Author Archives: Jitendra Gupta

Digital Love

Recently, I heard this fascinating youth radio program about how MySpace is changing the way kids interact/hook up with each other. It also discusses how kids deal with like commercial characters like Jack (of Jack in the box), who have a profile on MySpace and wants to be their best friends forever

Love in the Digital Age Youth Radio looks at how technology affects teen relationships: You’ll hear about how advertisers are cashing in on befriending young people through social networking sites, spying on MySpace, and why some people just shouldn’t use technology.

Interesting and enlightening…Great job Youth Radio.

Microsoft Vs Open Source Community

There was a great piece on CNet news.com about Higgins project waiting Microsoft’s approval for creating a Windows CardSpace’s open-source equivalent:

Higgins awaits Microsoft’s blessing

An open-source rival to a Microsoft identity tool has been in limbo for months, awaiting the software giant’s go-ahead on certain patent-related issues.

Developers working on the Higgins project want to create a tool equivalent to Microsoft’s Windows CardSpace, but fear the software giant’s legal wrath if they don’t receive permission on certain features. Although parts of the project continue to move forward, proponents say it may not reach its full potential without Microsoft’s help.

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While CardSpace is available on Windows, one goal of the Higgins project is to cover other operating systems. Higgins wants to offer an open-source alternative that works on Windows and on alternatives such as Linux and Mac OS X. The application would work similarly to CardSpace.

“We don’t intend to duplicate CardSpace, but a user should be able to sit down in front of the open-source implementation and feel comfortable and understand how things work, like Firefox versus Internet Explorer,” said Dale Olds, who holds the title of distinguished engineer at Novell, drawing a parallel to Web-browsing software.

Also, Higgins developers want to include the capability to take identity information from Linux systems or Macs and use it with CardSpace, and vice versa, Olds said.

“This is the equivalent of the user’s wallet. You want to be able to take your cards and use them in whatever system. How to do that has now been fully documented, but we need that included under the open-specification promise,” Olds said. Without Microsof’s acquiescence, import and export will only be possible between Higgins systems, he said.

I really like Microsoft Cardspace (see our review here) …Microsoft has done a lot of new groundbreaking work here. The issue with the Higgins project is that its gonna provide a card management client based on the Java based Eclipse platform. This would ensure that the product works for Linux and Mac and any other client that supports Java including Windows. This makes it tricky for Microsoft, as by giving up the patent rights, they will be essentially creating an open-source competitor for one of the key technologies in Vista. Not only will Higgins based CardSpace product take away one of the major selling points of Vista, it might even provide a web client implementation, which challenges the raison d’etre for an expensive desktop OS like Windows. On the other hand, an open source implementation of CardSpace functionality might generate a lot of free buzz and user education for a fairly new and unknown CardSpace functionality.

Overall, I can see the reasons for Microsoft’s reluctance in granting a license to Higgins. This is a complex decision…I won’t even be surprised if Microsoft rejected the request altogether, although I do think the right course of action would be to work with Higgins and try and advance this crucial technology together with open-source community.

Improving Online Communities

An online community, or for that matter any community, is built upon shared experiences of its participants. In the real world, people in a community typically interact with each other by gathering at same physical location, at the same time. In online communities, it is easy for users to interact with each other without any geographical or temporal limitations. But in return for the benefits that Internet (or even telephone to a lesser degree) provides in terms of ease of communication, it takes away from the richness, texture and context of the conversation. As such a number of startups are trying to address the problem with online communities and restore richness, texture and context to online communities. (Richard calls this market segment, meta social networking).

Who reads my blog

MyBlogLog started off with the agenda to provide blog analytics. They launched MyBlogLog Communities mid last year, to enable readers of blogs to join and share their experiences with other like-minded group of readers. The idea was that if readers like same content, they probably have plenty else in common. They built a platform where readers could trade messages with other readers and see what other sites they visit.

Power of Images

They hit the jackpot with the reader rolls that provided a picture to connect readers and writer of blogs. By just providing a static visual cue in the form of a picture, MyBlogLog provided an important visual context for online community conversations. The result, their usage took off and is not at over 50K users…In the meantime, they also got acquired by Yahoo! for a $10M.

Where there are visitors there is spam

With all the success came a number of people looking use MyBlogLog for financial gains. From R-Rated avatars to people pretending to be somebody else to other commercial avatars like Mr. Online Pharmacy, there has been a glut of stories related to how people are trying to game MyBlogLog and given their history, MyBlogLog has understandably been having a hard time coping.

