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I think Facebook and Twitter are jealous of each other

by

green monster

If social networks are all about putting forward idealized images of ourselves for others to be impressed by, and maybe envy a little, then it makes sense that the two leading companies in this space might take on a similar behavior pattern.

Facebook and Twitter are both thriving on a scale most online services can only dream of. Yet each is eyeing the other covetously.

Twitter’s the smaller of the two, so its jealousy is more straightforward. It wants Facebook’s numbers.

From the Times:

Twitter had 255 million monthly users globally in March, up 5.8 percent from the end of December. Analysts had hoped to see more than 260 million. Growth at the end of last year was even slower. That has disappointed investors …

A mere 255 million users! Twitter went public by comparing itself to Facebook, so investors are now making the same comparison, and Facebook has five times that many users. (Never mind that both companies’ numbers are as carefully framed as the average profile photo, and that “monthly active users” is itself a statistic designed with advertisers, not users, in mind.)

But Facebook isn’t just sitting back thinking it’s got an unbeatable lead in the numbers race. It’s got stars on its mind. It wants Twitter’s Big Names.

From Peter Kafka at Re/code:

John Cantarella used to run high-profile Web sites for Time Inc. Now he has a new job: Getting high-profile people to post things on Facebook…. The big idea: Convince famous people — say, Bill Clinton or Richard Branson — to use Facebook more, and do the same for the people who run nonprofits and other “causes.”

It’s part of Facebook’s bigger push to encourage more “public content” on the site — the kind of stuff that appears on Twitter all the time.

Facebook may have the crowd, but Twitter has all the cool people. So what if its entire pitch as a network was that it was the service where you would connect with your actual friends? That’s old hat now. Twitter’s getting buzz for the way celebrities use it to connect with masses of fans. Facebook wants some of that.

Envy isn’t pretty — it will make you a monster. Facebook and Twitter know that, but by now they’ve both moved beyond the realm of conscious action; they’re creatures of the market, steered by the corporate id.

And just think: six deadly sins to go!

Links: Leaving Facebook; sockpuppets on TV; everybody hurts — even robots

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robot boy

Back from vacation! Lots of ground to cover.

I Left Facebook, And You Can Too (Jessica Ferris):

The cost of being on Facebook, the cost of handing over your connections with the people you love, is real…. What I was taking for granted as just the way things were was actually just the way Facebook wanted things to be….I think we can expect, if we keep trusting Facebook, to keep having our trust abused. We have no reason not to expect this, and yet we’ve been letting Facebook stay in our most intimate relationships. Facebook has so far succeeded in convincing us that we have to let it stay so that we might keep our loved ones close. It does not have to be this way…. What do the platforms we legitimize with our personal and heartfelt work have to do to earn our trust? Right now, not enough. It all feels like a shady bargain.

Could you free yourself of Facebook? (Mary Elizabeth Williams):

The challenge – one that close to 9,000 people have already taken – is simple. Change your FB avatar to the “99 Days of Freedom” one to let friends know you’re not checking in for the next few months.

This Social Network Changed How News Works. But Then It Made Some News Of Its Own (John Herrman): The Facebook “emotional contagion” study was just the kind of story that Facebook users would find contagious, Herrman explains: “If News Feed could dream, it would dream of stories like this.”

Facebook Will Use Your Browsing and Apps History For Ads (Despite Saying It Wouldn’t 3 Years Ago) (Kashmir Hill): “That’s the thing about data collection. Once you collect it, it’s like a pint of ice cream sitting in the freezer, impossible to resist.”

Here’s the Facebook spokesperson in 2011: “No information we receive when you see social plugins is used to target ads; we delete or anonymize this information within 90 days, and we never sell your information.”

Facebook in 2014: Information we receive when you see social plugins in mobile apps will be used to target ads, and it’s in the works for the same thing to happen when you see them when you’re browsing on your computer.

Why you can no longer expect that the news will find you (Tom Krazit): Five years on, in a world where Google and Facebook “control the relevancy of digital information,” the notion that “the news will find us” (Jeff Jarvis in 2008) is a recipe for passivity and ignorance.

This Japanese Television Conspiracy Has Familiar Faces (Brian Ashcraft): We’ve spent 20 years now worrying about how easily people can fake themselves online, and we’ve become thoroughly accustomed to thinking that the Web is full of doppelgangers and deceptions — unlike older media, where we can easily detect what’s real. In this report of the way Japanese TV news shows stage “man on the street” interviews with actors who keep turning up, Zelig-style, it’s the old-school medium that’s confronting us with sockpuppet fakery — and ironically the only reason we know about it is that online video archives allow us to double-check.

You Should Learn to Trust Robots. It’s for Your Own Good (Emily Anthes): Demonstrating vulnerability — sharing information that shows we’re human and that we can and do hurt — is a powerful way to connect with other people. The same thing works for robots!

We need machines that cop to their own vulnerabilities. In fact, robots should tell us not only that they might fail but also explain why — letting us know, for instance, that certain conditions cause their sensors to be less reliable or that certain situations cause their decision-making models to break down. In the end, establishing trust and building productive relationships with robots won’t be all that different from doing so with people. After all, a good colleague wouldn’t just bail out on a group presentation. Instead, they’d warn you that they tend to stammer and sweat when speaking in front of an audience and then offer to pick up the slack somewhere else.

