apophenia:

Bog description: “Making connections where none previously existed.”

danah boyd is a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She’s one of the smartest people in this space, I love reading her stuff because it makes me smarter and want to go back to school to get a PhD or something. You can follow danah on Twitter here. Her last 3 posts were:

“Privacy and Publicity in the Context of Big Data”

Big Data presents new opportunities for understanding social practice. Of course the next statement must begin with a “but.” And that “but” is simple: Just because you see traces of data doesn’t mean you always know the intention or cultural logic behind them.

Harassment by Q&A: Initial Thoughts on Formspring.me

Questions-and-answers have played a central role in digital bonding since the early days of Usenet. Teenagers have consistently co-opted quizzes and surveys and personality tests to talk about themselves with those around them.

Big Data: Opportunities for Computational and Social Sciences

I gave today’s opening keynote at the WWW Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. My talk was about methodological and ethical issues involved in the study of Big Data, focusing heavily on privacy issues in light of public data.

Marty Collins — Marketing today

Blog description: “Join the conversation your customers are having without you.”

Marty Collins is Director of Emerging Media for Microsoft. She was previously running the Windows social media team. I’ve worked with Marty recently on an Internal Microsoft team and she’s very smart and grounded about this space. You’ll find some great real life case studies from the work she’s doing on her blog. You can follow Marty on Twitter here. Her last 3 posts:

Chat with Twitter COO Dick Costolo

Yesterday I got the opportunity to sit with Dick Costolo, COO of Twitter, and hear first hand Twitter’s positioning of their Sponsored Tweets program and what they are focusing on next.

Facebook announces Open Graph

Today at F8 Facebook announced radical changes to their API offerings. They introduced a concept they call Open Graph.

140 Proof – Monetize Twitter

In my role I have the opportunity to meet and learn about lots of new media companies, social networks, monitoring tools, etc. I hope to bring some of what I see to this blog for others get a line of sight to as well. The first media company I’m going to review is 140 Proof.

Glass House

Blog description: “The blog of Frank X Shaw”

Frank is a corporate vice president at Microsoft on the corporate communications team. He previously worked at Waggener Edstrom as the President of our Microsoft business. Frank used to blog on a previous iteration of Glass House that lived on WaggenerEdstrom.com for years but this is his newest version of that blog. You’ll find a mix of everything but Frank is a great writer and a sharp guy. You can follow Frank on Twitter here. His last 3 posts were:

Comms Challenge – Goldman Sachs & The Pope « Glass House

In a tweet earlier today, I wondered who had the bigger comms challenge – Goldman Sachs or the Vatican? This was spurred by this Memo From Vatican City in the NYT today, plus other coverage looking at criminal and civil charges for Goldman.

Bloomberg & Gizmodo –See Any Difference? « Glass House

Courtesy of the NYT, a great (inadvertent) comparison between the way Gawker Media operates and the new Bloomberg BusinessWeek operates.

Thinking About Risk « Glass House

it’s a common term these days – Risk. When is it good, when is it bad, when should it be regulated, when should it be rewarded. Mostly this is in context of what happened on Wall Street in the last few years and through the lens of business risk.

Last month I posted 3 blogs of people I work with, today I decided to extend that to three blogs from employees of Microsoft. These are all there personal blogs. I didn’t pick these blogs because they’re clients, I love smart employee blogs of big brands. They have a day to day insight most people don’t get and I think its incredibly valuable that they share their learnings with everyone else. It makes great brand ambassadors.

Check out their blogs and let me know what you think.Similar Posts:

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Full disclosure I used to work at HP (who is now a client). Microsoft, T-Mobile (who sells Google’s Android phones) and HTC are all clients. But my wary feelings towards Apple have been around long before I worked in tech. I’ll take choice and glitches over design and limitations.

MG Seigler, TechCrunch’s editor and self proclaimed Apple fanboi, has a post about Apple’s latest move to block porn from the app store. I think this is a fascinating move by Apple. My personal stance on morality is that first I believe everyone has their own free agency to do as they see fit and it’s not my business. Second I personally dislike anything that’s addicting. This goes for drugs, alcohol and pornography. (Yes porn’s addicting). So while I want to applaud Apple for this move, it’s not any type of moral victory, as MG points out.

