June 15, 2009

Knowing About Stuff You Know You Should Know About

Filed under: Convergence, Overview, Social Networking — Tags: — jothmeister @ 9:54 am

tour_1So many people seem confused about what Twitter really is and what it is good for. First, let’s clearly disabuse anyone of thinking Twitter is just like Facebook status updates. It is not that. Facebook status updates are more personal in nature and tend to answer the question “What are you doing now?” Tweets on the other hand answer the question,”What have you learned, said,or seen, that you want to tell others about?” In a nutshell, Facebook is for people you know, and Twitter is for people you don’t know and with whom you may share common interests.  

Now let’s compare Twitter to an RSS feed. You can sit in your RSS reader (usually a browser or an email client) and the updates come to you,, which is great for blogs and news sites you are already aware of and trust.  

Then there are the sites that are full of information you never knew you were dying to know about.. So how can you possibly know about all the cool content you could know about? The answer:  find someone you trust, who spends their time discovering and reporting on things you want to learn about and follow their every move. They effectively become a human RSS feed for tons of information you would never find out about otherwise. Enter: Twitter.  

Eventually the vast majority of users will realize that Twitter is a personal promotional tool (I promote my content and I also promote what I find interesting elsewhere ), it will become more and more valuable,  providing you with the “Wisdom of Crowds” to get recommendations for what you should spend your time looking at. Once that happens, tools that aggregate the best Tweets from the best Tweeters on a specific subject will become the most important way to deal with not just Tweets, but entire conversations over multiple platforms including email, chats, texts and every other form of electronic communication. Twitter is another step in the process as we try to figure out how to deal with the complexity of so much input of information in our daily lives.

April 16, 2009

Microblogging and Millennials

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — jothmeister @ 4:40 pm

Like a lot of people, I think microblogging is and will be very important but interestingly, very few of the millennials I know are using it much yet. On the other hand it’s being heavily used by my peers (mobile professionals). I think I know why. Most of the people I know who are microblogging are promoting something. It might be their blog or their company or some activity they would like some PR for. pasted-graphic
Today, Millennials are still hanging out much more on social networks like than they are on microblogging sites like Twitter. Millennials were heavy instant messenger users and then switched to social networking sites when they arrived on campus right as the concept of social network was taking off. Those kids were starting out their independent lives and broader social interactions, meeting people, getting dates, and what their friends were doing was precisely what they wanted to follow. That carries over today but only to a point. Many of them are entering the next phase of their lives and are less interested in following detailed minute by minute activities of those same people they used to follow when they were all in school.

I believe the Millennials who have not converted over already will actually find microblogging very useful in the near future. The network effect still needs to kick in for these services but it’s well on the way. Groups, organizations, news outlets, companies are all creating Twitter names and are starting to generate message streams. As the Millennials develop their unique expertise or they work for a company whose products and services they want to promote, microblogging will be the way of choice to reach a large group of people quickly and easily. Even if the same people read the same message on a social network, the context is completely different and the message will not be effective. This is the key point I think most people miss. It’s not about the social networks adding a stream up status updates and suddenly they are just the same as a microblogging site. Why would I expect the place where friends share pictures and where they are going for dinner to have messages about a new product I should check out or where I should go look for some authoritative information that may help me in my job?

Social Networks and Microblogging are very different services, have very different user demographics and users use them for very different purposes. Tweetdeck is a great way to see this because it allows you to very easily see Facebook friend status feeds and Twitter update feeds side by side so we can see how very different they are. In One Place I mostly see things like where people are, what they are doing, who they are seeing and what they like. Great stuff when I have my social networking hat on. In the other, I see blogs I must go read, lectures I might want to listen to, new products to check out and lots about good causes I might consider helping. Also great stuff when I want to hear what my friends, whose judgement I depend on to cut through the market chatter, think I might get a lot of benefit from.

March 29, 2009

Whither goes telephony?

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , — jothmeister @ 6:13 pm

icon-landline-phoneWhat are you doing with that old telephone?

If you are Baby Boomer or older you probably have a land line at home, a land line at work, and a mobile phone you carry with you. Maybe you use Skype with a headset when sitting at your computer. And maybe one of your landlines is a VoIP phone. Each of these phones has its own voice mail. If you interact with the younger set, you may do some text messaging on your mobile phone. Since this was eased in upon us, we have sort of adapted to it but think about how complex this is and how many different places you have to go just to communicate.

You of the younger generation, the Millennials, already accept that you only need one phone and it’s mobile. In your dorms, in your apartments and even at your job, the mobile is your only phone. You probably text as much as you email and more than you voice call. And you are open to new things and will experiment with technology to find a better way to do things. Communication is as important as ever to your generation.