Tiny Letters to the Web We Miss (Joanne McNeil): Email newsletters are back! Oh, right, they never went away. Email, McNeil points out, offers the intimacy of the in-box but lacks the community-building opportunity of comments:

It is one-way communication. No one sees the replies but the sender. This is great for avoiding trolls, not so good if you miss the days that the comments section might be as worthwhile as the original post.

I Sent All My Text Messages in Calligraphy for a Week (Cristina Vanko): Here’s another way to create a sense of intimacy. (People with handwriting like mine will not choose it.)

IndieWeb and Respect Network: Two roads to decentralizing the network

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independence day fireworks

Independence — it’s hot! On the verge of July 4, here’s some info about a couple of independence-oriented Web projects.

When I kicked off the Wordyard Project, I wrote about my sense that we’ve reached “peak Facebook” — and are now entering a phase of digital history in which the pendulum will swing back from the collective to the individual, from the centralized to the distributed, from the corporate data silo to the personal digital homestead.

Over the last several days I’ve had brief immersion experiences in two very different — yet reasonably compatible — projects that aim to give that pendulum a big shove. One, the IndieWeb, is a classic Internet-era bottom-up movement trying to build and test working technologies and tools for autonomous, empowered individuals; the other, the Respect Network, is an attempt to jumpstart a new identity system and financial network based on individual trust and privacy. One is led by idealistic developers, the other by idealistic businesspeople.

IndieWeb Camp

Let’s start with the IndieWeb, which I introduced briefly last week. The idea here is to build systems centered on the individual and use the domain-name system as a de facto basis for identity. If you own wokcity.com (uh, someone does but they’re not doing much with it), the IndieWeb developers want to make it possible for you to use that address as home base. You could use it to sign in to other sites; to publish your posts and messages and converse with other people, in public or private as you wish; and to serve as a home for your personal data store. (Dan Gillmor’s piece earlier this year is another valuable overview of the IndieWeb vision.)

The IndieWeb effort — whose prominent contributors include folks such as Tantek Celik, Amber Case, Kevin Marks, and Aaron Parecki — is resolutely organized around diverse small projects that participants are using right now on their own sites, sharing open standards that build on existing Web technology. In other words, there are no boil-the-ocean attempts here, which is refreshing: It’s a lot easier to dream about a completed utopia than it is to take the first few steps toward an incrementally better near future. In the first situation, you get manifestos and blueprints and (often) pipe dreams; in the second, you get working demos.

At IndieWeb Camp this past weekend, enthusiasts gathered, chiefly in Portland and New York, for unconference-style discussions and a day-long hackathon-like building session. The namebadges read “Hello, my URL is…”

Here are some of the projects I saw demoed:

  • Ben Werdmuller, Aaron Parecki and Emma Kuo whipped up a prototype “Indieweb Reader” — basically, a Google Reader-ish content aggregator pulling in RSS/Atom syndicated posts along with Indieweb-style messages.
  • Bridgy is a nifty IndieWeb service that takes Twitter and Facebook responses to a post on your blog and feeds them back to you in the form of comments. Right now Bridgy only works if you send out a link first, so it knows the post is yours; Kyle Mahan showed a way to bypass this requirement.
  • Indie-auth is an Indieweb-style single sign-on protocol that uses your domain name to authenticate your identity. It’s still more developer-focused than user-friendly, but it keeps evolving. For the moment, the most common implementation involves a slightly confusing trip to Twitter or Facebook or Google+ to associate your domain with some already-authenticated account. But Aaron Parecki showed a method for using public-key encryption (GPG) to bypass that step.
  • Known is a startup that’s building a platform for personal publishing based on the Indieweb approach. The founders are Ben Werdmuller and Erin Jo Richey; you can see it at work on Werdmuller’s site at Werd.io.
  • A parallel project that’s less further along in terms of publicly viewable work is Shane Becker’s Homesteading — but I’m guessing that it’s powering his own site here.
  • Johannes Ernst put together a one-click “install WordPress with Indieweb extensions pre-installed” package for his Indiebox project.
  • Amber Case showed how to build a quick-and-dirty private social network using WordPress and its Twitter-like P2 theme.
  • Ward Cunningham — wiki inventor and pattern-repository founder — showed off the latest work on the Federated Wiki project.

There was lots more in Portland, and I’m sure even more in New York that I couldn’t track. (This wiki page has more details.) As you can see, the IndieWeb approach is to tackle its agenda of autonomy from many directions at once, with quick, agile-style stabs at getting stuff working. The result has some minuses for users: code is in flux and not always well documented, installing stuff isn’t always easy, a lot of things just don’t work yet. But the pluses, for users who are adventurous and handy with technical details, are hugely attractive — chief among them the chance to help shape the tools and platforms growing up around this privacy- and autonomy-oriented movement.

(One of my goals for Wordyard is to keep up with and write about the IndieWeb effort — while using some of the projects myself right here. For the moment, that means using Brid.gy and WordPress to collect mentions and conversations around my posts that happen on Twitter and Facebook and feed them back to my own comments system here. It’s not working perfectly yet, but it’s working, as you can see here.)

Respect Network

The Respect Network tackles the whole “take back the Web” idea from the opposite direction of the IndieWeb’s grassroots-developer tinkering. The project actually emerged from the community around the Internet Identity Workshop — a gathering very similar to IndieWeb Camp in spirit, and that has been around longer. But the Respect Network is much more conventional and institutional in its approach.

