Epeus' epigone

Keep ALL the versions

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Thu, 24 May 2012 16:44:06 PDT

Back in the 1980s, storage was expensive and slow. You had a copy of your document in memory and you would be asked every time you wanted to save it out to disk, because you didn't want to fill the disk up. That paradigm is so out of date now it's embarrassing to try to explain to my sons what the little floppy disk icon is in Microsoft Word. "What's that?" "it's a floppy disk." "Oh yeah, I think I saw one in the garage once"

The world view of having to load and save is being gradually eroded. Apple has changed the operating system - Mountain Lion no longer has Save and Save As, but instead a model of going back through edit histories. Google Docs originally didn’t have a floppy disk icon, but put it back because people were looking for it in user testing. Now it has been removed.

We've had source code control as programmers for a long time. But the github world takes that further: the first thing you do is clone a project into your own repository, then start forking it. You can eventually merge stuff back later, but there is the assumption that things are happening in parallel. As James Governor put it:

Open Source used to count download numbers as a measure of developer success.
Today, we increasingly use forks as the metric of traction.

Wikipedia has put this into the public consciousness by having publicly visible edit histories, so you can go back and forwards in time over the history of the article. The paradigm of "storage is not a problem, we should keep every version of everything ever" is moving through culture to be a default assumption.

This will be something we want on mobile too. The issue of "which have I got on the phone and which have I got in the cloud?” is what makes it tricky. I think there will be a battle between Apple and Google about how you present that to the user in a coherent way - Google Drive and iCloud are taking different paths here, with DropBox actually working between both. Google Drive not storing copies of Google Documents locally is a mistake I expect them to fix.

Everything is moving in this direction, even low level system design. The growth of functional programming is all about not having contention over a single copy of things in memory but having paths through data that are modifying things in their own version of the world.

If you think about the difference between the way JavaScript handles stuff and the way Java does, Java still has a ‘data structure being passed around’ world view; JavaScript has closures that are passed around that contain the entire state of the current machine at the time of that event which are held as you go off and do something else and come back. One of the reasons that node.js feels so nice when you're writing web programming is that it has the feeling you’re used to on the client side that you do something and then call something, passing it a callback. You end up writing the server side stuff in the same way, and it's just naturally parallelizable. It's easy to spin up more machines for it because you've written stuff with the presumption that each instance of it is wholly independent.

Not everything can be written that way. The core of node is in C because it has to deal with the raw machine contention and deal with this routing, but the spread of the functional world view is a natural fit for web apps.

The other potential that node.js makes manifest is convergence of client and server code. If you're running and writing the same code in the same language, with the same libraries running on both the client and the server you can decide to migrate bits back and forth much more easily.

You don’t have to spend so much time deciding which is which and without worrying about the boundaries of the world and different shapes of the data structures. So if you're creating a JSON object on the server and passing it to the client you can decide whether you do that or not, at which point you do that, at which point you render it and which point you don't. That sort of fluidity is going to become more important over time. Pat Patterson showed how this can work for mobile apps too.

The programmers' world view has changed on this and it is permeates out to the world as programmers make those ideas available to the public in usable form. The invention of ‘Undo’ was a huge part of what made the Mac great - enabling users to experiment safely. Being able to retrospectively undo mistakes later, or learn from others’ public variations on a theme is going mainstream too.

This post is based on discussions I had on This Week In Google ep 143, with Gina Trapani, Jeff Jarvis and Tom Merritt which were transcribed by Michael Shook from this video of the show Updated: At the same time, JP Rangaswami wrote Warning: Contains Warnings which give more context about how 'Undo' helps protect innovation.

Draw Something CEO, grace and high school mathematics

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Wed, 02 May 2012 00:29:21 PDT

Dan Porter, CEO of OMGPop, has had a good week. His game, Draw Something (it is an asynchronous Pictionary for cellphones, like Words With Friends is an asynchronous Scrabble) has taken off like mad, and Zynga bought his company for over $200 million. However, one employee didn't go along to Zynga, and Dan's been whining on twitter:

What's so interesting about success is the number of failures who try to ride on your back. Shay Pierce is just one of many...
— Dan Porter (@tfadp) March 31, 2012

The one omgpop employee who turned down joining Zynga was the weakest one on the whole team. Selfish people make bad games. Good riddance!
— Dan Porter (@tfadp) March 31, 2012

This has drawn some reactions from others, eg Notch, CEO of Minecaraft:

@tfadp You're an insane idiot.
— Markus Persson (@notch) April 1, 2012

and Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter:

@tfadp I'm sure you realize by now what a nitwit comment that was, but wow, what a nitwit comment that was.
— dick costolo (@dickc) April 1, 2012

and the lovely Tom Coates:

I hope I never say anything this awful: @tfadp "What's so interesting about success is the number of failures who try to ride on your back."
— Tom Coates (@tomcoates) April 1, 2012

Now just before this crass public display of arrogance, he said something just as telling:

4 years of HS math I got every prob right. Teachers said was wrong way to the answer. Math, business, games, I'll stick with my wrong way.
— Dan Porter (@tfadp) March 30, 2012

The thing is, Draw Something has a maths problem. The so-called Birthday Paradox is kicking in. This is named for the unexpected result that if you have 23 people in a room, there's a 50:50 chance two of them have the same birthday.

There's a similar effect with games. If you keep randomly picking a word from a list, you'll see repeats quickly. Classic board games understand this - this is why Balderdash, Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit etc insist you use a discard pile after shuffling and picking a question, so you only pick a new card from those you haven't seen. Draw Something isn't doing this, so we're all seeing words repeat, which is discouraging play. This is all over twitter too:

Too many repeat words in DrawSomething. :|
— Shreya Ghoshal (@shreyaghoshal) March 30, 2012

I've played Draw Something too much so every word now is a repeat. #firstworldpain
— ∆li (@AleeZaidee) April 1, 2012

Just now coming off a week-long "Draw Something" binge. The fact that I keep getting the same words over & over is helping.
— Aimee Mann (@aimeemann) March 31, 2012

One way or another, I think Draw Something has peaked.

When you're the merchandise, not the customer

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 12:09:50 PDT

Jonathan Zittrain posted today that he is not the source of the quote widely attributed to him:

I participated in the Berkman Center’s fascinating HyperPublic symposium in the summer of 2011. When moderating a panel I invoked the aphorism that “When something online is free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” It’s a way of encapsulating the idea that online free services usually make money by extracting lots of data from users — and then selling that data, or using it for targeted availability of those users for advertising, to advertisers. In that sense, the advertisers are the clients, and the users enjoying free content are what’s being sold. (Of course, sometimes that happens even when the user pays.)

I didn’t coin the phrase, and since it was featured (and attributed to me!) in wordsmith.org’s wildly popular “word a day” as a thought for the day accompanying the word “enceinte” — I sought to nail down its provenance.

The first use of the quote that we can find is as a comment within the famed MetaFilter community in August 2010. The user’s name is blue_beetle, who might be someone named Andrew Lewis. It’s entirely possible I saw it there, as MeFi is one of my five favorite sites on the Web.

