Social Networks at Work

IF you’re surprised that I’ve gone so long without posting here properly, its because I’ve been spending so much time on Friendfeed.

Friendfeed suits my style so much better than blogging. With its link/article centred comments threads, it allows short comments about a particular subject that aren’t a blog in length. Its suits my free ranging style, commenting of just about anything that I’m interested in.

Two incidents this week, both well publicised on Friendfeed illustrate the power of the social network.

The first, and arguably most public, is the PR battle now erupting between Thomas Hawk (the photographer) and his supporters on the one side, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on the other. In the middle there are a few moderates keeping a steady and cool head.

Thomas Hawk:

After purchasing my family membership and visiting the museum today I was forcibly thrown out of the museum by two museum security guards at the direction of the Director of Visitor Relations Simon Blint.
My crime? Taking a photograph from the second floor stairs in the SFMOMA’s atrium (an area where the SF MOMA’s own website explicitly says photography is allowed).

And again ( the following day):

One allegation that has been raised is that Blint threw me out because he felt that I was shooting down a low cut blouse of one of his employees sitting in the atrium below where I was shooting. The photo above is a photo that I snapped of Blint as he was publicly admonishing me from the floor, that’s him with his arms crossed there — he’s about the size of an ant in the photo.

I can vouch for the absurdity of shooting down a low cut blouse with  14mm lens from the top of those stairs

The comments are prolific on both these posts with a number of differing viewpoints about Thomas’ account. While most are not explicitly for or against, there is a searach for a middle ground between emphasising Photographers Rights and the way in which the situation was handled. Just do a search for “Simon Blint” on Friendfeed. Here.

SFMOMA responded with this Press Release:

Last Friday an incident occurred in our museum in which a visitor was asked to leave the building. We stand firmly behind the actions of our director of visitor services, who acted appropriately to ensure the safety of the museum’s admissions staff. He took measures to protect another staff member who according to witnesses on our staff and among the general public was being photographed in an inappropriate and harassing manner. SFMOMA welcomes over 600,000 visitors annually; disputes and disagreements between our guests and our staff very rarely occur.
This was not an issue relating to the museum’s official photography policy. In fact, SFMOMA recently made a policy change to allow photographers to take pictures of the permanent collection, the architecture of the building, and the museum’s public spaces.

The comments on this link on Friendfeed are quite interesting, you can find them here. Most are wondering why the other side of the story is not being told here (Since all the information we have is from Thomas). I can understadn them drawing a line under the incident. I’d want to as well:  the issue of Photographers rights has well and truly been highlighted.

This whole discussion has gotten way out of hand. Someone even posted a link to Simon Blints Facebook page ( Which I will not link to, on principle). On the one hand, this will dominate any Google searches for Simon and potentially portray him in the wrong light. On the other it portrays him as on his toes, looking out for the needs of his employees and visitors alike (tenuous, I know, but still).

Do I think Thomas should have blogged this? Yes indeed. Do I think both sides could have handled it better. Yes again.

In closing, Jeremiah Owyang said the following:

Thomas Hawk’s skewering of Simon Blint: Thomas is a community leader (and photo site CEO) he needs to wield his power with responsbility

And you can see the level of discussion that generated below:

 

The other one, which I am less informed about is a solely a twitter affair. Usually Twitters popup in my feed entirely out of context. This time, however almost my entire page way covered in Twiters between Jason Calcanis of Mahalo and Andrew Baron.

And boy were the insults flying back and forth.

It takes up the first page and a half of this FF search.

That last entry in the picture above refers to this chart regarding Mahalo traffic numbers:

And that’s how this whole thing kicked off. Exactly what was the bone of contention, I’ve no idea.

Again, the power of social networks was leveraged since the combined communities of Twitter and Friendfeed were spectators to the whole debacle.  What ordinarily would be solved via email just a few years ago, now is thrust on to the Internet for all to see.

What is particularly troublesome of this kind of behaviour across multiple social networks is the effect that they have. No matter who was in the right or wrong, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

These two incidents also shows the difference in format between two highly successful social networks (can you even describe FF as a social network?). It emphasises that we can either interact with the content or which each other. Interacting with the content gives us a starting pint for conversation, interacting with each other, apparently, can be much shakier.