Competition

In addition to all the spammers, there is new competition on the horizon for MyBlogLog. OthersOnline and Explode are two emerging players. These players have interesting new twists to the functionality provided by MyBlogLog. Let’s take a quick look at each:

Explode

Explode provides the same analytics capability as MyBlogLog but in addition to Analytics, it also allows users to build a network for friends who can be readers or writers of blogs. Bloggers can then display a friends widget on their blogs. This widget provides valuable context on the readers of the blog and the bloggers circle of friends. Another capability Explode provides is a comment wall for each user, where friends and other users can post comments. This also provides valuable context on each of the user.

OthersOnline

OthersOnline has an interesting twist on the idea of providing context. They allow people to register their profile along with their website. As part of the registration process, OthersOnline asks users to categorize their website and themselves via keywords. Now using these keywords, OthersOnline shows profile information, along with presence and email, of users via a browser plug-in (a widget is in the works as well). The idea is to make it easy for people to locate other like minded individuals or websites in the course of browsing.

Conclusion

While these companies are breaking new ground in making online conversations more useful, there is still a long way to do before we have achieved a good enough quality of online interactions. Good things, a lot of companies are working on it.

Patent reform: Use social networking

First USAToday and now the US Patent office…It looks everybody is trying to leverage social networking to improve the services they deliver. In the case of US Patent office, following are the details:

The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency’s examiners. A first for the federal government, the system resembles the one used by Wikipedia, the popular user-created online encyclopedia.

Below are the mechanics of how the system will work:

The new patent system will try to help separate experts from posers by offering extensive details about the people sending information to the site. To help others evaluate the quality of this information, called prior art, each posting will include several measures gauging the quality of his other contributions to the site. Patent examiners, for instance, will award “gold stars” to people who previously submitted the most useful information for judging earlier applications, Noveck said.

Ultimately, those registered to participate in this online forum will vote on all the nominated information, and the top 10 items will be passed on to the examiner, who will serve as the final arbiter on whether to award a patent.

Major kudos to the US Patent office for leveraging the community of interested parties to express their opinions via the Internet. This will certainly make the process better…but because of the amounts of money at stake, there will be extremely perverse incentives for participants to game the system. I would not be surprised, if big companies create a department, just to game the review process…I think a better system with checks and balances that rewards good behavior and punishes bad behavior might be better to negate some of the incentive issues here…What do you think?

Google: Click Fraud at 0.02%

Interesting post on inside Adwords blog about the extent of click fraud. The upshot is that Google is claiming that they are only seeing 0.02% of all clicks as being invalid clicks but initially recorded by Google as valid clicks. Here is the interesting bit:

Our Click Quality team investigates every inquiry we receive from advertisers who believe they may have been affected by undetected click fraud. Many of these cases are misunderstandings, but in most cases where malicious activity is found, the clicks have already been filtered out (and not charged for) by our real-time filters. Because of the broad operation of our proactive detection, the relatively rare cases we find of advertisers being affected by undetected click fraud constitute less than 0.02% of all clicks.

Put another way, for every ten thousand clicks on Google AdWords ads, fewer than two are reactively detected cases of possible click fraud. This proportion has stayed within this range every quarter since we launched AdWords, even as the issue of click fraud has received more widespread media attention. In the cases of reactively detected invalid clicks, a refund or credit is provided to the advertiser, and we utilize the discovery as a feedback mechanism to improve our proactive detection systems.

They explain it with a diagram as follows:

The interesting question though is how many of these clicks are invalid that even the Google Click Quality Team is not able to detect? I just don’t know its possible with filtering or with humans to detect all kinds of click fraud scenarios. The is especially troublesome because Google does not allow its advertisers to control where there ads will be shown. This makes it really hard for customers and Google to detect the fraud based on more controllable set of conditions thereby making it a more manageable problem. Apparently some advertisers are getting frustrated with Google and switch to one of their upcoming competitors, profiled recently by NYT:

Google and Yahoo have been fighting it out over which company will dominate the online advertising business, with Google maintaining the upper hand so far.

But in the competition for contextual text ads — those small sponsored links that run adjacent to related articles online — both companies are facing a challenge from a tiny but growing adversary named Quigo Technologies, a New York-based ad service that bills itself as an alternative to the giants.

In the last year and a half, a trickle of large media sites like ESPN.com, FoxNews.com and Cox Newspapers’ 17 sites have stopped using Google and Yahoo and instead signed up with Quigo.