That’s understandable, given what it’s trying to accomplish: It aims to engineer an alternative financial and data infrastructure built on personal ownership of data and shared principles of trust; the model seems to be Visa/Mastercard, but where you own your data. (There’s a detailed “Trust Framework” that participating businesses must adopt.) The key elements here are:

  • “Cloud names” — global personal (or business) identifiers that use an equal sign rather than, say, email/Twitter’s “@” sign or the domain-name system to represent an individual user (for example, I am “=scottros”).
  • Cloud service providers — companies that provide cloud name registration and personal/business data storage under Respect Network principles.
  • A single sign-in button (like the ubiquitous “sign in with Facebook/Twitter” buttons) for sites to deploy so users can log in to multiple services using their cloud names.
  • All of this works under a technical standard called XDI, which should allow for the emergence of a system of competing businesses all sharing the same infrastructure. XDI has been worked on for some time now but there isn’t a ton of actual services and products using it today.

(More details at GigaOm.)

The Respect Network founders have assembled an alliance of infrastructure companies, service providers and creative thinkers — people like Doc Searls, Phil Windley, and Jerry Michalski — and begun to sign up partners and customers. Tuesday was launch day for the network in San Francisco (it’s in the middle of a global road show).

It was clear at the event that, right now, there isn’t a huge amount of Respect Network services that anyone can yet use: About all you can do is reserve a cloud name. The network’s goal is to sign up a million people for this at a special $25-for-life introductory rate. You can go today to providers like Emmett Global and do this, as I did. But you can’t do much with it yet. Eventually, the idea is that this name will serve as the address for all your data, and when you interact with businesses and other people you’ll be able to set the terms.

Respect Network is trying to bridge the worlds of privacy activism and Internet marketing, and that is unquestionably a tough challenge: The company’s leaders need to persuade the business people that they mean business, while demonstrating to the idealists who will be their first participants and customers that they are not sell-outs.

It’s hard to say how far they’ll get. On the one hand, the free/ad-supported model is powerful and everywhere today. It’s not going to just wither and die. On the other, the logic of the simple “you should own your own data” principle is potent; the world of advertising keeps finding new ways to overstep public tolerance; and the keepers of corporate silos keep stepping into their own booby traps.

Emmett founder Lionel Wolberger gave his pitch at Monday’s event with a memorable joke, envisioning what phone calls would be like if they were ad-supported the way so many web services are. The idea of companies listening in to our phone calls so they could break in and pitch products sounds ludicrous, unimaginable — yet somehow we are willing to tolerate this same dynamic in our online communications. The Respect Network will test our appetite for alternatives.

The simple reason Facebook’s mood study creeps us out

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puppets

By now I’m sure you’ve heard about that Facebook study of “emotional contagion,” in which the company (along with two researchers) tinkered with the newsfeeds of 689,000 users in 2012, to explore whether moods can spread based on the tenor of posts. (This Atlantic roundup will get you up to speed.)

Many academic observers are up in arms because experimenting on people has a long tarnished history, and there are rules around it that this study may have bypassed. The facts remain fuzzy there (just look at the crossouts in this piece!), but the issue is real.

The pushback, in turn, is that Facebook, like all big tech companies, does this sort of thing all the time; nothing happens on Facebook without A/B testing! So get over it.

Finally, there is a contingent of commentary that declares the experiment to have been “creepy,” for reasons that we can’t quite express but we viscerally share. You might say the news of this study has itself become an “emotional contagion.”

The most common explanation for this creep factor is that we recoil from the study’s exposure of Facebook’s “commercial behaviorism.” The researchers appear to have callously treated Facebook users as test subjects, rats in a Skinner box. No one enjoys that role; thus the mass creep-out.

I’m sure there’s plenty to that, but I think the public recoil is based on something even simpler. Facebook’s central idea — its “value proposition,” in bizspeak — is that if we give it a list of our friends, it will provide us with a personally tailored stream of their posts and shares. That stream, the newsfeed, is a phenomenally successful product — a river not of news but of social info. We know Facebook doesn’t show us everything, but to each of us, our newsfeed feels like a space that has been put together just for us.

It feels like home. But in fact, of course, it’s a private space that someone else owns. Most of us have never read the rental agreement. And until something like this mood study comes along, we don’t even think about the terms under which we live there.

So the true creep-out in Facebook’s study isn’t about research ethics or Skinner boxes; it’s about ownership of space. The “emotional contagion” study dramatically rips off a curtain that separated Facebook’s public face and its backstage. Publicly, Facebook woos us with a vision of a social information stream shaped by our individual needs and networks; backstage, the folks behind the curtain are pulling levers to find more efficient ways to hijack our attention and sell us stuff. (The frontstage/backstage theory sounds like The Wizard of Oz but is actually Erving Goffman’s.)

It all works beautifully until something wrecks the, um, mood. Facebook’s endless privacy snafus and “context collapse” disorders do that. Ads can do it, too, which is why Facebook has moved so gingerly to insert “sponsored posts” into the newsfeed.

The mood study is a perfect storm for Facebook because it’s not about privacy or ads or any other longstanding bone of social-network contention. It’s a pure instance of frontstage/backstage collapse. All it does is dramatically illustrate that, in the space so many of us have adopted as our digital home, we don’t call the shots.

Something that we’d embraced as organic and authentic — literally, “friend-ly” — proves instead to be crudely instrumental and manipulative. Everyone hates when that happens!

