Mark Trapp. Blog.

Dr. Private Message

Mark Trapp — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:54:42 +0000

Bottom Line: We ought not to fear because the problem of private messages is too hard: we ought to fear because we've already solved them yet won't use that knowledge.

Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the web

Today, Alexander Van Elsas had a sort of 95 Thesis/20 Questions amalgam about a host of issues involving the state of the internet today. One set of questions provoked a couple points of discussion from Rob Diana and John Bredehoft:

Networks and destinations

If everything becomes open and connected, what will happen to the big destinations?

Why is the web rapidly evolving into uncountable databases with connections, instead of one database where everything connects?

If all services and destinations become open, then what is the point in being a destination site in the first place?

Why are we creating webs within webs, instead of one network that connects it all?

Rob Diana suggests that your email inbox might be the gateway for all of these siloed communication systems, or that the messages from these systems might be pushed to one specific user destination (be it email or something else, like a cell phone).

John Bredehoft, in a comment to Rob's post, argued that we need to have multiple destinations, as each destination is a context in and of itself: one communicates with FriendFeed friends on FriendFeed, or Facebook friends on Facebook, or email friends through email, to ensure maximal participation.

John and Rob touch on two parts of the greater communications problem, but there's something unsatisfying in both of their answers, especially as it relates to Alexander's final question: why are we creating webs within webs, instead of one network that connects it all? I think the answer to this question is likely a house of cards: we should be creating a network by which we can tie these all together. A revolution? Not really: this is the foundation of many of the oldest communication systems on the block: DNS, telephony, and email.

United Federation of Messages

Federation, a term that seemed to come into vogue with the rise of XMPP, describes a concept that's been around for decades, long before web 2.0, and long before there was an internet. It basically entails the following:

There is one standard, vetted by the community, by which all participants should conform. Some parts of the standard should be baseline: all participants must implement it. Other parts of the standard might be implemented by many or few of the participants.
All destinations have a largely unique piece of information to identify themselves to the greater network of participants. For email, it's your email address. For DNS, it's a name server. For telephony, it's a phone number.
The standard must identify the logical path a participant must take in order to reach a uniquely identified destination. In most instances, this is a concept called routing and it identifies computers (routers) that will relay messages to other computers to ensure messages reach the proper destination.

Federation works brilliantly. Because of these three criteria, I can set up a computer made of scrap parts in my bedroom that can send email to anyone in the world and serve DNS. It doesn't matter who participates: everyone has more or less equal access to everyone else. This is a concept called network neutrality. You may have heard about political issues involving this: it's currently a right protected by most governments because of the value of federation.

Facebook is not the standard

Somehow, the concepts of network neutrality and federation have been lost with the rise of web 2.0: even though everyone talks about "open APIs", "transparency", and other buzzwords, nothing really talks to each other. Each system implements its own standard, and leaves it up to everyone else to figure out if and how they want to communicate with that system.

To use email as an example: imagine having 100 competing systems of email where none of them talk to each other. You have to have 100 different email addresses in order for it to work. Some enterprising individuals have come up with ways to link email addresses together (so you can have one email address), but it only works on about 5 of the email systems, and requires you registering yet another email addresses (so now you have 101).

We're into silly territory, but this is the state of the web, and more importantly, messaging, today. But this problem has already been solved, over and over again: there's no reason to come up with a completely new method for handling the multitude problem.

Where has the cabal gone?

Attempts at interoperability, via "standards" like OpenID, OpenSocial, OpenMicroBlogging, are primitive and re-imagine tried and true concepts. A lot of times, the advocacy of such technology feels like a guy marveling at his ability to make a fire (which he claims he invented, and calls it OpenMiracleLight) a thousand years after fire was perfected and turned into all sorts of useful things, like heating and electricity.

Back in the 70s and 80s, there were tons of smart people who came up with the standards for the backbones of technology we use today: what happened to them? Why isn't their work being used to progress the web?

They say those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it: why do we need to keep resolving the same problems?

