Category Archives: Social Networking

Geek talent wars

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Apparently, Facebook is now paying engineers more than Google. And BusinessInsider reports that it seems to be worrying the search giant.

Google offering $100,000 cash bonuses is so last summer. Now it’s apparently offering seven-figure stock payouts to keep engineers from defecting

Last week it was $3.5 million. This week, All Things D reports that one engineer ended a bidding war by taking a $6 million stock grant.

We’ve seem talent wars like this before. Microsoft was sued back in 1997 for poaching employees from database company Borland. Google returned the favor last decade, causing Steve Ballmer throw a chair across the room. Now, Google is trying its hardest not to end up on the losing end as the cycle repeats itself.

In the past, this kind of thing was usually a symptom of a bubble. Why should it be any different now?

Facebook’s über-communications platform

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Dan Gillmor takes a pretty sceptical view of Facebook’s new messaging system.

In a feature that Facebook thinks is great — and will thrill law enforcement and divorce lawyers — every conversation will be captured for posterity, unless users delete specific messages or entire conversations. Do you assume that the people with whom you communicate are saving every text message and IM? You’d better.

That’s only one of the things that makes me cautious about the service. Facebook’s privacy record is spotty enough already; trusting the company to archive and protect my communications? Not so likely.

Om Malik is much more complimentary:

Facebook has not only reinvented the idea of the inbox, but it has gone one better: it has done so by moving away from the traditional idea of email. One of the reasons why Yahoo and Google Mail have struggled to become entirely social is because it is hard to graft a social hierarchy on top of tools of communication. If you look at Gmail – it has most of the elements that are available in the new social inbox, but they are all discrete elements and give the appearance of many different silos, being cobbled together.

Facebook did the exact opposite – it imagined email only as a subset of what is in reality communication. SMS, Chat, Facebook messages, status updates and email is how Zuckerberg sees the world. With the address book under its control, Facebook is now looking to become the “interaction hub” of our post-broadband, always-on lives. Having trained nearly 350 million people to use its stream-based, simple inbox, Facebook has reinvented the “communication” experience.

The deadpan NYT report on the new initiative is here.

We’re all hamsters now

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Image used under Creative Commons licence from Flikr user: www.flickr.com/photos/cryztalvisions/2422753682/

Dave Winer has a lovely blog post in which he explains why Facebook (and Google and all those other ‘free’ services) are effectively hamster cages for humans.

They make a wide variety of colorful and fun cages for hamsters that are designed to keep the hamster, and their human owners, entertained for hours. When you get tired of one, you can buy another. It’s looks great until you realize one day, that you can’t get out! That’s the whole point of a cage.

Remember how they used to say: “If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is?” They still say it. :-)

Another one: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Exactly.

When they say you get to use their social network for free, look for the hidden price. It’s there. They’re listening and watching. It’s pretty and colorful and endlessly fun for you and your human owner.

Or, as one of the commenters on Dave’s post put it: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you are the product being sold.”

What’s the point of The Social Network?

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This morning’s Observer column.

Lessig’s point is that it’s the open internet that should be the real hero of the story. “What’s important here,” he writes, “is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without – and here is the critical bit – asking the permission of anyone.” That’s true, but I think Lessig is too harsh. The message he wants the film to communicate is there in the screenplay if you look hard enough. It lies in the film’s portrayal of the contrast between what happens to unauthorised innovation on a closed, tightly controlled system and what’s possible with the open, uncontrolled architecture of the internet.

Chatbot wears down proponents of anti-Science nonsense

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Now here is an excellent use of technology.

Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.

The result is the Twitter chatbot @AI_AGW. Its operation is fairly simple: Every five minutes, it searches twitter for several hundred set phrases that tend to correspond to any of the usual tired arguments about how global warming isn’t happening or humans aren’t responsible for it.

It then spits back at the twitterer who made that argument a canned response culled from a database of hundreds. The responses are matched to the argument in question — tweets about how Neptune is warming just like the earth, for example, are met with the appropriate links to scientific sources explaining why that hardly constitutes evidence that the source of global warming on earth is a warming sun.

I like this approach. It’s got lots of other applications. Now, let me see: where shall we start? There’s all that gibbering about how the bond markets will come for us if Osborne doesn’t slash public spending. And then there’s the bleating of the Irish government about how the country’s situation is “manageable”. And there’s the fantastical vapourings of the Intellectual Property lobbies…

Reverse engineering Facebook’s ranking algorithms

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Interesting experiment to see how Facebook decides which of your friends see your news feed.