Of the two choices, I would rather join a discussion centring on something solid, a blog post, link, photo or even an informative twitter.

Online Aggregation – a la FriendFeed

If you read regularly, you’ve probably begun to wonder where i’ve been these past few weeks. I’m not blaming you.

Between FriendFeed and exams there aren’t enough hours in the day.

FreindFeed itself is great. Being able to aggregate so much data in one place is very useful. FF ( as FriendFeed is shortened to) supports 35 ( or more) services directly and more through the use of the RSS feed(s) that you can add.

Robert Scoble is the prime example of this. The sheer amount of online output the man generates makes you wonder if he ever sleeps.  Go on, click the link and admire this river of news, posts, tweets, videos and photos. Then take a look at how many friends the guys has- well over 10,000 people as friends ( people that either are subscribed to him or he subscribes to). FF has a Friend of a Friend feature that add some of his friends posts to your home page on FF. This gives you a tremendous amount of noise to wade through.

And combine this with all your other friends. This gives you a long, long river of news to read through.

However, FF is not a true social networking site. It aggregates data from a huge amount of sites. But your Friends are nothing more than people you’ve subscribed to for their feed. Its rather like saying that because you have a subscription to the NYT you are their friend and they’re yours.

To reinforce the point there is zero information about you save a picture – which suits me as you’ll notice I don’t have an About Me page ( I’m thinking about putting one up, though). And I’m dithering on what picture I should put up.

Jennifer Woodward Maderazo made the point that its very personal having all this information in one place. Possibly. It depends on what information you share. Robert Scoble and Thomas Hawk have no problem with this – they’re subscribed to practically every service available. I mean, its darn interesting to see what photos Thomas favourites on Flickr. I’m sure its possible to figure out his taste in photos and his political leanings from his content. Even how he likes Mac and  Microsoft solely for its Windows Media Centre.  But there is no real, personal  information being shared here.

On Jennifer’s second point about no real interaction – come on!! I comment more in FF than outside, often commenting as a post comes in, and as part of a conversation. I like a lot as well ( comments and likes are another way if discerning peoples taste – but no real information is there. See above). If there is anything to suggest its no otherwise the case, its that comments don’t follow items as they are ReShared or posted within FF. This inevitably leads to fragmented conversations and a reduction in interaction. Also blog and FF comments should be synced in some form that will lead to even more interaction.

And Jennifer’s last point about information overload is just plain wrong. We have fine grained control of what turns up in our feed. from hiding friends of friends completely to hiding on a per-friend-per-service basis ( you can also blanket hide a service entirely – so no Twitter tweets show up from any friend, ever).

The Flickr favourites feature I mentioned above is a compelling reason to join Flickr ( I’m with SmugMug and intend to stay – you’ll see my photos show up).

One thing that is surprising is that FF is slowing taking attention share away from Google Reader. Not just when it comes to commenting, but I post links that I find interesting. Steve Rubel, for example, tweets and posts links fairly often that point to interesting material – I share some. But those don’t show up in my Shared items to your right ( from Google Reader Shared items). I’m thinking of some way to integrate them together using the FF API.

Another reason is the Imaginary Friend feature. I currently only have one at the moment – MarsPhoenix. If that sounds familiar to you its that lander NASA just put on Mars’ north pole. Its got two blogs and a twitter feed. This Friend combines them into a one feed with posts from both blogs mixed in with the numerous tweet updates and makes it dead easy to follow via FF or RSS. These appear as fart of my feed on the FF homepage along with everything else, making it doubly useful.

FF is literally Google Reader gone wild (rather than Twitter). Its subscriptions based. And, one up on Google Reader, shares all of your online activity back to the community. Its not even Digg (I can’t remember the last time I logged in to Digg).

Many belive that Robert will be going on about another service in a few months time. But FF has the traction ( its many services and thus audiences that it serves) and the leverage (the huge number of adopters it has at the moment) to survive. It straddles the difference between a true, thoroughbred networking site like Twitter ( or Facebook, if you prefer) and the disconnected consumption of content of a RSS reader. Its perfectly situated to bridge the gap between all these disparate services.