Of course the dustup won’t kill Facebook. It probably won’t even materially affect its business. But it is one more step in awakening the universe of Facebook users, which is nearly all of us, to ou predicament: We only think the place is ours. And the landlords — well, they really can be creepy sometimes.

Links: Butt-biting facades, fake followers, a new mesh Net

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botox sale

(Fake) friends with (Real) benefits (Gilad Lotan) – Data scientist Lotan spent five bucks to buy 4000 fake followers on Twitter. (You can analyze what percent of your Twitter following is real or fake using this tool.)

Even more interesting, at least to me, was what my fake followers did for me. My Klout score almost instantly shot up. I was not impressed by that until I realized that Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, collaborates with Klout, so that a higher Klout score put me higher on Bing’s search results.My completely fake numbers on one platform had a very real effect on a completely different service.

Inside the Mirrortocracy (Carlos Bueno): Sharp analysis of how tech startups use “culture” and “fit” as code to justify a diversity-limiting (and self-defeating) approach to hiring only “people like us.”

The Culture can’t really be written about; it has to be experienced. You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth. What wearing a suit really indicates is — I am not making this up — non-conformity, one of the gravest of sins. For extra excitement, the rules are unwritten and ever-changing, and you will never be told how you screwed up….If spam filters sorted messages the way Silicon Valley sorts people, you’d only get email from your college roommate.

The music industry is still screwed: Why Spotify, Amazon and iTunes can’t save musical artists (Andrew Leonard): Nearly 20 years into the digital music revolution, we still haven’t really figured out how to properly support creative artists. But we’re working on it!

But $2 million in 12 months for Patreon artists is nothing to sneeze at. Clearly, as a society, we do want to support the creation of art and music. So we are faced with a terrific, inspiring challenge: finding ways to use technology to build connection and community even as the old world disintegrates around us. Michael St. James is right to worry about what will happen around the corner, but probably wrong to fret about music itself being doomed. Because we’ll still need it to free our souls. And if people stop making it because they can’t make a living from their streaming royalties, then we’ll be forced to flock to places like Patreon, to keep music alive.

Pay it forward (Karen McGrane): A New York Post feature described how some professionals, particularly time-starved freelancers, are beginning to tell youngsters who approach them for “informational interviews” that they’re going to have to pay. McGrane, like me, thinks that’s a mistake.

Not everything in our professional lives is a transaction, scrutinized and evaluated against how much it costs us, how much someone should pay. Not every teaching relationship must be formalized—a mentoring opportunity, a coach, an internship. Not every investment of time has to be “worth it.”

Our Incredible Journey: You know when a big company gobbles up a little one and the founders of the little one announce how excited they are and how unfortunately the service that they built must now be shut down, but thanks for joining them on their incredible journey? This Tumblr gathers instances — where “acquihire” means users lose. [Via Lane Becker @monstro]

Sex and Silicon Valley: the veritable arms race of the dating app industry (The Guardian): What lengths will people go to dress up their online dating profile pictures? Long lengths indeed. The following quote is remarkable not only for the metaphor overload but for the plastic surgeon’s bluntness about about the nature of his work.

Before taking their profile picture, some trek to dermatologists like Seth Matarasso, who runs an upscale clinic, for Botox injections. “It can backfire, almost like false advertising,” he said. “You put up a facade, eventually it’ll bite you on the butt.”

Is there such a thing as the self? (Jim Holt): The invaluable Holt reviews two books on identity, one by philosopher Barry Dainton and the other by science journalist Jennifer Ouellette.

According to neuroscientists, there is no single place in the brain that generates a self. According to psychologists, there is no little commander-in-chief in our heads directing our behaviour. According to philosophers, there is no “Cartesian ego” unifying our consciousness, no unchanging core of identity that makes us the same person from day to day; there is only an ever-shifting bundle of thoughts, feelings and memories… The basic question about the self is: what, in essence, am I? Is my identity rooted in something physical (my body/brain) or something psychological (my memories/personality)? Normally, physical and mental go together, so we are not compelled to think of ourselves as primarily one or the other. But thought experiments can vex our intuitions about personal identity.

On Taxis and Rainbows (Vijay Pandurangan): Anonymity is hard! Fascinating description by a developer of how simple it was (for him, with a little help from Amazon cloud services, elastic mapreduce and other tools) to de-anonymize a year’s worth of New York City taxi data.

To digital marketers, “Onboarding” means loading your offline self into your browser’s cookie: An FTC report fascinatingly defines the marketers’ process of connecting your offline identity with your online profile and delves into the mechanics. [via Alexis Madrigal’s Five Intriguing Things email]

Maybe it’s time to build a new internet (Mehan Jayasuriya): After the NSA and Comcast and all, “might we be approaching the point at which the internet’s centralization begs for a technological solution?” I say: yeah.

The thought of building a new global network from scratch might seem herculean but similarly ambitious projects have been successfully undertaken in the past by hobbyists…. Remarkably, both FidoNet and Usenet were crafted using technology that now seems downright antediluvian: phone lines, dial-up-modems and computers less powerful than modern calculators. The situation today is, of course, very different. Powerful, WiFi-enabled devices can be found in the majority of American homes, be they laptops, smartphones, tablets or routers. This provides massive potential for so-called “mesh networks”—networks that connect devices directly to each other, forming a sort of daisy-chained connection that requires no central access point.