The phone is over 130 years old and certainly things have changed a lot in that time. But the pace of change has really heated up and in the very near future this picture is going to be very different.

Unless you have an iPhone you don’t do much computing on your phone. Yet. But the iPhone has really broken new ground not just because it’s cool and hip but because of the openness of its platform and its application store resulting in over 80,000 applications so far. Even before external applications were being written, Apple showed us that browsing, email, maps, and more work great on a small powerful device in our pocket. From now on, the mobile phone is not a phone but is a communications and computing device that is connected to the network all the time. Another thing the iPhone shows is how a networked device can fluidly move from one communications network to another with ease without interrupting what you are doing. You can be browsing the internet or receiving email on the device over the cell network and move into your home where it will jump seamlessly onto your WiFi network and dramatically increase its speed of communication and you won’t even notice what the device just did. The same thing will soon happen with your voice calls. When you move into your home, or anywhere that has a WiFi or WiMax network, the device will jump onto the faster network and continue communications. In your home, this will also enable switching to mobile handsets throughout your home to continue your calls.

In our 10-digit phone numbers we still call those first three digits an area code but they no longer have anything to do with areas. That relic is also all but gone and with number portability, you will from now on think of your phone number as a number for life instead of something you change when you move. Since we still might want to take calls on other devices than just our mobile (like our computer, TV, or home handsets), we will have the ability to control where that number rings through. Callee control is coming. Today, the Caller still has control over where and how you receive their communication. If they text you, you get that text on your mobile phone. If they call your mobile number you either answer or their call goes through to your mobile voice mail. Callee control means that, based on who is calling and rules you set for how calls from them are to be handled, that call might be re-routed to your computer, to your voicemail, or never to be answered at all. Furthermore, humans can process written text faster than we can speak or listen so a service that routes a call to a transcription system that then sends you the text as an email or a text message is much less intrusive then a voice call you must take right now.

Increasingly, our ’conversations‘ with people stretch across multiple modalities of communication. We might start a discussion via email. At some point, the information exchange has to be real time so we open up a chat dialog with the other person. Later they call and leave a voicemail with more critical information building on all the previous dialogs. And you light up when they text you with the short message, ‘Deal is closed!’ But later, what if you need to see the entire conversation you had with that person? Maybe there is a legal challenge. Or maybe you just need one tiny detail they said to you in one of those many modalities, which with today’s technology are spread across many different clients, devices, and repositories. Voice is a start, but ultimately we want to integrate all our communications in one place.

January 28, 2009

Data Privacy Day 2009

Filed under: Security — Tags: — jothmeister @ 4:01 pm

From a great post today at TechCrunch http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/28/the-privacy-dilemma/ comes the following quote:

The more of our lives that we put online, the less privacy we have. It is as simple as that. And this is a problem that will just get worse over time. You cannot be fully engaged on social networks, blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, and all the rest without opening yourself up to phishers, scammers, and identity thieves. Something to think about since today is Data Privacy Day.

How much personal information do you share on-line? A lot, we suspect, the younger you are. We have learned from a focus group of our Millennial advisors that while they are conscious and concerned about privacy, they still Twitter and Facebook their status away with things like “Having a burger” or even “In the shower now.” At the same time, these are the same 18-32 year-olds entering the work force aware that they need to disable their social network accounts whenever they apply for school or a job. Why? Because they don’t trust the sites completely and they know people are now checking candidate’s social network pages. We think these Millennials are being very prudent. After all, the social network sites started life as picture and status sharing sites and data privacy is not core to them. And none of the social networking sites are set up with a fine-grained approach to controlling access to your profile. Isn’t what you want; a way to control exactly who gets to see what portion of your profile? You may want just your college buddies to see those pictures of you inebriated at the fraternity party. You sure don’t want the next set of recruiters to see them. Might not even want your parents or your girlfriend to see them either. Someone needs to come along with strong privacy and security DNA and create this kind of fine-grained control in a trustable profile system that allows you to not only control who sees what, but also who gets to even communicate with you.

So is it that privacy is so hard to deliver on the Internet? Actually no but it has to be planned out and built in from the start. Technology has strongly supported good control over access to information for quite some time and it is quite mature with even free open source versions of it available. But you have to care enough to use it. If its not core to your business, perhaps you don’t bother with it. We think that is wrong especially if your core business intersects with handling people’s personal information. Even if you are not a bank and even if you never ask for social security numbers. To many of us, some of those pictures may be more private than even our social security number.

