Drop.io: swl

The note 'claiming via technorati' has been added to the drop swl.

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:58:32 GMT

so - i just decided to claim this on technorati - this is the code i needed to drop to do this - might as well keep it transparent gwzjkp7uhx

The note '(Unfinished Draft) RIP search 1999-2009, we hardly knew ye' has been added to the drop swl.

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 04:11:27 GMT

note: I am posting this as a draft because, quite frankly, I don't have the time to refine it and won't for a while...

There have been several quite insightful posts analyzing the diffusion of information around Michael Jackson's death. The point has been made a few times that the 'social' web -- twitter, digg, facebook, etc picked up on and diffused information about his death far faster than google et al. were able to react. In fact, google news falsely sensed an attack sensed an attack shut down and for the second time I can recently remember.

people have been hinting, let me come right out and say it - open ad supported search is dead*. It is as over as yahoo directories were in 1998. It was a 10 year accidental blip on a continuum, and here are just a few reasons why:

1. search ranking is a war of attrition - access to arms is flattening with cloud computing, and they are way more of them then there are of you.

2. the types of questions that search answers are commodetized - (bing has this right). the value of information is a function of probability, and google's results are quickly becoming highly probable. there is no value in knowing the answer when everyone else also knows the answer.

3. biology tends to get things right. a networks of peers, not a central dbs, dominate bio.

4. push will always be faster than pull. Search is a pull/crawl metaphor, where social is push.

5. 'the commons' always get messed up.

The good news - despite some crazy recent advances in quantum computing - point one humanity.

The ?bad? news - the world is NOT getting flat - the map is just no longer geographic. We will look back at a brief period where access to information appeared to be flattening, and watch social flip it back in the opposite direction.

a final teaser - search is democratic, social is not... so here comes the most fundamental divide of the haves/have-nots ever.

*deep search, tech to cull complicated datasets, etc. that is only just beginning --- and if marooned in realtime tells us anything, accumulating and efficiently scanning databases takes the cake.

The note 'my sleep cycles by the numbers (BPM)' has been added to the drop swl.

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:01:44 GMT

recently I got an amazing Garmin 405 forerunner watch which has on board GPS and a heart rate monitor. It is awesome for running (main purpose) - but once I have a cool device for data collection I tend to play. Recently I have been using the device to graph my heart rate while I sleep. The results are totally amazing (see below). Friday night I averaged 55 bpm throughout the night and the curve looks really clean -- I remember sleeping well. Saturday I went out with friends and perhaps had a bit too much wine.... my average was significantly higher as a % ... I woke up early after just over 5 hours of sleep, but I remember being basically already awake before I got up... sunday, was I stressed? it really looks like I didn't sleep well.

twitter - @doctors, how am I looking? do I need to come in for a checkup or does the below look normal :) -- Is this the future of health?

P.S. Garmin - I have now bought another 405 for a friend, and convinced at least 3 other people to buy your watches -- that is a few thousand in revenue for you... how about an affiliate kickback :)

The file sleep cycles SWL has been added to the drop swl.

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 14:00:03 GMT

To view this file on drop.io, please visit http://drop.io/swl/asset/sleep-cycles-swl.

The file Kindle API in pictures (download) has been added to the drop swl.

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:44:00 GMT

To view this file on drop.io, please visit http://drop.io/swl/asset/kindle-api-in-pictures-download.

The note 'Forget star ratings, I desperately want a kindle API:' has been added to the drop swl.

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:23:56 GMT

- I want to know if people actually finish this book
- on what page/chapter does the average reader generally abandon (segmented by sex, edu. etc) ?
- are there sections that people read faster/slower?
- how quickly do they finish the book (pages/min)? (Is it a 'page turner')
- what time of the day do most people read this book?
- how many days does it take the average person to finish this book?
- did my roommate actually read the book he keeps quoting?

The kindle has all of this data - and it is the ONLY platform that has this data - Amazon is clearly collecting it centrally (whisper sync to my iPhone proves they have it). So, while all I want for Christmas is access to a Amazon Kindle API, I suspect that Amazon recognizes how priceless the data is (value of data is based on scarcity and they are the only ones who can capture this stuff) and will not be giving it away any time soon.

That said, if I had access to a Kindle API (which is really just one huge but simple reading dataset -- user, book, page -- with time stamps on every action, page flip, open/close, etc.) here is what I would do:

1. Make the purchase page/rankings/information about books data driven:

This is the most benign and probably the first thing that will happen. Instead of having a four star rating on a book, when I am purchasing I want to know the rate at which a book has actually been finished and the speed at which people tend to read it segmented by age, gender, and probably some education and social stats that would require a mashup to facebook connect. I don't want to read a book that everyone clearly gets bored with and abandons on chapter 3.

While we are at it, it is worth customizing the stats to my own personal book reading history to pull out how likely I am to finish the book, my expected pace PPM (pages per minute), where I will slow down, etc.

Finally, I would love to be able to search Amazon by saying, I have a four hour flight, can you give me something that I can read in four hours and will likely finish and enjoy?

2. Give authors tools for understanding & revising their work:

Further out, but not necessarily requiring any more data than the kindle API would easily have, why not give the data back to the authors and help them refine their works. If a book is looking people on chapter 7 as noted by a high abandon rate and slowing pages per minute of the average reader (or the target of 28 year old females who like ponies and tattoos), why not go back and revise?

Just like google analytics, the kindle API could give authors powerful tools to analyze how people are reading their books based on some easy segmentation. Since we are talking about digital ink and not physical releases, why not let the authors edit the section and push up a new edition.... let's move away from book releases to BAAS (books as a service)

3. Give teachers/educators a dashboard to watch their student progress:

This one the kids will hate... again, just use the Kindle API and a few basic stats and Teacher can track the progress of students through a book. Are there sections where the kids are getting hung up as their PPM drops significantly (either because it is too boring or too difficult).

Is Timmy clearly not doing his homework (either the books are going unfinished, or is there a pattern of very low PPM followed by bursts of very high PPM -- while he is just hitting 'page next' while watching TV)?

How is Timmy progressing, is his speed measured by kindle and comprehension (probably requires tests) increasing throughout the year?

How is the class performing against averages of students their age? Are they reading more quickly or less quickly.

4. not to mention the pure research of it all:

how do people really read, when, and how. How does reading evolve with age and along other segmentations. How is reading changing over time. What percentage of books purchased actually get read. What percentage of books that are started are finished, and where are the common abandon points. These are all fascinating research projects, all they need is the dataset that Amazon has.

Ultimately, this is not new thinking - but newly possible

As a highly dyslexic person who didn't learn to really read until about 6th grade (and faked it before that) I find this new transparency a very complex concept socially. As someone who loves books and believes lines about the sanctity of literature, I am not sure that living wikiesque books is a good idea...

but, 1. this is all going to happen whether we like it or not, of this I am relatively sure. 2. the 'data nerd' in me loves every second of it.

so, Amazon, do what is right and make a whole new industry and set of problems for us - release a kindle API and let me mash it up with facebook, build interfaces for teachers and authors, and generally completely overhaul the concept of what a book is and what reading one means.

The file two.PNG has been added to the drop swl.

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:20:46 GMT

To view this file on drop.io, please visit http://drop.io/swl/asset/two-png.

The file three.PNG has been added to the drop swl.

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:20:35 GMT

To view this file on drop.io, please visit http://drop.io/swl/asset/three-png.

The file one.PNG has been added to the drop swl.

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:20:28 GMT

To view this file on drop.io, please visit http://drop.io/swl/asset/one-png.

The file four.PNG has been added to the drop swl.

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:20:20 GMT

To view this file on drop.io, please visit http://drop.io/swl/asset/four-png.

The note 'The Lessin Location Roundup' has been added to the drop swl.

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:11:09 GMT

a true recap of Internet Week NYC, because GPS rarely lies...

June 1 - June 8 was a week long fest of all things internet in NYC, panels, parties, and events galore. As has become the fashion, the week kicked off a frothy 'Wave' of all forms of media coverage - blogs, vlogs, photo streams, twitter, tumblr, etc. While perhaps seemingly 'state of the art' I couldn't help but feel like these forms of covering and conveying an event seemed stale. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, isn't it time to skip the editorials and start recapping the event straight off the GPS feed (or, in the case of my data-set, the self-reported location 'checkin' data of 100 young technorati of NYC). So, without further adieu - I give you the first edition of the Lessin Location Roundup, an exclusively GPS driven nightlife monthly (with occasional twitter cross reference), and perhaps a glimpse into the world we will live in just a few years from now - XOXO

Internet week kicked off with a bang, starting with a flurry of activity at the New World Stage (Ignite NYC) - the hottest event of the night.. from there the party quickly migrated downtown to the Puck Building (Youtube Party) and Tom and Jerry's Bar (A hotspot among the GPSoratti). The night ended with a group migrating to Sing Sing for some ambitious Monday night Karaoke around 1AM.

Tuesday was a big day and a bigger night. Presenters and the unemployed (underemployed?) drove a bulk of checkins a bit before 4pm at the Fashion Institute of Technology (the NY Tech Meetup Showcase). After the event it appears that some continued on to the Microsoft Gallery while another group bounced down to Shake Shack - presumably to fuel up for the evening revelries. At an average time of about 8pm a group of techies descended upon Soho House in the meatpacking district... perhaps to mingle with the old-media folk?

While not on the official schedule, GPS tells us that something BIG went down at the Standard Hotel with an average time of about 10PM -- It appears as though one of the the most heavily 'checked-in' location of the week wasn't on the official event list. As the Standard Hotel team wound down, a large percentage of the group moved a few blocks away to Hogs & Heifers checking in on average just after midnight -- not a bad tuesday night.

Wednesday was relatively low key. A few people gathered at the Roger Smith Hotel (social media breakfast) a bit after 10:30 (people were on average 20 min late) -- A handful headed to Shake Shack at 3pm for a snack and people gathered a tad on the early side at the 92YTribecca for Pete Cashmore's talk. Things really picked up at the Hotel on Rivington (Yacht Rock) around 9:30 and there were later night pops at The Marshall Stack and Local 138.

Wednesday might have been a tad slower, but thursday was big business. The morning started early for a group that met at Roasting Planet at 10:00, but really the action was in the evening, starting with the Rooftop Garden at Rockefeller Center and a small gathering at the Roger Smith Hotel. Things Ramped up just before 9PM (on average) at Webster Hall (Digg event). after which some people headed to M:2 and others to the Gawker Media Roof Deck. -- but the real news is that just after midnight there was a big event at Sing Sing -- note to self: Lessin Roundup should expand into the Tech Karaoke business.

On Friday the foursquare team made it to their offices at 10:01 AM on average, well before the crack of noon. The day seems to have been relatively relaxed. A few people gathered at the Roger Smith Hotel in the afternoon, and far bigger early evening gathering was at the Empire Hotel (the Webutante Ball). It looks like the after party for Webutante kicked off at 10 Degrees around 11:15 ish.

The weekend was generally quite chill. Some people headed out of town via JFK and you could find groups hanging out in McCarren Park and Washington Square Park in the afternoons. On Saturday some people gathered around 9pm at Lunasa, and on Sunday the place to be was M1-5 at 10:30 ish.

Monday was back to work for many (Rosting Planet Greenwich average checkin moved earlier to about 9:40 AM) - but the foursquare team must of had a rough weekend it seems - they didn't make it to their office in Cooper Square until almost 1pm. -- of course, the real action got cranking in the early evening as nicely primed techies checked in to Cipriani - Wall Street (the Webbies)... at around 11:15 (on average) the party moved to the Hiro Ballroom, (for the Webby Afterparty) --- needless to say, the data shows plenty of people crashing the afterparty who didn't go to the awards.... That is all for now.... let the GPS feed show it was a hell of a fun week.

* Below are some fun graphs and the data file (names stripped out) if you want to play around.