Interviewing the ex-audience #2: Sylvia Paull

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Sylvia Paull

This is the second post in my homage to Spalding Gray’s “Interviewing the Audience” — this time, with a spotlight on someone I’ve know for two decades. I first met Sylvia Paull when I somehow stumbled on the Cybersalon she was hosting in her Berkeley living room in the early ’90s. She is a great connector of people and ideas; these days she runs two different lunch series (one tech-oriented and one for women to share ideas) and hosts speaking events at the Hillside Club, still under the Cybersalon rubric.

A Fast Company profile once called Paull “a public relations icon.” Yet unlike so many who have labored in that field, she is fearless about speaking her own mind. I’m grateful for the time she took to answer my questions.

Who are you and what are you up to? Tell us a little about yourself — or a lot.

Who is Sylvia? That’s my email moniker, the title of a Shakespeare sonnet and a Schubert lieder, and it’s a question I ask myself every day. I’m a writer who makes her living writing for high-tech startups and nonprofits that want to be covered by media, attract an audience, and become famous for what they do.

I was the first U.S. citizen born in Germany after WWII, in 1946, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower came to visit me and my parents at the U.S. Army hospital in Frankfurt am Main. My father, trained as a conductor, was Eisenhower’s bandleader; he met my mother, a German Holocaust survivor, right after WWII when he went to find missing relatives at the Jewish refugee services, where she was working. They regarded my birth as something of a miracle. My birth certificate, which is in German, identifies me as neither German nor American but as “Israelisch.” Like many Jews of my generation, I was named after a dead relative. One of my first memories is of two Yahrzeit candles burning on the mantelpiece of our San Francisco home and my mother telling me they stood for her father and her mother.

Our house was filled with music, food, and absence. My father was gone for 18 months when he led a U.S. military band in South Korea during the so-called Korean conflict. He said that General Douglas MacArthur, the military commander, refused to let his soldiers put on winter clothing until the final victory march. There was no victory, and all of the men in my father’s band were left behind to freeze in Chinese prison camps. My father, because he was an officer, albeit the lowest ranking chief warrant officer, was in the last batch of troops ferried to an escaping ship.

Another early memory: I am five years old waiting for my father to come off a troop ship anchored in San Francisco Bay. If I listen, I can still hear the ship’s horn echoing through the fog. The ship’s passengers are quarantined because of some illness, and we stare out of the window in the Sunset District, waiting for our father to appear out of the mist. He finally comes, much heavier than before, wearing a thick winter coat. Every week during his absence, my mother had baked a marble cake — swirling chocolate into vanilla batter, which my sister and I got to taste by licking the prongs from the electric beater and the mixing bowl — and sent the cake to Korea. Dad lived on those cakes, and also canned beans, because he wouldn’t eat non-kosher meat.

I asked him if he ever shot anyone, and he wouldn’t tell me. He did say the band played live music at the front lines while the Chinese placed tape recorders and speakers in the terrain to rouse their troops to battle.

We later moved to Bremerhaven, Germany, where I got my first bicycle and pedaled over cobblestone streets. We lived in a military zone, occupied by the British and the U.S. I had to be careful never to go off road because of live landmines. Convoys of tanks regularly commandeered the roads, and I’d weave my one-speed bicycle, decked out with embroidered badges and flags, between them. At the U.S. Army school, we played ghost in a bomb shelter left over from WWII, and on Sundays, my dad would take us to a desecrated Jewish cemetery and read us stories from the Old Testament. On weekends, we went to the local opera house, rebuilt after the war, and listened to light operas like Die Fledermaus, and ate chocolates filled with real liquor.

I am a product of WWII, and although I am and have always been an American, I feel European and also part of a world that no longer exists. It’s ironic, because I make my living by celebrating the disruption of former worlds.

What does “being yourself” mean to you? what do you do that makes you feel most yourself?

Writing and bicycling make me forget who I am. Instead, I become what I do. Once I dreamt I was writing a great novel – in German – and when I woke up, I had the certain feeling that I would write that book some day. When I was 50, I took up amateur bicycle racing and raced all over Northern California. I remember a breakthrough race when my body just took over – my mind disappeared – and I felt as if my purpose in life was to bicycle fast. When my mind did reappear, it said, “This is what life is all about.” Having a child was like that, too.

Is there anything (or things) about the Web and social media today that you think get in the way of you “being yourself” — or other people being themselves?

It’s scary how ubiquitous computing has become. Going anywhere, people are always checking their mobile devices. Maybe this puts them more in touch with themselves than looking at random people and objects in the street would do, but it just seems weird and kind of habit-forming.

I used to smoke cigarettes, and the need to constantly check one’s mobile device reminds me of the nicotine habit.

What’s your media diet? How do you go about choosing what you read, see, listen to?

I read good writing, usually in print form because it’s easier on the eyes and I’m used to print. (I used to work in the UC Printing plant, where typesetters laid lead type by hand.) Every day I read The New York Times, which is delivered to my place. I start with the obituaries, then the op-ed columns, the arts, business, and finally, the “news,” which is old by the time it appears in print. I choose to read whatever my favorite reporters write, people like Patricia Leigh Brown, Kim Severson, David Carr, and Dwight Garner (these are all NY Times bylines).

I read Re/code for tech news because the writing and curation demonstrate a standard for selection, whereas most tech sites churn out whatever press releases come their way.

I’ve been reading The New Yorker since I was nine. I take handwritten notes on articles and stories I like and look up words I don’t know.