Trust is the key to privacy. But as Frances Fukuyama in his seminal book Trust argues, “the most pervasive cultural characteristic influencing a nation’s prosperity and ability to compete is the level of trust or cooperative behavior based upon shared norms. In comparison with low-trust societies (China, France, Italy, Korea), which need to negotiate and often litigate rules and regulations, high-trust societies like those in Germany and Japan are able to develop innovative organizations and hold down the cost of doing business.” Fukuyama argues that the United States, like Japan and Germany, has been a high-trust society historically but that this status has eroded in recent years.

We believe the increased dependence on the Internet for transactions of all kinds and for social interactions combined with the very lax approach to trust exhibited by most Internet-based organizations is significantly contributing to this erosion. And this is dangerous. Lose trust and you never get it back. And one bad egg can spoil the batch which in the context of the Internet could mean one bad incident on a social networking site could scare everyone away from all of them.

As a citizen on the Internet we want to provide personally identifiable information (PII) when we get some benefit in return but you always have to ask yourself if you trust the company you are giving it to. But as focus groups recently held by Microsoft turned up, most of us also just close our eyes and jump, out of a sense of resignation all too often. How often have you gone ahead and sent something kind of sensitive through any of the huge Webmail portals? You know full well their servers scan and process your email because that’s how they generate what are supposed to be context-appropriate ads on your Inbox page. I have to admit, even someone like me who has started a security company and written books on the subject have done it when sending business plans, sensitive legal documents and presentations and even sometimes PII. The experts call the tight control over who can read your messages no matter where they go confidentiality. It’s related to privacy because you want that information just to get to the person you specify and not to be accessible to any strangers along the way. Again, the technology to make the information in those messages absolutely unreadable by anyone except the intended recipient has been around for a long time. But it is rare to find it put to use in any of the messaging systems we all use. It seems only the government makes regular use of it. Again, we think it is long past time for that to change.

Here on Privacy Day 2009, it’s time for privacy to stop being something you close your eyes and pray for and becomes front and center in the value you seek and expect from online information brokers.

December 15, 2008

Inbox Overload

Filed under: Convergence, Overview, Social Networking, Uncategorized — Tags: , , , — jothmeister @ 3:24 pm

I am not atypical for a middle-aged so-called mobile professional in how many different forms of electronic communication I use in a typical day. Here are all the modalities of communication I use pretty much daily almost all of which require I use a separate client:

  • 4 email accounts
  • 2 calendars
  • 4 instant messenger accounts
  • 1 VoIP (Skype) account
  • 2 phones for voice calls (land, mobile)
  • 2 voicemail boxes
  • 1 text message device (my phone)
  • 3 social networking sites that have inboxes
  • 2 blogs I write regularly and get comments on
  • 2 blogs I read regularly and make comments on
    I also get faxes in my inbox a few times per month

That adds up to 23 different forms of communication using different clients or devices for almost every one. I know people who use more. Many Millennials use more because they are using Twitter and many more social networks than I do.

A lot of people are noticing that this is amping up the complexity and stress in our lives when electronic communication was supposed to ease the stress and improve our lives.

Dr. Thomas Jackson at Loughborough University in the UK studies this intently. He sees email becoming as addictive as slot machines with employees now spending up to half a day in their inboxes. That costs companies billions according to Jackson. Dr. Jackson has also found that its not just that email and how many messages we get that wastes a lot of our time everyday. But it is also this switching from what we were doing to one client and then to another and another just to communicate. After all, communicating is what we humans seem to live for as evidenced by the people who seem unable to drive without a phone pasted to their ears. He found that it takes on average 64 seconds for a human to stop what they were doing and set themselves on a new task using a new application (or client). It takes that same 64 seconds to switch back to what they were doing after checking email or instant messenger or a text message. That is a lot of time wasting especially if you have many clients all of which are ringing, dinging and buzzing as they have messages for you all day long. But there is more to it than that. There is also the added load on us of having to organize important messages in multiple places. Suppose you are in a good meaty email dialog with someone but it heats up more and you both switch to instant messenger to finish things off. Later, could you easily find all that communications? Maybe, but not in one place.

November 30, 2008

Communications Complexity Conundrum

Filed under: Telephony, Uncategorized — jothmeister @ 1:13 pm

I’d like to discuss the number of different forms of electronic communication we all try to use these days and how complex and stressful our lives have become as a result. It sure is great that we can so quickly and efficiently communicate with our friends, family, co-workers and even strangers. Compared with one generation older than us this is a dramatic change. Our kids don’t even know what “carbon” is when they “carbon copy” someone on an email. Who sits down and hand writes everyday messages to other people any more?