Real-time Killed the Web 2.0 Star

Mark Trapp — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 23:40:04 +0000

Bottom Line: The real-time web renders the old web 2.0 convention of following tons of people obsolete: filters replace follows, and trying to maintain the old order will break your user experience of what's to come.

Today, FriendFeed unveiled a redesign of its product, focusing on real-time communication as a principle design goal. Expectedly, there are more than a few detractors of the decision to place real-time at the forefront (see Steven Hodson's post on Inquisitr, Michael Arrington's post on TechCrunch, or do a search on FriendFeed). I think they're stuck in a paradigm that's lasted for years that real-time has now rendered obsolete: the "follow."

Dunbar Was Right, Scoble Was Wrong

One staple of social psychology is the concept of Dunbar's Number: that there's a cognitive limit to the amount of people with which we can hold stable social relationships. The upper bound for this is thought to be somewhere around 150, but it's not hard to find thousands, if not millions, of people in social networks and services following or friending well beyond that limit.

A few weeks ago, Hutch Carpenter wrote a great article on how social relationships may be changing to incorporate far more people than Dunbar's number: that we use the follow relationship as a means to discover new content and track interests rather than as a means to follow people in the normal sense of the word. Instead of Dunbar's number, we should be focusing on Scoble's Number: the number of people you can follow that captures what you're interested in. This is a great hypothesis, and has great explanatory power in the normal web 2.0 world. Robert Scoble has talked about how he uses his "friends" to keep track on trends and find new stuff.

The problem is that this breaks down in the real-time world: content comes in too quickly, and it is very difficult to find anything that's of any use. Following hundreds or thousands of people in real-time prevents the cognitive absorption of information. Instead of finding the diamonds in the rough that you'd normally miss if you didn't follow lots of people, you instead can't find anything. Utilizing a network of hundreds of people to filter the good stuff just compounds the problem.

It's a Follow Problem, Not a Filter Problem

This is where filters come in: real-time filtering solves the information discovery problem far better than the kludge of following people with diverse interests. I don't need to follow a person to find out about the interesting bits they're sharing: I can monitor, in real time, based on semantic data. FriendFeed, in its new version, provides this, and it's merely the beginning. Filters will become far more powerful and provide far more targetted information that a social graph could ever produce.

Real-time Mimics Real-World

So where does this leave the social graph? I mentioned it on FriendFeed, but I think we're now much closer to how the real world works than anything else, and it's a sign of things to come. In real life, we don't go around making friends with everyone in hopes of getting some sort of information: we have close networks based on shared life experiences, and we use those close networks to experience a lot of stuff outside of our own worldview. A friend may invite you to a party, or tell you about their life, or catch up with you about things you've neglected that are personal to you. We use filters, in various forms, to get information about the rest: newspaper sections, TV channels, college courses, and so on.

Wrapping Up

FriendFeed, in its new form, is not perfect, but it's closer to capturing our natural methods of acquiring information than anything else out there. It's a sign of things to come: if you're a person like Robert Scoble, you're going to have to forget about following a thousand, 10,000, or 50,000 people; instead, start thinking about how to filter the infinite amount of information out there to things that interest you. Set up your information and entertainment channels and stop using people as if they were news feeds.

MG Siegler on VentureBeat had a great article today about this change, quoting Top Gun:

Instead, I’ll just quote a line from Top Gun that speaks to why I love the new FriendFeed: I feel the need — the need for speed.

Look, information happens in real time. One of the reasons the web has exploded in popularity is because it gives you access to more information, faster than ever before. This new version of FriendFeed does the exact same thing, to the extreme — it’s wonderful. Are people really complaining that we should slow the information down? It may be a bit extreme to say, but that really is a form of censorship. Don’t slow the information down, tweak the way you consume it.

In keeping with the go-go 80s metaphors, it's a real-time world, and I'm just a real-time girl.

URL Shorteners Are Playing with Fire

Mark Trapp — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 16:24:08 +0000

Bottom Line: URL shorteners, due to their very nature, may be on borrowed time. One step by Google and the entire industry collapses like the house of cards it is.