I don’t have a television and do not watch TV shows on the Internet. The only live videos I watch are bicycle races like the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France. I watch Netflix movies, mostly foreign films and particularly German movies, which are usually grim. I also go to movie theaters regularly, as well as Berkeley Rep, and the Hillside Club for concerts.

I listen to a variety of Internet radio stations, from college stations across the country to the Mozart channel and Cajun music. I rarely listen to radio news, except once in a while I’ll turn on NPR while I’m preparing a meal. I used to co-produce a radio show on science for UC called Science Editor, so I’m jaded about radio news and interviews. I know what goes into the sausage.

I give money to KQED, Grist, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Berkeleyside because I support independent journalism, but I don’t always read everything they send me. If I only have two hours a day for absorbing news, then I’ll stick to the Times and Re/code.

Give us a link to something you made, or something you love, or something that you want the rest of us to see!

Years ago, Dave Winer got me started on a blog: whoisylvia.typepad.com. It’s become a forum for me and myself, since most people don’t have time to read other people’s blogs, myself included. I also host several events, more like salons, where I like to get people questioning the way we think about work, play, and life in general. These are listed on my web site at www.sylviapaull.com.

IndieWeb ho! A brief intro to a little movement with big ideas

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Independent Rider Rally
If you believe, as I do, that

  • Good things start small;
  • Open technology is more attractive and reliable than proprietary technology;
  • The Web works best when we connect as autonomous individuals in public space rather than as customers in private space;
  • Playing around with new Web tools is fun even when they’re not quite ready for prime time;

then you will be as excited as I am about the IndieWeb. Self-described as “a people-focused alternative to the ‘corporate web’,” the IndieWeb is an umbrella term describing what is at once a movement, a concept, and a set of nascent software tools.

To date it has manifested itself mostly in the form of informal working meetups called IndieWebCamps (the first was in 2011). The next one is this weekend, taking place both in Portland and in NYC, with some farther-flung outposts checking in as well. Since Wordyard is both a place for me to write about stuff like the IndieWeb and also to put some of these tools to use, I’m going to Portland — both to report and to participate.

There is no single iconic IndieWeb project, protocol, or standard. Here are some exemplary initiatives (these are just the ones I’m most familiar with — there’s a fuller list here):

  • IndieAuth: Method for using your own domain name to sign in to websites.
  • Bridgy: Service that feeds social-media comments on your posts back to your personal site.
  • Known: Personal publishing/community platform in development, based on IndieWeb principles.
  • P3K: Personal publishing and status updates, based on IndieWeb principles.
  • IndieBox: “Personal cloud”-style hardware for managing personal data.

That should give you a quick sense of the breadth and heterogeneity of the work by IndieWeb enthusiasts. The spirit here isn’t “let’s conquer the world”; it’s “let’s stop just talking about this stuff and start getting it to work for ourselves.” The IndieWebCamp “Principles” page is a good read if you want to understand the ideals at work behind these projects.

Wired ran a thorough write-up last summer under the headline “Meet the Hackers Who Want to Jailbreak the Internet.” Since then the IndieWeb has largely flown under the tech-media radar.

In a world where the press is mostly occupied with handicapping the participants in a corporate Battle of the Behemoths, that’s only to be expected. But I think it’s a mistake.

Unless you enjoy tinkering with unfinished software on your website (some of us do!) most of these projects aren’t going to serve your needs — yet. The IndieWeb’s collective project is simply not ready for prime time or mass adoption. And sure, it’s possible that it may never be. It may always be for pros and semi-pros, developers and technical sophisticates.

On the other hand, every time I hear that line about some new technology, I think, you know, that’s what they said about the Internet in 1993.

Why Amazon vs. Hachette should have news publishers quaking

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Amazon UK Warehouse

Proposition: Amazon is to Hachette as Facebook is to all news publishers.

You know about Amazon’s dispute with book publishing giant Hachette, right? Amazon and the collective book publishing industry have been locked in a long-term war over the price of ebooks, and that’s now left the World’s Biggest Bookstore with some unusual gaps on its shelves. There is no underdog in this fight; it’s two colossal, unsympathetic combatants rolling in the mud — the Eastern Front of the online trade wars. (Here’s a good primer on the fight.)

Amazon is powerful today because over the past 20 years it has become the central chokepoint for distribution of both physical books and ebooks. It’s not a full-on monopoly yet; it’s got one ailing large-company competitor still in Barnes & Noble, and a sea of plucky independents will still sell us books. But it’s the key player. So when it says to a publisher like Hachette, “If you don’t play along you’ll pay a price,” it can extract a price.

Amazon vs. Hachette is a fascinating story in its own right, but today I want to use it as a lens to look at a different conflict — one that hasn’t flared yet.

Over the past 2-3 years, Facebook has begun to assume an Amazon-like role in the ecosystem of online news. We have quickly moved from a Web in which you got your readers either from search or from “organic” traffic sources (home-page visitors, regulars, and e-mail subscribers) to one where you get an enormous chunk of your readers directly from Facebook shares.

Partly this has happened naturally; so many of us love to graze on Facebook links! More recently, Facebook itself has goosed the process by deliberately opening a spigot of traffic to news publishers by tweaking its News Feed algorithm to favor their links.

When this happened last year, once it became clear that the changes favored actual quality journalism over viral linkbait, there was much celebration in newsrooms. Facebook was a savior. All you had to do was beef up your social-media team, A/B test your headlines and you could count on steady, impressive traffic growth from now till doomsday.