I was pretty sure this idea dates back further, so I went digging. First I found Josh Klein's 2009 blogpost, which cites Philip Broughton's 2008 book Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School

"My favorite moment comes in an anecdote about an MBA candidate who, not getting his way, complains to an administrator, “I’m the customer! Why are you treating me so badly?”

To which the administrator responds, “you’re not the customer. You’re the product.”

But the sense is not quite the same there - an MBA is not a free web service after all. Going back a little further, this 2006 discussion at Joel on Software Is the Magical Fairy-tale For Google Engineers about to End? (nicely prefiguring James Whittaker's Why I left Google) includes this contribution from Drew K:

Like clam pointed out, Google's customers are the advertisers. "Skooter" is a user. Just like with ad-supported broadcast TV, you're not the customer, you're the product.

The idea is pretty well-expressed there, but I think we can go back further. In 2004, Coding Forums discussed the then-new Gmail, and liorian commented:

From a Google perspective, you're not the customer. The ad service buyer is the customer. You're the commodity. By making you a more attractive commodity, i.e. by making sure to only serve you an ad if you are in the target population for it, they are making the ads pay better for their customers, and they can reap a large part of the difference to their competitors, the other ad services.

This isn't a new idea then, as the analogy to television makes clear. The earliest, most thorough exegesis of this idea I have found is Claire Wolfe's 1999 article Little brother is watching you The Menace of Corporate America which opens with:

Perhaps because you're not the customer any more. You're simply a "resource" to be managed for profit. The customer is someone else now — and usually someone without your best interests at heart.

And has a continuing refrain of “Who is the Customer? Not you”, ending with

Who is the customer? Not you, whose life is reduced to someone else's salable, searchable, investigatable data. The customer is everyone who wishes to own a piece of your life.

The underlying warning is definitely worth thinking about — Maciej Ceglowski eloquently made the case for why you should pay Software Artisans on a recent TummelVision — but the deeper changes to what it means to be a customer matter too. There are other things we take part in without paying or being sold, because we find shared value in them, and the net enables those too.

QR Codes: bad idea or terrible idea?

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 09:43:47 PST

People have a problem finding your URL. You post a QR Code. Now they have 2 problems. Or more:

They see a chunk of robot barf on your poster, and have to realise it isn't a crossword puzzle, but a QR code.
They need to take a digital photograph of it with their phone. If they have a laptop, even with a camera, this requires physical contortions
They need an application on their phone that can make sense of a QR code.
They need a lot of patience as they fiddle with it.
They need a working network connection to resolve it.

Conversely, with a URL they could type it in, take a photograph of it and type it in later, or if they have the right app, it will recognise the URL text from the image and make it clickable.

That is the irony of this. QR Codes ignore years of research and culture on how to communicate meaning in symbolic form designed to be captured by image processing tools behind a lens. We have this technology. It is called writing.

Written language has a set of symbols that are relatively unambiguous, that are formed of curves rather than hard edges making them resilient to noise, and have been market-tested for milennia. QR Codes don't just ignore this, they ignore the relative success of one dimensional barcodes. Notice something about a barcode? It has the number printed on it as well, so you can type it in if the scan fails. QR Codes don't do this, so it's far too easy to put the wrong one in, or fail to replace a mockup. Which is why so many QR codes link to Justin's site instead.

The only place you should use QR codes is if you have a dedicated reader for them, like a classic barcode scanner, and a workflow that is designed for this that actually saves time. If you do empirical research on using QR codes for the public, you'll likely see 80% worse performance than text like this museum did. By all means try the experiment and report your results. Put up a QR code and a printed URL and see which gets the most usage.

Or listen to others:

a majority of our respondents knew more or less what they were for, very few (n=2, or around 7%) were successfully able to use QR codes to resolve a URL, even when coached by a knowledgeable researcher.[..] A strong theme that emerged — which we certainly found entirely unsurprising, but which ought to give genuine pause to the cleverer sort of marketers — is that, even where respondents displayed sufficient awareness and understanding of QR codes to make use of them, virtually no one expressed any interest in actually doing so.

As Alexis Madrigal puts it:

Is it really faster and better to use a QR code that will direct you to part of a marketing campaign rather than getting a broader sweep of information by simply using the browser that you already use all the time on your phone? In the instant cost-benefit analysis I do every time I see a QR code, it has yet to make sense for me to fire up the decoder app I have installed on my phone.

QR code at the bus stop to get time of next bus. Really useful in the dark. Not. yfrog.com/mgicpqj
— Martin Geddes (@martingeddes) January 27, 2012

Google Plus admits they want fake names

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:29:13 PST

Today, after 7 months, Bradley Horowitz announced that Google Plus will accept some pseudonyms. Kinda. If you can prove you're already famous. And can convince their robot it looks like a name. However, Google Engineer Yonatan Zunger spills the beans in a comment on that thread:

First of all, you might ask why we have a names policy at all. (i.e., why we don’t simply go with the JWZ proposal) One thing which we have discovered, while putting some miles on the system, is that it is indeed important to have a name-based service rather than a handle-based service. This isn’t a matter of functionality so much as of community: You get a different kind of community when people are known as Mary Smith than when they are known as captaincrunch42, and for a social product in particular we decided that the first kind of community is the one we want to build. In order to do that, we want to establish a general norm that the names you put in to the system should be names, not handles.

So one thing that our name checking flow tries to catch is handles, which should normally be nicknames, shown in addition to a name. The other important thing it’s trying to catch is people who are creating individual accounts, rather than +Pages, for non-human entities such as businesses or organizations. The behavior of +Pages is deliberately restricted in the system, and we don’t want people to be creating fake human accounts to circumvent that. The name check turns out to be a very powerful tool to catch these.

Our name check is therefore looking, not for things that don’t look like “your” name, but for things which don’t look like names, period. In fact, we do not give a damn whether the name posted is “your” name or not: we will not challenge you on this basis, nor is there any mechanism for other users to cause you to be challenged for this.

There are two main cases where the name check screws up. One is false positives: people (such as you) who have unusual names which get flagged because they looked like handles. Being able to appeal via things such as drivers’ licenses is useful for this case, since it’s a simple “oh, we got this wrong.” The other case is people such as +trench coat, who are so well-known under this handle that it would be bizarre not to let them onto the system under this name. For this case, we allow appeals based on being well-known under the name: thus the ability to prove the “established pseudonym.” We’ve deliberately set the threshold for that latter case fairly high for now, but we intend to continue to tune it; the objective is that the frequency of such names should basically be the same as their frequency in meatspace.

So to answer your questions one-by-one:

(2) “Meaningful following” only applies to cases of established pseudonyms which do not look like names. The definition of “meaningful” is deliberately vague so that we can tune it, so that it behaves in a natural fashion.

(3) That’s correct; drivers’ licenses are for false positives, not pseudonyms.

(4) Unusual names will indeed hit friction, because of false positives. We’re trying to minimize that, but it’s going to take some trial and error.

(5) Google+ can absolutely be your first identity online. No matter what your language, no matter where you come from. The “established pseudonym” logic should apply to a very small subset of people. If some groups are seeing a higher false positive rate than others, that’s a bug, not a feature, and we have the data available to spot this situation and remedy it.