* Also below you will find a short slide loop with a few callouts of most popular places, time of visit, etc. during thew week

Also, here are the checkin locations on a handy dandy map http://mapspread.com/publish/show/swlpersonal/basic-internet-week-2009

About the report: this report was generated from my friend checkins on foursquare (http://playfoursquare.com) - I built and used a little tool to pull the checkin data into a flat file from my email (http://csvemail.com) -- but they have a cool API on the way out that will make this easier. If you want to contribute to this report, friend me on foursquare. (sam l.) http://playfoursquare.com/user/854

The file checkins.PNG has been added to the drop swl.

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:03:23 GMT

To view this file on drop.io, please visit http://drop.io/swl/asset/checkins-png.

The file checkintime.PNG has been added to the drop swl.

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:03:19 GMT

To view this file on drop.io, please visit http://drop.io/swl/asset/checkintime-png.

The file Internet Week Dataset.xls has been added to the drop swl.

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:02:37 GMT

To view this file on drop.io, please visit http://drop.io/swl/asset/internet-week-dataset-xls.

The file Lessin Location Roundup Graphs.pdf has been added to the drop swl.

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:02:21 GMT

To view this file on drop.io, please visit http://drop.io/swl/asset/lessin-location-roundup-graphs-pdf.

The note 'twitter applets, being more blatant re: how to use them' has been added to the drop swl.

Mon, 25 May 2009 23:33:06 GMT

people recommended I share a theoretical case or two on how to use the twitter applets released below. So, I will share two use cases on how you could use 'find friend' and 'reciprocity' in tandem. I wanted to just throw them up and see what happens, but - here you go:

Case 1: render unsavory services / pyramid schemes (& things like tweepme) useless - Step 1 - sign up for a shady twitter follower scheme & collect followers (which really don't make sense anyway, but hear me out...) Step 2 - use 'reciprocity' to instantly remove en-mass they 'pyramid' aspect where via these services you end up following more people than follow you.

I have been playing with this method on the twitter account http://twittter.com/swltweep - 2K followers and only 1 tweet :) - P.S. anyone following me on that account also is using tweepme, how is that for a scarlet letter.

Case 2: run your own questionable targeted 'follower' scheme / juice those made by others - Step 1 - pick a topic people tweet about that you want to reach, use 'find friends' app to automatically follow a few hundred of them. Step 2 - use reciprocity to immediately un-follow everyone you just followed. They will get messages inviting them to follow you, but you will look like you invited them by hand.

Using this pattern, you basically can use twitter's invite process to amass groups of followers on topics you want to be able to push messaging out on.

The philosophical point to this *generally* (that I tried to avoid but have been advised to just come out and say) -- twitter is an awesome open messaging platform... you can build things on it that change the nature of the chatter/messages bouncing around, but ultimately the platform should find equilibrium - so long as the rules are clear. Especially given that there are no forced developer keys on the API, and *almost* no rate limiting on follow/unfollow - you can build some relatively crazy stuff in the form of decentralized and relatively uncontrollable AIR apps... catch me in person for more

The note 'releasing two quick twitter air applets, sans philosophizing:' has been added to the drop swl.

Mon, 25 May 2009 22:43:40 GMT

below are a pair of single serving twitter applets I had built and have been experimenting with on side twitter accounts. One is called 'reciprocity' and the other is called 'find friends' - they are stand alone air apps that you can run on your desktop. here is what they do:

'reciprocity' = put in your twitter username, password, and it unfollows anyone you are following that is not following you back.

'find friends' = put in your twitter username, password, and some search terms. it finds everyone who has tweeted about those topics (up to a few hundred people) and then follows them from your account.

You can scroll down to download them. Feel free to use them both as much as you want, distribute them as you wish, etc - no license at all (although a shout-out would be appreciated).

Please note that zero drop.io resources were used in making these... and I personally spent about 45 min specing them one night I couldn't sleep, and a few personal dollars having an AIR dev whip them up (great guy if you are looking for someone). I highlight this because while fun, useful, and slightly aggressive little projects - these applets have no actual long-term value. They fit far outside the purview of what we do/build at drop.io, and - even if i could somehow justify these applets under our mission (which I absolutely can't) - I would never waste our talented team building easily replicable and marginally interesting toys.

Two caveats - 1st, reciprocity works well up to the low thousands of followers, but it isn't robust when you get to extreme numbers. If you are 5K+ followers/friends 'reciprocity' might not work so well. 2nd, if you catch my drift and want to push the concept further give me a shout, there are a few obvious ways to make these work better (for instance, put them on a cron job and set rates for people to follow per hour, and people to remove per hour - then just let them run infinitely in the background on a spare laptop :)

I am going to leave my traditional philosophizing out of this post - I am, of course, tempted to write a long bit on information theory, how I came up with these, why I have learned playing with them, etc.... but my sense is that if you are into thinking about - and maybe manipulating - twitter, you will catch my drift on this - and no one else cares. If you are interested and don't get it, catch me on the street sometime. -- else, reciprocity and friend find away :)

UPDATE 7/6/09: apparently there was an air update, and the applets require some tweaking to work on the new version -- I will get around to making this happen, but in the meantime you can do the same thing (all be it without interface) via. a few little ruby scripts

The note 'happy birthday and love to JEV' has been added to the drop swl.

Tue, 12 May 2009 01:23:17 GMT

today is JEV's birthday... and while there are plenty of 'off gird' ways to wish her well, sitting in front of my screen in NYC while she is in SF I quickly ponder how the Internets (specifically Facebook) has totally changed the value-flow of birthday wishes. (stick with me - the early bit of this is old/obvious, the end is fun and new)...

Remembering birthdays once carried value, but no more: For years I kept detailed records of close friends birthdays and had annual calendar updates set up. People appreciated it when I remembered their birthday (or, at least the fact that I took the time to put them in outlook and then make a call). Facebook destroyed that in 2005 as a form of meaningful social expression. When it took effort/investment to remember someones birthday, wishing them well carried some meaning. There was investment and an exchange (I bet before writing was invented remembering someones birthday was even more meaningful - although they probably didn't remember themselves). Now, since there is zero investment in remembering the birthday, there is zero value in the expression of just remembering the date.

Facebook also devalued the communication of B-day wishes: when FB rolled out 'the wall' a whole new birthday dynamic evolved. The new and massively devalued 'currency' was in following a pre-formatted immediately at hand link to make a 'wall' post... (or, later, perhaps invest in selecting and then put physical capital against a virtual gift). You not only got the date for free, but you got their address and an open line for free as well -- The cost of sending birthday wishes declined dramatically, so the volume of wishes went way up. Basically, the currency was doubly devalued -- both remembering birthdays and sending the message itself lost value --

but that was hardly the half of it....

'Wall' actually made B-day wishes a negative cost: 'wall' + birthday reminders = an almost instant competition to who posted first. While you might make the argument that this was a way to re-introduced some value into the birthday system (all of a sudden, there was some appreciation of the expression of being first) I would argue it was actually propelled by a totally different social mechanism... what was really evolving is that if you were first, everyone else coming after you would see your name and photo posted up. You actually gained social currency. People no longer posted for the sake of the birthday, they posted for the sake of the social currency. It was essentially like having a high social-search ranking. Wishing someone a happy birthday was selfish.

Then they became a really negative cost with News-feed: then came Newsfed and the fun ramped up. With Newsfeed not only did you get to harvest social credit via people also visiting a profile page... but you got to magnify that credibility throughout your and the birthday girl's network. All of a sudden you could get social credit across a whole network of people, not just mutual friends, by being the first to wish a 'happy birthday'

Now, with feed comments, the birthday girl is actually the one that pays the 'well wisher': the new phenom is actually a total inversion of traditional birthday wishes. With an avalanche of 'happy birthday' posts, it is actually the birthday girl who gives to the 'well wisher' value by commenting on/responding to/ and thereby validating 'true' friends... it is a tax. The birthday wishing ritual has inverted, the mating dance has gone all topsy turvy. The unit of currency is no longer wishing a happy birthday to someone, but the thank-you comment in the opposite direction. You want to be the chosen birthday well wisher who gets the response - and the glory.

So, what is left? what can the new social expression of birthday care for those you appreciate mean... I might argue that it is taking up your own social space... posting in your limited social messaging footprint to sometimes unwilling listeners, posting on your twitter feed... or perhaps writing a blog post about the birthday -- it is inflicting pain on your network for the glory of another :)

or -- just as likely -- this is actually the greatest inversion of all.... leveraging your girlfriend's birthday into a post on your blog :) --

either way, thinking of you and love you JEV -- happy birthday

The note 'value of information vs. utility created by information' has been added to the drop swl.

Wed, 06 May 2009 14:19:16 GMT

(diffusion from high value, low utility - to low utility, high value)

A few weeks ago at our brooklyn Y+30 meetup a gentleman came up to me and said that he had been reading my blog, but took serious issue with my definition of the value of information...

I generally like to state that the value of information is based on improbability. Information that is perfectly probable has no value, information that is highly improbable is almost priceless.

This generally translates to saying that the information's value = f (speed * accuracy). Perfectly fast perfectly un-trustworthy information is worthless, perfectly trustworthy information that is un-timely is worthless -- value exists in degrees of speed and trust.

This gentleman posed a question that at the time I didn't really answer, but I now want to take a second to actually fully respond. He asked, (paraphrasing) "I admit that your definition covers some types of information, but there is this other type of valuable information which gains value the more people know about it. For instance, knowledge that "smoking is bad for you" - if one person knows it is a heck of a lot less valuable than if everyone knows."

I actually totally disagree, but the question brings up a set of very interesting points worth discussing. If you were the only person in the world that knew that smoking is bad for you - and you had an effective way to distribute that information (speed * expected accuracy), you could make a lot of money off of it. If everyone knew that smoking was bad for them, no one would make any profit, the information would be worthless.

In the smoking case, what does grow with distribution is total social utility. No question, if only one person in the world knew that smoking was bad, that would yield far less total utility than if everyone knew.

The key is to remember that utility and value are two separate (though highly related) elements.

At the surface, this mismatch might sound like a problem/or imply that we should think of ways to actively convert valuable information with low total utility into worthless information with very high total utility...

The good news is that when you bang on this phenomenon, you realize that that is actually precisely what a good functioning information economy does! In fact, the core principle which drives information is diffusion from very high concentration high value pools with very low total utility, to very low concentration low value footprints with very high total utility.

We rely on innovators, scientists, and sometimes even thinkers, to be incentivised to not only discover new bits of information, but then to be incentivised to share their findings and harvest the profits.

This doesn't always function properly. In fact, in a very interesting Yale open course catalog lecture Robert Shiller (Econ 252) provides an amazing example of how this breaks down. Apparently, reading through fables and historical accounts, it appears as though individuals discovered the concept of probability countless times throughout human history, but each time the knowledge wouldn't spread and died quickly up until the Renaissance.

Why? Shiller argues that because understanding probability concepts before the rest of the world caught on was so incredibly valuable that it was guarded very closely. Individuals would become very powerful based on their discovery in their lifetimes, but then would take the secret to the grave. This is precisely the type of information-scape that we do not want to occur...

So, we should firmly keep in mind with any IP regulation/patent law/etc. that the whole idea should be to maximize the creation of valuable information, and let that value propel an economic harvest from high to low, to propel utility of the information from low to high. When and where that dynamic breaks down there will be trouble.

The note 'why this year, of all years, I AM giving to harvard - it is all about institutional leverage' has been added to the drop swl.

Sun, 03 May 2009 16:17:28 GMT

Sitting in harvard square, I am feeling a bit in the mood for a harvard post.... for several years I have served as a representative of my class to the Harvard College Fund. Every year, as requested by the college fund, I have written a very small but personally not inconsequential check (actually, credit card charge) and dutifully gone out and asked my classmates to financially give back to their university.