Yesterday, Joshua Schachter had an excellent piece on the perils of the URL shortener: it's clear, concise, and scathing. Jason Kottke and Dave Winer had a few suggestions on how to mitigate the problem, or get us on the right track to eventually deprecating the use of URL shorteners.

I agree with Schachter's assessment, and I think Kottke and Winer are on the right track, but I think the URL shortener problem is far greater than what Schachter enumerates: no longer satisfied with controlling the initial click, URL shorteners have decided to add toolbars to promote ther content or to sell adspace: the most notable and recent addition to this group is Digg's toolbar, DiggBar. Dubious utility aside, they are trampling in the garden of an angry god.

The 800lb Gorilla: Google

For better or for worse, all things link-related must pass Google's standards. Google's search engine depends on high quality, relevant results determined, in no small part, in how the web links together. It's something Google protects with its blacklisting policy: you do something Google doesn't like, and your links disappear from Google's index. It's as if they didn't exist at all.

Although it sounds like the 21st Century equivalent of Big Brother, they do at least give a clear indication of what is not acceptable, so you can avoid doing it if you want to play nice with Google. You follow those, you're probably in favor with Google.

The Doorway Page

But in reflecting upon the topic of toolbar URL shorteners, there's one set of policies that caught my attention, on cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects, and doorway pages:

Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our webmaster guidelines.

Google's aim is to give our users the most valuable and relevant search results. Therefore, we frown on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the ones they selected, and that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines. Google may take action on doorway sites and other sites making use of these deceptive practice, including removing these sites from the Google index.

It seems to me the toolbar URL shorteners are treading dangerously close to Google's definition of a "doorway page:" all it takes is Google to classify them as such and Digg, of all sites, disappears from Google's index. Think of that concept: Digg, by far, gets most of its traffic from organic search results. Why would they even risk it?

Wrapping Up

While I agree with Schachter, Kottke, and Winer about the problems of URL shortening, I think those of us against the practice of URL shorteners (and at least for me personally, especially the use of toolbar URL shorteners) could soon have a powerful friend in Google. One step by Google towards classifying URL shorterners would mark the death of the practice: I'm not sure it's worth the risk for any of us to use them.

All Likes Are Not Created Equal

Mark Trapp — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 01:24:23 +0000

Bottom Line: Facebook still doesn't hold a torch to the basic user experience of FriendFeed not because it isn't trying, but because of the rules it's decided to play by.

Recently, Facebook released a feature in its newsfeed that allows people to "like" newsfeed items. As it's described by Facebook's program manager Leah Pearlman, the feature allows you to tell your friends you approve of what they posted:

This is similar to how you might rate a restaurant on a reviews site. If you go to the restaurant and have a great time, you may want to rate it 5 stars. But if you had a particularly delicious dish there and want to rave about it, you can write a review detailing what you liked about the restaurant. We think of the new "Like" feature to be the stars, and the comments to be the review.

This feature prima face copies FriendFeed's "like" functionality, right down to the interaction and the verbage. Not surprisingly, FriendFeed's supporters were outraged and appalled at Facebook's Machievellian drive to copy FriendFeed. But I think it's important to take a step back and talk about the value of a "like".

"This is interesting" vs. "I approve of this"

What most people seem to miss in the analysis of Facebook's latest feature is how different it is, in both intent and implementation, from FriendFeed's feature. It uses the same word, and lets the poster know you liked the story, but FriendFeed does something more: it shares that story to everyone that's subscribed to you.

Why is this important? FriendFeed's like acts as a means to rapidly disseminate things you find interestng with people. Think about Robert Scoble's 2,000-hour project: he's not just telling all those people that he approves of what they posted, he's telling his 20,000+ followers that they should check it out because Robert finds it interesting. That's true power and knowledge sharing.

Facebook's implementation of the "like" is for one thing only: to tell your friend (and others) that you approve of what your friend posted. While it makes you and your friend feel good, what value does it have to the social aspect of the newsfeed? If you like the story so much, wouldn't you want to share it with people?

Think about a real life interaction: say your best friend tells you they just got engaged. That's important! I'd be telling everyone about it. But Facebook doesn't capture that. It lets you tell your friend "cool." and walk away. I guess there's a small token value to that, but it's not capturing an important part of the power of social media.