Problem number one is that while Apple is removing most of these sexy apps from the App Store, it’s not removing all of them. So who gets to stay? Big publishers like Sports Illustrated and Playboy. In fact, not only is Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit 2010 app not being removed, it’s being featured in the App Store. Both it and the Playboy app clearly violate the new rules of the more prudish App Store, yet they get to stay.

The TechCrunch post has well over 100 comments as I write this and is trending on many news aggregation sites. Apple has struck a nerve. Now anyone who has studied technology adoption understands tech’s dirty little secret: Porn

VHS, BluRay, broadband adoption (what pictures and videos do you think people so desperately wanted to look at in the late 90′s), and search can all thank their success, in very large part, to the porn industry. That’s why Apple’s stance against porn seemed so interesting.

Google and Android have no such qualms about porn and several commenters to the opportunity to proclaim their “love” for Android. I also have to doubt Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace will follow Apple’s lead here. It is still in it’s infancy and won’t really see it’s potential until Windows Phone 7 comes out and Microsoft typically takes a hands off approach to content and partner development.

Ultimately I have to think this is a move towards Apple to placate publishers. As MG points out Apple hasn’t removed Apps with similar types of content from Sports Illustrated and Playboy.  Again from TechCrunch we see a hint at the future in Apple’s response?

As Apple VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller explained earlier to the New York Times, it’s because they’re well-known companies known for that content. Yet, he also cited women being upset about feeling degraded and parents being upset about kids having access to sexy apps as the main reason Apple is cracking down on them. The omission of the fact that parents probably also don’t want their kids downloading the Playboy app, or that some women might also find the Swimsuit app degrading is laughable.

I imagine that Apple users will get their porn, especially with the iPad coming out. It’s just going to come from established (and struggling) publishers.I just wonder how much longer developers and users will put up with Apple?

[UPDATE] Yep, thought so:  New “Explicit” Category in App Store Could Herald Return of Sexy Apps Similar Posts:

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Play On

As a proud member of Gen X I have fond memories of my Atari 2600.If you are reading this chances are you had an Atari, Nintendo 64 or Sega Genesis and chances are even greater you have an Xbox, Wii or Sony Play Station in your home right now. In fact to carry this even further, you are also likely to have an iPod or iPhone loaded with several games.

Gaming is a huge industry. But social media can thank much of it’s growth to gaming.

I’m not just talking about all the Farmville, Mafia Wars, sheep throwing, super poking and other plagues that roam Facebook.Social networks are filled with gaming components. The most obvious is Four Square with it’s points, badges and unelected mayors.

LinkedIn was the first time I noticed it with it’s profile status bar. If you remember back to when you first signed up there was a status bar that gave you a percentage of completion and next steps to improve your level of completion.Add a photo, invite friends, fill in job history, etc. The annoying thing was that I knew I was being gamed but I did it anyway.

Image by Tac Anderson via Flickr

But there are even less obvious forms of gaming. Why do people care about their Twitter follower count? We don’t really care how many people are following us. It’s nice affirmation and all but really it taps into that deep seeded, primal urge that games satisfies for us.

We watch how many followers we have, we watch haw many RT’s we get and how many replies to questions we ask, just like we watch how many coins we collect or aliens we kill.

Business Need to Play More games

One thing that strikes me as a huge opportunity is to more overtly build gaming qualities into business software.

The biggest problem with CRM software is that sales people don’t enter the needed information in. Taking this thread to the extreme and knowing sales people and their uber competitive nature, what if each lead was a kill and all additional information under that kill determined the value of the kill. You would also need a constant leader board that sales people would check daily (I promise many of them will check it multiple times a day). You could also make a kill list out of your target customers and offer bounties for special targets.

While this is an extreme example that could potentially cause some perception problems, I promise that this would be the most successful CRM system out there.

The Future Will Be One Big Game

With the advent of Augmented Reality we will quickly move from AR games on our phones to AR glasses to everything being one big game.

[Prediction] By 2020 games will be the next social networking. Not games like we think if them today but systems that work off the same gaming theories. There will be gaming communities that dwarf Facebook and challenge Google and Microsoft for time spent, functionality, marketing dollars and developers.

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From the moment that Marketing was created the battle over customer privacy and spam began. It may not have been called privacy or spam when the first salesperson knocked on someone’s door during dinner but the same thinking was in play.

Few companies have fought more battles between Privacy and Spam than Microsoft. A recent blog post by Windows Live Mail highlights this:  Fighting the war on spam

Why do people send spam in the first place? It’s simple: for the money. Spam is big, big business. Much of it is also illegal, but, unfortunately, that hasn’t kept people from sending it.