(posted in full, in case of subsequent retraction, and because G+ doesn't have permalinks for comments)

Yonatan admits what Bradley obscures:that this is an Identity Theatre issue. They don't want your name, They don't care if you have a forename in one language and a surname in another. Let me quote this exactly:

Our name check is therefore looking, not for things that don’t look like “your” name, but for things which don’t look like names, period. In fact, we do not give a damn whether the name posted is “your” name or not: we will not challenge you on this basis, nor is there any mechanism for other users to cause you to be challenged for this.

This is what I suspected when I wrote Google Plus must stop this Identity Theatre

Google+ is letting an algorithm decide what is a name and what isn't. You will be forced into it's Procrustean idea of what names are, or be harassed for it. You have to pass as normal, like call centre workers forced to learn to sound American.

You can create disposable accounts with fake names, as long as they look plausible to Yonatan's bot.

This algorithm has allowed people called 'panel heater' 'The Phoenix Rising' 'tous les mais du monde' and Mehr Decent , a bot with a well-known actress's photo posting links to a single website to follow me (and that's just in the most recent 30 I checked).

So Google continues to encourage fakers and discourage those who need a pseudonym for good reasons.

Could Apple make premium devices in the USA?

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 02:14:51 PST

After This American Life's disturbing episode on Apple's Chinese factories, the NYT wrote a defence of Apple, which said it was just too expensive to build their products in the USA:

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said.

For computers, phones and tablets, it's hard to make a real premium product, as the economies of scale work so well - Tim Cook's Apple has closed in on PC prices by a focus on costs and suppliers, and by building fewer models and relying on Chinese flexibility to ramp them up.

The Gold iPad 2 had a huge premium price, but also weighed more the 3 times as much as a normal iPad.

Instead, what if Apple made premium USA iPads, MacBooks and iPhones? They could have a distinctive look, so people knew they were US made, focus on the higher-end models, and charge a premium markup for the warm glow of supporting US jobs.

How much more would it cost? Hard to say, according to the NYT:

It is hard to estimate how much more it would cost to build iPhones in the United States. However, various academics and manufacturing analysts estimate that because labor is such a small part of technology manufacturing, paying American wages would add up to $65 to each iPhone’s expense. Since Apple’s profits are often hundreds of dollars per phone, building domestically, in theory, would still give the company a healthy reward.
[...]
Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.
[...]
A few years after Mr. Saragoza started his job, his bosses explained how the California plant stacked up against overseas factories: the cost, excluding the materials, of building a $1,500 computer in Elk Grove was $22 a machine. In Singapore, it was $6. In Taiwan, $4.85. Wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities. Rather it was costs like inventory and how long it took workers to finish a task.

Compared the the huge price disparities for other goods, these seem modest; for example, Timoni found a nice carry-on bag recently:

Couldn't find carryon I wanted. Then found a nice one: "This is good, I could get this." Price? $8,000. *doh*
— timoni west (@timoni) January 9, 2012

So here's my proposition for Tim Cook:
Reopen the Elk Grove Apple factory to sell top-line Apple products, designed for those who want 'designer' luxury goods, and are willing to pay more for exclusivity. Make the 'made in USA' a key argument for a premium price. that way you need fewer staff than in China, and paying them well just adds to the cachet of the devices. You could cover them in Jasper Johns Flag, visibly number them as a limited edition, or come up with something more creative. As a way of extending the product line to a new, higher price point, while quieting those who wish Apple did more in the US, it seems an a obvious move.

Translation from sanctimonious bluster to English of Chris Dodd's statement on the internet blackout protests

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:07:03 PST

WASHINGTON —The following is a statement by Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) on the so-called “Blackout Day” protesting anti-piracy legislation:

Senator and CEO - let's lead with the revolving door promises to politicians

“Only days after the White House and chief sponsors of the legislation responded to the major concern expressed by opponents and then called for all parties to work cooperatively together,

Why are my former colleagues listening to their constituents about legislation? Don't they stay bought?

some technology business interests are resorting to stunts that punish their users or turn them into their corporate pawns, rather than coming to the table to find solutions to a problem that all now seem to agree is very real and damaging.

Maybe if we keep saying copyright infringement is a real problem without evidence, they'll believe it.

It is an irresponsible response and a disservice to people who rely on them for information and use their services.

How dare they edit their sites unless we force them to under penalty of perjury and felony convictions?

It is also an abuse of power given the freedoms these companies enjoy in the marketplace today.

Tomorrow was supposed to be different, that's why we bought this legislation.

It’s a dangerous and troubling development when the platforms that serve as gateways to information intentionally skew the facts to incite their users in order to further their corporate interests.

Being the gateways and skewing the facts is our job, dammit.

A so-called “blackout” is yet another gimmick, albeit a dangerous one, designed to punish elected and administration officials who are working diligently to protect American jobs from foreign criminals.

I am high as a kite

It is our hope that the White House and the Congress will call on those who intend to stage this “blackout” to stop the hyperbole and PR stunts and engage in meaningful efforts to combat piracy.”

What have the Romans done for us? Apart from instantaneous global communications, digital audio and video editing, the DVD, Blu-ray, Digital projection, movie playback devices in everyone's pockets and handbags...

How to fight this nonsense

(with apologies to John Gruber and Mark Pilgrim)

Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus shun HTML, causing the infographic plague.

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 12:59:35 PST

By choosing images over links, and by restricting markup, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are hostile to HTML. This is leading to the plague of infographics crowding out text, and of video used to convey minimal information.

The rise of so-called infographics has been out of control this year, though the term was unknown a couple of years ago. I attribute this to the favourable presentation that image links get within Facebook, followed by Twitter and Google plus, and of course though other referral sites like Reddit. By showing a preview of the image, the item is given extra weight over a textual link; indeed even for a url link, Facebook and G+ will show an image preview by default.

Consequently, the dominant form of expression has become the image. This was already happening with LOLcats and other meme generators like Rage Comics, where a trite observation can be dressed up with an image or series of images.

Before this, in the blogging age, there was a weight given to prose pieces, and Facebook and Google preserve some of this, but the expressiveness of HTML through linking, quoting, using images inline, changing font weight and so on, is filtered out by the crude editing tools they make available.

Feeds and feed readers started out this way too, but rapidly gained the ability to include HTML markup. Twitter went back to the beginning, and added the extra constrain of 140 characters because of it's initial SMS focus. Now it is painfully reinventing markup, though the gigantic envelope and wrapper of metadata that accompanies every tweet. This now has an edit list for entities pointing into it, and instructions for how to parse this to regain the author's intent is part of the overhead of working with their API.

Image links, however — at least those from recognised partners — are given privileged treatment. Facebook and Google have emulated this too, leading to the 'trite quote as image' trope. The spillover of this to news organisations became complete this year, with blogs and newspapers falling over themselves to link to often-tendentious information presented in all-caps and crude histogram form.

So here's my plea for 2012: Twitter, Facebook, Google+: please provide equal space for HTML. And for authors and designers everywhere, stop making giant bitmaps when well-written text with charts that are worth the bytes spent on them could convey your message better.