So sure, all of this social interaction is mostly a really good thing but how come we have to maintain so many different things just to keep in touch, have fun, do our jobs and be part of a modern, mobile society? How many more inboxes are you going to have to tolerate before enough is enough? I think we have already reached that point and it is time to do something about that. To wit, let’s discuss just a few of the myriad of electronic communication mediums we all use every day. One more thing; I tend to focus a lot on the Millennials who are currently between 14-31. Here is why (Wikipedia):

  • 97% own a computer
  • 97% have downloaded music and other media using the Internet
  • 94% own a cell phone
  • 76% use instant messaging and social networking sites
  • 75% of college students have a Facebook profile and most of them check it daily.
  • 60% own some type of portable music and/or video device such as an iPod
  • 49% regularly download music and other media using peer-to-peer file sharing
  • 34% use websites as their primary source of news
  • there are 75 million of them and they spend about $172 billion per year

Mobile Phones

We all have them. And some of us use them a heck of a lot even while driving :-(   Last year we passed the magic point where more than half the human population has a mobile phone: over 3.3 billion have them now. In the US that number is 265 million or 86% of the US population. By the way, that is one of the lowest penetration rates in the industrialized world as most of Europe and several Asian countries have more phones than people. Millennials have an average 7 calls per day while us boomers have only 5.3 per day. I don’t have the data but I suspect on average their calls are longer too. The Millennials tend to have no other phone number while Boomers also have a landline at their home. Even Millennials in the workforce sometimes don’t have a separate work number and use the cell phone even for work. Boomers do tend to have a work line and increasingly they also use some form of VoIP (like Skype or Vonage) through their computer. Each of those phones has a voice mail box which requires focused time to process it. You have to log in or call the voice mail box number, listen to each message and then do something with each message you process.

Texting (SMS) with our mobile phones

74% of all mobile phone users are active texters (over 2.4 billion out of 3.3 billion total). Across that entire worldwide user base, 2.6 SMS messages were sent per day per person. In the US, the CTIA says the average number per month sent was 188. Millennials are huge texters with over 96% regularly texting and their average per day at about 20. They have had an impact on their parents because now over 20% of adults 55-64 send text messages too (Sprint). What is very interesting is the shift in communication mediums being chosen. It is very age-linked but  early Millennials are the most balanced in their use of email, texting and instant messaging. This is one reason we believe it is essential to have only one client from which you send and receive all types of messages and have the ability to easily see all communications no matter what form, in one organized place. If you had some emails with someone, switched to IM to have a quick conversation and then when you were out and about and did some texting with them, seeing all that communication in one place can be pretty important. Switching from one client to communicate to another (or from whatever you were doing to a new device) is time-consuming taking on average 64 seconds each time you switch according to studies done by Dr Thomas Jackson of Loughborough University, England. That “context switch” time works in both directions so if you stop working on something to take a call or respond to a text message you actually lose 64 seconds twice in that process.

Email

Across the world, 1.4 billion people have active email accounts (Radicati Group). In the US this translates into 97 billion messages per day more than half of which are spam (IDC). According to the IDC study, 77 percent of online consumers said they were annoyed with e-mail volume and have begun to lessen their use of e-mail in favor of other communication channels, such as social networks and text messages. We know business users send and/or receive a total of 156 emails per day on average. The number is smaller for personal use at an average of 71. The amount of time spent on email per day is 130 minutes. One study found that 26% of that time is considered wasted (Cohesive Knowledge). The waste is characterized in this quote from one of the sponsors of this study.

“Few people practice efficient [email] use. Poor habits like never emptying Inbox and Deleted Items. Not using folders to organize email for later use and record keeping. Not using Rules to route incoming email to folders. Using email to send too large of attachments. Sending small email back and forth, when IMs would be more efficient.”

Instant Messaging

ComScore found that 82 million people (49% of the European online population) used IM applications to communicate monthly.  In comparison, 69 million people in North America (37% of the online population) used IM. 90% of 13-21 year old use IM, and 80% of 22-34 year olds do but only 49% of those older than 55 use it. It is increasingly used at work to augment other forms of communication especially when you want to communicate quickly with a colleague and to get an answer you need to make a business decision. And while IM use remains very high, I have anecdotal evidence from my own small sample group of my kids and their friends that their use of IM dropped off a cliff as they switched mostly to Facebook and texting.