I have always been more than happy to play this role. I believe in it. While a few hundred dollars from a recent graduate truly is inconsequential to a school with tens of billions of endowment dollars,I feel that I owe a great deal to the university. Further, I am very happy to be able to direct my dollars to specific causes at the university which are relatively less well funded (though I think it is very important to seriously underline the word relatively).

In almost all cases, my classmates and friends also contribute on the same thesis. We all owe a lot back to an institution that directly and indirectly intellectually gave to us on a level which far outstrips the tuition we paid.

When people decide not to give back to the university, is is almost always based on the argument that they give to more 'needy' causes and charities. After all, isn't it hard to justify giving more money to analready wealthy institution when people are literally starving, dieing of curable diseases, and facing incredible political oppression allover the world?

This year puts these issues in very stark contrast

On one hand, in the wake of one of the worst financial years in American history many many very important and needy charities are facing serious shortfalls and will have trouble supporting exceedingly immediate, humane, and important causes. This is only compounded by the fact that some truly distasteful characters (like Madoff) literally robbed these causes blind. Many worthy institutions face extinction,and those whom they support are in very dire need.

At the same time, on a relative basis, Harvard also faces serious financial shortfalls. Especially after exceedingly bold recent initiatives around financial aid, the university is hardly the picture of financial health.

What is an individual with a limited charity wallet to do?

I have thought long and hard about this. Is it downright irresponsible to give Harvard money this year of all years? Do the obligations I feel change in an extreme environment? Is Harvard on the wrong side ofa diminishing marginal donation curve?

It is honestly a tough call. There is not a cut and dry answer which I find fully satisfying, but after a lot of consideration I am going to give the same relatively small but personally meaningful check I did last year. I feel very good about this decision, and I will urge my classmates to do the same.

It isn't that I have any true delusions that my few hundred dollars is actually meaningful to the bottom line shortfall - it isn't. While my emotional sense of pure obligation plays a role in this decision, that isn't the primary factor either.

What it comes down to is leverage on leverage (in a positive and transparent form - not the sub-prime form).

I think that Harvard, and many other similar institutions, have an incredibly important role to play in our society in furthering the farthest reaching bounds of knowledge and science, as well as training some of the most driven and intelligent social actors of the future. Critically, they have a role doing this in an environment beyond the biased reaches of governments and economic actors.

We need very strong entities Harvard that have the institutional fortitude to play that non-partisan role, and to do that - they need a strong base behind them.

While Harvard's institutional strength is seeded first and foremost in the university's immense wealth, it also is based on the belief that living alums will guarantee the current and future credit of the institution as an independent actor.

It is based on the idea that this generation of graduates will not let an institution that has been in existence since 1636 disappear on our watch, which means access to cheaper capital, and a sense of support that allows them to maintain independent in their actions without checking over their shoulders.

In donating to Harvard, I am helping the university raise the funding it needs to function independent of interference at highly preferential interest rates. My few hundred dollars, aggregated with donations from thousands of other alums, in a very small way signals an institutional commitment. That commitment translates to less expensive capital on the open market for the university, and the university's ability to continue to act independently and in line with its true nature. I am donating to a cause in which I believe, and doing it in highly beneficially leveraged way.

It is a mistake to sell out the future for the present and to respond to immediate disaster by sacrificing the grander picture. -- and signaling to the broader world that harvard has deep deep leverage hasan enormous multiplier effect.

Regardless of alum support, harvard will have to tighten the belt for the next few years. That is probably a good thing to throw in the mix now and again. Perhaps some scaling back on the carnival cookies is in order - but I think that it is key that the university stays a very strong independent actor, with access to very cheap capital, firmly supported by an extra layer of security to rest upon in the form of their alums.

The last thing we want is for our universities to need a bailout and wind up with government or or private sector actors sitting on their boards, or even need to consider that a long term possibility. So,sometimes scale matters, and sometimes leverage on leverage on leverage- really does provide leverage.

The note 'Means, Ends, Cathedrals, and Tech: (10 year optimism, 100 year pessimism)' has been added to the drop swl.

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 23:31:11 GMT

yesterday I watched a wonderful series of Yale lectures on the Old Testament by Christine Hayes on academic earth (http://academicearth.org), Last night I plowed through another great section of The Black Swan criticizing the application of the Gaussian function, I have been thinking a lot about Kant, and BCM and I had a good debate this afternoon - so, consider this a Sunday of sweeping references and generalizations.

The summary goes something like this - I am increasingly concerned that scaling technology, access, power, and greater inter-connection is taking further and further away from a lot of the traditional structures that make western civilization generally work. If the Gaussian function (the bell curve) doesn't actually work in social model when accelerated - if technology, access, and power, are bringing us closer and closer to facing down a chaotic world, then we are going to have to rapidly adapt society to survive.

One can generalize the vast majority of moral reasoning/social theory as either ends based or means based. teleology/deontology. I do things either because I forecast forward what I must do now to cause a positive future outcome which I desire, or because I feel duty bound to do something regardless of outcome.

I personally have always found teleological arguments (which might very loosely be thought to be correlated with utilitarianism) to be far more appealing, and I would make the argument that a lot of our society deploys teleological constructs to keep society functioning. You should eat your brussels sprouts, go to work, don't litter, pay your taxes, even if you don't want to because the ultimately resulting personal outcome is positive.

The problem is that teleology is breaking down:

1. the nature of the problems we face as individual human actors in the context of an ever wider society are growing beyond the computable bounds of pure teleological reasoning (this isn't new, but it is getting truly extreme). The projects where my intervention is theoretically needed in general have impact beyond my lifetime, and there is less and less I can do with a direct correlation between action and result (where computers and other systems take over the simple model-able processes).

2. In our exponential world, if we throw out Gaussian curves and are forced to confront a structure dominated by out of band randomness, then we cannot take meaningful action towards teleological ends. So, people can't even be sure they are working meaningfully towards ends which they even desire.

this might mean that the only hope of maintaining long term growth and a balanced society must be some sort of worldwide deontological revolution and/or some sort of universal world wide cathedral project (think, star trek)... that or a very powerful worldwide regime in which we manufacture localized personal teleological outcomes for people.

None of this thinking is new, I just feel it is newly practically relevant/meaningful. Without a structure where humans can apply valuable labor for defined outcomes, things become a bit crazy...

1. I know what I want/what makes me happy
2. I can directly impact the outcome
3. I can directly invest against my goals
4. There is highly limited variability/risk in the outcome (or I can easily hedge the risk)
5. I get to enjoy the fruit of my effort.

If the above fails to be satisfied, things either get very strange, or someone/something steps into the power vacuum to make the equation work locally.

so, while I am personally very very positive on the impact of technology on a ten year horizon, I think that the 100 year implications of a faster more interconnected global society get to be rather complicated... so, in closing - what is really killing the equation is:

1. lack of clear cause and effect / the obscuring of linkage in a 'black swan' driven world
2. problems are bigger than our lifetimes
3. technology is disconnecting us from direct results/influence

The note 'taking (i)hostages' has been added to the drop swl.

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 18:04:51 GMT

I remember vividly when the internet was first starting to truly takeoff a mad scramble to buy up the domain names of major brands and then hold the URLs hostage. It was really quite a simple and old idea, major companies were slow to realize that owning their URL was critical, and smart enterprising individuals made them pay for their mistake. I believe, though I do not remember the details, that ultimately some level of regulation meant that no one got an enormous payout for having picked up mcdonalds.com, but certainly that was the game many people tried to run.

A second iteration of the same game is playing out in the social scape with the identities of people and brands as we speak. This time, it is going to be far harder to regulate away as a problem, and early sophisticated movers will likely get a whole lot more ransom money...

We already watched this happen with twitter name squatting, but that isn't even the tip of the iceberg....

A mildly more interesting example of this next generation of hostage taking is quantcast.com -- For advertising driven businesses, quantcast essentially establishes itself as a trusted source of statistics as the baseline for an advertising market, and then basically forces a brand to hand over ongoing access to their user stats. I suspect, although I cannot prove, that their game is to actually do everything they possibly can to understate the stats and demographic value of 'un-quantified' sites (ones who have not yet paid their ransom) so as to force sites looking for advertising to open up the kimono -- if they aren't running their game that way, they should be.

Perhaps the best corporate example in play now is getsatsifaction which holds your brand hostage by encouraging users to post and the SEOing highlighted customer service problems - forcing brands to engage, and then charging you for premium management over your brand identity.

A more avant guard example is a website called famegame.com - the niche NYC based social scene website basically works by crawling photos and guest lists from new york parties and building out social profiles for each person. They then SEO each persons name. Rather than a traditional opt-in network famegame pre-populates a profile for you...they hold a set of SEOed content about you hostage and you need to register with them to retake control. They hold your NYC social scene presence hostage.

An apparently fictitious, but none the less interesting example is the recent yelp scandal, where they allegedly swapped advertising deals with brands for the right to remove bad user reviews from their profiles. My sources say this incident is bunk, but if they could getaway with it they should be doing exactly that (or someone else certainly will).

My question is, whom else can you take hostage in this very new very old game? The best I can come up with so far is celebrities and politicians (usually the best people to hold for 'ransom' in any situation) --

I don't know exactly how to factor it, but someone should create a celebrity tracking service on a per-celebrity basis. Choose which editorial content to post on each celebrity (and look to go slightly to exceedingly negative)... then, ransom the profile/identity back to the actual celeb.

Even more powerfully, how about a political profile hostage service? Take politicians, and even local political campaigns. Categorize all of the players, and represent them in a useful but unflattering way...then sell them back their identities.

To be clear, when we say 'taking hostage' what is really implied is holding SEO ranking and/or social graph relevance on the person's identity. This is a war of attrition because the big search and social players have it generally in their interest to work in the opposite direction, but the key... but there is a wide swath of gray area in which to play.

The note 'why the kindle doesn't have a 'clock'' has been added to the drop swl.

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:01:34 GMT

I have been absolutely loving my kindle 2 - it is, in my mind, the best device I have purchased in a long long time – and I purchase a lot of devices…

At a high level, the reason I love it so much is that the form factor and design has completely revolutionized my ability to feasibly have a book and the newspaper on me at all times… Because it is literally possible to slip a good book and today’s paper in my back pocket – and immediately get back to my place - I have been able to squeeze more and more reading into dead air that used to be consumed by podcasts/music on my iphone… books are way better.

While a lot of people have been fawning over the device for the contrast ratio, the form factor, etc..., what is frequently missed are all the very small and important design decisions that make what would otherwise be a good device great.

the little stuff matters -

This occurred to me a few days ago when I noticed that the kindle doesn’t have a clock in the footer/header of the page when you are reading. Every digital device on the face of the earth seems to have a little digital clock on it somewhere, and no question the kindle has access to several timing mechanisms both onboard and over the air - so it was clearly a deliberate design decision to keep the clock behind the scenes… and I bet one which was actually discussed/debated for a reasonable amount of time.

Amazon 100% made the right call in keeping a clock away from the page. Part of the beauty of books is being able to loose yourself… and having a little ticking clock staring back at you would have made that much harder.

So, the kindle is just that much better for not having a digital clock, as is Amazon for knowing when less is more - which only leads me to think about other places where removing elements is net positive

The note 'drop.io at the facebook developer garage austin/SXSW 2009' has been added to the drop swl.

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 03:43:57 GMT

last week i had the privilege of presenting a bit of drop.io thought at the facebook developer garage austin during SXSW. a few people asked for my slides, so please find them below - along with a dark video if you want a little context/ voiceover video of presentation

drop.io at Facebook Dev Austin Garage, SXSW

View more presentations from Sam Lessin.

The note 'Daniel Lessin, Rainbow's End, Foursquare, and the rise of ARGs' has been added to the drop swl.