What Quigo offers is transparency and control in what can often be an opaque business: advertisers pay Yahoo and Google for contextual ad placement on a wide variety of Web pages, but get little say over where those ads run or even a list of sites where they do appear.

Quigo, by contrast, gives advertisers not only the list of specific sites where their ads have appeared but also the opportunity to buy only on specific Web sites or particular pages on those sites. It also allows media company sites like ESPN.com and FoxNews.com a chance to manage their own relationships with advertisers.

Although Quigo remains a small competitor, with less than 10 percent of the contextual ad business, its growing success has apparently persuaded Google, which is accustomed to calling the shots in all aspects of its business, that it has to change the way it sells the sponsored link ads in the future.

Quigo still has a long way to go, but its nice to see some of the advertisers and web-sites getting a little bit more say in their ad placements. This can only lead to good things for the overall online ad market.

I paid to get to Digg front page

Fascinating piece on the Wired web site, related to how the editors put together a nonsensical web site, and got it on the front page of Digg by paying for diggs at User/Submitter (check out our review here) site:



Ten hours after hiring U/S, I had 40 diggs. The vast majority of them had also dugg the Photoshop tutorial or the $35 offer. This was the moment when I reached a tipping point, and I began to get a lot of organic diggs and comments. The crowd on Digg is drawn to what’s popular, and many of them second-guessed themselves when they checked out my blog and saw how crappy it was. Quomen commented, “None of those photographs really appeal to me. Am I defective? or just a loner.”Despite their doubts, Diggers kept digging my blog. There’s a perverse incentive here: Diggers who vote early on stories that become wildly popular become more “reputable” in the Digg system. If you’re trying to move up the Digg ranks, it’s in your best interest to vote on anything that looks like it’s gaining popularity. And my blog, with its flurry of paid votes, fit the pattern.

Interesting crowd dynamics at the Digg and the incentive structure does not help either…I have actually seen people comment they are not sure what a particular topic means but still Digg it. In this case more than 1/2 the Diggs were unpaid…That is just unbelievable. I guess the momentum trading theory is alive and kicking.

“We find it interesting that Digg still allows anybody to view any user’s diggs,” U/S told me in an e-mail. “By way of this ‘feature,’ User/Submitter is able to verify that our users actually digg the stories they’re given. Without this feature, Digg users are given complete digging privacy, and User/Submitter cannot exist.”

This is another perverse incentive…but this is driven by Digg’s drive to build a community. To fix this one, they will need to change the business model…All in all great job by the editors for creating and publishing this interesting experiment.

Comments are important

Interesting piece on the future of communities blog (Thanks Chris for pointing it out). It talks about what bloggers can do to incentivize more and better participation in communities.

“Given limited time and resources, where do you spend your time to increase participation?”

Here are some approaches:

1. Focus your efforts on the 1% and help them by making it easier to contribute. Compelling argument: Focus on the what you do best, is an approach that many have heard from several experts. Phil Wainewright suggests that you focus on those who are motivated to contribute. Its also easier to help people that want to help you. The real challenge is metrics that matter at times tend to be skewed by this group of enthusiastic participants who might sometimes intimidate the 9 or 90%.

2. Attempt to increase participation among the 9%: Compelling argument: Any incremental uptick will get you a more engaged audience. This is the marketing person’s dream come true. I remember hearing an entrepreneur pitching me his new idea 5 years ago on mobile phone accessories. There are going to be billion phones – even if I get 5% that’s a huge market. The trouble is our experience most of the 9% is of a different mindset and profile than your 1%. Hence getting them to participate is not materially different from the sample size.

3. Get rid of as many of the 90%. Compelling argument: They are not significantly enriching the community, but just parasites, so go forth and look for the next 1% types – or the “alphas” in your user community. The disadvantage of this model is that if your target addressable community is of a low number, the lurkers are really needed to justify the investment in the community.

4. Do a little of everything aka “peanut butter approach”: Compelling argument: Try several things at the same time and keep what works. Trouble is if you have the community being Sue’s night job and David’s “part time assignment” or Anil’s “opportunity to excel”, none of them really want to do everything. Also a “controlled experiment” is a lot harder to run in this case.

5. Do nothing but understand and accept, plan accordingly. Compelling argument: Before you scoff at this consider how little we know about these things just yet and letting “things take their course” may not be a bad option. But for the MBO-driven, metrics oriented, get it done culture we have this may clearly not be acceptable in some companies.