Update: My son made a Rage Comic version of this post (with an explanation) why.

Our brains make the social graph real

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:13:45 PST

Brilliant web essayist Maciej Cegłowski of Two Steaks and Pinboard fame has focused his considerable insight on the area of web standards I've been involved with for the past few years. You should go and read his The Social Graph is Neither now.

Maciej is spot on in his criticisms:

This obsession with modeling has led us into a social version of the Uncanny Valley, that weird phenomenon from computer graphics where the more faithfully you try to represent something human, the creepier it becomes. As the model becomes more expressive, we really start to notice the places where it fails.
Personally, I think finding an adequate data model for the totality of interpersonal connections is an AI-hard problem. But even if you disagree, it's clear that a plain old graph is not going to cut it.

Clearly you can't model human relationships exactly in software. Keeping track of a few hundred of them in all their nuanced subtlety is why our brains are so huge compared to other animals. As Douglas Adams put it:

Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.

It is an act of hubris to attempt to represent such vital things as human relationships in a database, and those who have done so often do resemble Maciej's Mormon bartender - Orkut Büyükkökten, Mark Zuckerberg and Jonathan Abrams do seem to have made what danah boyd has called Autistic Social Software.

The thing is, people seem to find these attempts helpful. As Maciej points out, we're good at forming subcultures and relationships even around the most primitive of tools. He pokes fun at opensocial.Enum.Drinker.HEAVILY, but when we were compiling the OpenSocial Person fields, we found a high degree of convergence between the 20 or so social network sites we reviewed. Despite their crudity, the billions of people using these sites do find something of interest in them.

People choose to model different relationships on different sites and applications, but being able to avoid re-entering them anew each time by importing some or all from another source makes this easier. The Social Graph API may return results that are a little frayed or out of date, but humans can cope with that and smart social sites will let them edit the lists and selectively connect the new account to the web. Having a common data representation doesn't mean that all data is revealed to all who ask; we have OAuth to reveal different subsets to different apps, if need be.

The real value comes from combining these imperfect, scrappy computerized representations of relationships with the rich, nuanced understandings we have stored away in our cerebella. With the face of your friend, acquaintance or crush next to what they are saying, your brain is instantly engaged and can decide whether they are joking, flirting or just being a grumpy poet again, and choose whether to signal that you have seen it or not.

As danah says:

While we want perfect reliability for our own needs, we also want there to be failures in the system so that we can blame technology when we don’t want to admit to our own weaknesses. In other words, we want plausible deniability. We want to be able to blame our spam filters when we failed to respond to an email that someone sent that we didn’t feel like answering. We want to blame cell phone reception when we’ve had enough of a conversation and “accidentally” hang up. The more reliable technology gets, the more we have to find new ways for blaming the technology so that we don’t have to do the socially rude thing.

So here's to approximate, incomplete social web standards.

'with Amazon' replacing 'with Google' on Android?

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:17:12 PDT

Amazon is set to launch an Android Tablet on Wednesday. What if they license their code too? Android as experienced on phones is actually two separate software bundles - the Open Source core of Android, and the proprietary 'with Google' applications, including the App Market, Maps, Gmail, Talk, Contacts, Listen and other apps bound to Google services, and requiring a business development deal to ship with a device. Eric Schmidt explicitly discussed this strategy at Dreamforce.

Now there are already more Android devices than I can count that don't follow the 'with Google' playbook, including the Barnes & Noble Nook that probably inspired this response from Amazon, but there are hints of a broader strategy here. What if Amazon offered an alternative to Google's top half of Android? I think Amazon does not really want to be in the hardware design business, but wants to be sure that they can't be locked out of it or forced to pay extra by Apple, Google or any other potential competitor. As well as releasing their own 7" tablet, they could offer an Open Source or lightly licensed version of their stack to other hardware developers.

Why would Amazon do this? Because they are primarily in the shopping and media business. Apple has stopped them selling eBooks and media inside their apps on iPad/iPhone; Google has banned their App Store from the Google Android Market. Amazon could even offer a referral fee for anything bought via their store as an incentive for device manufacturers to ship it.

An even bolder step wold be to actually fork Android. Google has a delayed-open model for Android source, where a new version is released in public after a closed development process, without a clear way to send in patches to Google. Amazon could put their current version up on Github, accept patches, and treat Google's new drops as another source of possible patches.

Understanding each company's core business is what makes this likely. Apple is in the devices business, with the media business as a small side earner designed to make their devices more attractive. Google is in the Advertising business, with their Android business designed to make searching everywhere, continuously more likely. Amazon is in the shopping business, migrating from physical goods to media, with Kindle a way to drive this. A tablet that they can sell audio and video to as well as eBooks makes more sense to them if it as widely distributed as Kindle playback apps are now.

Is Netflix picking the right disruption?

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:19:49 PDT

The decision to split Netflix into two companies, with the poorly-named Qwikster getting the DVD by post business and Netflix keeping the streaming business has caused a lot of fuss. Bill Gurley suggests that this is due to the very different licensing regimes the two businesses work under, and Clayton Christensen has praised this an a rare example of a company pre-emptively disrupting itself.

However, Reed Hastings gave rather non-plussed responses to those who complained about not having the two queues (DVD and streaming) integrated. As danah said,

It may seem logical to split the world based on business models from the inside of a business, but if you want your business to succeed, you should be focusing on understanding your users' mental models. And those aren't organized along business lines. They're organized around movies that they like, obtained by the means that is appropriate to the particular context of that user. People understand Netflix through its database of movies and the ratings that they've spent time providing, not its distinct queues.

Hastings clearly isn't thinking about this from our point of view - we want to watch something, and are much less focused on the particular medium. Instead of separating the two modes, Netflix should be uniting them further - help us book cinema tickets too, or buy Blu-ray discs. Encourage us to bring in information on favourite films and TV shows from Facebook, Amazon, GetGlue. They still could do this in an exemplary way by having Netflix and Qwikster share users' information through public APIs that others could use too. Activity Streams was made for this.

Being on the users' side in this way is another disruption, and indeed several startups at TechCrunch Disrupt had this mindset - what Doc Searls's VRM project calls '4th party tools' - ones that mediate between the customer and the vendor on the customers behalf. Cake Health mediate between you and insurers, TalkTo between you and local shops, FlickMunk between you and cinemas, and u4them as a way to donate to others medical bills.

The deeper currents of disruption of the film and TV industry are showing up in music. At SF Music Tech last week, turntable.fm was on everyone's lips, as the site that has got us all sitting round playing music for each other again, like the older label execs fondly remember from the 1970s. What it has done is apply the semi-overlapping publics and sharing models of twitter to listening to music together.

The other critique of Netflix that I saw was Megan McCardle saying that they were freeloading on the studios by only paying the marginal cost. Someone has to fund the creation, she pleads with us. Again, the answer was assumed at SF Music Tech, in the form of Kickstarter, which explicitly encourages people to fund production, and not just at marginal cost either. A key part of a successful Kickstarter project is widely spaced payment options, the special deals that are really about showing support with largesse. That these are power-law distributed seems odd at first sight - why would people pay more? But in fact it makes perfect sense. Income and wealth are power-law distributed in the US too, so people can pick the level of patronage that fits their income.