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 05:10:15 GMT

My brother is possibly the greatest leading indicator of social trends of anyone I know. He has an incredible knack for picking up and getting very involved in cultural trends which ultimately become exceedingly popular in the mainstream years later. He is the ultimate early adopter. So, when Danny started getting very very involved in reenactments and roll playing games a few years ago (LARPing, eLARPing, etc) I stated to pay attention, even if I didn't personally get the appeal.

I am not sure we are 100% there yet, but listening to Dennis and Naveen discuss Foursquare last Monday at the New York Tech Meetup, and then starting to play the game myself - I think that, yet again, Danny called the trend early... Sure, the local 'game' itself of 'foursquare' is interesting itself -- but what is far more interesting is that it seems that foursquare is meant to be extended in many different directions.

It feels like foursquare is the platform for mainstream eLARPing, where individuals, organizations, and maybe even companies, can easily create their own games to overlay on top of reality.

Of course, there are plenty of other people who have called this trend before Danny. For instance, a future full of ARGs is a major theme of Rainbow's End; however, I give my brother credit yet again for adopting a few years before the tech is real, and the world is ready to play.

Of course, I also give Dennis and Naveen incredible credit - not for foursquare as the game that currently exists, but for creating what appears to be the beginnings of a platform/ecosystem for the mass adoption of an old, but possibly soon to be mass form of virtual/physical gaming...

The note 'quickly on NYSE, a bit more following up to comments on the def. of information' has been added to the drop swl.

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:52:22 GMT

once again... an overstimulating week, with not enough time to process. I want to at least quickly note one minor points and then clarify one more major question as brought up by Aaron Sittig.

Minor Point 1: follow-up from massively interesting talk at NYSE on Wednesday night.

I had the privilege of attending a fascinating small dinner talk on Wednesday at the New York Stock Exchange. the point of discussion was largely about the financial mess we are currently in, how we got here, and where to go.

Some of the more interesting points were about the implications of accounting rules and the concept of 'off balance sheet' liabilities/assets, and the detachment of financial transactions (mortgages specifically) from their sources, including the difference between defaulting on your neighborhood friend and banker, and defaulting on a product that has been packaged and repackaged to oblivion.

None of this is new, but what was fascinating to me was the number of times the people at the center of the crisis used terms like language, dialogue, communication, etc. to discuss the situation. The markets are facing linguistic transaction problems

This makes perfect sense, but it is heartening to hear how smart and on-point these leaders are. As Hayek would say, markets are just tools for information... and the breakdown of the markets (sadly a leading indicator of wider problems) is a breakdown of communication and information. The ability to widely and efficiently transact, repackage, and move content is destroying knowledge.

Major Point: follow-up to post on how to think about the value of information

I finally got around to posting on the way I look at information, specifically - The value of information/news = the improbability of information = F (speed * trust).

Aarong Sittig, whom I very much respect, responded by saying: "There's an additional kink that could be folded into this. I like to explain that... Information = Personal Meaning(Data)

Since you can throw bits of data at me all day, but if they're bits I don't care about, it's wrong to consider them information. Information only makes sense then relative to a personal subjective context.

So Facebook takes a huge pile of data, runs it through a process to filter by personal meaning, using our social graph among other things as our best guess, and finds the real information buried in the data.

So perfectly fast, perfectly trustworthy data is worthless if it's not personally significant to me. Take, for instance, the excellent local news coverage of the LA Times. To me it's not information though I'm sure it's timely and I have plenty of reasons to trust the LA Times.

The point of all this is to stress that there are factors beyond trust and speed that need to be maximized when thinking about improving the value of news flows."

While I get his drift and agree fully agree that facebook provides a ton of value in the form of filtering information, I actually disagree with the more structural point. Unlike beauty, 'information' is not in the eye of the beholder, it is objective.

I don't care who won the Kentucky derby one bit, but that doesn't mean it isn't information as a function of improbability, speed and trustworthiness. Quite frankly, to a comment by Joe Jackson, I don't care where Yahoo's stock closed yesterday, but it's closing price is a point of information.

The interesting point that Aaron is speaking to is not about the definition of 'information' out is about the changing nature of the informationscape. For almost all of human history the problem was not enough information, we could process and digest far more information and value that we were presented with on a daily basis.

As the cost of publishing has fallen to zero, the problem is inverted. There is for the first time way too much information being publicly thrown at us and the bottleneck is consumption. I simply can't process anything when everyone is shouting in the public forum....

So, facebook's role has always been, and is continuing to push forward as, a bit of selective hearing in the public forum. I might choose to set filters to listen only to the most valuable information, or tune my listening to only receive content I find entertaining... That is quite a cool function and highly valuable*. In many ways this isthe role that most newspaper used to play - straddling information and entertainment, but this role sits on top of information and content**, it doesn't change the fundamental definition of information.

* I also love that it is biologically derived - human beings have a highly developed selective hearing funciton, I think there was a great New Yorker article on it recently

**The FB filers are not only about 'information' but also about 'content' - the difference is that the value of information by definition declines as it is shared (value is based on scarcity) where content does not decline, and sometimes even gains value when it is shared (the fact that I have seen Watchmen makes the content no less valuable to you, and probably makes it more valuable).... Since this post is really content not information, I am going to share it widely - on FB.

The note 'a few quick 'real-time' comments back about the facebook changes as a brand' has been added to the drop swl.

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:45:44 GMT

drop.io has almost 3K facebook about 3.5K twitter fans... until yesterday I would have told you that twitter was a was a far more important channel for us, but with the seismic changes to fb pages, that is about to change, possibly... what follows is my on the fly analysis of the facebook changes, as a startup founder trying to re-evaluate what it means for how we speak to our community.

High level my on the fly read, is that this is actually the biggest set of changes facebook has deployed in a while, and they are both very useful/good and very very smart from a business/power play dynamic. here is why, or - more specifically - where I am re: changing the way drop.io posts and my analysis of why the changes are as they are.

1. I can't figure out how to update fb page 'status' via FB Connect or FB Applications, not sure you can... if I can't, that is a very interesting product move/design decision as it means that facebook has defacto made itself my starting point from which to federate out to other services for brands

2. Point needing clarification - how to manage my posts for a company without an understanding of how often the stories will show up at to whom. This could just be a messaging thing - but my understanding is that the front page will be weighted so that ALL stories will flow in 'real-time' from all friends... but what about pages? transparency in how information will be consumed defines how I want to push it out -- this is something twitter does very well

3. Point of possible slight annoyance I am slightly annoyed that stories published via the FB API won't show up on the homepage, and not sure if that includes publishing status via the API. I get why, again, it makes interactions on the core FB property much much much more valuable, but it feels like a compromise with 'openness'

Overall - I like all these moves a lot - FB continues to push the envelope more than any other major platform, and what they are pushing towards is awesome

The note 'real 'information' services will all be subscription based in 5 years' has been added to the drop swl.

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:02:50 GMT

PN: I have been trying to get a post out on why I am bullish on the information business for months. It isn't going to happen, so I am going to codify what I have and move on... the thesis is intact, I just wish I could clean it up a bit.

Apparently, the new argument in the online world isn't whether or not the 'press' will shortly be a thing of the past, but instead a feeding frenzy over who gets credit for having declared the death first. My I just say, whoa nelly -- Jeff Jarvis, et al - you might want to take another look at those tea leaves. A lot of thoughtful people disagree, and are starting to be more vocal about alternative ways the 'information' business will ultimately play out.

The internet was supposed to provide almost unlimited free access to 'information' -- but I would posit that it does not seem to be ending up that way. Instead, what we are seeing is that 'entertainment' is getting extremely inexpensive and almost universally accessible - actual information is getting more expensive and harder to find. This phenomenon, which sounds a heck of a lot like Colbert's concept of 'truthieness' is possibly the largest mid-term threat to the functioning of our liberal democracy.

before you cry foul, hear me out:  does anyone really know if Sara Palin really did/didn't say that South Africa was/wasn't a country? What really did go on with Yahoo? Is Wikipedia's entry on the white rhino actually correct? "We", as a general public, have no idea.... fast and cheap communication is actually clogging the line with non-information, not clearing the channel. So, while citizens can clearly turn out an enormous volume of content very quickly, I don't see them taking over the professional journalist function any time soon.  Again, I am not the only one thinking along these lines, and I have to credit Clive Thompson for making a similar point in Wired.

But - Why? Information theory 101:

Starting from zero and then building up -- the value of real news & information is fundamentally based on improbability and improbability alone. This is the same concept that underpins the concept of binary and compression technologies in computer science. If you already know something there is zero value to me informing you of the same fact. When you cycle this up, the critical implication is that THE VALUE OF INFORMATION DOES NOT SCALE, but rather that the value of information is inversely related to how public it is. At the same time, however, the value of entertainment content scales quite nicely.

to put it in a real world context. If you and you alone know with 100% certainty the closing stock price of WMT tomorrow the information is almost infinitely valuable. If everyone knows then it is worthless... meanwhile, if you consumed and enjoyed the latest batman movie, that does not in any way make the movie less enjoyable for me (in fact, the community around the content might make it more valuable).

The Value of Information / News = the Improbability of Information = F (Speed * Trust)

Perfectly fast information that is completely untrustworthy is worthless. Perfectly trustworthy information that is completely untimely is worthless. The value of information is a function of speed and trust -- in a multiplicative not additive sense.

1. The first way to make money/create value from this fact is 'SPEED' - Speed is just a shorthand for improbability because the improbability of a situation goes way way down after someone has reported it. So, even on niche or relatively unimportant topics there is value in being the fastest transmitter (there is little value in being second on speed). This used to be a function of 'knowing' something first and having the fastest distribution mechanism (pony express / telegraph, etc), but outside of companies like Reuters enabling algorithmic trading, it is now just about 'knowing first' and typing fast.

2. The second way to make money/create value from the improbability of information is 'TRUST'. If you are the first one reporting a new piece of information, the recipient of the information has to handicap the value of your information based on the probability that it is true. So, if you are betting on a coin toss and a source reports that the answer is 'heads', you have to handicap your bet based on how trustworthy the source is... being a trusted source of information creates value - fact checking creates value.

So, what is actually changing for the 'news' business....

Historically news organizations faced a segmented and regional information space in which to operate. They didn't need to be first to a story and they didn't need to be 100% trustworthy... they just had to have a decently fast way to transmit decently trusted information. The only thing that has changed with the internet is that the cost of 'distributing' information is approaching zero. News organizations, which historically spent an incredible amount of money and built value based on distribution channels are out of luck. The zeroing of distribution costs have two critical implications:

1. Speed, which used to be a function of CAPEX, can no longer be captured as a fundamental driver of value. There is no RMS/ROS (relative market size, return on sales) as a pure function of distribution.

2. There are no longer natural barriers to how information flows that can be easily exploited for profit. Think of this one like the bubble in illegal music sharing. Historically, clunky physical mediums for music (records, tapes) meant that even though you could steal music, it wasn't worth it - it was cheaper and easier to just buy it and leverage the physical distribution channels of the record labels... but when the medium changed all of a sudden copying and sharing music was 'profitable' from the consumer payoff sense. This is what has happened for the information business. It is far cheaper to copy and re-copy information than to just buy it from the source, and in this way the medium defines the nature of the transaction.

Newspapers need to essentially write off their huge investment in and value derived from distribution and the reaction of most papers - put 'entertainment' through the same pipe, get out of the 'information' game entirely

Most newspapers have reacted by giving up on the information business and concentrating on pure entertainment content. After all, if information diffuses outside of your control almost instantly, it is very hard to derive value from an information business... entertainment is a totally different story, because the exclusivity of the content isn't as central.

Just because the current players largely are exiting the 'information' business doesn't mean it will go away...

Actually, it means that the remaining players stand to make a lot of money. As more and more players exit a smaller and smaller number of players will end up owning and controlling the information business - which means that they should be able to extract higher rents.