Believe me, spam is a battle. Spammers won’t ever quit, and they are very clever. Spammers are constantly finding new ways to exploit the services that we provide to our customers, to abuse the very system that you use every day to communicate with your friends and family and to conduct your personal business. But we won’t quit, either.

Customer information is possibly the most valuable substance on earth. The core of marketing since it’s beginnings, stemming from government subsidized, post World War II research, has been customer data. In the beginning the first breakthrough was demographic data. Demographic data excited and terrified people because of it’s implications, both to the new field of Marketing but also on privacy. Demographic data terrified a World still recovering from the Nazi threat.

Today’s social networks create data that makes demographic data dated and benign. And this scares people. Mark Zuckerberg recently made the statement that Privacy doesn’t matter anymore which has created some great debate.

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote about the importance of privacy Why Facebook is Wrong: Privacy Is Still Important

Privacy is a fundamental human right and while that may seem less true when we’re operating on corporate turf like Facebook, Facebook used to be based on privacy. Why give it up so easily? (Isn’t it a cause for concern that so much of our civic interaction now goes on through this and other corporate channels?)

It’s very hard to believe that the hundreds of millions of mainstream Facebook users are wanting to throw their privacy out the window – and if Facebook believes they are, why not just ask them clearly?

Mike Arrington writes about the illusion of privavcy we’ve been living under for years. Ok You Luddites, Time To Chill Out On Facebook Over Privacy

The fact is that privacy is already really, really dead. Howard Lindzon nailed it the other day when he said “Equifax, Transunion, Capital One, American Express and their cousins raped our privacy,” Everything we do, everything we buy, everywhere we go is tracked and sitting in a database somewhere. Our location via our phone, or our car GPS. Our credit card transactions. Everything. Honestly, a picture of you taking a bong hit in college is mice nuts compared to the mountain of data that is gathered and exploited about every single one of us every single day. You just don’t really see that other stuff because those companies don’t like to talk about the data their gathering.

Neither Marshall or Mike are wrong. Privacy is important and we do live in a World where privacy isn’t what we think it is. For digitally savvy people like you and me that are very aware of and (relatively) comfortable with the amount of data we have out there this isn’t a big problem. But most people have no idea about privacy and spam. The rise of worms and security exploits in social networks is already a huge problem because most people don’t know to not click on weird links. This only fuels the fear around privacy.

Some companies live on this fear and many more profit from it. Hence the recent partnership with McAfee and Facebook. Both companies make money on this deal. Better Security through Software | Facebook

One of the best defenses against security threats is a good offense, and we want to help you take the offensive by having the latest security software installed on your computer. Today, we are announcing a year-long partnership with McAfee to offer all 350 million people who use Facebook the ability to download a six-month subscription to McAfee security software at no cost, along with a special discount once the six months are over.

This only exacerbates the problem of privacy vs. spam. Facebook (and any Web company) make more money the more information they can get you to expose. This opens up users to the risk of spam and the risk of viruses which Facebook (and other Web companies) need to control in order to keep users (read MySpace) but they also make money by fighting it. It’s the arms dealer making money selling weapons to both sides.

Hence the never ending battle. The only thing we can do is be smart about our data and approach the battle with eyes wide open. After all it’s our information the battle is being waged over, be smart with it.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Privacy, Spam,

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There’s a lot of chatter about the fire hose data deals Twitter is making and will continue to make.

The holy grail of data filtering in our over data flooded world is surfacing the quality content above irrelevant noise. This has proven to be the true value of Twitter. This strength is serious enough to be a credible threat to Google and the current search industry.

The real time web is the coolest thing to happen in our space in at least a few months. But it’s really, really cool. What’s really cool about Twitter is the value that it has unleashed through its API and partners. How big of a deal is Twitter’s API? Big enough to make a company built on that API a threat to more established businesses.

Just How Big Is TweetMeme Anyway, And Why Does It Matter?

Everyone is trying to take real time Twitter data and massage it into a useful, filtered news stream. Bit.ly has a new product on the way called Bit.ly Now. Digg is rebuilding the service from the ground up to take advantage of Twitter data in figuring out what’s hot sooner.

But it doesn’t matter how big Twitter gets.The value isn’t in the quantity of conversation or shared links its in the quality of the shared links.