The Daily Beast set out to crack the code of Facebook’s personalized news feed. Why do some friends seem to pop up constantly, while others are seldom seen? How much do the clicks of other friends in your network affect what you’re shown? Does Facebook reward some activities with undue exposure? And can you ‘stalk’ your way into a friend's news feed by obsessively viewing their page and photos?

Not getting it

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It’s comical to watch guys who have been big names in steam media trying to catch on to online media — and getting the tone completely wrong, as with Yawnsley here. They just don’t get it. Irony, elusiveness and understatement are what works here. I know another really good print journalist who sometimes ventures onto Twitter. But he never links to anything he’s written or finds interesting. I’m fond of him and challenged him gently about it when we met at a conference. “Why don’t you link to stuff?”, I said. He looked sheepishly at me. “Because I don’t know how to do it,” he replied. I offered to help, but he hasn’t come back to me. Sigh.

Reading the pulse

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This morning’s Observer column.

One of the few comical aspects of the spending review is the frantic attempts by all concerned to predict how the victims of Osborne's axe will respond. The major newspaper groups and the Tory party will of course be deploying the usual – expensive – steam-age tools: opinion polls and focus groups. The cash-strapped Labour and Liberal Democrat parties may have to resort to cheaper techniques – inspecting the entrails of slaughtered goats, perhaps. In the interests of levelling the playing field, therefore, this column offers them a better idea: intelligent data-mining on Twitter.

It’s taken a while for the penny to drop, but finally the world is waking up to the fact that the phenomenon of social networking might actually tell us useful things about what's happening out there in the world beyond the Washington Beltway and the Westminster village. Not only that, but the resulting data might even be useful for predicting what’s likely to happen…

The Facebook Money Machine

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Interesting insight, as usual, from Frédéric Filloux on Monday Note.

This year, Facebook will make about $1.5bn in advertising revenue. On average, this is about three dollars per registered user, a figure that is significantly higher for the 50% of the social network’s population that logs in at least once a day. How does Facebook achieve such numbers? Last week, we looked at the architecture Facebook is building as a kind of internet overlay. Now, let’s take a closer look at the money side.

If Google is a one-cent-at-a-time advertising machine, Facebook is a one-user-at-a-time engine. The social network is putting the highest possible value on two things: a) user data, b) the social graph, e.g. the connections between users.

For a European or American media, one user in, say, Turkey (23m Facebook users) carries little or no value as far as advertising is concerned. To Facebook, this person’s connections will be the key metric of his/her value. Especially if she is connected to others living outside Turkey. According to Justin Smith from the research firm Inside Facebook, in any given new market, the social network’s membership really takes off once the number of connections to the outside world exceeds domestic-only connections. A Turkish person whose contacts are solely located within the country is less valuable than an educated individual chatting with people abroad; the latter is expected to travel, has a significant purchasing power and carries a serious consumer influence over her network. As a result, Facebook extracts much more value from a remote consumer than any other type of media does.

Cheering for Bob Woodward

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Bob Woodward (aka the stenographer to power) says he doesn’t do Twitter. Dave Winer gives him a cheer. Here’s why:

I cheered for Woodward the way an addict cheers for someone who was smart enough never to smoke the first cigarette, or take the first hit of coke or smack. I am stuck in Twitter, like the frog in the boiling water. I notice it’s getting uncomfortable as they pull back features that were central to my adopting it in the first place. The ability to hack my own stuff in there. The level playing field where I could be as influential as the greatest media celebrity. The level playing field relative to Yahoo and Google and all the other Giants of the Valley. These are all lost, they were things I came to depend on, and now that they’re gone, like my friend Jay — I’m not happy. And as with Jay, it’s my fault for believing, for no good reason, that things would more or less stay as they were.

The only way to get what we want is to make the stuff work the way we want it to work. We can’t wait for Silicon Valley to do that for us, because they will never do it. It's not in their nature.

So mazel tov to Woodward…

Dave’s right. What enthusiasts for free services seem to forget is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In the end, the providers of these services are doing it to serve their own purposes. And those sure as hell aren’t your purposes or mine. Why is why Eben Moglen’s “Freedom in the Cloud” lecture was so interesting.