Real information will be subscription based, and it will be a function of a professional group of trusted journalists - not 'the crowd'

Ultimately, the news/information will go back to a subscription business. I get value from having real information, and I will pay directly for that value based. The faster and more trustworthy your information, the more I will pay for it. Most importantly, advertising is in our new age a fundamentally incongruous form of monetization for news... because advertising relies on wide distribution to generate incremental value, and information requires limited distribution.*(even in the context of super targeted information - see nanotargeting - the mere interruption of advertising messages degrades information)

As for 'the crowd' - well, first off, by definition the 'the crowd' can't produce information... because if the crowd is providing it/it is common knowledge, it isn't valuable.

So, while I was impressed and very much appreciate how cool it was to get a real stream of content about the flight landing in the Hudson, that content stream was NOT information, it was content. The fact that more and more people knew about and saw pictures of the event real time didn't actually provide any value - and the fact that others saw the pictures didn't make them any less valuable to me.

Even if you are just talking about the first tweet 'US air plane lands in hudson' -- without any trust associated with the individual reporting the fact, it is valueless...

It is un-questionable that the news business is changing - but it isn't going away in the slightest. In fact, I see a very bright future for those that provide speedy and trusted information in a world where truth is ever more scarce.

Post script(s) -

i am realizing that this train of thoughts is far more than a blogpost - and being highly explored by many people at this point -- that said, i am attaching a few post-scripts of other concepts and ideas i would like to include in the master message, but i just don't have time to write

how I was going to begin this post months ago:  I have had at least four conversations in the last month which have wound towards a discussion of the unparalleled similarities between recent history and Atlas Shrugged. The general consensus is that the last month could easily have been mistaken for a chapter out of the book. The movements on the market, the government response, the scraped auto industry... it all feels very much like a fictional narrative I have already read.

That said, the narrative similarities are far less disturbing (or interesting) then some of the deeper and more philosophical parallels. Specifically, I am appalled by some of the similarities between Rand's portrayal of the fourth estate and what it feels like modern 'journalism' (or I should at least say 'reporting') is fast becoming. I do think that there are still publications in the world that are intellectually honest (and therefor valuable), but it feels like an ever greater percentage of the information being communicated publicly in the world is actively unconcerned with the truth. Rather, news as entertainment has become so dominant that the 'reality' of information is truly becoming an afterthought. The title 'news' has been degraded to be little more than a presentation format. I know this sounds highly alarmist and unoriginality cynical (the worst type of cynicism). It probably is to some degree, but hear me out...

What about deep analysis, digestability, marketability of information: there are a few other elements of information's value which fold under Speed and Trust which are worth briefly discussing.

First, the question - isn't there value in analysis? The answer is, absolutely, but only so long as it feeds speed. Analysis of information can either be directly characterized as being the first

Second, digestabilty - isn't there value in the digestability/format of information? Again, yes, but only so far as it feeds speed. The format of the WSJ or NYT is valuable because the layout allows others to consume the information with maximal efficiency - the paper format is a fat pipe and one can learn to read it efficiently looking to specific areas which have specific value.

What about 'marketability' of information.... isn't the value of information have to do with the subject of the information? Isn't information about clinical trials for a new blockbuster drug more intrinsically valuable than whether a coin will come up heads or tails? -- I would argue possibly not. Obviously, you need to have a market where people are willing to bet against/are betting based on your information-- but ultimately all information is the same, all that matters is how many parties you can aggregate that are betting against you (what the initial probability is of your outcome).

The note 'reaction to the facebook 'terms of use' question' has been added to the drop swl.

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:13:32 GMT

...a case for separating 'I/O' and 'network'

Over the last few days a mini saga has played out over the question of a seemingly small change to facebook's terms of use. Before going any further, I just have to say that I have the utmost respect for the fb folk and do genuinely trust them with information. I think that the magnitude of the reaction people had to a slight and seemingly necessary change in the terms of use given their current and future business was far far over the top and unwarranted.

that said - the issue of facebook's terms of use strikes at a much deeper and more important issue around information ownership given different types of services and application architectures. These issues are going to only get more intense over time.

Facebook's service is designed to syndicate content. It needs to own your data to push it out to the parties that the service is designed to serve.... this is because it is both a content host, and a network. it actively takes your information and p ushes that data out to your friends. As Mark explained in a blog post --

"When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work."

That is one way to build applications, but it isn't the only way...

drop.io's approach to data ownership is very different, and it allows us to give you full ownership and control of your information and how others interact with it. we simply allow you to put information in a drop, and then when you 'share' it based on the permission set you establish for content within a drop, you define specifically how the content can and does move. check out our terms of use and you will see how this plays out - we don't duplicate your content into other people's 'inboxes'/spheres of control.

because we only handle the input, access, and ouput of content and have no associated 'index' or 'network' we simply don't face the same issues that facebook must wrestle with about data ownership -- the ownership parameters are totally clear in our case, we don't own any of the content being placed in our service, end of story.

So, what does it all mean....

When you want to 'share' something on drop.io you are not making and distributing copies, instead you are simply passing on links which refer back to your drop. So, if you want to share content you own and have placed on drop.io, you can simply push out a link to your facebook network via facebook connect, or via our twitter integration, or via email, rss, and a bunch of our other 'output' options.... none of these 'networks'/distribution channels end up 'owning' or needing to duplicate anything more than URL pointers.

we hope that this becomes the option of choice in the future, where data I/O is divorced from distribution networks instead of being conflagrated.... in an always connected world, there is no reason for I/O and 'network/distribution' to be encapsulated in the same entity, as it clearly only causes problems...

the model of content hosting and distribution of the future allows you to keep your information somewhere you can flexibly exert total control, and push out links/pointers across the social and searchable web. that way, when you are done you can efficiently close shop, and you don't have to worry about others needing to 'own' your content to be effective.

i see this as a big part of the future of privacy and dealing with the control of massive amounts of asymmetrical data in a massively accessible environment

The note 'typealyzer analysis of this blog' has been added to the drop swl.

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:40:20 GMT

I came across a site called typealyzer.com on the blog 'i'm not actually a geek' which parses the 'writing style' of blogs and spits back Myer-Briggs personality types... seems to have done a good job with mine... it said:

INTP - The Thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

The note 'value = doing things + signaling the state of things being done, nothing else' has been added to the drop swl.

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 03:56:02 GMT

I am really enjoying living and creating somewhere between product development and macro economics. Splitting my days between helping to direct a highly talented development team at drop.io and working on some of the macro business development issues and problems the company faces has allowed me to cross pollinate, and hopefully made me net-net more effective.

From the development mindset I have been thinking more and more about all the component parts of drop.io. Each piece of our platform either has a specific active function (chopping down trees) or signals the state of a function (tells other functions that a tree has been chopped down). That is it, all things we build fit into one functional bucket or the other (and never both).

If you chop down a tree and no one signals it - then the action is worthless. If you signal something that didn't happen - you are certainly not creating value and quite possibly destroying it. You need both action and signal to create value, and total value of action is based on the effectiveness in action and signaling.

This conception of value holds true in the real world. Everything, ever industry, every person, must either be creating things or signal the creation of things to be valuable. I am relatively certain that this holds/makes sense, but still open to finding some case I am missing.

The note 'contact dumping from gmail to twitter/FB' has been added to the drop swl.

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 20:48:24 GMT

I try to keep is a single CSV (text) file with details of everyone I know/work with/have ever emailed with, etc. and go to great lengths to keep this consolidated list up to date and centralized across various social networks, email clients, IM, and other contexts...

Every once in a while I like to try to re-sync all of my contacts across spheres, by uploading them into gmail, and then syncing various networks (twitter, facebook, etc) against my centralized gmail list. Every time I do this hilarious and interesting things happen.

Last week, i synced twitter - of the few odd thousand contacts I threw at it (I don't at all discriminate) several hundred had twitter accounts set up. 'Following' them was a funny and interesting experience. An untold number of people (including my father) that are clear second/third wave twitter users had one or two posts up that just said "trying twitter", "twitttering", "I don't get it"...

More interesting still was to see the huge number of 'dead' twitter accounts associated with tech folk who are heavy twitter users. When you search for them by email address you get all of their old stubs, demos, experiments that they played with for different projects or before fully adopting the tool. So, my contact dump twitter story is first an amazingly high number of people have tried it/are trying it from the mainstream -- and a lot who are not yet convinced

Dumping all my contacts into facebook was an even more interesting experience largely because the scale is staggering. Upon sync facebook found 600 contacts in my email that were on facebook but with whom I was not friends (on top of another 800 with whom I was already friends)... Upon pushing friend requests to the group I got almost 100 confirmations within an hour... and they are continuing to stream in.

The vibrancy and reach of the property is staggering. I am now friends with the woman who organizes helicopter ski trips in northern Canada for CMH, tons of developers I know in the Philippians, people from all over the globe and of all ages.

It was also amusing to get tens of 'do I know you' emails from people that were in my gmail 'contact' list but I don't really know (in most cases, people that had been cced on chains I was responding to). Getting emails back asking about relationships highlights the fundamental difference regarding how most people feel about their facebook profiles... the reality/accuracy of FB's network may be diluted from what it once was, but it is still much more 'real' than anything else out there.

The note 'The privacy at a tipping point - a month in quick recap' has been added to the drop swl.

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:38:11 GMT

I literally can't keep up. When we started drop.io in 2007 I was forecasting that 2009/2010 would be the years that privacy would become both functionally critical and culturally relevant... but the speed at which privacy is exploding as an issue across the internet along several different lines of reasoning in Jan 2009 is staggering.

I mostly blog to help structure my own thoughts at this point (almost no one outside of my family reads this), and I feel completely behind the ball in integrating recent developments. Since I am not going to have a chance to write full posts on everything of interest going on, this will be a very brief overview of several of the critical trends that I am currently watching/thinking about. It is giong to be a facinating facinating ride, and I am only sorry I don't have time to truely structure/write on what is unfolding in full and refined format.

1. the Michael Arrington 'incident' highlights the central value of privacy and anonymity

As a very small number of obsessive tech people know, Michael Arrington, the face of techcrunch, recently announced in a long rant that he would be taking a 'break' from blogging after a specific incident where he was spat on by a disgruntled startup founder, but really as the result of an ever increasing volume of hate mail/comments, and the stress of a death threat. No one should be spat at, and it is sad that he feels he cannot continue to pursue his business, but some of the social drivers of his decision (and his explanation) are fascinating. Among the relevant take away points from the incident:

a. It highlights the personal value of privacy - someone will always disagree with you and your opinions, whatever they may be. When you are publicly speaking to an audience of millions - or billions - with the weight of your own name, people will disagree - and some will disagree violently. We have lived in a time of incredible prosperity and consensus around the globe (especially of the wired and engaged population) - but as the wired population expands and issues and power becomes more contentious people will move back to privacy

b. It highlights the social value of anonymity - truth/freedom of speech fundamentally relies on anonymity to survive for the above reason. It isn't just about whistle blowers - or, rather - the concept of whistle blowing goes far beyond exposing malicious corporate practices. People need the ability to seek, consider, and discuss the nature of truth, and in a fully transparent world with total recall, people are not free. Attaching your name to an argument will always carry more weight, but for personal, family, or social reasons we can't loose the discourse of everyone who dislikes being spit on or has something to loose.

c. It highlights the problematic thesis of 'citizen journalism' and 'blogging' - Arrington doesn't have the weight of a real news organization supporting his voice. There is no ethics committee, and he has no guidelines. The falling cost of content production allows him to speak to millions under his own power, which means he captures the upside when things go well - but he has nothing to support him when things go poorly. This changes the nature of the discourse, and the relationship of the individual speaker to the discourse. If he had clear process and structure, with a full system of editors and fact checkers backing him up, even if people were unhappy with "the mirror", it would be harder for them to argue with him. One of the most interesting topics being currently debated is that the professional press is becoming ever more important, not less - and Arrington, the uber-blogger, is demonstrating exactly why.

d. It touched off a set of discussions about security, while the issue is actually privacy - The response to the Arrington situation was Techcrunch and Mashable posts about privacy that really spoke about security. Privacy and security are distinct concepts, and while security is a war of attrition - privacy is alive and strong... it just requires a different approach to applications and the concept of communication. The internet can be re-factored away from an ad-supported model and towards a conduit for real information sharing.