Social Network usage

Finally, I’d like to cover social networking to round out our discussion of the most common form of electronic communications mediums. MySpace and Facebook are now essentially neck-and-neck with approximately 120 million active visitors per month. Facebook has come from behind and by most measures is now taking the lead as the most popular social network in the world. In face, it is now the 4th most trafficked website in the world (ComScore). Even LinkedIn, which is a social network site “for adults” used by business people quite heavily, now has 10 million users. All of these sites now have Inboxes and other forms of 1:1 and 1:many communication which require you to be on the site to use. So we have to now consider not just mobile phone (voice), texting, emailing, and instant messaging as the primary forms of electronic communication but increasingly we have to add social networking to that list as well. It is another “client” so you have to switch to your browser and navigate to the correct URL to use it and you have to organize and sort though your incoming and outgoing messages (using a more primitive UI than your normal email) just like an email program so it is probably much less efficient than email normally is.

All of this is bad enough but there is more. In this blog I did not consider all the places you have to maintain your profiles. I did not consider all of the time you have to spend getting into your voicemail box and listening and responding to those messages. If you are a blog reader, and I have proof you are :-) , you may take the time to comment on something you read: well, that is communication you might want to easily be able to find later. We at Rocketvox are not the only ones to recognize this is gettign to be a pretty darn big problem. Read what Radicati Group had to say about this

“Service providers are increasingly requiring reliable commercial e-mail platforms in order to provide feature-rich messaging and collaboration offerings. With aggressive competition and price pressure in the hosted e-mail market, service providers are looking for e-mail platform suppliers to include more features with their products, particularly support for IM, wireless e-mail, VoIP, enhanced security, and Web 2.0 clients, to meet the growing demand from businesses for next-generation messaging and collaboration.”

Soon on this blog we will install a little electronics communications personal complexity calculator where you will be able to see how much time you spend communicating and how much time you waste with inefficient, poorly organized or scattered forms of communication. And what we cannot measure is your psuchit overload and stress level from having to maintain all those things you need to use to go have the relationships you want to have.

November 19, 2008

Killer social App? The Away Message!

Filed under: Social Networking — Tags: , , — jothmeister @ 6:19 pm

That is right. Remember, the Millennials, at least most of them, were in high school and college during the hay day of instant messenger. Sure they liked to chat but the real game was their away message. Everyone loved seeing what their friends thought up to put on their away messages. Some put up poems, some just little clues and as I have said, my daughter used to say “In the shower, leave one” which drove me crazy. She knew others could read it but kept insisting no one but her friends in her dorm would care.

I talked in the last blog about the mass migration away from IM towards both texting for fast unthethered communcation, and Facebook for…what? Answer: It’s just the Away Message again, stupid. Facebook calls it the “What are you doing right now” thing which always starts off “Jothy is…” so you can say a lot of different things. My son used to like saying “better than you” back when he was a wise guy. The point is that it is this that they consider the critical feature of Facebook not the Newsfeed which they hate and not even the pictures which lots of sites have.

Where Facebook falls down flat on its face again is that this message is binary: either you have one up on your page or you don’t and the whole world that visits your page can see this message. We think that is dead wrong. Just as you want to control how much information on your profile is seen by the different concentric circles that describe your relationships, you want to control who sees what about what you are doing. Maybe you do want to say “In the shower” but you only want those closest to you seeing it. Everyone else should just see “Away” or nothing.

November 12, 2008

Millennials will abandon Facebook

Filed under: Profiles, Social Networking — Tags: , — jothmeister @ 9:45 pm

 

There is no disputing the fact that Facebook is quite a phenomenon. It has now overtaken MySpace and has 120MM active user accounts. ComScore reports that Facebook attracted 132.1 million unique visitors in June 2008, compared to MySpace, which attracted a paltry 117.6 million. Here are some other numbers that make one take pause: Facebook is in the process of increasing the number of servers from current estimates of about 10,000 servers to over 50,000 servers in order to keep up with its growth.

But what is Facebook trying to become? And do its core users want it to become that? How badly are some of the negatives about Facebook hurting it? 

To understand (which we won’t completely because even they do not know) what Facebook is trying to become, first we must quickly remind ourselves where they came from. Mark Zuckerberg founded “The Facebook”, originally located at thefacebook.com, in early 2004 while attending Harvard University as a sophomore. The company dropped The from its name after purchasing the domain name facebook.com in 2005. Actually, Facebook originally started out as a “Hot or Not”-esque project called FaceSmash a site to rate women like a diving competition on a scale of 1 to 10. They changed the name and dropped that focus and became the place on campus to keep in touch with each other. Membership was initially restricted to students of Harvard, and within the first month, more than half the undergraduate population at Harvard were registered on the service (just the guys?). They expanded beyond Harvard when it opened to all Ivy League schools and gradually most universities in Canada and the United States. For a long time you had to have an .edu email address to register. Facebook later expanded membership eligibility to employees of several companies including Apple Inc. and Microsoft and they then opened to everyone with a valid e-mail address in late 2006.