Link of the Day

via Scott Rosenburg:

Pentagon’s Accounting Mess – Portfolio.com: Yet Another Federal Software Quagmire (cf. the IRS, the FBI, the FAA, etc.). An account of the Pentagon’s failure to upgrade its ancient mainframe-era accounting system; the tale unfolds in a building in Indianapolis the size of 28 football fields, and explains why the U.S. military cannot be audited. The Pentagon literally cannot tell you how much it has spent or what it has purchased. If you ran your family this way, they’d disown you.

Err, this is the 21st Century and this should not be too difficult to accomplish.

And they’re still using COBOL?? What can I say?

<humour> Solution? Call Microsoft </humour>

Aprils Fools 2008 (and a little late at that)

I think its becoming a tradition here to list some of the funnier April Fools Day pranks:

• Read – Space bot demands to be called “Dextre the Magnificent”
• Read – Google’s gDay with MATE searches the future
• Read – Think Geek’s Betamax to HD-DVD Converter
• Read – Qualcomm’s HandSolo
• Read – Virgin and Google form Virgil for Mars expedition
• Read – Xbox 360 Wireless Helmet, Board Game

More Google pranks here.

TUAW has a round up of the Apple Pranks.

Three from Sun Microsystems:

• Give It Back
• Meeting with a VC
• Invasion

On Robotic Fish

I was reading this weeks New Scientist ( the print edition, mind you) and this story  about what the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research is doing caught my eye:

AGILE robotic fish that look like the real thing are being developed to act as government spies.

The article goes onto say that the fish will have cameras and communicate with each other using sonar.

To anyone that has read Michael Crichton’s Prey, this sounds suspiciously like a multi-agent system, albeit one that uses physical agents rather than computer simulated ones.

Wikipeedia has this to say:

The exact nature of the agents is a matter of some controversy. They are sometimes claimed to be autonomous. For example a household floor cleaning robot can be autonomous in that it is dependent on a human operator only to start it up. On the other hand, in practice, all agents are under active human supervision. Furthermore, the more important the activities of the agent are to humans, the more supervision that they receive. In fact, autonomy is seldom desired. Instead interdependent systems are needed.

[...]

MAS systems are also referred to as “self-organized systems” as they tend to find the best solution for their problems “without intervention”.

[...]

The main feature which is achieved when developing MAS systems, if they work, is flexibility, since a MAS system can be added to, modified and reconstructed, without the need for detailed rewriting of the application. These systems also tend to be rapidly self-recovering and failure proof, usually due to the heavy redundancy of components and the self managed features, referred to, above.

Although we’re not likely to see these become evolving, man-eating piranhas, it is something to keep an eye on (if you’ve read the book, you’ll know where I’m coming from).

And it demonstrates a physical application of  this technology that, while the agents are not strictly independent, they are not exactly predictable either.

At least, that is the way I understand it.

Data: Mine or Theirs?

Although I’m writing this under the fallout of  Scoble-Facebook, I don’t think the issue of who owns your data is either confined only to Digital identity or has been very well thought out.

First, a roundup of the various reactions:

It’s not about data portability. It’s about trust.

Offline, my friends and I share a mutual connection. Maybe it’s around work, maybe it’s around our kids or something in our past. Whatever it is, they’re my friend because they know something about me beyond what’s easily accessible to others. Keyword here is mutual. I know a bit about them too. Their relationship with me is unique as compared to their relationship with others.

…

Online, those lines are blurred. For what I would guess is at least 4,500 of the 5,000 “friends” Robert Scoble has on Facebook, he is the equivalent of a magazine publisher and you are his subscriber base/audience. He says it’s mutual and that’s the beauty of the social and connected web, but he only cares about you when you put something on the table that he’s interested in. It’s not about you. Yet, he’s “sitting” right next to your real friends, getting the same information about you that you’re sharing with them. If he takes that information and abuses it, however un- or good-intentioned, it serves you both right.

…

Robert Scoble valued his relationship with Plaxo more than he valued his relationship with his “friends,” otherwise he would have posted to them what he was doing with an experimental, alpha-quality and untested script before he did it…or he wouldn’t have done it at all.

