new ways to serve those needs. As Clay says:

When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

And to be quite frank, we can already see the shape of that reinvention in specialized fields. In the mid-1990s, Michael Leeds, the CEO of CMP, in its day one of the titans of specialty computer newspapers, told me that if he couldn't get one of his papers to $50 million in revenue in 3 years, he would shut it down as not worth doing. Today, many of the papers he owned are gone, yet small firms like Techcrunch, Mashable, and ReadWriteWeb are successful (and doing at least as good a job of covering computer industry news) at an order of magnitude less revenue than CMP would once have thrown away.

Jobs that matter get done. But no one is guaranteed that their business as they conceive of it today will be preserved, especially at any given scale or profitability. So, have faith. The world as we know it is being broken. Now, let's get on with reinventing it!

Radar Interview with Clay Shirky

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 3

Clay Shirky is one of the most incisive thinkers on technology and its effects on business and society. I had the pleasure to sit down with him after his keynote at the FASTForward '09 conference last week in Las Vegas.
In this interview Clay talks about

• The effects of low cost coordination and group action.
• Where to find the next layer of value when many professions are being disrupted by the Internet
• The necessary role of low cost experimentation in finding new business models

A big thanks to the FASTForward Blog team for hosting me there.

O'Reilly Media on Twitter

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 11

Laurel Ruma (@laurelatoreilly) just did a quick census of the number of O'Reilly employees on twitter. She came up with 74 twitter accounts out of about 300 employees worldwide, plus five people who were controlling departmental or project-based O'Reilly twitter accounts like the following:

Official O'Reilly account: @oreillymedia: The top level O'Reilly Media site.
@oreilly_verlag: O'Reilly Germany

Number of O'Reilly products or divisions on Twitter: 8
@make: Make: Magazine and makezine blog
@craft: Craft: Magazine and craftzine blog
@hacks: Hacks book series and hackszine blog
@insideria: Our Inside RIA microsite sponsored by Adobe.
@missingmanuals: The Missing Manuals
@headfirstlabs: Head First book series
@tocTools of Change for Publishing conference and blog
@radar: The O'Reilly Radar blog

Number of O'Reilly conferences on Twitter: 12
@oscon: The O'Reilly Open Source Convention
@etech: The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
@moneytech: Money:Tech
@foundconf: Found: The Search Acquisition and Architecture Conference
@where20: Where 2.0
@railsconf: RailsConf
@MySQLconf: The MySQL User Conference
@web2summit: The Web 2.0 Summit
@RailsConfEU: RailsConf EU
@w2esf09: Web 2.0 Expo SF
@w2e09: Web 2.0 Expo NY
@velocityconf: Velocity

Many of you have probably seen some or all of these accounts in my retweet stream. For better or worse, my personal account (@timoreilly) has garnered the most followers, and so I've become a switchboard for passing on the best of the news from others in the company.

I do find this to be an interesting exercise in managing corporate social media. I don't follow every O'Reilly employee, as we have no formal method for tracking them, but often, people who have posted something they want to bring to my attention send me an email requesting a retweet. (So do lots of outsiders. My habit of retweeting has ended up building a great extended information network!)

The fact that I don't automatically pass on company propaganda, but require it to be interesting, makes for a great teaching opportunity with employees. As I explain to them what I consider retweetable and why, and how to write tweets that make me want to share them, we improve the overall social media marketing IQ of the company.

Is SocialMedia Overstepping Facebook's Privacy Line?

by David Recordon | @daveman692 | comments: 6

SocialMedia is an advertising network which places ads within social applications such as those on Facebook and MySpace. SocialMedia claims to be more effective in this type of advertising, due to a patent-pending technology they've developed named FriendRank. SocialMedia CEO Seth Goldstein claims that SocialMedia ads can pay up to 2.5 times more than traditional ads within social networks and that early tests show people are 200 times more likely to respond to a "social ad". See CNET's coverage of SocialMedia's FriendRank launch for more detailed information.

This sounds very compelling, but immediately raises serious questions around privacy and whether a Facebook user knows that SocialMedia is using their profile information in this way. While technology certainly makes this possible, are user expectations being set correctly? Facebook's Beacon functionality faced an uproar at its launch earlier this year not for the technology it provided, but rather for upsetting expectations around privacy, information sharing, and ultimately ad targeting. So how is SocialMedia getting access to the type of information required to create such a compelling social advertising network?