Overall, it is shocking that Arrington, the great proponent of the 'social and open' web is closing down. I think it is probably more shocking to him than to anyone else... I honestly think that he wholeheartedly bought into his claims for personal openness and total transparency, which means that this must be devastating for him.

2. Calacanis riffs on privacy and empathy

"I'm 100% convinced that the trend in 2010 and forward will be people trying to remove their virtual presence on sites like Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook. Already, I've noticed people are moving their settings to private--perhaps something they should have done from the start."

Jason Calacanis, possibly in response to the Arrington incident, or possibly not, wrote a very interesting and eloquent post about how living without privacy is/will destroy empathy. While there is much I would disagree with, I think the spirit of his writing is spot on, "We are all canaries in the coal mines now". It was interesting to hear how he moved away from a blog to a newsletter (an earlier semi-private, or at least not searched platform) in an attempt to regain control - but the real and final move will be back to speaking and exchanging privately with one another.

While very good, this again fits in the category of being noteworthy only because the biggest names in blogging and social media are starting to seriously wake up to the medium in which they are working and the nature of the discourse.

3. Clive Thompson writes on "manufacturing confusion"

the Calacanis and Arrington blips spoke to the nature of personal identity and privacy in our brave new world. Clive Thompson's article in wired "manufacturing confusion" strikes on a far deeper and more interesting problem. Namely, because the cost of speaking has dropped to zero, people manufacture any 'information' they want regardless of validity. When everyone speaks no one can hear, and truth is indistinguishable from fiction.

I did take the time to respond in two parts below to Clive's writings - so I won't dwell on them here, but the perspective he is asserting is critical. The problem of communication and sharing online isn't just about personal identity and freedom of expression -- it is also about the fundamental technicals of the internet. It is becoming easier and easier to manipulate information and people as the scale and speed at which information travels increases while the cost decreases.

Search and social are not the toolkit to fix this. Search, if anything, allows people to even more easily google the answers they want with total disregard for reality or balance, turning debate into baseless 'fact' sourcing. Social, if anything, allows micro populations to control the dialogue/information flow to limited groups.

3. US credit card database is compromised, biggest privacy breach yet.

You can't offload your privacy to third parties, and each huge 'private' data breach of centralized databases shows why. Private data, or any data for that matter, represents a pool of value. The value of the data set is based on things like the raw amount of the data, the usefulness, and how structured it is (how easy it is to tap the sweet sweet nectar). For now, people are mainly concerned with "private" data in terms of immediately usable credit and cash. That is why the credit card processors need to invest so much in defense, and why hackers are willing and able to spend more and more time and money assaulting them with the types of results we have been seeing recently.

That said, credit card databases are not the only pools of value. Stores of structured personal data and social information are getting to be more and more attractive targets. So, as facebook and twitter continue to grow their centralized datasets by hundreds of thousands of people a day they are going to become targets and/or they will use the data in unwanted ways themselves (because the value will be too enormous and attractive in aggregate).

More later, but the point here is that as datasets grow, they are going to fight an increasingly expensive and impossible war of attrition against those targeting to acquire valuable data. There are solutions, like identi.ca that keeps the data-sets federated/diffuse enough that you might be able to trust third parties, but the point is this.... the 'privacy' solution is not about offloading your content/privacy issues to a third party, they are about how you publicly interact. Security is a war of attrition, and privacy is a totally separate game that can't be offloaded to a third party.

4. Kanye gets hacked, Paris Hilton admits it is all a ruse - and the joke is on us

Which leaves me with Kanye and Paris. Kanye is claiming his gmail got hacked and people used it to send offensive emails (or at least emails he didn't want sent). There is no way to know the truth of what went on... but the key is that Kanye got burned by letting third party technology assume control over part of his identity/self. The medium controlled the man... While, at the same time, Paris Hilton seemed to offhandedly admit that she is an even better actor than Stephen Colbert, and that she has just been playing a dumb blond in the public sphere. (I actually always suspected as much).

So, where did January 2009 leave us?

Arrington has become a victim of his own identity
Kanye has become a victim of the medium
Paris admits she has been masterfully controlling the identity and the medium the whole time

leading me to believe that Ms. Hilton actually had it all right from the beginning.

The note 'Why the Internet is destroying access to information (the freestyle version)' has been added to the drop swl.

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 01:19:28 GMT

I have been working out a draft of my position on why people like Jeff Jarvis (who claim the death of the professional press/news-media) are dead wrong for months... I have the argument firmly in mind, but since I actually care deeply about the subject, I am taking my time and trying not to be too loose and free with my discussion and language... (and I will not make the argument here and now just yet).

That said, Clive Thompson's article "Manufacturing Confusion" (pulling from Robert Proctor and Farhad Manjoo - neither of whom I have read) immediately jumped out at me, because his opening lines almost perfectly matched the opening lines of the post on which I have been working. "Is global warming caused by humans? Is Barack Obama a Christian.... when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: ignorance is increased... when society doesn't know something, it's often because special interests work hard to create confusion."

This is an exceedingly big deal. It is so big that it, in classic science meets religion form - it reeks of the allegory of the Tower of Babel. Content production and communication has gotten so cheap and easy, that anyone with any agenda or anything to gain can and will clog the wire, and consumers have no ability to distinguish fact from fiction.

Traditional 'search' algorithms can't deal with this - I have already been experimenting with intentionally generating and running some SEO against misinformation, and I believe that in a world of open communication misinformation will actually become the dominant form of privacy. Search will always get harder and harder to game, but it will always be game-able... the channel will forever be locked in a war of attrition.

Social filters and algorithms are no better. Forget true "crowd-sourcing" (like wikipedia), which I don't even feel the need to address - and instead examine your friend network, the facebook/twitter social filter model. It certainly provides exactly what you WANT to read -- but what you want to read has nothing to do with the truth. If anything, the micro-distribution of content through social channels is simply an echo chamber, which simply will reflect the beliefs and interests of the individual instead of any objective reality.

I am still hopeful for the survival of information and verity because real information and truth has intrinsic market value. So, while the internet (free distribution) is destroying access to that value on a massive scale, when there is value and people loose access to value, a good capitalist society will create/preserve an avenue.

But, I am scared because I think that the next year is going to make Orison Wells "War of the Worlds" look like childsplay; however, this time the question will be, will we even ever be cognizant of the ruse? I worry that when we don't know what our neighbors are reading any more, the game is up. ~as always, I know I sound alarmist and almost fanatical - In reality I am just fascinated...

so, to go one crazy step further, I ultimately wonder - does this line of thought lead to the end of civil society, or the end of freedom of speech, or both. For centuries, the cheaper publishing has become the more vibrant society has grown - but when publishing becomes a zero or in reality a negative cost does its effect invert?

The note 'Briefly Reiterated: Finance fell first, API based 'infrastructure' of the web is next' has been added to the drop swl.

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:10:18 GMT

Clive Thompson hit on my core thesis in this month's Wired - the fact that in many cases the internet is actually destroying knowledge and information, not creating it.

In his article he notes, "even the financial meltdown was driven by ignorance. Credit-default swaps were designed not merely to dilute risk but to dilute knowledge; after they'd changed hands and been serially securitized, no one knew what they were worth." - this relates highly to my earlier post about blaming the internet for the financial crisis... people lost the ability to rationally value assets once they were repackaged enough times that the 'irrational' seemed 'rational'.

But, that is hardly the scariest conclusion of his line of thought. What Clive doesn't highlight is that by the same process the internet is in the process of destroying itself via a series of APIs, which are fundamentally exactly like repackaged financial products.

The more we build APIs on APIs on APIs, the less information we have about the core functions and properties of the systems we build. Without fundamental insight all the way down the chain, we are building an exceedingly risky pyramid, in which we don't really know how our systems act and will interact.

repackaging APIs on APIs on APIs is exactly the same thing as repackaged fund of funds investing in hedge funds investing in mortgaged backed securities buying slightly collateralized debt from individuals. Open software helps a little bit, but it doesn't solve the problem.

Finance always leads trends, but other systems follow - and the fallout from internet services unraveling will be even scarier.... and I must buy Farhad Manjoo's new book "True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society".

The note 'found - an early blogging experiment' has been added to the drop swl.

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:14:53 GMT

In testing/playing with ping.fm (news soon) I started recovering all of the various blog stubs I have played with over the years (http://lessin.wordpress.com, http://lessin.tumblr.com)...

I came across an old blogger blog I had played with in 2004 when I started getting re-interested in social media. Interesting to find some old/early thoughts - and see how I was using it - the stub is at: http://slessin.blogspot.com -

The note 'Facebook should be making Whopper Sacrifice love, not war' has been added to the drop swl.

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:18:16 GMT

So, who knows what the real politics are - but the headlines are reading that Facebook is either shutting down or massively limiting "Whopper Sacrifice" (see note below - updated)... I think this is senseless, if anything Facebook should be embracing and promoting the app -- and I wouldn't be surprised if a few of the crew over in Palo Alto agree.

By way of quick background, Burger King launched a very cleaver app recently that asks Facebook users to 'sacrifice' 10 friends (remove 10 friends) in return for a free Whopper burger. According to my sketchy research online whoppers cost $2.39, meaning that to 'sacrifice' a friend on Facebook you are valuing that connection at $0.239 or less.

I am comfortable declaring that if the information stream and connection you get from a given 'friend' on Facebook is worth less than $0.24 cents, then they are not a real friend. I personally really like the app, and I love burgers, but looking down my friend list (which is almost 1000 people long) I can't think of anyone I would boot for 1/10th of a hamburger.

Facebook's value is built on the verity of their information and their friend graph. If anything, they should be encouraging people to purge out non-real worthless connections. Facebook has been speaking for ages about how to guard the truth and purity of the graph as a real world representation of friendships, isn't this a perfectly economically rational way to get there?

So, I honestly think Facebook should be embracing and even promoting apps like this. In fact, perhaps Facebook should be offering a straight up $0.24 cent buyout to their users per 'sacrificed' friend, it would be a great incentive to cull my 'friend' list to reflect reality...

Update: so, after reading the articles that came out today - a bit more info. Something I didn't understand is that the Burger King app was telling people when they had been 'sacrificed' and thereby was violating the FB terms. First, this means that the cost of sacrificing a friend was actually higher than $0.24 cents - there was social 'blow back' involved. Further, it means, theoretically FB would have let the campaign go on with a slight modification (removing that function).

This makes me feel better about FB's move (since the app was in violation of the terms), but I still think FB should be encouraging this type of behavior / initiate a 'friend' buyout.

The note 'Thoughts coming out of the BLKNY+30, world as a zero sum game?' has been added to the drop swl.

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:06:27 GMT

Last night the Brooklyn Future Meetup Y+30 was lead by Graham Hill of treehugger. He presented a view of the environment +30 years with a message centered around the fact that while we have the tools at hand to do more to stabilize the environment, the question becomes how fast, and at what pace, we feel like "moving towards the life boats". The presentation was exceedingly thought provoking, as was the conversation that followed. Environmental issues, in my mind, are some of the toughest to discussion on a +30 year horizon because the impact is hard to conceptualize and exceedingly wide ranging across practical and philosophical dimensions.

What struck me most, was that it ended up hitting on many many of the same themes as I realize are driving my pointed dislike of Rawls as of late.

At the end of Graham's presentation he posed three questions for discussion, two of which were: A. "do we care about future generations of unborn children and strange animals" and B. "are we willing to sacrifice today for stability tomorrow" (both paraphrased). Further, he suggested that humans as a species are really not designed to think more than a few years (or even just a single winter) in advance - making thinking 30 years, or the 100+ on which we could truly feel the impact of environmental change very very hard to pivot around.