Independent artists like Pomplamoose and Zoë Keating are not served by the commodity pricing of Spotify - many are removing their songs from the catalog; they'd rather host them for download themselves. Zoë reports that her Bandcamp site, which lets you pay as much as you like for an album, has received payments of $8 to $500. Because they want to support her.

Cory Doctorow once said that "If big-budget movies might turn into opera, then long-form narrative books might turn into poetry." Opera has long understood the power-law distribution of wealth, and seeks donations in the same kind of structure.

In some ways, this power-law distribution of price is visible throughout commerce in the US. You can pay anything from $1 to $5000 for a burger, with price points inbetween, similarly for housing, transport, drinks, clothing, shoes, you name it.

The old economic choice between a commodity business that's all about margins, or a fashion business that is about competing for the most popular spot is finding a new accommodation. The discovery mechanisms like Turntable, Spotify, Pandora, and yes even Netflix, need to connect to these artist empowering patronage sites, as well as the commodity playback from the industrial aggregators. They need to lead people to Kickstarter and Bandcamp too. They need to be convenient, comprehensive and supportive of those creating art.

Update:Zoë Keating on Spotify, Apple and Independents (and lettuce)

Google Plus must stop this Identity Theatre

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 05:52:43 PDT

Bruce Schneier in Beyond Fear coined a phrase:

one of the goals of a security countermeasure is to provide people with a feeling of security in addition to the reality. But some countermeasures provide the feeling of security instead of the reality. These are nothing more than security theater. They're palliative at best.

The Common Names debâcle at Google Plus is a variant of this, where the supposed protections are manifestly not working. Google's stated policy on this is that you should use your 'common name' - normatively defined to have exactly two words in it, in a naïve English speaking way, that fails in a huge number of common English cases, let alone other languages.

Vic Gundotra has said

he is trying to make sure a positive tone gets set here. Like when a restaurant doesn't allow people who aren't wearing shirts to enter.

so it is explicitly designed to exclude 'people not like us' from the space.

Early users can set the tone for a network, but one that has aspirations to include most people will need to support multiple different communities within it. If you want a positive tone, you have to work at it, and empower the tummlers to maintain it. Teresa Nielsen-Hayden put it well:

1. There can be no ongoing discourse without some degree of moderation, if only to kill off the hardcore trolls. It takes rather more moderation than that to create a complex, nuanced, civil discourse. If you want that to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden.
2. Once you have a well-established online conversation space, with enough regulars to explain the local mores to newcomers, they’ll do a lot of the policing themselves.

David Cameron should heed Douglas Adams and ORG

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 14:00:56 PDT

Widely reported today are David Cameron's comments to parliament on riots and social media:

Mr Speaker, everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media.

Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill.

[And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them.]

So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.

I have also asked the police if they need any other new powers.

(the bit in square brackets was in his press statement, but not read in the Commons)

This particular line of reasoning was magnificently rebutted by Douglas Adams in 1999:

Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.' They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans 'over a cup of tea,' though each of these was new and controversial in their day.

I was encouraged recently when the UK Govt abandoned web blocking plans in the Digital Economy Act. Understanding that the internet is there for common carriage (a mere conduit, as the EU puts it) is important. Even on its own terms this threat makes little sense: if people are plotting riots on social media, that is surely exactly the evidence you need to convict them under the UK's statutory Conspiracy law. The telephone, the M4 and cups of tea are much harder to use as sources of evidence.

The Open Rights Group, has a typically measured and thoughtful response to this.

Cameron should be careful, or he'll look to posterity like William Cobbett ranting about the pernicious evils of tea.

Should 'Money' be an adjective, not a noun?

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 00:07:43 PDT

I've been following Ben Laurie's thoughts on Bitcoin and now his new paper on An Efficient and Practical Distributed Currency.

He envisages a group of 'mintettes' that can agree on the distribution of coins, transfer them between individuals, and mint new ones, deciding between themselves how to distribute these. I like the idea of the different mintettes having different Public Good type ideas of where the newly created coins get assigned. The key here is to grow the coin supply at a rate that is lower than the growth of value held, so holders of your coinage get some appreciation, and distribute the new money to worthy causes, or to clients of that mintette.

In effect you're doing an end run around Gresham's law, in the same way that the Brazilian Real did - and not how the US Govt is doing with dollar coins. This is the bit that the libertarian summer camp got backwards - although they traded with gold, they set prices in US dollars.

We do have a precedent for this, and it is an encouraging one. In effect, each company stock is a private currency. The success of Silicon Valley has been helped by the ability of companies here to mint this money-like stuff, and distribute it to stakeholders and investors alike. The difference is that they create new tranches of 'coins' at board meetings, though stock option vesting is a bit like the smooth currency growth that Bitcoin and Ben envisage. Again the goal is growing the money supply at a rate below demand, so that those holding it are rewarded.

In effect we already have things that are more or less like currencies, and these new ones have some encouraging precedents.

Which Companion is the BBC treating us like this year?

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 11:14:40 PDT

A while back I complained that the BBC's parochial attitude that was making Neil Gaiman furtively obtain Doctor Who - expat fans were being treated like Madame de Pompadour in The Girl in the Fireplace, only getting the Doctor on DVD, after waiting long enough to die.

They solved this problem for Neil by having him write The Doctor's Wife, so he gets to carry round the series on a flash key. It almost seemed like the BBC got the message, boasting in the New York Times that the US premiere will not be delayed. But that was like the promise to Amelia Pond that they'd be right back, while we pay iTunes or Amazon for the new series, and are left sitting on our suitcase in our nightie and wellies, while nothing downloads for us.

Instead, because they fret archaically about TV ratings, we're supposed to wait 13 hours after the UK sees it, and then, like Rose in Journey's End, we're stuck in a parallel universe with a pale imitation of the Doctor - BBC America's letterboxed, pillarboxed, advertisement-infested, scenes-cut-for-time version that I truly hope Steven Moffat, Russell Davies, Neil Gaiman, and everyone else who worked so hard to imagine these adventures for us, never gets to see. It's like the Dream Lord from Amy's Choice seized control of the Tardis from us.

So what can we do? We can be like River Song in the Impossible Astronaut, and fly the Tardis properly, sweetly warn of spoilers, and get the episode from BitTorrent instead.

If the BBC were smart about this, they'd offer the diehard fans a pay-to-download package that started downloading during the UK première TV showing. If they were even smarter they'd charge a super premium to get access the same time they do the press previews the week before.

RIP Elisabeth Sladen, like us fans in the 90s, dropped off in the wrong place, with just memories and a bad robot dog to keep us going, but we held out hope and saw the Doctor again.

Ev's identity map ignores what we say

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 18:26:53 PDT

Ev Williams wrote a good blog post on identity yesterday, that I suggest you go and read. The odd thing is that he leaves out the publicly articulated thoughts that we use blogs, Twitter and other services to publish as an expression of our identity. Before I get to that, though, I'd like to connect his facets back to the open specs that represent these aspects.