Twitter power users are some of the biggest info junkies on the planet. The collective filtering power of all the geekiness is worth more than what Twitter is valued at.

It doesn’t mean Twitter is worth more because those valuable early adopters are fickle at best. But Twitter currently controls their mind share and add that to search related products like Digg or straight up search engines like Bing and the potential is only begining to be seen.

Web 2.0 Summit: A Conversation With Qi Lu. Bing Wave 2 With Twitter.

Qi Lu, spoke with Tim O’Reilly. He hit on some of his overall goals with Microsoft and search, but the real story was clear: The deal between Microsoft and Twitter to inject real-time tweets into Bing’s results. Yes, the deal is real and it’s a key part of what Microsoft is calling “Bing Wave 2.”

Things are about to get super duper interesting.

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I got to help launch Microsoft’s first store yesterday. I’ll be down in California next week opening the Mission Viejo store too. It was a great experience. You can see everything I was doing here on the Microsoft Store Posterous site.

It’s been great and we’ve had some wonderful success I’ll share with you when it’s all said and done (I’ll also share some valuable lessons about dealing with haters and trolls) but for now I’ll leave you with a clip from a post I wrote back in July:

New Comm Biz  Be a Social Media Black Belt with Posterous

If you’re on top of things managing your social media you have a Twitter, Flickr and YouTube account plus a blog. If not go do that right now. Even for the most conservative companies out there, it’s pretty standard now to have Twitter, Flickr and YouTube set up. If you don’t and you think your company/client won’t go for it, try asking, you might be surprised.

If nothing else YOU should have a Twitter, Flickr and YouTube account. If not, I don’t know why you’re reading this.

Now to earning that Black Belt: (For the benefit of those with uber anal legal departments we’ll leave out blogs).

Assuming you now have all 4 of these accounts set up (Posterous, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter) go into your Autopost to Everywhere setting in Posterous and enable posting to these other accounts. You can also set to post to Vimeo, Facebook, Delicious, your blog and many other services, but we’ll focus on the big three because they’re the ones I use the most.

Now take a picture or a video on your phone and send to post@posterous.com. If you sent a picture, you just posted to Posterous, Flickr and Twitter. If it was a video you just posted to Posterous, YouTube and Twitter. Score!

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One of the more interesting things about being a parent is watching your children grow up. Especially as they begin to make more independent decisions, you start to get an idea of what kind of adult they’ll be.

As a business junkie the same is true as I watch companies “grow up” and scale. Two companies that I have always enjoyed watching are Google and Apple. Both of these companies are extremely successful and profitable in their own right but compared to many of their Fortune 500 counterparts are still relatively *small*.

How can I say Google and Apple are small? Well on one level they are small. Compare them to companies like HP and Microsoft (disclosure: both Microsoft and HP are clients of my employer Waggener Edstrom):

• They don’t have nearly the number of employees. Especially if you count contractors and agencies. Google and Apple seem to do most of their marketing in house, while you’d be hard pressed to find a firm that hasn’t done work for HP or Microsoft.
• Microsoft has 14 businesses all doing over $1 Billion annually and did $60+ Billion in 2008.
• HP grew during 2008 and did $118 Billion.
• Apple’s revenue in 2008, while strong was only $32 Billion. (That’s half of what Microsoft does annually and about what HP does in one quarter.)
• And the mighty Google? It’s impressive to think that they make most of their money one click at a time and get pennies for each click but with as omnipresent as they are they only did $21+ Billion in 2008.(yes I realize the irony in saying *only* 21 Billion)

Related to bullet point #1 is the way Google and Apple go to market with new products. Apple has Mac World but other than that they don’t have to do much hype building.Their fans do more than enough for them.

Google usually does even less. Their approach is sometimes a blog post, along the lines of, “Oh yeah we just launched this new product. Leave us a comment and let us know what you think.” That’s a big product release. Usually they just roll out the feature or put something in the Labs and wait for people to notice.

As someone who works in marketing (I’m resistant to calling myself a marketer) I’m often at awe with this approach. I’ve even encouraged my clients to do the same thing. You don’t need a press release for every little thing.

But something different happened in May. May is when Microsoft launched Bing (again full disclosure, I work with the Bing account). Google publicly dismissed it (of course) but I think they were a little nervous. The same day Bing launched Google pre-released Wave. They had a conference, demoed the product (that they admitted was not ready for release) and got everyone very excited. This is a classic product marketing move. I know people at HP that live for stunts like this.