FriendFeed's Like is Safe

What's great for FriendFeed about this difference is that this isn't merely an oversight of Facebook, to be corrected later. Facebook's privacy culture, which holds people's privacy as sacrosanct, prevents the FriendFeed like from ever occurring. While it's great for the average Facebooker concerned about privacy, it relegates Facebook's offering to a mere novelty gimmick, destined to the same fate as the superpoke.

Main photo credit: Nono Farahshila (Flickr)

My Perfect FriendFeed: Meme-less

Mark Trapp — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 23:10:51 +0000

Bottom Line: FriendFeed should not be work to use constructively. Better filtering tools, and more predictive tools, would elevate FriendFeed beyond the goof-off place it is today.

A couple weeks ago, one of the founders of FriendFeed, Paul Buchheit, asked the world their ideas on the perfect FriendFeed. I've been thinking about this since then, and there are a few standbys: I'd like better filtering options, I'd like to be able to have Tumblr treated like a blog, I'd like a native FriendFeed iPhone client that has 100% of the functionality of the website, and others. But these are either vague, or non-critical to my usage of FriendFeed. I could live without a good iPhone client. And what do I mean "better filtering options?"

Memes

By better filtering options, I really am trying to remove one "type" of thing from my feed: memes. I know there are a lot of people who love them, but I don't. I don't find memes to be a particularly valuable or useful phenomenon on the internet: I want to find new information, not 300 variations of a topic. So, what I would love to see FriendFeed somehow tackle is memeing: identify when a meme is going down, and block it, either for me or universally. "Blocking" may be too strong of a word: it could be handled like a hide, or even like other inflammatory discussions, where they simply don't get bumped up to the top of people's feeds.

It'd be really awesome if this was automatic: the moment there's a spike in "25 things" posts, institute the block. However, a poor man's version could be a keyword block. If I could hide or block things with keywords, it'd probably accomplish the same thing, albeit with more work.

Less work, more fun

The tried and true standby of those who respond to people like me who complain about content is "if you don't like it, hide it." Hiding is work. Having to read something, identify if it's valuable, then take an action to hide it is robbing me of time I could be spent doing something else. One hide is negligible, 10 hides is annoying, 100, 1000, or 10,000 hides is insanity. How much time have we lost individually hiding things on FriendFeed or manually managing lists and subscriptions? It shouldn't be so time consuming to derive value from FriendFeed: I think this time sink is what gives FriendFeed an air of "this place isn't for serious business," which is a shame. I don't want a game, I want a tool to augment my online use.

Updated: Yes, it's a Free country

In responding to some of the initial reactions to this post, I realize I didn't fully elucidate a big distinction of mine: I don't want to limit people's abilities to use FriendFeed however they want. You want to spend your time answering questions and filling out surveys and posting lolcats? More power to you. What I am saying is that it should be a lot easier for people not interested in those things to filter that out: FriendFeed could be much more useful to them if it was.

BuddyFeed, a Native FriendFeed Client

Mark Trapp — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:56:52 +0000

Bottom Line: BuddyFeed is a promising native iPhone client for FriendFeed, but there are a few things it fails to handle which probably makes it a non-starter for most people, even for its relatively small price tag of 99 cents.

One of the things that's been missing from FriendFeed has been a native iPhone client. Sure, there's the iPhone version of the website, and there's FFToGo, but they both miss a lot of administrative features of FriendFeed and don't provide the lustery UI of a native app. Recently, a third-party FriendFeed iPhone app came out called BuddyFeed. It's promising, but there are a few things it fails to handle which probably makes it a non-starter for most people, even for its relatively small price tag of 99 cents. It also has a few UI failures that really need to be addressed.

Overview

For screenshots, check out the Flickr photo album.

Like all good third-party FriendFeed clients, BuddyFeed asks for your username and remote key, indicating it's working off the standard, third-party API FriendFeed provides and not off of some magical scraping technique. This is great for users who are wary of giving their authentication information to third parties, but it also highlights just how far BuddyFeed is able to go: if FriendFeed doesn't provide it, BuddyFeed can't do it. A FriendFeed client written by FriendFeed itself probably won't have those same restrictions.