My kids are Millennials who were in college during the perfect time when Facebook was open to all .edu addresses but still closed to the rest of the world. They shifted from almost total dependence on instant messaging to keep in touch with each other to Facebook. That is worth noting: they dropped IM like a hot potato and they have never gone back. IM worked well for them in high school because they and all their friends were on precisely the same schedule and so they knew the other person would be on-line and ready to IM when they were. College didn’t work so well for IM so Facebook took its place nicely to deal with their out-of-sync new lifestyles. They liked the fact that Facebook was closed and only college kids were in it. They felt safe and private from the prying eyes of creeps and parents. And frankly, while not many of them were thinking ahead about this, they were safe from a graduate school admissions person or a hiring manager for a job from seeing any of their profiles. By the way, Millennials are a really big deal: there are 75MM of them and they are the best group of any for advertisers.

What did Facebook do for these Millennials? They used it instead of email to communicate directly with someone. In fact, email seemed very formal to them: it’s what parents used for their work. They used the Facebook Wall feature to send broadcast messages to a bunch of people. They posted pictures for fun to share with their friends. My observation is that most of those pictures somehow always seemed to involve drinking. Once in a while they used Facebook to expand their network by finding some high school friend who went to a different college but this was pretty rare. That’s it. And that’s all they really needed during college. 

When they graduated, their use of Facebook dropped dramatically. They went from being on it for long periods of time six times per day to checking in once a day or even just every few days. They still felt drawn to it because they did not want to lose touch with important people with whom they had established a Facebook relationship. But right about then Facebook opened up to the whole world. Suddenly they started to hear about friends who were rejected for a job that looked good for them only to find out that it was because of some of those Facebook debauched party pictures that seemed so innocent at the time.

They froze. And they have started to rebel. But you see, Facebook won’t notice any more than Microsoft noticed that every single person on the plane with you is grumbling how much they hate Microsoft (and it will take a while but we are seeing the beginning of the demise of Microsoft). What happens to companies like this sneaks up on them. They have lost touch with the real customer and they are just focused on the numbers. Facebook thinks they are masters of the universe because of their growth. What’s strange is that they still don’t have a business model that works (at least Microsoft has had that for 20 years). To wit. 

Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg insists that his company remains more focused on expanding its user base than its revenues. The right business model for the site will emerge over time, he has said. — WSJ

Look at this. MySpace makes $6-7 per user per year. FaceBook will make less than $3 per user in 2008. They are losing money at a monumental pace.

So what is turning the Millennials — Facebook’s original and core constituency — away in droves? Creepiness, complexity, and lack of privacy.

As soon as the floodgates opened up, Facebook’s safe collegial walls came down and let the creeps in. My daughter was even outraged that I could come in and join. She did not want me in there. She did not want me seeing what was arguably her private place. I am not a creep but creeps came in as well. They used to laugh derisively about how creepy MySpace was and now Facebook to them is the same kind of place. And wake up Facebook: THEY ARE LEAVING as soon as they can.

To Facebook, the news feed and the apps and all the other things are either experiments to try to find something that works or they are the coolest new platform for Web 2.0 stuff but to the core audience they are just noise. These people are not buying it. And guess what, even though the Millennials used to say email was for the old-foggies, they now use it as they have become professionals themselves. And now the way Facebook makes you come to their site to see your inbox and answer messages is just a pain in the ass. It gets worse. 

“Slide, the hot Widget start-up, has arranged for video from Hulu, CBS and Warner Brothers on Facebook. It is part of a new Facebook application the company is working on FunSpace Channels. Facebook is all about person-to-person and person-to-small group communications. It is using your social connections to improve e-mail, not to improve television.” — NYT

I firmly believe, as soon as someone let’s the Millennials have what they still want from Facebook and avoids the noise and clutter they are gone.

But the biggest issue for these kids is the lack of privacy. You have so little control over your profile on Facebook. Look what kind of horrible things happen all the time. A recent survey by Kaplan Test Prep indicates that roughly 1 out of 10 admissions offices check out prospective applicants on Facebook. Ouch.

Virgin Atlantic recently sacked 13 of its cabin staff after they criticised the airline and some of its passengers on social networking website Facebook. — The Independent

Giving millennials a chance to get off of Facebook onto a secure network was helping them get rid of their ‘Facebook tattoo’. -Former Telecoms exec now at a Silicon Valley startus

We at Rocketvox have done some initial surveys with over 100 Millennials to examine what they like and don’t like about social networks like Facebook. What they told us about what they did not like included

“Can’t opt out of things like the newsfeed.”