I think these points/questions are dead on.... The worrisome part is that it isn't only human beings in a practical/immediate sense who have a hard time digesting these meta trends and inter generational issues. Our institutions, capitalism, government, etc. are equally designed with at most a few years of forecasting in mind - not centuries. Most disturbingly, our theory can't even account for this long term thinking. Utilitarianism in the most general form can, but offers no real direction when stretched to that end - our man Rawls, I believe, is completely up a creek without some sort of way to measure fairness, etc. in terms of not just a current population but future generations - at the other end of the spectrum guys like Nozick (in the justice as acquisition sense) because it is impossible to balance the rights of others to acquire in the future vs. our rights to acquire now.

The world isn't a zero sum game, but there really are some zero sum aspects we are now hitting up against as a society. This indefinite mixture makes things very very complicated.

I personally think the only solution may be to dramatically change tastes. Celebrities driving hybrids isn't enough - I think that the only solution may be some sort of modern cathedral which we can all stand behind, and which allows us to pleasurably optimize our own lives in the short run, while enabling and protecting future generations as a positive externality.

The note 'Built on Twitter' has been added to the drop swl.

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 01:33:16 GMT

I wrote a short discussion of the most recent NYC tech meetup for Adage last week - and figured it is worth re-posting here... the original is at http://bit.ly/srzI

Everyone needs someone, and that is especially true in the online world. Just as Michelin's tire business wouldn't be worth much without a car industry, Microsoft Windows wouldn't be very useful without PCs, Google wouldn't be worth a dime without ISPs, and our company, Drop.io, wouldn't do much today without Amazon Web Services.

Tuesday night at the New York Tech Meetup, newly elected organizer Nate Westheimer led the group through a set of companies and projects that are "built on Twitter" (read: that all apparently "need" Twitter).

Where most NYTM events showcase companies that have either raised venture-capital financing or are actively looking to do an A round, at this event, no one presenting had raised VC or even announced that they were actively looking for institutional funding. The general sentiment at the NYTM seemed to be that that investors are, in general, not yet willing to make big bets on companies built on a platform that has yet to make its first dime of revenue (let alone profit). Especially in this environment, people don't yet have enough faith in the viability of the host.

But something clicked for me at the NYTM, and I think that this approach is a mistake. There is fundamental technology being developed in New York that might be built "on Twitter" but isn't actually as dependent on Twitter as it may seem at first blush.

@Shakeshack kicked off the event, presenting their social experiment using Twitter to create a "new data set" around the community of people who have a sometimes scary obsession with the eatery and the length of the line to get your hands on a delicious burger.

TwiTerra presented its visualization of the Twitter "re-tweet" data set, displaying one way to think about the type of data set @Shakeshack is creating.

CoTweet presented a whole new interface for how groups of people can interact with messages via a single Twitter feed, in what could be seen either as a system for using Twitter as a 1920s style "party line" or as a corporate switchboard for tweets.

StockTwits showed its interface for using Twitter for reputation driven real-time stock tips.

The Shorty Awards presented its massively popular three-part "awards" program and spoke a bit of how it is morphing into a way to rate top Twitter feeds in various categories of interest.

Klout showed off its attempt to algorithmically measure impact and influence on Twitter.

Finally, one of my favorite projects, Botanicalls, showed off its project to bring your plants into the tweet-o-sphere.

Sure, all of these companies are using Twitter's API, and developing interfaces, features and the like that need Twitter to live tomorrow -- but what bets are they really making, what are they really developing? Coming out of the NYTM, I would argue that they are all making a very safe bet on a real-time future for the internet, not Twitter itself.

Twitter has grown because it is a fast way to easily route messages, and with a dead simple API it is a quick and easy way for the next generation of innovators to get up and running with a new "real time" or "social" project or company. Iis CoTweet the CRM of the future?. Is Shorty Awards or Klout going to provide the next "pagerank"? I haven't a clue. Is Botanicalls going to be part of the basis for smart real-time device interface? Not sure.

But I will say this -- this is real stuff, if Twitter goes away someone else (or a federation of someone elses) with a similar API will take its place and these projects and people will continue. Just as we make sure at drop.io that if need be we could get off our host (Amazon Web Services) at an acceptable cost, Twitter isn't going to hold these companies hostage for long.

So, coming out of this Meetup, I think it is time to start embracing the vibrancy of what people are building "on" Twitter in the New York tech community, and unless you want to bet against a future of highly open real-time communication, start investing in some Twitter based start-ups.

As a closing thought, remember another company with New York ties, Summize. Summize built core real time search technology. They started off working on an Amazon data set, and ended up selling to twitter based on how their groundwork enabled Twitter's data set. Someone that presented at the NYTM this week will do very well with the fundamentals they are developing, whether they do it "on" Twitter or elsewhere.

Google may need solvent ISPs, Microsoft might need Dell, and the U.S. might need an auto industry and a banking system, but these "Twitter" start-ups don't need Twitter.

The note 'I am not a 'net native'' has been added to the drop swl.

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:44:01 GMT

I spent a lot of time with my 14 year old sister over the holiday school break. Spending time with her, I thought a lot about the fact that she is a true net native, having never really seen a pre-internet pre-mobile world. It made me realize that, as much as I pretend, I am not a 'net native' the way she, and all future generations of Americans will be. Unlike KJWL, I actually remember learning how to:

1. type
2. double click (that actually was hard to learn at first)
3. right click
4. always use an area code in a phone numbers (7 digits used to work fine)
5. transcribe long URLs (it used to be really hard)
6. hit 'call'/'send' when dialing a number
7. text message (/T9)
8. type with my thumbs
9. efficiently see and navigate application 'windows'

I remember when my father first came home with a briefcase sized cell phone, and how people used to gawk at him on the street. I can still sing the modem handshake song. I remember trying to download the 5mb duke nukem trial on 10 kbps connections that would keep dropping. I remember the first CD I ordered online. I remember how amazing it was to jack a "general magic" 'mobile' Internet device into the wall and go online. I remember film cameras, and my first digital camera which used a serial port to let you download its 500K internal memory. I remember 10 mb max inbox sizes, and freshman week without facebook. I remember aohell.

It is amazing to recognize that my generation will be the last to remember the pre-digital world, and that our role might be to guard the lessons from those fading memories.

The note 'Rawls is rapidly getting out of date in our 'exponential' world' has been added to the drop swl.

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:01:35 GMT

a sunday pause for a few quick and dirty thoughts on social philosophy

This morning in the gym I watched Michael Sandel's "Justice" lecture #16 on John Rawls (available at post.harvard.edu). As an undergrad, I remember having largely disliked Rawls. When we studied "Justice as Fairness" I took fundamental issue with his suppositions of what people would choose under veil of ignorance (based on its grounding in minimax theory, and presupposition of risk aversion)... but that said, I haven't studied his theory in a while and am not sharp enough on the finer points to be confident in playing ball at that level right now.

What really struck me, and what is worth noting, is that watching Sandel's lecture I felt for the first time that Rawls is starting to seem like a quaint antique of slower and more stable age.

His theory can't functionally account for our exponential world in which impact and change is ever more rapid, long ranging, and difficult to "value".

Rawls states "In justice as fairness men agree to share one anther's fate. In designing institutions they undertake to avail themselves of the accidents of nature and social circumstance only when doing so is for the common benefit". My fundamental issues with Rawls now stem from the fact that I am not exactly sure how we should be defining and thinking about the basic ideas of "men" and "common" -

For the first time in history we are facing environmental and technological issues which could drastically change or destroy society in a matter of decades via a thousand cuts. These challenges are not at all like the threat of nuclear annihilation, which was always a game of a limited set of state actors - instead these challenges are ones which we all collectively face together based on millions of independent decisions by independent but fundamentally bound individuals and organizations. Should we be thinking about our commitments to just our contemporary "men", or for humanity for the next 100 years, or for the next 1000 years? Should we be thinking about the "common" benefit this year, this century, or for the next fifty generations? Rawls doesn't help here at all, and without any answers on these more fundamental questions it makes his entire framework rather useless.

These types of questions didn't matter very much historically because we as a society couldn't do all that much that would have 100 or 1000 year impact. We could talk about formats for or conceptions of maximizing utility on a bounded basis because our impact and the capital we built or destroyed as a civilization didn't last that long in any meaningful way. However, the more our actions today have serious impacts in the very long term the more we have to re-define what we mean by maximizing and sharing wealth, utility, etc.

Are we maximizing for today or tomorrow, or 10,000 years from now? What, if anything, can we agree is 'utility' in the long run? What decay rate should we be applying to future human utility streams?

In an exponential world all of these problems become much more tangible and immediately relevant, and if we can't 'agree' we are going to have to re-evaluate.

I am picking on Rawls specifically because he deploys many many devices which are particularly problematic in this new very-long-term framework. Applying any of his philosophy relies upon society making centralized and unitary decisions regarding the value/worth/etc of individual actions and activities. To know how much to tax a given person society needs to centrally make a value judgment on that person's contributions. This simply doesn't work in the modern framework, because the value of given contributions, etc. are getting ever more complicated and hard to agree upon.

When I was in college I remember being highly seduced by the clean and clear social theory of Locke, but being forced to recognize that his work was a simplistic relic of an earlier time. As humanity became more and more interdependent and interconnected most of his theory lost any sort of real world relevance, because there was no longer such thing as actions that truly existed in a vacuum. As our actions no longer just impact each other in the immediate or temporal space, but infinitely into the future Rawls theory also seems like a relic (whether or not you agree with it).

So, what is left? I am not sure. I am sure there are a lot of thinkers/approaches I have not yet been exposed to, but for now I am stuck re-considering my opinion of philosophical frameworks that don't rely on socially coordinated ends based reasoning.

The note 'Post-Industrial Education (Reprise)' has been added to the drop swl.

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 03:31:46 GMT

I mentioned this a while back, and I am sure someone has actually studied this in detail -- but, having just discussed it again with KJWL, I must say that I am very excited about the future of education. Reading David McCullough's 1776 a few months back it struck me that the American generals in the opening days of the revolutionary war were mostly considered qualified to lead by the mere fact of having had access to and studied war strategy books. McCullough notes that at the time it was considered quite reasonable to master a skill or a new body of work on your own through books. After a few centuries in which it feels like education followed the industrial revolution towards institutionalization, centralization, standardization, and accreditation we are coming out the other side... and with the aid of the Internet it is again becoming both reasonable and acceptable to learn without centralized structure, and to ply a trade without a officially sanctioned degree. As much as Widener Library will remain a wonderful and meaningful place, I cannot see it - or Harvard - holding the same top down importance to education and the landscape of learning in the 21st century as it did in the preceding 200 years.

The note 'Communicative Symmetry, ATT & First Revenue Assurance' has been added to the drop swl.

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 20:35:22 GMT

Happy New Year! -- Last Sunday (the 28th) in the NYT Gretchen Morgenson wrote an article called "A Paper Trail That Often Leads Nowhere" - I was exceedingly excited to read it, not only because it was a great article and expose, but because it highlights a communicative issue that I have been personally experiencing and am exceedingly worried about as a social issue in the midterm.... Specifically, as she points out, the ability to re-package and re-sell commitments and relationships creates incredibly perverse economic situations which are seriously threatening, and sadly seem to require more regulation in the mid-term (though I have a hard time envisioning what exactly that regulation would functionally look like). Morgenson talks about this in terms of renegotiating home loans which are in danger of defaulting.... a business which I once studied in detail -- my personal experience has to do with predatory debt collection practices.