Authentication

Ev mentions OpenID here, and is essentially correct that it is not helpful on its own. It was designed to verify URLs for blog comments. If all you do is use OpenID, you just replace logging into your site with logging into another, adding extra confusion without much benefit. However, once you have a URL for someone, you can then discover further information about them, by examining that URL and its links. Microformats can encode this directly in the webpage, or you can use related links to discover API endpoints for more.

The distinction between Authorization and Authentication is elided by Ev, and in practice OAuth has been winning out over OpenID as it is explicitly an Authorization APi that had Authentication as a side effect. The new OpenID Connect proposals try to remedy both these failing by using OAuth and by standardizing on how to list other endpoints.

Representation

Here Ev is looking for what is commonly called profile information. We have some mature standards for this - vCard is widely used by email clients, and is currently going through another standardization round to add modern features. The hCard microformat gives a simple way to embed profiles in web pages. Also, the rel="me" part of XFN makes it straightforward to link web pages together that represent different aspects fo your public representation. This is supported by Facebook, Twitter and Google, but sadly not by about.me whom Ev praises.

If you want a general data format for profile data, Portable Contacts is what you need.

Communication

Ev's emphasis on email addresses here illustrates the problem with them; they are primarily write-only; though we persist in using them for log-in IDs, they are not readily discoverable. The WebFinger spec gives a way round this - a way to go from an email to endpoints for other readable identity standards. Other communication standards have piggy-backed on email address, such as Jabber and Wave.

Personalization

This hints at the glaring gap in Ev's model, the expression of personal taste and preference. This is commonly done by reviewing, and we have the hReview microformat to express that, but it can also be useful just to track a history of media played or places visited to derive preferences over time. Here Activity Streams are an obvious fit, and it would be good to map such proprietary formats as Amazon purchases, Last.fm scrobbles, iTunes played songs and so on into a common format to derive this.

One model we can use for this is tagging - associating keywords with things. Many feed specs have tagging built in, and the rel="tag" microformat is a way of indicating these publicly.

Reputation

As Ev says, this is problematic, and also often highly contextual; I may trust someone's advice on restaurants without listening to them about which programming language to use. Reputation and trust are subtle, deeply human and very hard to model. The best answer here may be to rely on the power of faces and following; if we attach the face of someone we know to their public statements, we can decide for ourselves how much weight to give them.

Which brings me back to my opening point. When we decide who to pay attention to online, we tend to rely on what they say; if you get an @ reply on twitter, clicking on that person's name to see their most recent comments is hugely useful in deciding how much attention to pay to them. Similarly, the history of public blog posts, or their reviews of movies, music, books or restaurants arre other reasons we may follow them, and our identity is most strongly formed from the stories we tell and retell about ourselves. Feeds, whether in Atom, RSS or hAtom, and Activity Streams give rich representation of our thought, opinions and actions.

Whom we choose to associate with or follow is also an expression of our identity, and a useful signal when deciding how much attention to pay to someone, and XFN and Portable Contacts are both usefule in discovering these connections.

Dare Obasanjo also responded to Ev's Identity post, and added in payment as well as the friends as missed aspects. I'd love to discuss this further with both Ev and Dare at the Internet Identity Workshop next month, which is where many of the specs mentioned above were conceived and agreed. Maybe Ev can bring some others from Twitter with him too; their past contributions to OAuth were highly useful and there is plenty more to get our teeth into, as Ev's post shows.

How the w3c invented the ‘semantics’ logo

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 14:48:43 PST

Today the w3c launched an HTML5 logo, that includes sub-logos for different technologies included in or associated with the standard. Here's my parodic view of how the semantics one was made:

Jeremy is upset that they're using 'HTML5' to include CSS3, SVG, WOFF too. I've seen SVG and CSS3 versions of the logo - who's got a WOFF one?

Update: I made a version of the logo in HTML only for the purists.

Two faces of Android

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:12:46 PST

The most remarkable thing about Android is that it is the first widely adopted Open Source client operating system. It's long been clear that Open Source is the best way to preserve infrastructural code from the vicissitudes of corporate and governmental volatility, but using it for client applications has so far not taken off as well. There has often been a separation between an open source underlying layer and a proprietary user experience that is built atop it.

Android does follow this pattern to some extent - the underlying OS code is fully Open Source under an Apache License, so anyone can bend it to their own uses, but in order to get the "with Google" logo on your device, you need to conform to Google's Compatibility Definition Document. That has changed over time; for example the 2.1 version specifies that your device MUST have a camera and 1.6 requires telephony.

If you do this, you might then get access to what I call the top half of Android - the closed source Google apps that integrate the device closely with their web services - Contacts, GMail, Talk, Android Market, Google Maps, Navigation, Listen, Earth, Places and so on. However, this requires an explicit partnership with Google.

The fascinating thing here is that there is already a Cambrian Explosion of new Android devices going on in China and India. You can buy iPad lookalikes, things that look like a huge iPod, TV-based video game systems and more that run Android, often for under $100. I fully expect most digital photo frames and mp3 players being built this year will end up running some form of Android, with cameras following on too.

This means that more and more devices will be naturally web-connected, able to run browsers, and to plug into web publishing ecosystems naturally - the Android Intent model means that Apps can plug together neatly, and replace system features if desired.

However, a lot of the day-to day utility of an Android device is in the proprietary, partners-only layer - that you only get after doing a business development deal with Google of some kind. What we will start to see is alternatives for these Applications being developed. To some extent we're already seeing this from US carriers, but I think this year we'll see both an Open Source suite of apps to swap in many of these functions, and other proprietary offerings to compete with the Google upper half.

Who could build such a suite? Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft clearly have most of the necessary pieces, but how about Baidu, Tencent, Vkontakte or other companies with strong regional ties?

Now we have a truly Open consumer OS, a world of possibilities open up.

Firesheep, enterprise software and other broken models

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 00:28:59 PST

There has been a lot of fuss about FireSheep, a browser plugin that show how easy it is to intercept packets on the internet, and masquerade as someone else. The idea is nothing new: EtherPeg—which intercepts wifi traffic and shows the JPEGs and other images passing by—is over 10 years old. Annalee Newitz wrote a Wired story on people packet sniffing in coffee shops back in 2004.

The underlying design of the internet means that you don't know who will be able to see any packets you send. If you care about not being snooped on, you need an encrypted connection from your computer to the one serving you at the other end. The best way to do this on the web is to use HTTPS, which all browsers support, and most servers support with configuration changes. It's not perfect, but it's good enough.

However, much of the advice following on from FireSheep was misleading or outright wrong. I saw several articles saying:

Avoid Open WiFi
Turn on WPA encryption
Use a VPN to tunnel the traffic into a server elsewhere

These techniques may protect for a while against those nearby you in the Café, but by not securing the whole connection, they just change who is able to intercept your communications.

The security model here is the firewall one - the notion that there are trusted networks and untrusted networks, and as long as you're inside a trusted one, you'll be OK. This is an obsolete worldview. When computers were large fixed physical entities with software controlled by a specialist, and networks were wires under their control too, this had some correspondence with reality, but it was always tenuous - others within the firewall could be running compromised machines; outbound connections could still leak data.