Facebook provides a customizable public profile page for each user (mine is here) which by default makes your name, picture, and a few friends publicly available. SocialMedia could and most likely is using this public information, just like anyone else could too. Multiple sources including ValleyWag and others familiar with the ad platform say that SocialMedia doesn't stop there. Rather they're very quietly also accessing information from Facebook Platform applications directly. This was originally broken by The Social Times a few weeks ago:

So how does SocialMedia display these targeted ads outside of Facebook? Through a collection of data via applications in combination with images obtained via user public profiles and unique cookies they can piece together who you are and who some of your friends are. This is off of Facebook.

The question then is, are social applications properly disclosing the fact that they give your information to SocialMedia, and is that action covered by a clear privacy policy? This is not about the technology behind how SocialMedia might access this information, but rather making sure that the technological implementation matches user expecations. We can start by looking at the process of adding an application on Facebook which does not appear to use SocialMedia for advertising:

If you've ever installed a Facebook application, you're familiar with this screen, which prompts you to grant explicit permissions to each and every application you choose to install. It should be noted that Facebook Platform does not have any affordance for allowing an application to share your information data with a third party. Facebook's Developer Terms of Service explicitly prohibit such sharing, and the technological implementation of the Facebook Platform API make it extremely likely that sharing such data would sometimes involve sharing a developer's secret key with SocialMedia as well. All of this is explicitly and strictly prohibited by Facebook's Developer Terms of Service: (emphasis is mine for readability):

"Facebook Platform" means a set of APIs and services provided by Facebook that enable websites and applications (collectively, "Applications") to retrieve data relating to Facebook Users made available by Facebook and/or retrieve authorized data from other Applications. The term "Facebook Platform" includes any data, images, text, content, code, APIs, tools or other information or materials provided by Facebook through or in connection with such APIs and services (collectively, the "Facebook Properties").

...

5) You may not sell, resell, lease, redistribute, license, sublicense or transfer all or any portion of the Facebook Properties, or use or store any Facebook Properties for any purpose other than as specifically authorized herein.

The bottom line is that though this might seem like an obscure technical issue, sharing user activity and profile information with SocialMedia would be as objectionable as the worst behaviors ascribed to Facebook Beacon. With Beacon people were surprised that their actions from around the web were starting to be shared with their friends on Facebook. It wasn't that everyone objected to this happening, but rather that it was implemented as opt-out which led to information being shared in ways that normal people didn't expect. This in turn completely killed Beacon with participating brands such as Coke dropping support. A few weeks ago Facebook shut off access to Slide's Top Friends application for "allowing access to non-friends' personal information" as reported by Inside Facebook. The following week Facebook's responded with a blog post Building Trust and Protecting User Privacy which started by saying:

Privacy is at the core of Facebook.

Because we provide users with rich privacy controls and respect their choices, users feel safe using Facebook to share their information with their friends. By opening up Facebook through Platform, developers have the opportunity to innovate on top of this information. In exchange, developers commit to treating user information with the same respect that users expect of Facebook. Our Developer Terms of Service strictly limit use of user data and serves as guidelines to these expectations.

But I truly believe that Facebook does try to protect user privacy and by doing so creates an environment promoting the creation of rich profiles tied to real offline identities and sharing more content between friends. Facebook has shown a history of learning from these situations over time. If Facebook learned so much about the dangers of surprise with Beacon, shut off Top Friends for sharing profile information, and continues to block access to Google's Friend Connect for redistribution of profile information then why are they still permitting Platform applications to possibly share this data with SocialMedia? As technologists we must be extremely careful in making sure that our implementations match a normal person's expectations. If we forget to do this, we could collectively end up killing something that might someday become great.

I've tried contacting SocialMedia to ask about how their advertising network works, though unfortunately while I've received replies have not had my questions answered. As full disclosure, I work for Six Apart which launched an advertising network for bloggers earlier this year, and has a privacy policy here. I'll be at O'Reilly's Open Source conference in Portland at the end of the month.