You may ask: What does this have to do with your comments or future of communities: Your comments are valued and I thank you for them!
I have a hunch that unless we get participation to be more encompassing and device good methods and means to make it better, the future — plurality of the masses will just be an empty promise.

Lack of quality participation is a real problem in most online communities. In the blogosphere especially, for the longest time, there was a mindset that if you got something good to say, you blog. But as more and more people are realizing that blogging is pretty hard and takes a lot of time commitment and energy, there is a renewed focus on figuring out, what can be done to get better participation from ad hoc commenters, in order to improve the quality of discussion. I think, the first step in the process is to really recognizing the importance of quality comments and ad-hoc participation.

Once we accept the importance of quality participation in blogs, we gotta look at how we can get more participation. A lot of the lack of participation really has to do with the lack of incentives for users that participate. But how can sites reward their participants…A lot of these rewards can be non-monitory like Amazon.com recognition of a top raters or viral spread of user generated content on YouTube, in contrast, commenters on blogs get nothing…Heck, most people can’t even be sure who the commenters are, so the ego boost angle is hard…This is a tough nut to crack but once we figure out an equitable and just mechanism for rewarding the participants we will be well on our way to solving this tough problem.

Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free

Fascinating piece in the Time Magazine, titled “Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free” by Justin Fox, about how the new wave of open-source kind of projects are creating real riches for some:

It might seem very odd to look to a long-dead Russian anarchist for business advice. But Peter Kropotkin’s big idea–that there are important human motivations beyond what he called “reckless individualism”–is very relevant these days. That’s because one of the most interesting questions in business has become how much work people will do for free.

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Open-source, volunteer-created computer software like the Linux operating system and the Firefox Web browser have also established themselves as significant and lasting economic realities. That’s not true yet in the worlds of science, news and entertainment: we’re still figuring out what the role of volunteers will be, but that it will be much bigger than in the past seems obvious.

“The question for the past decade was, Is this real?” says Yale law professor Yochai Benkler. “The question for the next half-decade is, How do you make this damned thing work?” Benkler is a leading prophet of today’s gift economy, and he fits the part:

What might those things be? Take the case Benkler makes in his 2006 book, The Wealth of Networks (available, free, at www.benkler.org) for the economic benefits of “peer production” of software and other information products–from journalism to scientific research to videos of people mixing Mentos and Diet Coke. Peer production by people who donate small or large quantities of their time and expertise isn’t necessarily great at generating the original and the unique, but it’s very good for improving existing products (like software) and bringing together dispersed information (Wikipedia). Often better, in Benkler’s telling, than corporations armed with copyright and patent laws.

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Clever entrepreneurs and even established companies can profit from this volunteerism–but only if they don’t get too greedy. The key, Benkler says, is “managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker.” In software, where IBM and other companies charge billions of dollars to install and run otherwise free Linux systems, this seems to be working–in part because Linux volunteers can make money from their expertise and there’s a clear understanding of what one can charge for.

In other fields, it’s not so clear. In a critique of Benkler’s work last summer, business writer Nicholas Carr speculated that Web 2.0 media sites like Digg, Flickr and YouTube are able to rely on volunteer contributions simply because a market has yet to emerge to price this “new kind of labor.” He and Benkler then entered into what has come to be widely known in Web circles as the “Carr-Benkler wager”: a bet on whether, by 2011, such sites will be driven primarily by volunteers or by professionals.

I usually love Nick Carr’s blog, but on this one I tend to agree with Benkler…People who set up open source systems do setup schemes to reward the participants in a number of non-monitory ways. Some of these rewards are recognition as a leader in the community, or enabling users to connect with other members or to enable user to share their content (youTube) with their family and friends. Most of the users find these to be suitable reward for their efforts and don’t worry about the owners of such establishments getting huge chunks of money.

I think a good parallel for the community sites on the web is hot night clubs…These clubs (like club 52 in NYC) attract a lot of people and charge substantial cover charges in addition to obscene amounts for beverages etc. and still typically have a line of people wanting to go participate. Going by Nick Analysis, such popular establishment are just exploiting their visitors (much like youTube etc.) and don’t really deserve the profits they get. I tend to think that instead of disparaging such businesses, we should be appreciating and learning from them as they are able to create an environment where community members want to participate. I think they fully deserve their riches and their rock-star statuses.