The UI is pretty standard iPhone app fare: which is a Good Thing. Most functions are available from a single click or within 2 clicks. You can subscribe and unsusbscribe from people (something you can't do on the FriendFeed iPhone website or FF2Go), get to your rooms, see your own feed, see your likes and comments, and post messsages (including messages while using the built-in iPhone camera). However, there are two glaring omissions:

No hiding, no lists

Two of FriendFeed's main features for filtering your stream, hiding and lists, are completely missing from BuddyFeed. I've seen these missing from other third-party FriendFeed apps, so I wonder how much that has to do with the third-party API BuddyFeed uses. Regardless of the cause, the lack of hide support breaks FriendFeed in a big way, and the lack of lists is a sorely missed feature from FriendFeed proper.

Quirky User Interface

BuddyFeed also suffers from some really odd UI quirks. In order to see comments and likes, or to make your own comment or like, you can't just feed item a story, you have to touch the feed item in the lower right hand corner, in an unmarked area. If you don't, the feed item goes to whatever it was linked to (for example, an external webpage).

The other big failure is the choice of icon for the comment function: it's a "go back" arrow. It took me a while, and a blind guess, to divine that the arrow meant "comment." It really needs to be changed.

Conclusion

BuddyFeed looks pretty promising, and the lack of lists and the odd UI choices are forgivable, but the lack of hide support is not. If you use FriendFeed at all on a regular basis, the lack of hide is probably going to stop this show.

Update: Robin Lu, the developer of BuddyFeed, just sent me this response:

Hi Mark,

Great thanks for trying the app and giving all the suggestions.

The "hide" setting will be honored in the next version.

"List" support will be added for the next version.

The icon is the native one for "Reply". You may find the same icon in the "Mail" for replying the mail. Maybe I should change it to the one as "Post".

Best Regards, Robin Lu

Sounds good to me. Here's to the next version!

Twitter vs. the Business-to-Business Model

Mark Trapp — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:07:26 +0000

Bottom Line: The value of social media for the business-to-business model, especially as we start to look at who participates in social media and who the decision makers are, is unclear. What do you think?

Over the past couple of days, I've been thinking about Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing as it relates to social media, and truth be told, I'm lost. Rather than go into a rant about how the internet's wronged me today, or try to get into a lesson about an abstract concept, I'm going to go through my take on the state of B2B social media marketing and pass it off to you, the reader.

Businesses are not individuals

One of the key concepts in social media is the emphasis on the individual: rather than talking to, or marketing to, large swathes of the population, you can interact with indivudual customers. This is great: for Business-to-Consumer strategies. But what about B2B? This is where the value of social media breaks down for me. I can see maintaining a blog: it allows you to keep your message out there and provides great SEO value. But if you're not targetting individuals at all, what's the point of Twitter? Or Facebook? Or FriendFeed? Or any other individual-based social network?

The decision makers are too old for Facebook

One counter to the above is that businesses don't really talk to each other: it's individual decision makers, and those people could be using social media to keep in touch. But in reality, I wonder how much that is the case. The average executive age is 53, and there's a substantial generational gap for social media. What's the average age of a Facebook user? It's probably under 35.

Even disregarding the generational gap in social media, there's something odd and unproductive about having decision makers hash complex B2B deals on social media. In the back of my mind, I've tried to picture Steve Ballmer and Jerry Yang working out a buyout deal over Twitter, and it's just awkward. I mean, come on:

B2B deals are large, complex, and time-consuming processes. 140 characters don't cut it, and the lack of a respect of privacy, at least in principle, is a problem. So where do these great social media tools fit in? How do you justify telling a B2B company that they can't afford to miss out on social media?

Short-term failure, long term success?

The one value I can see clearly with investing time and effort is to prepare for the next generation of executives, managers, and other decision makers. As scary as it sounds, there are people entering the workforce now who have spent their entire adult lives with Facebook, nevermind the increasing amount of the population who have never known a pre-Internet world. It would be remiss not to be talking to them using the same tools they use. But that's in 10 years or so: most social media addicts are in their 20s, or even younger; most executives are over 40.