If you VPN into a company or service to mask your outbound connections, that endpoint is an attractive point of attack, as it has collected a set of people who think their data needs securing. There's a clear example of this in this NYT article about a hacker who lured his friends to use an FBI VPN to track them down and arrest them.

This worldview connects with two other themes. The US Government is trying to pass a law requiring ISPs to enable your communications to be intercepted. The UK government is also working on legislation on retaining all email and web traffic. Similarly, many companies monitor internet traffic within and leaving their secure networks for legal compliance and employee monitoring. Such mandated backdoors, like the VPN tunnel, become attractive targets for other bad actors - remember the Greek government being spied on through a legally mandated interception backdoor in the phones they used?

This week, I spent a couple of days at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, hearing how open standards like Activity Streams and OpenSocial are being used to bridge separate business information systems both within and between companies, with OAuth used to enforce corporate policy.

This seems anathema to old-line IT managers who assume that they dictate who gets to see what, but the pragmatic realisation that many business people have more powerful and connected computing devices in their pockets as phones than on their desks from corporate IT was in evidence at E2.0 at least.

This brought to mind the great conversation we had with Josh Klein on TummelVision last week, discussing his book Hacking Work - breaking stupid rules for smart results:

one of the most common hacks we found: jumping IT’s firewall and working around their restrictions and tools in open computing environments, then bringing the work back over the firewall and presenting it to bosses as if the corporate tools had actually been used.

Ben Horowitz's article on enterprise sales in TechCrunch today tries to justify corporate practices, even as he recognizes the inversion of the innovation flow.

What this misses is the underlying economic justification for the existence of a corporation in the first place - the economic theories that build on Coase's work saying that firms exist because transaction costs are lower within them than external transactions mediated by the marketplaces. Pettifogging internal purchasing rules should be subject to this test: does the internal transaction cost of approving and purchasing something exceed the value of the thing being purchased?

Reading Ben's explanation of how corporate salespeople help institutions negotiate their own labyrinthine processes, I couldn't help but be reminded of John Hagel's Big Shift model, (also discussed on TummelVision), which continues to show a declining return on assets for corporations.

The challenge we have on the web is to maintain the kinds of open-to-all interoperable standards that empower us to work round these creaking bureaucracies. If we delegate our online identities to a few firms operating proprietary APIs, that they can revoke access to, or decide who can call them for reasons of corporate strategy, the lowered transaction costs suddenly get very high again.

Doc Searls's work on VRM (this week's TummelVision) is all about making sure that we can retain agency over our own information. I expect to discuss this in depth at Defrag next week.

Geek Cinema: 'The Social Network' vs 'The Man in the White Suit'

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 17:53:52 PDT

I recently watched a film that dramatically evoked the disruption caused by geeky inventors, the difficulties they have getting funded, and the forces that combine to oppose them in the name of the status quo.

Sadly, this wasn't at last night's showing of The Social Network, but watching the 1951 Ealing comedy The Man In The White Suit on my phone while flying home.

The Social Network has zinging dialogue, tilt-shift rowing at Henley, and has lawyers as its most sympathetic characters. Most of its humour comes from heavy-handed prefiguring of Facebook's eventual success; clearly you can't spoil the ending, so the trailer just recaps the whole film:

The opening hacking scene, dramatized almost verbatim from Zuckerberg's blog at the time, is perhaps the best 'using a computer' scene in a movie yet - Mark should get a screenwriting credit. But the mythical girlfriend who dumped him and his reactions to that - 'cyberbullying', seeking fame, plaintively hitting refresh on the friend request - that frame the film are a disappointing narrative touch that duck the chance to try to explain his real motivation. Apart from the lawyer, all the women in this film are purely sex objects - when Zuck is asked 'What are the girls going to do?' and replies 'Nothing', that's clearly Sorkin talking.

In contrast, The Man in the White Suit has Alec Guinness inventing a monomolecular fibre that can't break and naturally repels dirt. To do this he has to get to work into labs at textile factories under false pretenses, and when he eventually succeeds, provokes a hostile reaction from both the factory owners and the unionized employees, who want to suppress his work. If you haven't seen it, Amazon and Netflix have it.

Here, the motivation to invent something new and exciting is expressed well, and the technology behind it is plausibly explained. Guinness inspires Joan Greenwood with his idea, and she researches it and champions him to get his work funded. The women in this sixty-year-old film are well-drawn characters, with motivations of their own. They are peers and colleagues to Guinness's Stanley, not sex objects; indeed that is directly challenged. The film is stronger and more emotionally powerful for it.

Both films capture the ascetic geek intensity and focus well, but Sorkin and Fincher want to tear it down, whereas MacDougal and MacKendrick see the Innovators Dilemma clearly 45 years before Christensen did. As Lessig says, The Social Network portrays a legal system that preys on invention, not supporting it; the Man in the White Suit has the inventor's notebooks establishing rights that he needs to be paid for.

Conversely, to get his invention out to people, Stanley needs to convince the very industry he is disrupting to adopt it, whereas the existence of the Internet and it's open protocols mean that Zuckerberg was able to get his idea adopted by thousands with a small loan from a friend.

Technology has made a lot of progress in 60 years, but judging by this new film, law and women's roles have gone backwards.

The Slutsky vanishes - Google Instant has a smutty mind

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 08:13:05 PDT

At the Google Instant Launch on Wednesday, I ran into my former colleague, the writer and internet famous video star Irina Slutsky. We sat together, and so naturally when we were trying out Google Instant during the launch, I tried typing her name in. And an odd thing happened - Google whited out the Instant search results.

Irina asked about this, and Johanna Wright of Google replied that they white out some words related to sex and hate speech, in case inappropriate results appeared for people who weren't expecting it. 'Slut' is one of these words, but it is not clear at all why 'Slutsky' is.

I already wrote about my concerns that Google's predictive words could narrow the range of searched-for terms into clichés - that as you type Google, in Stoppard's words, is

announcing every stale revelation of the newly enlightened, like stout Cortez coming upon the Pacific — war is profits, politicians are puppets, Parliament is a farce, justice is a fraud, property is theft… It’s all here: the Stock Exchange, the arms dealers, the press barons… You can’t fool Brodie — patriotism is propaganda, religion is a con trick, royalty is an anachronism… Pages and pages of it. It’s like being run over very slowly by a travelling freak show of favourite simpletons, the India rubber pedagogue, the midget intellectual, the human panacea…

At least these suggestions are based on integrating over the text of the web; the words that get the silent whiteout treatment seem to have been chosen by a committee though, and clearly an American one at that, as it whites out 'ass' but not 'arse, 'shit' but not 'shite', 'slut' but not 'slag' and so on (I didn't type every smutty British slang word in, life is too short).

However, the modern-day Bowdlers at Google don't white you out based on what you type, but on what they predict you're going to type.

If I type 'blue-footed' - it predicts I'm typing 'blue-foooted booby' and as 'boobies' is an Official Google Smutty Word, my search goes white (in fact 'blue-foo' is enough).

Similarly, typing 'turn again d' implies 'turn again Dick Whittington', and 'dick' is a an Official Google Smutty Word.