Judi Sohn

I think there are two questions here. The first is whether users should be able to extract their data [including social graph data] from one service and import it into another. I personally believe the answer is Yes and this philosophy underlies what we’ve been working on at Windows Live and specifically the team I’m on which is responsible for the social graph contacts platform.

Dare Obasanjo

Then there is the oft-cited  post by Paul Buchheit (the guy who created Gmail).

Now I’m not on Facebook et al for a reason: data, in the case of a person,  is that person. Whereas data for iTunes is essentially  the signals sent to your sound card. Se the difference

Is it important to guard those things? Yes, or course. At the end of the day, its all you are left with if everything goes to hell: Your sense of self and identity, and your friends ( real friends, that is).

So we essentially have two options:

1. Manage that data ourselves in a way that gives complete and utter control over every aspect of things
2. Give our data over to a less than trustworthy service that essentially controls who you are, your identity ( on- and off-line) and who your freinds are and what your realtionship is with them

I’ll take option one any day of the week. Why? Becuase of control. It is all about control.

Plaxo may or may not keep your data after you opt-out ( i think its the former rather than the latter). Facebook has the awesome power of wiping out very single trace of you from its universe with a simple mouse-click. Add a hundred and one other web services that suck your data out of Google, Hotmail and the like.

There is a missing element in the above situations. Find it yet? And its not trust. Its control. And I mean, complete and utter control.

At least Twitter gives you more granular control( in terms of message recipients)  and has a proper API.

Better yet, Open ID, while somewhat flawed, is a brilliant idea insofar as you have a digital identity provided and vouchsafed by a trusted source ( AOL, for example). This blog is my digital identity ( since WP supports Open ID).  I can decide what to do with that identity, what to reveal, what to password protect. If I move on to from one blog to another, I can export all my posts and import them else where.

In short I have complete control of that Open ID identity (short of running my own webserver).

So because I have control I can never be in a Scoble snafu like that ( And I don’t care for the fact that Scoble was pressing FB’s buttons on purpose – he gave up his control over that data and he knew it).

In a  sense, its the MS DOS command line all over again. And  loss of control is like letting Vista hide the RUN command and the task manager and tickle itself silly with crashes.

iPhone Price Cut – Economics at Work

I just stumbled upon this article in Reason Magazine ( be sure to read the rest of the article):

Sure, it’s good economics—even if it’s bad PR, Apple did manage to sell 1 million iPhones in 74 days-but is it fair? Is it just? To find out, we need look no farther than question posed by rubber bracelets everywhere: WWJD? Not What Would Jobs Do?, of course, since we already know: he’d give in to the whiners and offer $100 credits good for Apple products in the future.

The parable of the workers in the vineyard is the Bible’s final word on this point, and takes a much harder line than Steve Jobs. Jesus tells the story of a group of workers looking for employment. A few are hired in the morning for one denarius. As the day drags on, more and more workers were hired, with the last batch brought to the field only at the eleventh hour. Then it comes time to cash out:

The workers who were hired about the eleventh hour came and each received a denarius. So when those came who were hired first, they expected to receive more. But each one of them also received a denarius. When they received it, they began to grumble against the landowner. ‘These men who were hired last worked only one hour,’ they said, ‘and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the work and the heat of the day.’

“But he answered one of them, ‘Friend, I am not being unfair to you. Didn’t you agree to work for a denarius? Take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same as I gave you. Don’t I have the right to do what I want with my own money?”

As one writer put it: “if you’re still upset about ‘paying too much’ for your iPhone, take it up with the man upstairs.”

Or maybe this is all just an extraordinarily elaborate PR strategy after all. Consider a customer we’ll call “Katherine.” She would never wait in line for a gadget. She’s just not quite geeky/status-seeky enough. And she doesn’t track consumer electronics prices, nor does she browse in Best Buy or the Apple store for fun. But thanks to the hullabaloo about the price drop, she now knows that Apple phones are “cheap.” Hard to imagine the fact would have penetrated her consciousness so quickly or so thoroughly as it has without a controversy to reinforce the message.