But there is an actual doomsday on this timeline. We know this because not that long ago Facebook pulled this same act with the entire world of consumer-facing business (or “brands,” as they’ve been dubbed in this arena). Facebook sold the “brands” on using its platform to connect with Real People, and brands leapt at the opportunity, pouring money and effort into building brand pages and huge followings, and everything was great until Facebook turned around and said, “Now we are demoting your posts — if you want to reach people you’ll have to pay us.”

If you are an editor or publisher or news executive today, you must know that Facebook is going to pull exactly the same bait-and-switch move on you. Feast on free traffic! Tailor your business around it! Now, pay up! Facebook has big post-IPO revenue goals it needs to deliver on; there is no question that this is going to happen — the only uncertainty is when.

I understand that publishers today have no choice but to engage with Facebook on some level: you go where your readers are, and right now, the readers are there. But smart ones will keep an eye on the world beyond Facebook. Sooner or later they are going to find themselves, just like Hachette, locked in a commercial struggle with the entity that increasingly controls their distribution. And they’re going to have even less leverage than Hachette does.

In upcoming posts, I’ll look at what concrete steps publishers can take to avoid the Facebook trap and build a more sustainable future.

MICROECONOMICS ADDENDUM: There’s an unusual wrinkle to my analogy that is of quantitative interest. Amazon wants Hachette to sell its ebooks cheaper than Hachette wants; it’s the classic Walmart squeeze-your-suppliers tactic. With Facebook and news publishers, the news publishers (almost but not quite universally) are already giving away their product for free. So the “lower your prices” squeeze manifests itself as a negative price — i.e., Facebook ends up asking the publishers for a fee to distribute their goods.

Troll-slayer or name layer? How the Times/Post/Mozilla project could matter

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troll

Last week’s announcement of the latest big Knight-Foundation-funded effort to build a better digital mousetrap for news organizations prompted a wave of coverage that framed it as the latest effort to “solve the comments problem.” The new collaboration between developers at the New York Times and the Washington Post will be overseen by the folks at Mozilla Open News and funded by $3.9 million from the Knight Foundation.

Despite the announcement’s promise of providing readers with tools to “submit pictures, links and other media; track discussions; and manage their contributions and online identities,” virtually every story dubbed the project as a “new comments system” that would help large news sites like the Times and the Post surface the best reader comments algorithmically (the way Gawker’s Kinja platform does) — and maybe reduce the population of trolls and spammers.

Certainly, all this seems to be part of the project’s portfolio. But it is not — as the Washington Post’s piece put it — the “most ambitious aim” here. Coverage huddles around that idea only because we’ve collectively narrowed our understanding of the ways newsrooms can open themselves up. If the only thing readers can do is post a comment, then managing “reader engagement” boils down to catching trolls and starring valuable contributions.

But it looks like there’s a much broader ambition at work in this enterprise. “This isn’t another commenting platform for publishers; it’s a publishing platform for readers,” the Post’s Greg Barber says. Mozilla’s Dan Sinker, who will lead the project, writes on his own blog that the plan is to create “building blocks for engaging communities throughout the web” and that the resulting platform will be “open source at its core, and focused on giving users unprecedented control over their identity and contributions.”

See how this word “identity” keeps rearing its head? That’s because it’s the key to understanding the scope and promise of the project’s ambition. If you’re building a toolkit for two big competing newspapers to share (and for other publishers to adopt), you know that these institutions are never going to share user information. So this project can’t rely on any single proprietary approach to user accounts and identities. It will need some kind of open authentication standard or model.

In the past, news sites have typically either handled this problem in a one-off way on their own. Or they’ve handed it off to a third-party platform like Disqus or (increasingly today) Facebook.

There’s good reason for this! The technical community has long understood identity across systems as a profoundly difficult challenge. (Talk to the good people at the Internet Identity Workshop, who have been pursuing solutions for a decade.) Meanwhile, the business community has recently concluded that this game is over and Facebook won.

But if the Internet is going to serve us well in the future as a public sphere and a platform for self-expression, we must solve this problem with an approach that no single company owns and that everyone — from big publishers to individuals — can use.

This is what’s most exciting about the Times/Post/Mozilla project. Sinker seems to agree. “To me, the loftiest of these goals is the potential for an open identity layer for the web,” he told Nieman Lab. On Twitter, in an exchange with Jay Rosen, he said: “Comments isn’t really the focus of the project… identity and user ownership/control of same is a key element.”

This is important. If this project aims not just to “fix comments” but to become a new kind of platform for news organizations to apply Dan Gillmor’s “my readers know more than I do” principle, then the individual readers matter, and it matters who they are. They’re not just eyeballs or pageview-generators, they’re experts and sources and contributors and critics (and, yes, spitball-throwers and grudge-bearers, too). The most valuable contributions won’t get made by the most knowledgeable contributors unless they have some sense of ownership and control. We’ve all been there and done that; we won’t get fooled again. (Yeah, fingers crossed on that one.)

The value to readers is clear; why should publishers want such a system? Because the alternatives — led by Facebook — trap them in somebody else’s system. Though publishers may wish they could “own” their readers as customers, they’re coming to understand how impossible that has become. But at least they don’t have to hand their readers over for some other company to own.

The Times embraced RSS early on in its spread, in 2002, helping that open model for content-sharing become a key part of the Web’s infrastructure today. Today the Times, Post, and Mozilla together are in a position to kickstart a similarly valuable standard for user identity, if they get it right.