The same is true for Irina -so shocking is her last name that all you have to type is 'irina sl' and the Google whiteout erases her from results.

Weirdly, if you type 'who killed cock' it is completed to 'who killed cock-robin' with a hyphen inserted, which implies someone has edited the auto-complete list manually.

My worldview and sense of appropriateness is probably close enough to Google's committee that I'm not going to be too bothered by this, but I do wonder about them deciding what the norms of speech are for everyone in the world.

If Google predicts your future, will it be a cliché?

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:50:57 PDT

I wonder if Michael Frayn saw the launch of Google Scribe today, and smiled to himself. In 1965, Frayn wrote a book The Tin Men, which featured a mechanism that wrote newspaper articles by joining together clichéd phrases through a small number of rules.

There's an explanatory extract from it in this discussion of why you should avoid clichés when writing Poetry.

George Orwell, in Politics and the English Language, described this way of writing:

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier—even quicker, once you have the habit—to say “In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that” than to say “I think”. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry—when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech—it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like “a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind” or ”a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent” will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump.

Clearly, Google Scribe has been trained on the vast corpus of English language text that is also used for Google Translate to come up with plausible sentence fragments. Equally clearly, that means it is bound to be plucking phrases that have been written before out of the web for you, and favouring those that have been said most often. It won't come up with a crisp, resoundingly clear phrase for you, unless it has already been said many times before.

The most likely words to follow “clocks were” now, according to Google, are “striking thirteen”. I hope Orwell would appreciate the irony.

Now, this is amusing in itself, but it is also indicative of a wider problem. If you've done much web searching for, say, home maintenance tips, you'll see a lot of prose that has either been written by a machine of this type, or by poorly paid human writers who use a very similar compositional process. We have a kind of mutated Turing Test going on all around us, where robotic writers are trying to convince robotic readers that they are human, and their stilted prose is worth presenting to the real people searching. Of course, the robots are searching too, to get the source material that is fed into their word mills to create this shambling facsimile of human prose.

It may be impressive that computers can now write bad prose like so many people do, but I do wonder about Eric Schmidt's grand vision of Google predicting what we will want to do before we think of it ourselves. Will it in fact be what we wanted, or will it be a mishmash of expected behaviours, that we'll regret on our deathbeds?

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled.

A scene in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing sums this up well:

He’s a lout with language. I can’t help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech… Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more, and Brodie knocks corners off without knowing he’s doing it. So everything he writes is jerry-built. It’s rubbish. An intelligent child could push it over. I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.

People are used to typing questions into a box on Google and getting a machine's suggestions. Increasingly though, they're typing emotions into a box on Twitter or Facebook, and getting a human response instead.

Welcome Apple, seriously

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:32:46 PDT

Yesterday's update of iTunes added Ping, a music-focused social network. When I tried it out early in the evening, it had Facebook Connect enabled, and both imported friends from Facebook, and notified me when new ones joined. Shortly afterwards, Mark Zuckerberg joined, and shortly after that the Facebook connection was missing.
This morning, neither company is talking on the record, though Kara Swisher reports that Steve Jobs complained about 'onerous terms' from Facebook.

This naturally reminds me of the problems we had with Google Friend Connect, where Facebook's accusation of a ToS violation was never backed up by an explanation of what would not violate the terms, leading to the "Data Roach Motel" accusations at Supernova. The underlying issue is whether you should give another company veto power over your application. Last time I wrote on this, it was Apple's veto I was warning about, though at the same time Apple was trying to avoid giving Adobe veto power over their platform again.

The thing is, we have been round this cycle before, and the answer is known too - the way to interoperate with another company without having to have a business agreement with them is to use open standards, not proprietary APIs.

Apple knows this - they have helped lead development of HTML5 and WebKit, along with many other standards in the past, including podcasting and MPEG4. Facebook knows this too, and they have been strong supporters of OAuth and Activity Streams, and even of Portable Contacts, when it's them doing the importing.

Clearly it good for us as users to be able to delegate our contact lists to an existing source - this weeks launch of conference sharing site Lanyrd shows that. It's also in our interests to be able to propagate the actions of playing, liking and purchasing music, videos and anything else between sites of our choosing, so that we can share with our friends, and so we can get more useful recommendations for the future (at minimum, not suggesting things we already have).

This was the core of the discussion at the VRM Workshop last week in Boston - that we should control over who sees what about us, and I think that with these common standards we can solve both problems - the individuals get to save having to re-enter their information everywhere, and control what flows to where, and the companies get the ability to interoperate without bizdev and single source lock-in. Activity Streams (and the associated standards they build on) are our best hope for this.

Steve Jobs and the Curate's Egg

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 11:26:16 PST

The word 'curation' has become popular recently in the tech world to describe what I call mutual media - the way, by reading many things and passing on a few of them, that we mediate the world of information for each other. As m'colleague JP Rangaswami says, "Curators add to relevance by stripping away the irrelevant and the unneeded and the shoddy."

However, there is a move to co-opt this useful term into a new form of centralised control. Sarah Rotman of Forrester defines 'curated computing' as:

A mode of computing where choice is constrained to deliver less complex, more relevant experiences.

Given Forrester's background, expect this 'curated computing' idea to be used to justify IT departments preventing corporate users from using applications they choose any day now.

At the D Conference last week, Steve Jobs embraced this term, referring to a 'curated app store'.

This definition moves the idea of curation from democratic to hierarchical - our choice becomes take it or leave it. As Jobs said

Things are packages, of emphasis. Some things are emphasised in a product, some things are not done as well in a product, some things are chosen not to be done at all in a product.

This reminds me of the classic 'Curate's Egg' cartoon:
Bishop: "I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr Jones";
Curate: "Oh, no, my Lord, I assure you that parts of it are excellent!"

When choosing what features go into Apple Products, of course Jobs gets to decide this; it is indeed a great skill. However, when offering technology platforms for others to build businesses on, this is more problematic.

While talking about Flash on the iPad, Jobs said:

A more popular developer environment was HyperCard, we were OK to axe that[...] Hypercard was huge in it's day because it was accessible to anybody

Indeed it was - many people miss it; Dale Dougherty says he wants a HyperCard for the iPad. I don't think he does.

When Steve Jobs's Apple cancelled the HyperCard in QuickTime project, all the people who had built businesses on it could do was plead with Apple, to no avail.

As Jobs himself says, we have a platform to build on for the future - it is HTML5. It's an emerging standard that is not under the control of any one company, but is built on the Web as agreement. And even Steve Jobs can't stop it.

Dandelions and Viruses

podcast@epeus.com (Kevin Marks) — Fri, 21 May 2010 18:48:28 PDT

Last week, Betsy Aoki tweeted:

Sick visual around how content is passed around - organic=dandelion, and then the spam marketing campaign (cancery clumps) #w2eless than a minute ago via webBetsy Aoki
BAoki

This intrigued me, as I had used Dandelion and Virus analogies talking about the social web 2 years ago and used these pictures:

Organic dandelion versus virus

And here's Paul Yiu's slide Betsy was looking at (number 8 in this deck):

Looks like a case of metaphors converging.