“It’s really ugly now.”

“Can’t remove things from your page.”

“You are stuck with things that are useless to you.”

“It’s getting creepy.”

What they really want is simple: a way to find and connect with friends and friends of friends. They understand that especially when you are starting out a lot of your opportunities are based on who you know and who will help you. So they fully understand and appreciate the importance of building and maintaining a good solid network of contacts for business as well as for social activities. Fun is important too but that fun has to be carefully kept private from any prying inappropriate eyes.

We believe Facebook has lost its way and just like Instant Messaging, this generation will drop it so fast Facebook will not know what to do with their 50,000 servers. It’s just about the upteenth time the lesson will have had to be learned that you are doomed if you do not carefully listen to your core customers and give them what they really want.

November 8, 2008

Relationship-centric communication

Filed under: Profiles — Tags: — jothmeister @ 11:17 am

 

I used the term “relationship-centric” computing in my first blog post here and I should explain more about what I mean. In a way the term is a tad redundant since one could say that anyone you communicate with by definition is someone you have a relationship with. But if it’s so obvious how come most email systems only give you the ability to sort messages by one attribute such as ‘From:’ or ‘To:’ at a time? That feature where you can sort by a column are great but more often than not, I actually want to see all the messages To and From a particular person. And by the way, I would actually also like to have those messages where they were just Cc:’ed included as well.

 

 

Truth is what I really want is every communication of every type that I have had with a certain person grouped all together to give me the complete picture of what, frankly, my relationship with that person entails. This is drifting back to the concept of a truly unified inbox but all of these problems with our e-communications are somewhat interlinked. To see the complete picture of my relationship with that person, I want all emails, all IMs, text messages and yes, I want the Facebook wall postings and the comments they made on my blog. I want it all and I want it all in one place. That finally would give me a complete picture of where our relationship is going.

So seeing everything in one place is part one of relationship-centric communication. Part two is fine-grained control over who sees what in my profile and then how I can categorize all my relationships into groupings that I think of as “circles”. Around me (because in this situation I really do get to be the center of my universe) I will see a set of rings or circles of people who are close to me and then not so close to me and finally people I barely know but still want to sometimes communicate with (even if its just to call them to order pizza). Once I have done that, I can use those groupings or circles to not only control exactly what parts of my profile each circle gets to see but I get to go back and exert my callee-control (see immediately preceding post) again, based on these relationship circles.

We’ll visit this concept again when we delve a bit more into what seems to be working and what doesn’t in social networks.

November 4, 2008

Private/confidential e-communication

Filed under: Security — Tags: , — jothmeister @ 12:24 pm

 

When you send a physical letter though the postal service you have an expectation and a guarantee of privacy for that communication: it is a federal offense to open mail not addressed to you.  From Wikipedia:

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) is one of the oldest law enforcement agencies in the U.S. It was founded by Benjamin Franklin.[12]

The mission of the USPIS is to protect the U.S. Postal Service, its employees and its customers from criminal attack, and protect the nation’s mail system from criminal misuse.

U.S. law provides for the protection of mail. Postal Inspectors enforce over 200 federal laws in investigations of crimes that may adversely affect or fraudulently use the U.S. Mail, the postal system or postal employees. The USPIS is a major federal law enforcement agency.

The physical seal on the envelope is pretty darn good assurance that the letter has not been opened. And the physical nature of the medium makes monitoring all mail a completely unscalable proposition. In the EU, there is a constitutional guarantee of secrecy of correspondence and e-mail is covered from eavesdropping. The guarantee is a lot softer in the US with a requirement for a reasonable expectation of privacy.

 

The Internet is a huge network of computers designed to withstand major disruptions (e.g. nuclear strike) on one portion and still able to function and in fact continue to route traffic around the disruption through a redundant set of routers and switches. The Internet is amazingly open and accessible making all this traffic inherently vulnerable to eavesdropping or worse. The standard still used for email today was established as the SMTP standard in 1980. It was originally designed to exchange messages between the researchers who were by design the original users of the Internet. The standard has not been replaced but simply had add-ons such as MIME for attachments added to it. As a mail message leaves your desktop it probably goes through your company’s server, through the ISP’s servers who serves your company, through some unknown intermediate switches, routers and servers and finally to the ISP and corporate servers of your addressee. That is a lot of servers, switches and routers not to mention connections between them where the message could be read. Many people believe they have some protection called “security through obscurity” whereby there are so many billions of messages going through these servers that the chances someone will pick my little message to focus on must be really low. For anyone who uses Gmail or one of the other free mail offerings that publish ads on your Inbox page, you know better. They have clearly scanned your messages to pick out words and phrases to drive their auto-placement of ads. We are told this is a fully automated process and that no one intervenes, but as we now know, such assurances about the NSA monitoring phone communication only of non-US citizens were not true so it calls the email assurances into equally high questionability.