It will be anything but easy. The project has all the markers of a potential software trainwreck: multiple stakeholders with conflicting interests. Broad but somewhat fuzzy goals. Lots of ideals and principles everyone wants to honor. And a pot of money.

The ingredients look familiar to me because they overlap a lot with those of the Chandler project that I wrote about in Dreaming in Code. Chandler is essentially dead today but a lot of good came out of it, including stuff like the CalDAV standard that’s now widely used in group calendaring.

If two years from now, the headline verdicts on the Times/Post/Mozilla collaboration complain that it didn’t “fix comments,” I won’t be terribly surprised. But what if, in the meantime, we emerge with some useful steps towards an independent, open, usable online identity system? Then, I think, the Knight Foundation will have gotten every penny’s worth of its investment and more.

Other comments on the project:

Dave Winer says fixing comments isn’t the problem. At GigaOm, Mathew Ingram is cautiously optimistic. In the Daily Dot, Rusty Foster is not.

Links: Twitter trolls, data doppelgangers, Obama anon

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Twitter just got significantly crazier

Basically, a bunch of misogynist pranksters from 4chan have recently taken to creating fake Twitter accounts to impersonate feminist caricatures. This campaign in turn seems to be part of a broader effort, according to this Buzzfeed summary, “Activists Are Outing Hundreds Of Twitter Users Believed To Be 4chan Trolls Posing As Feminists”:

Operation: Lollipop is a propaganda campaign run largely by members of the Men’s Rights and Pick-Up Artist communities. The idea is to pose as women of color on Twitter and guide activist hashtags as a way to embarrass the online social justice community.

This loathsome and ridiculous development raises all sorts of disturbing questions — particularly for journalists who increasingly rely on Twitter for “person in the street” quotes and story leads. It’s good to see the pushback against these buffoons, but it’s also one more reason to use caution when relying on Twitter as a source of actual information, human sentiments, and quotations.

Personalization and its discontents

Data Doppelgängers and the Uncanny Valley of Personalization is a provocative argument by Sara Watson, in the Atlantic, about the imperfection of personalized ad-targeting and the creepy feelings it induces, with a nod to Freud:

Ads seem trivial. But when they start to question whether I’m eating enough, a line has been crossed…

My data doppelgänger is made up of my browsing history, my status updates, my GPS locations, my responses to marketing mail, my credit card transactions, and my public records. Still, it constantly gets me wrong, often to hilarious effect. I take some comfort that the system doesn’t know me too well, yet it is unnerving when something is misdirected at me. Why do I take it so personally when personalization gets it wrong?…

Personalization appeals to a Western, egocentric belief in individualism. Yet it is based on the generalizing statistical distributions and normalized curves methods used to classify and categorize large populations. Personalization purports to be uniquely meaningful, yet it alienates us in its mass application. Data tracking and personalized advertising is often described as “creepy.” Personalized ads and experiences are supposed to reflect individuals, so when these systems miss their mark, they can interfere with a person’s sense of self. It’s hard to tell whether the algorithm doesn’t know us at all, or if it actually knows us better than we know ourselves. And it’s disconcerting to think that there might be a glimmer of truth in what otherwise seems unfamiliar. This goes beyond creepy, and even beyond the sense of being watched.

We’ve wandered into the uncanny valley.

Obama <3 Anonymous

Obama Adviser Valerie Jarrett: President Has ‘Cabin Fever’:

“I might walk up to the Lincoln Memorial, sit on there,” Obama said when asked on the “Live with Kelly and Michael” talk show what he would choose if he could do anything unrecognized. “Maybe I’d wander around and find myself at a little outdoor cafe or something and sit and order something and just watch people go by. The thing you miss most about being president is anonymity.”

Before you laugh, remember that the presidential panopticon seems to be where everyday life for the rest of us is heading.

Of course, there’s always the Henry V “go incognito amongst your troops the night before battle” solution:

Gawker anatomized

Great description of Gawker in Michael Hastings’ posthumously published novel, as quoted in Dwight Garner’s review:

…Wretched, a website that resembles Gawker. It’s a site he admires and reviles, where the contributors harbor “a desire to be noticed and to criticize the criticizers of the world, to gain its acceptance by rejecting it, breeding a strange kind of apathy and nihilism and ambition.”

There is, I think, a direct line of descent — ideologically, at least — from Spy to Suck.com to Gawker.

thinksmallRequiem for a copywriter

Ad man Julian Koenig created Volkswagen’s classic “Think Small” campaign, which must have left a deep impression on the young Steve Jobs. This obit for Koenig, who also created memorable campaigns for Timex and the first Earth Day, is full of fascinating bits.

In 1966, he was inducted into the Copywriters Hall of Fame of the Advertising Writers Association of New York. He expressed his gratitude by skewering the association for giving awards based on creativity or artfulness.

Sales, he suggested, were the only important measure.

“The hardest thing in the world to resist is applause,” he said at his induction. “Your job is to reveal how good the product is, not how good you are, and the simpler the better.”

…Advertising earned Mr. Koenig a very good living, and it was important to him that he received proper credit for his work. But throughout his life he also questioned whether it was a valid profession.

He spoke candidly about his concern in a 2009 interview for the public radio program “This American Life.” The segment was produced by [his daughter] Sarah Koenig, a “This American Life” producer.

“Advertising is built on puffery — on, at heart, deception,” he said. “And I don’t think anybody can go proudly into the next world with a career built on deception — no matter how well they do it.”