But to my knowledge, Google’s never done something like this before (please correct me if I’m wrong). I use and love Gmail and Google Reader among many Google products but something never sat right with me about Wave. What need was it serving? To replace email? Most email is not working on a collaborative project. Google has struggled with integrated products (but they are getting better), was this just going to be another standalone product?Was it going to replace Gmail? Too many questions IMO.

I though maybe I was jaded because of my client work. So I held my tongue. But I wasn’t the only one skeptic. TechCrunch’s own MG Seigler predicted backlash. Google turned on the hype machine and now they had to deliver.

While Wave is an impressive application with a lot of potential it hasn’t lived up to the promise. Most early adopters are unimpressed.

Google Wave crashes on beach of overhype

But this service is way overhyped and as people start to use it they will realize it brings the worst of email and IM together: unproductivity.

Google has fallen victim to the same hype cycle the it’s much larger competitors have fallen victim to over the years. In all fairness it’s easy to do. Big public companies have a lot of pressure on them to return results quarter after quarter. They either have to grow revenue or cut expenses. Neither of which are easy but the latter is especially tough because it often means cutting jobs. The question is, will they try it again?

Apple hasn’t been without its own troubles and missteps this year. But I’ve blogged about those already.

As both Apple and Google grow they are going to have to learn some of the same lessons that Microsoft and HP have had to learn. Growth isn’t easy. Scale is really tough. You can’t make everyone happy.

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Image via CrunchBase

As I was flipping through one of my favorite start pages I couldn’t help but notice something. Let’s see if you notice it to:

• Palm and Apple Squabble Over iTunes Access on the Pre – NYTimes.com
• Apple’s Rejection of Google Voice Points to Just One Thing
• Apple bans App Store’s 3rd-most prolific developer
• FTC to press on with Apple-Google board probe | Reuters
• Slashdot IT Story | Apple Keyboard Firmware Hack Demonstrated
• The Google vs. Apple War Begins – Columns by PC Magazine

Notice a theme here? Do you know what that is? That’s Apple entering the main stream. Now yes, Apple has been main stream for a few years but until now they’ve been able to act like the cool outsider who jeered and derided, well pretty much everybody.

I’ve wondered out loud how it is that Apple could get away with the approach they take to Social Media (aka hatred and disdain). They have had a very clear lack of presence. There was no need for them to get involved. Why would they waste their time, attention and money on social media when all their fan boy’s took care of hyping them, building buzz, monitoring their brand and defending their virtue?

But things are different now. Apple’s is no longer just a threat to Microsoft (and every PC manufacturer). They have become the main threat to every mobile phone company. And they are now a threat to their biggest ally, Goolge. But competition is nothing new to Apple. The current scale and pressure they are facing is something new but something else has changed.

When you compete in the main stream not every customer is willing to put up with your little idiosyncrasies. As you scale not every manufacturing partner plays by your rules. As your platform gets bigger not every developer is willing to put up with your rules.

Consumers don’t trust size. As you get bigger people don’t trust you. This is why so many companies have become more transparent and are engaging in social media. Openness and transparency are not in Apple’s DNA. The sad thing is that they would have to do so little to have a big impact.

Now that the honeymoon is over will people continue to accept Apple’s lack of transparency and lack of presence in social media? I don’t know, we’ll see.

(Microsoft, T-Mobile and HTC are all clients of my employer Waggener Edstrom. Please see my disclosure)Similar Posts:

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This takes digital marketing up to a whole new level. Kudos to Activision, Xbox and whichever did this. Amazing. Jeremiah has the write up where I first saw this.

This is a HUGE win for Facebook and Facebook Connect.

[UPDATE] I was in such a hurry to write this that I’ve had some additional thought. I think what I find so unexpected about this approach is that it’s not about building an app in Facebook and it’s not trying to mine the data.It’s not trying to force me to push it on all my friends (although I would).

It just creates a great experience which I will naturally want to share.It’s a one time (or 5 times if you keep refreshing the page like I have) customized experience.

What I’d like to see next time is the ability to share the video with friends on Facebook or via email. I’d also like to download my personalized video. Load time is a drag, but well worth it.

We’ll be seeing more of this for sure. Plus I could see some real fun stuff with Twitter’s version of this.

What do you think? Maybe some thoughts from my non-gamer friends.

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