By way of quick and truncated background, a few months back about my interesting issue with ATT and First Revenue Assurance -- when I set up my iPhone Apple and ATT mistakenly created a second fictitious account in my name, and then passed it to collections when I didn't pay the phantom balance on the phantom account. ATT acknowledged the mistake and guarantees on the phone that the issue has been resolved, but is exceedingly tight fisted with any sort of traceable documentation by system design. First Revenue Assurance and their agents refuse to acknowledge that the 'debt' is not owed, and have actively lied in attempting to collect on the account, and attempt to harass me through several channels.

Why and how? It is all about understanding and reacting to economic incentives.

Setting aside the fact that I am actually a very well paying ATT customer, in the general state ATT has zero incentive to protect individuals whose accounts they have 'written off' in any way shape or form for whatever reason. They don't expect any future business from written off customers, and they have either already been paid a fractional fee for the defaulted account (or have assigned a definite discounted value to the account based on the probability of recovery). Their incentives in dealing with a customer in a 'defaulted' situation are squarely based on the probability/cost associated with legal action, and the brand risk associated with a negative story getting out into the public about their practices.

First Revenue Assurance, and their agents, have even clearer incentives. They have either paid for the right to collect a bad debt, or have some other definite arrangement where they make money based on getting me to pay them. As a company their job is to acquire bad accounts as cheaply as possible, work them efficiently, and get as much money paid back as possible. They have no brand or reputation value which they are concerned about protecting with consumers, nor do they have any financial interest in how it was they came to have this 'right of collection'. If and when they resell their rights to another agency, the same economic logic and incentives apply.

So, as they have done to me, they will lie and actively look to deceive in any untraceable/unrecorded medium, and will engage in communication strictly on what they consider to be immediately high ROI terms (meaning, as they have done, they will hang up on you, and not engage unless they think you are going to 'pay up'). As a company they will do everything right up to the line of the law, because their only risks (other than a negative ROI which they are modeling constantly), is legal action or loosing access to future business from ATT.

What does this mean? It means that ATT thinks it has zero economic incentive to fix the situation and will try to have as few interactions with me that cost them as little as possible (meaning, not focus on the issue at all), First Revenue Assurance, will deploy whatever apparently ROI positive tactics they can to get me to give them money. Quite simply it is the wild wild west, -- and everyone is losing as a result.

What is a consumer to do? I take a strictly economic approach. That means evaluating the costs and payoffs which are in bounds for each player:

My economically optimal move from day one would have been to just pay FRA the extortion money (the $300 they claim I owe them) avoid the loss time and effort of dealing with the situation, and not risk my credit score (my future cost of capital). This is how ransom works, it is the economically rational move to just pay up. That said, I don't negotiate with terrorists as a rule because I assign a very high dollar value to my integrity.

So, to maximize my value in the situation I deploy a few tactics:

1. I minimize my exposure to costs that FRA is trying to impose on me to compel my acquiescence. I never read physical mail, filter my email, and as a rule I never pick up my phone when people call whom I don't know. So, in general, FRA's tactics to levy expenses on me by wasting my time and jamming my communications don't work. Further, I have stopped even trying to work with or talk to their line representatives. The incentive structure their representatives are so misaligned that time I spend actually trying to resolve issues with them is clearly wasted and just a tax.

2. I maximize the actual and anticipated cost to FRA to continuing to attempt to extort me. I have begun writing letters to the attorneys general of both my home state and their states of operation, and have been scraping together all possible material and evidence of their harassment. Beyond that, I have contacted ATT to let them know that I had begun such action and requesting that they review their relationship with FRA. These are expensive and time consuming activities for me, but I see them as ROI positive.

Conclusion

My personal battle will be long and drawn out. I highly suspect that for all sorts of systemic reasons FRA is massively over-estimating their likelihood of getting me to pay out, and they are massively underestimating the costs they will incur for continuing to pursue their course... In the meantime, I find this situation theoretically fascinating (that extra bit of return which makes the whole thing ROI positive on a total basis for me personally), and deeply scary in terms of what it means for our society. So, everyone will continue to lose, but at least it will be interesting.

But, to be serious for a second, in the general case, this situation illustrates the pervasiveness of the central issue Morgenson identified in her article. The dynamics and structures in place around reselling/repackaging relationships are creating massively negative outcomes for all parties involved, and with an economic downturn more and more people are going to find themselves facing these types of communicative situations in contexts that are less entertaining. This is a enormous structural issue and I honestly don't have any idea on how to deal with it on a 30 year time horizon outside of regulation... and I can't yet articulate what I think that regulation should actually look like.

That said, as a final note, I think I would be remiss not to note that, as with many things, pervasive access to information will make these types of issues go away on a 100 year cycle. If all parties had perfect information FRA wouldn't be making such a massive miscalculation on the value of the 'debt' I 'owe' them, let alone the fact that this situation would have never occurred in the first place -- but we are a long way from that utopia and it is going to be a scary ride in the middle.

The note 'the internet IS to blame for the economic crash' has been added to the drop swl.

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 15:35:35 GMT

Last weekend our very good family friend Burt Ross was on the cover of the Wall Street Journal telling the story of how he lost the vast majority of his personal net worth with Madoff. The graph from the article that struck me most was as follows:

"Mr. Ross says he remembers being puzzled about how Mr. Madoff was able to show positive returns, even in months when the stocks Mr. Madoff's fund owned were down. He pushed such thoughts aside "I thought, 'Who am I to question?" Mr. Ross says. "This guy has a formula involving computerized trading... It's like Coke. We're not supposed to know the formula"

Over the last several months I have heard a lot of people who work around the tech industry saying things along the lines of 'at least we didn't cause this one' -- the implication being that this recent downturn was a housing/banking lead phenom. This is dead wrong, in fact, if anything I think technology and the marketing of technology is more to directly blame for this market crash than the 'correction' of 2001.

Burt, who is a very smart and highly educated man, believed that 'computerized trading' could account for a gap which would otherwise be inexplicable, and he was is not alone. Millions of people across an incredible range of financial products bought the marketing hype that the dawning of the digital age had fundamentally changed the nature of risk, finance, and investing...

Why? Because of the ipod, google, youtube, facebook, not to mention those incredibly appealing Mac/PC ads. Over the last 10 years the almost overnight impact of technology and the internet on American lives has been so tangibly profound that people were willing to believe that technology had also fundamentally changed the laws of finance and economics.

When investment performance, interest rates, mortgages, lending practices, all seemed simply impossible or out of balance with reality, the simple retort of 'technology has changed the rules' sufficed for due diligence. After all, if technology allowed facebook to scale from 0 to 50 MM users in 24 months, why couldn't new technology allow the efficient pooling of zero interest loans to people with no credit or income? In light of the visible delta consumer tech, the impossible seemed plausible to even sophisticated investors.

So - who is to blame for this crash? It is Gates and Balmer, Jobs, the guy who wrote the mac commercials, Serge and Larry, maybe Mark and Dustin... because if they and many others hadn't pushed and marketed tangible consumer tech so far forward so quickly no one would have possibly bought the false promises of discontinuity via new 'computerized' financial technology. Burt Ross wouldn't have bought Madoff's impossible 8% YOY returns, and we wouldn't need a reality check now.

Fintech is a big deal - and tech is changing the financial landscape - but yet again we have learned to do our homework on the actual core impact, and never be afraid to call a bluff.

The note 'diminishing marginal utility... what does the next generation think?' has been added to the drop swl.

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 18:30:25 GMT

Last night I watched several Robert Shiller lectures on financial markets on the Yale Open Courses website (sorry big H, Y actually has more meat open to the public)... one thing that struck me was his early reminder that almost all finance strips back to the basic economic theory of diminishing marginal utility, namely that the value of an incremental dollar of wealth falls the wealthier you are and ultimately tends towards zero. The curve is supposed to look something like this:

Thinking about it this morning, I can see why this general curve makes sense and is correct on the ultimate macro level, but I don't think it very accurately models my personal utility, or that of many 2008/09 young and educated Americans. I think that my wealth/utility curve looks like one of the following variants - while I can make arguments for each, I don't know myself well enough to make the specific call from the below options:

What does this mean? What does it matter? Because if people are not incentivized by the generally accepted marginal utility curve the structure of finance and the economy must change to some degree. I am tempted to launch into a discussion of hedge fund blowups, or why the internet and exceedingly cheap access to information and communication is the driving force behind the change -- but even I see these tangents as a stretch. For now I will just propose that we live in a time of staggering change - (fact of the week: it is estimated that 4 exabytes of unique information will be generated this year... == more than previous 5,000 years http://bit.ly/14VIN)

utility curves on a micro/human level are shifting in the 'developed' world -- and it is worth examining the changes and considering the impact.

The note 'Change the dollar's slogan to: "In nothing else do we trust"' has been added to the drop swl.

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:24:02 GMT

Reading Bloomberg News this AM there is a discussion of the fact that while the government has borrowed an increasingly absurd amount of money in the last several months, the interest expense of all the borrowing is significantly down. The yield on treasuries is zero and in some cases even negative. In the middle of the meltdown we are literally paying the government to take and invest our money.... Why? Because with so little transparency into the value and dependencies of various 'assets' it increasingly seems like there is nowhere else to put our trust. The abstracted inter-dependencies of fund-of-fund-of-fund-of-funds is the only thing that enables something like a Madoff, and the only reason the government is able to now borrow literally trillions of dollars at zero cost of capital. Many have been talking about this - but if you will, please allow me bit of a saunter towards how I am considering the situation with an information theory spin on the equation --

Money is a medium of exchange & perfect information would actually render M0 meaningless

While I would like to think that I remember large swaths of my college economics courses, watching the economic events of the last few months I can't help but going back to just the first week of EC10. Specifically - i remember that currency has no underlying value, isn't 'real' in and of itself, it is just a medium of communication to facilitate the exchange of goods and services. M0 exists because without perfect information and free communication it is too hard to exchange physical value.

Thus, if we had perfect information there would be no need for currency (M0) -- instead of paying $10.00 for lunch, I could simply trade on the fly to get a sandwich for 4 sheep in the hills of Albania that were fed yesterday and vaccinated last month. With perfect information and zero cost of communication then all assets would themselves be fully liquid and money would have no role.

Capitalism is really simple. Set aside all of the complicated rules, regulations, policies, and mechanism - it is based on people creating differential value in the world by the sweat of their brows and the power of their minds.... when people create value the world's capitalization rises, when people destroy value the world's capitalization falls. The entire valuation pie cannot exceed the current value of all goods and services in circulation, plus the future value of all goods and services adjusted by how much the world trusts the future goods and services will actually come into being.

Why am I taking the time to rant about this? Because while the internet is actually bringing us closer and closer to trading Albanian sheep for lunch in Brooklyn (with ever more perfect information and lower communications costs), the world's economy seems to be marching in the other direction.

And, thus, the US government is borrowing trillions and trillions of dollars for free... more precisely, the US government is on track to print themselves a trillion units of communicative credit. Printing this money does not create value. So, why exactly is it that injecting new money into a system means anything? If the amount of goods and services stays constant, what do we care if the medium of exchange expands...

Because it signals a voluntary rebalancing based on lost faith in our ability to evaluate the total value of other entities. Our information seems bad, far worse than we expected, so we have no idea who actually owns all the Albanian sheep, how much we can trade them for today and tomorrow, and who has a reasonable probability of generating more goods and services in the future. Without any information we are creating our own reset by allowing the government to print tons of money, and then use it to buy up all the 'assets' of indefinite value.

If the world was comfortable valuing assets, if we had better information, it would be basically impossible for the government to print money for free and buy up all the current and future goods and services in the economy, but while people feel they lack enough information to effectively use currency, buy the government will....

This isn't the end of money, but it is voluntary nationalization, because 'in nothing else do we trust'

More thoughts about fundamentally why this happened based on a social miscalculation of the impact of tech on economics in the last 20 years (I DO blame tech companies for this crash), but now off to work. For the record, I am stealing the concept of playing on 'in god we trust from Atlas Shrugged, which seemed appropriate' -- but not the specific device.