If you work for a company in the US where we do not have any secrecy of correspondence laws, e-mails sent using company computers are considered the property of the company and they have an explicit right to monitor them and they do. They are looking for proprietary information leaking out of the company. They are looking for employees who are not doing company business on company time. And they are looking for potentially libelous or other types of inappropriate communication (e.g. sexual harassment, pornography) that could put the company at risk.

OK so why don’t we just encrypt all these messages and be done with it? There are actually a number of solutions that have been proposed to encrypt email communication so why don’t we all just do it as a regular course of daily activity?

Let’s just spend a minute talking about how encryption works. I am going to focus on public key cryptography for this discussion but there are other technologies that also can do this; PKI just happens to be the most prevalent form of encryption around. Like everyone else talking about cryptography, let’s use Bob and Alice as the actors. Bob wants to send something secret to Alice and he wants Alice and only Alice to be able to read it. First we need someone we both trust to identify us and to be able to assert we are who we say we are. If we don’t have this Alice could be someone else who just claims to be Alice. So we each have to prove we are who we say we are to a Certificate Authority (CA). We do that to our bank so you know how this goes. We have to tell them some personal secrets that they can validate before they are convinced we are who we say. There are all kinds of levels of authentication starting with “just trust me, I am who I say” all the way up to providing a DNA sample. The problem with “I am who I say” is that that approach has given us literally thousands of people who got certificates that said they were Bill Gates. OK so clearly that is a joke. But its pretty standard now to ask someone some questions only they know and you can check in databases like credit bureaus, drivers license bureau and other sources. So without having to show up at the doorstep we can pretty reliably get authenticated by a CA who will issue us a certificate. 

A certificate has two keys in it: a public key and a private key. These keys are just large numbers that can be plugged into a special mathematical algorithm used to transform (or scramble) some data. They are pretty magic in that if I use one of them to scramble some data, only its mate can unscramble the data. If I scramble with the private key, only the public key can read the original data. Or if I scramble with the public key, its only the private key that can read it. They are named public and private for a good reason: you always keep the private key very close to you and no one ever gets to see it or access it. On the other hand you freely distribute to everyone who needs it your public key. So play this out a little. If Bob grabs Alice’s public key and uses it to scramble (let’s start using the correct term – encrypt) a message, and assuming Alice really does keep her private key to herself, guess what, only Alice can read that message. Very simple, very clean, so what is the big deal?

Three things make this a technology that has never taken off. One is getting everyone who wants to communicate privately to get authenticated and get their certificates with the key pairs in them. If Bob wants to send a private message to Alice and she does not have a key-pair, Bob is stuck. He has no Alice public key to use to encrypt his message to her so if he wants to communicate at all he better just send it in the clear. The “network effect” is strongly at work here too. Bob can be a good guy and go get his certificate but if everyone he ever wants to communicate with has no certificate, Bob might as well give up because he can never encrypt any of his messages. And with none of those people out there having certificates, Bob will also never receive an encrypted message and he got that certificate for naught. Only within very closed environments such as the military and employee-to-employee within the same large company is there enough control such that everyone you communicate with can be counted on to have the certificate needed to participate.

The second reason this has never taken off is that it has never been smoothly integrated into the email / chat / SMS user interfaces. If its not easy to use, people will not be bothered and they will continue to hope that the critical data they are sending is not noticed by anyone out there. Finally, the third reason is that many of the biggest participants in email transport don’t want those messages encrypted. Certainly if you are a Google or a Yahoo! getting ad revenue by placing context-sensitive ads on people’s InBoxes, you will lose revenue if you can’t read the messages to extract the context.

People are increasingly sophisticated about e-communication. They hear the stories about people not getting a job because the new employer looked at the old pictures of them drunk out of their minds at the frat party. They see that the NSA is eavesdropping on US-citizen to US-citizen calling to have intimate comforting calls. And they know that technology exists to make communications secure. If we create a system built in one of these Internet Clouds where people register to get a new email account and when they do, a decent authentication that they are who they say they are is done, then we have a way to make sure everyone who is part of that system has a certificate. Further, as that system grows and grows, the network effect works in everyone’s favor and the people you want to communicate with will also be part of this system and will have a certificate. Finally, since such a system is just being built now the encryption of messages and the privacy of profiles is smoothly and elegantly built into a simple, clean UI from day one.

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