So the value isn't really in an action item for businesses, but for them to be hiring people with minimal skill sets in the future: somewhat like knowing how to use email or Microsoft Office. But what about the short-term and medium-term (less than 10 years)?

I'm interested in your thoughts on this: let me know in the comments.

Testing, Testing, 1-2-3

Mark Trapp — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:58:32 +0000

Bottom Line: Before testing out the latest shiny toy, take a few minutes and ask yourself a few pointed questions about whether or not it's a Good Idea.

This weekend, Twitter was the target of an extensive phishing campaign and a shady 3rd-party app that sold all its user data. Thousands of people were affected, and even the celebrities and news organizations were not spared. On FriendFeed, a 3rd-party application was introduced last night that produced unintended results: this week should serve as an indicator that we, as early adopters, need to take off our blinders and realize we need to add some thought before we try things out.

Phishing: yes, it'll happen to you.

On Saturday, a new Twitter-based app came out: it promised to send you all of your replies to your email. How genius is that? All it asked was for your Twitter user-name and password, and whether or not you want to support the project. Of course I want to support such an awesome project! Well, it wasn't stated that "supporting" the project meant sending out a tweet advertisement as if it came from you. It also didn't state that it'd sell your data within 24 hours for the lofty sum of $1,200.

I'm really serious about the Phishing thing.

On Sunday, a Twitter direct message-based phishing scam broke loose, targeting thousands of Twitter and Facebook users. Within hours, not only were thousands of Regular Joe users taken advantage of, but also celebrities and news organizations like Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Fox News, and CNN's Rick Sanchez. The deception was simple, and it followed the standard phishing scheme we should all fear from banking: the scammer created a page virtually identical to the Twitter and Facebook login pages and threw it up on a domain that, at first glance, was really similar to the actual legitimate service's domain. Once the user logged in, the scammer used that user's credentials to post obsence messages or to perpetuate the phishing scheme.

The reaction, almost across the board, was that this was Twitter's fault: that they should have better security. But in reality, the weakest part of a security policy is an unsuspecting user. A phishing scheme is a con: and every con needs a mark.

Early adopting does not need to be early idiocy

The final incident I'm going to talk about is a new tool, FriendFeed/Disqus Comment Sync. From the 50,000 foot view, it seems like a no-brainer: combine the Disqus comments on your blog with the comments on FriendFeed! Who wouldn't use this? However, when you get down to sea level, there were major flaws in the product. It breaks user moderation, it syncs long dead blog posts, it strips commenters of their ownership rights, its syncing period breaks the real-time web, and that's not getting into the general problem in pushing together two different conversations. But people leaped on it like it was the best thing since sliced bread.

On FriendFeed, I called out the people who did, and Steven Hodson of WinExtra gave his justification: "gee .. welcome to the world of trying new shit .. it doesn't always go as planned but isn't that the mantra of Web 2.0 .. build it - test it live and let the chips fall where they may?" and "hey bud such is the life of being on the edge - we get to bleed first[.]" Being on the bleeding edge does not mean you need to sacrifice reflection and separating a good idea from pretty awful execution. What service are we doing to others, and more importantly to ourselves, by not coming up with a smell test for broken things?

Is this new toy good for the company?

In the always-apt movie Office Space, a soul-crushing Bill Lumbergh unveils Initech's new motto, "Is this good for the company?" Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins used this line not six months ago, but I think it's time for a reminder: early adopters, you need to ask the same about that new toy you just read about on Mashable or VentureBeat. What, exactly does the toy do? Are you sure about that? What problem does it solve? What information is it asking for? Is that request reasonable? Taking a few minutes to reflect on a new product or service could help social media withstand the peddlers, scammers, con-men, and awful ideas that leech off of innovation and productivity.

Main photo credit: Gareth Harfoot (Flickr)

On Apple, FriendFeed, and Techmeme

Mark Trapp — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:06:54 +0000

Bottom Line: When discussion about a subject that you're passionate about, it's important to take a step back and figure out if you're providing a reasonable argument about it.