I think at the bottom of it, we need to recognize that non-monitory rewards can just be as effective as financial incentives. Human beings are really social creatures, and social interaction and recognition can be a powerful motivators for most people. Its no wonder solitary confinement is considered a punishment…I know its a hard think for most efficient market advocates to admit(full disclosure, I actually studied at U of Chicago) but I think the facts are stacked against them…

What do you think?

Public Connections

Great piece from Danah Boyd on her blog about the way Internet and social media makes it easy for people to document and publish their thoughts and feelings…and the effect it has on people’s behavior and relationships.

“The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.” — Hannah Arendt

Have you ever found yourself not saying something that is on your mind because you’re afraid that if you say it, it will become real? This is a really interesting conundrum in the context of blogging because it has to do with the ways in which public performances make ideas real. Arendt argues that one of the primary roles of the public is to make things real. People seek out witnesses to validate their emotions, ideas, actions, or mere existence. Our stories become real when we have other people to share them with, when other people saw and experienced what we experienced. Having no access to public life can be maddening (literally) because everything might as well be a fable with no witnesses to validate what took place.
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The Internet has allowed us to take the most “intimate” thoughts and ideas and perform them in a public before witnesses. This makes real every neurosis and stupid act – stuff that might simply have slipped away before. It makes it possible to be heard.

Of course once you make public a bunch of private things like your relationship, you need to undo them publicly as well if things don’t work out…Check out this youtube video of a UNC Pit student who decided to have a public breakup on valentine’s day:


I suspect, the ease with which the Internet enables people to go public, even changes dynamics of relationships…Anybody remember the speed dial episode on Sienfeld…now imagine kids, who are dealing with growing up and building up a more mature public persona, having a rich and public equivalent of the speed dial list. It isn’t hard to imagine, how kids will use the web to communicate various transitory feelings and crushes and regret some of those public communications later. No wonder their are companies like ReputationDefender that just focus on cleaning up online histories of kids.

Now the effect of public nature of connections might not just be limited to kids either. LinkedIn provides a good example of public connections that more and more adults are using. Using LinkedIn people can browse people’s professional networks. Now there are people on LinkedIn who have a huge number of connections. Some of these people build up these connections without really even meeting the person (I am sure you get such connection requests as well). I suspect its the public nature of the linked in connections that compels people to establish these useless connections…What do you guys think?

Why People Are Such Jerks Online

Great Piece by Mike on TechDirt

The concept of the flame war online is certainly nothing new. It’s been around since before most people were even aware the internet existed. However, more people are starting to look into the issue of why people tend to be such incredible jerks online when they might be perfectly nice in person. It seems that there are few different things contributing to the effect. First is that people somehow feel “disinhibited” when sitting behind a keyboard and monitor — whether it’s because of the supposed anonymity, the fact that you’re effectively “invisible” or even the fact that there’s a time lag between being a jerk and any response to it. The fact that you’re somewhat separate from the response just makes it that much easier to be a jerk. Some feel that it has even more to do with the lack of direct human contact in terms of either seeing hurt feelings or hearing someone’s voice. There’s just less empathy involved in seeing black and white text then seeing a physical reaction to being mean. Some of the latest research on this actually looked at how brains process messages during a conversation, and noted that in a normal conversation the person is tracking a variety of different cues in terms of how the other person is responding, and those cues help moderate what we say. Without any such cues when sitting behind a keyboard, you don’t get any of the warning lights to moderate what you’re saying, and the natural tendency is just to go right to the extreme edge without ever cooling off.

Another take from International Herald Tribune:

Jett Lucas, a 14-year-old friend, tells me the kids in his middle school send one another a steady stream of instant messages through the day. But there’s a problem.

“Kids will say things to each other in their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person,” Jett tells me. “Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up what they said in the message. It makes things tense.”

Jett’s complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.

The hallmark of the flame is precisely what Jett lamented: thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard would be put more diplomatically — or go unmentioned — face to face.

Flaming has a technical name, the “online disinhibition effect,” which psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace.

In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e- mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign — when a shy person feels free to open up online — or toxic, as in flaming.

Also there is this pithy cartoon from Penny Arcade (via a comment on TechDirt).

Out of the explanations, I tend to like the last one the best (The one in the cartoon). I think lack of accountability or even reliable identity and reputation online is the root cause of people being jerks. Without such mechanisms, I suspect even the real world, emotions/facial expressions or not, will disintegrate into a lawless flamefest. Another potential cause could be the lack of broad community participation on the Internet. This leads to people, who feel the strongest about a topic, to participate thereby causing the perception that people are jerks on the Internet.