Perhaps Steve Jobs did have the parable of the workers in the vineyard in mind after all. After all, the tale wraps up with that famous phrase, certainly applicable to iPhone prices today: “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”

Subtle Hints

BBC blogger Bill Thompson has just blasted electronic voting machines due to the inability of manufacturers to put adequate security on them. He titled his post “The Ghost in the Voting Machine”.

IF you remember correctly this is a paraphrasing of an expression used by Dr. Lanning in iRobot. He said that the Ghost in The Machine was/were random fragments of code that would allow machines to develop consciousness. Now how’s that thought: A voting machine with a conscience, or is that a contradiction in terms?

Subtle hint, or what?

Windows Home Server Updates

Well, here’s another update.

The extra  1GB RAM is in and is working its magic on server performance (2Gb in total) .

Next, I’ve got to choose a TV tuner card (details here). And then there is SageTv to install and configure.

I also hear that Diskeeper 2007 has a WHS edition.

Diskeeper automatically keeps all of the hard disks (both internal and external) on your home server defragmented to optimise the speed and performance of the server. Unlike the standard Disk Defragmenter application included in Windows Home Server (and other Windows SKUs), Diskeeper runs as a service in WHS, and continually works on defragmenting your disks whilst the server is idle. Access the server, Diskeeper stops. Server idle? Diskeeper gets back to work so there’s no noticable performance hit whilst it’s running. They call it Invisitaksing.

Sweet. I checked the disks yesterday and most had more than 30% file fragmentation.

 I wrote a quick Vb console app to defrag all the drives automatically (using defrag.exe and the task scheduler), but I’m still testing it and I’ll post the code when I’m done. (its a stop gap, I know ). So I’m desperate for Diskeeper 2007 to be RTM’d ( that’s Released To Manufacturing).

The homeserver.com domains are being registered. I just checked and swapped my domain over ( thanks to this reminder ).

And we have estimate retail pricing for WHS. Its a rumor that has yet to be confirmed.

I’m not sure weather to belive the £150 price tag. On the one had its rather cheap given the fact that Vista Home Premium is going for £135 from amazon.co.uk ( Home Basic: £79). On the other hand, it makes perfect sense since this is a product targeted at home users and should be in the same price range. On second thoughts, it also makes sense since people who buy WHS off the shelf most likely have spend money already building their server and won’t baulk at the price tag.

Update to the Update: Philip Churchill of the Ms Home Server blog suggests that it’ll go for £88.74 here in the UK.

Cheeky question time: if you’ve built a home server either for yourself or someone else, does that make you eligible for OEM prices?

Twist and Turn

I think I’ll point you to a BBC op-ed piece that talks about the new technology of spintronics (lo-and-behold, there is a Wikipedia article. Honestly, is there anything that is not in that wiki? But I digress).

Quote:

“If you think about the spin of a particle, such as an electron, it can point up or down or at any superposition of the two; partially up or partially down,” said Professor Awschalom.

Each of these different “superpositions” can represent an almost infinite number of combinations of ones and zeros.

“You can store an almost infinite number of bits of information in one particle space,” he added.

This almost limitless number of possibilities would also pave the way for advanced computer processing, such as is needed in quantum computing.

“The spin of a particle is a very natural particle for quantum information processing,” said Professor Awschalom.

 

I’m used to reading about major conflicts between classical and Quantum physics, but can anyone give me more info about the “superpositions” part of this theory – I’m having trouble getting my head around it?

This is the explanation from Wikipedia:

Spintronics is the ability to change or influence the rotation of an electron.

Electrons have the basic properties of spin, charge, and mass. That the electron has superposition (being everywhere) at the same time, where theory states you can only know certain values but not simultaneously, one pair is momentum and position, and the other is energy and time. Electrons have 2 spin states +spin up and -spin down which are usually found in paired electrons. No two electrons can occupy the same quantum state. Spin up and spin down states of fermions have different energies depending on whether or not the spin states are aligned with the magnetic field or not. Electrons absorb photons quantum energy to change valence orbits, and they lose spin coherence by colliding with mutually resonant photons frequencies causing the electron to spin flip by energy transfer through mutual spin-orbit coupling and photon emission.

 

I’m still having trouble getting this (the superposition article in Wikipedia isn’t much help either).