Although the title should make for some excellent Google bait, there were a couple topics today that seem to fit into what I've been discussing for the past couple of days. This morning, there was a lot of discussion on FriendFeed started Robert Scoble about Gabe Rivera's comments on FriendFeed founder Paul Buchheit's post on FriendFeed (hope you're still with me). From the post, Rivera said:

Nobody should count out FF. The obvious technical excellence of the team and the very impressive pace of innovation you guys have already demonstrated make that clear. But I think people are alarmed that so many people have tried the site and then abandoned it (or at least that's how it appears). I personally think the way commenting and liking works has created incentives for the wrong kind of behavior, and you might be stuck in a kind of local maximum as far as uptake until you really shake things up. But what do I know? Anyway, good luck, I'll use FF regardless (though I don't comment any more...).

This sparked some interest from Scoble, who asked Rivera to elaborate: Rivera complied, adding "leaving dumb comments will increase the attention you get. Not so on Twitter, where dumb tweets hurt your follower count." Rivera's comments mimic a good portion of things I've heard about FriendFeed (and Twitter, too, but that's not important). What was more interesting to me was the level of vitriol on FriendFeed towards comments like his. Chief among the responses to his comments were attacks against Rivera's service, Techmeme, implying and directly stating its inferiority to FriendFeed. Other responses included explanations of FrendFeed as levity to otherwise (ostensibly?) miserable online existences, or how Rivera doesn't participate therefore he'll never get it.

This was a lot of exposition: it's a very cabal-like discussion and in many ways the exposition should serve to illuminate how little importance the topic has, but I think it's an interesting case study in what not to do when arguing with someone, and here's why.

Arguments are not the same as the people who make them

The major theme in the responses to Rivera have been something like "well, what does Gabe Rivera know? Techmeme sucks." That may be true, but what if Louis Gray had said it? Or Robert Scoble? Or Mother Teresa? Or Steve Jobs? In reality, it doesn't matter who said it or what that person's situation is. I've talked about this a few months ago, but discounting a person doesn't discount their argument. Rivera's comments and his argument stands even if he was your best friend and you adored TechMeme.

Techmeme sucking doesn't make FriendFeed good

But let's grant that Techmeme sucks. So? It could be the case that Techmeme and FriendFeed both suck. Proving the former does not discount the latter: it requires a separate argument to show that FriendFeed is not what Rivera purports it to be. Using the template I described yesterday, try to identify Rivera's argument and argue to that argument, not some comparison with an unrelated service.

Rivera gave a lot of information about his argument: is there a problem with the incentives FriendFeed provides? Does it promote the wrong kind of behavior? Does leaving dumb comments increase the attention you get on FriendFeed? Dealing with those questions are the key to defeating his argument and showing FriendFeed has value, not taking pot shots at Techmeme.

On context and straw men

Related to the argument that Techmeme sucks were two other types of responses: nitpicking the definition of "dumb" and an account of FriendFeed that amounted to it being a place for being able to goof off and that's a good thing. Like the Techmeme sucks argument, neither actually address Rivera's comments. Rivera means something specific when he refers to the word "dumb:" given the context in which it appears, it's not hard to determine what he means.

Even if you couldn't determine what he means, arguing over the word "dumb" and claiming things like it being subjective doesn't address Rivera's point: even if the word "dumb" is subjective, it means something very specific in Rivera's point of view. In order to defeat the argument, you need to show that either Rivera is wrong, given his definition of dumb, or show how FriendFeed's success is not dependent on removing "dumb" comments, as described by Rivera.

The other related argument, that FriendFeed is a great place to let off steam and not be serious, suffers the same problems as the definition of "dumb" argument: Rivera means something very specific when he talks about FriendFeed's problems; ignoring his argument that "dumb" comments, as defined by Rivera, are killing FriendFeed and saying "the comments are not dumb they're fun and great" is akin to a four-year old saying "NUH-UH." You didn't counter Rivera's charge, you merely said "no." That's not productive.

Afterthought

On Saturday, I discussed a little about "armchair entrepeneuring" and the denial of akrasia: I'd like to see commenters join bloggers in the program I laid out there. Let's first start with the idea that maybe Rivera's right. One of the largest stories to break today was Steve Jobs's letter about his health. It was published about 8:30am EST, and it was the largest story all day. When I checked FriendFeed around 9:30am, the biggest story on FriendFeed was dozens of people complaining about having to work today. Which one of these is news? Which will have more of an impact on people's lives?

Anatomy of an Argument

Mark Trapp — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:35:20 +0000

Bottom Line: Every argument can be reduced down to three different parts: any argument can be understood or defeated by identifying these parts.

A few months ago, I discussed the value of discussing, not debating, ideas: that we should be focused on a person's argument, not the person. Yesterday, I talked a little about a real-world application of a discussion of ideas, and the value of understanding an opposing argument before providing your own. Today, I'm going to go back to basics and discuss what, exactly, constitutes an argument, and how knowing how to spot an argument can help one form one's own arguments.

What does an argument look like?

I've said previously that an argument isn't a yelling match: it's a rational justification for an idea. It's more than that, though: when you make an argument, or you try to understand another person's argument, you're looking for three very specific things:

Identify what the argument is trying to claim, and what facts it provides to support it (Premises and Conclusions),
Figure out if the claim necessarily comes from the supporting facts (Valid Arguments), and
Determine if the supporting facts are actually true. (Soundness)

Premises and Conclusions

The first step in understanding an argument is to identify two types of information. Firstly, you provide some information that one ought to take as being true, called premises, and secondly, you provide a conclusion drawn from those premises.

"I can see the Sun: it's daytime" would be a very simple argument. The statement of fact, that it's daytime, is dependent on my seeing the Sun being true, and that seeing the Sun does, in fact, indicate that it's daytime. Another argument might be "I can see the Sun; therefore, the iPhone is a smart phone."

Valid Arguments: necessity and sufficiency

This second argument is a little strange: the conclusion doesn't have anything to do with the premise. That's because the argument is not valid: a valid argument is one where the conclusion necessarily comes from the premises.

Necessarily is the operative word; the iPhone could be a smart phone: my (bad) argument doesn't preclude that. In order to make good on my argument, I need to provide other premises that would enough to necessitate the conclusion. If I said, for example, "The iPhone can access the internet and do more than just make calls," that'd be more likely to necessitate the conclusion, "the iPhone is a smart phone."

On the other hand, the first argument, that because I can see the sun, it's daytime, is a valid argument. In fact, the premise, "I can see the sun" is sufficient for coming up with the conclusion: based on that fact alone, the conclusion couldn't possibly be false.

Necessity and sufficiency will play an important role in a later post, where I go into fallacies: for now, they act as a means for differentiating a valid argument from an invalid one.

Soundness

The final thing to identify in an argument is its soundness. A sound argument is a valid argument that also consists of true premises. Consider the valid argument from above: "I can see the Sun, therefore it's daytime." That's a valid argument: but what if I'm lying, and I can't actually see the sun? Then the argument isn't sound. It doesn't necessarily mean the conclusion is false: it could be a cloudy day, after all. Note that the argument must be valid: "I can see the Sun; therefore the iPhone is a smart phone" could never be sound, even if the premise were true.

Wrapping Up

The three steps outlined are important: in fact, all arguments can be parsed with these three steps alone (obviously, each step has its own methods and tricks for completing them, more on that in later posts). Besides providing a foundation for understanding an argument, every bad argument can be defeated with at least one of the steps: either the argument doesn't provide reasons for a conclusion, the conclusion doesn't necessarily follow from the reasons provided, the reasons provided are simply false, or a combination of the three.

Homework

Try looking at a few claims people make to you, take a look at a TV spot: what is the conclusion, and what are the premises? Do the premises necessitate the conclusion? Are the premises sufficient for coming up with the conclusion, or do they need more? Are the premises actually true?

Main illustration credit: Henry Vandyke Carter, illustrator for Henry Gray's Gray's Anatomy (via Things to Look At)