Internet Technology

I've been engaged with social media since forever. Always found it fascinating, even exciting. I really like Twitter. Now Quora seems interesting, but in a semi-social-media sort of way. There's a bit of a shift happening. A lot of "early adopters" have been doing the Quora thing for a while and now it's on the upswing of that familiar knee function of exponential growth.

Meanwhile, Twitter seems a little less vibrant. Is it because all the cool kids are playing with Quora? Partially. After all anyone with a real job only has so much time to dicker with this stuff, unless you're a rare beast: a Professional Social Media Guru that's a real job. So maybe Twitter is a little less shimmering with excitement because really interesting people are spending less time on it.

But that isn't all. That only explains part of it.

I think the dampening of Twitter is something that's been repeated many times with other trends – most notably blogging – and the common factor is audience. I think audience kills.

Along with a few million people, I signed on to Twitter about two years ago (call me a just-past-the-bleeding-edge adopter). What was compelling about it was the community. Chances you were going to find someone interesting, or even be followed by someone interesting were pretty high. That's exciting.

Then it became a mass phenomenon. People stopped talking to their community of followers and stated talking to their Audience. Many people stripped character from their tweets, so they didn't run a risk of offending their Audience. Characterless marketing opportunity opportunists joined in droves. Now I get endless series of follows who have triggered off some word I've used. Say the dreaded "Search Engine Optimization", expect to get followed by 35 so-called experts, half of whom promote the same methods I labelled as absolute garbage in the tweet that triggered the follow! No dialogue, no engagement, not even an argument. Just follow on keyword. These aren't people, they're applications. It's not a conversation, it's not anything.

The result is low grade ore. Generic, bland grey goo. Repetitions of repetitions of the mildly informative, rehashed. It's not spam, it's not interesting. It's a fire hose of information with few gems. The vibrancy is increasingly hard to find.

This decay is all down to Audience. Many blogs were great – when almost nobody read them. Now they write to their Audience, mostly with corresponding non-offensive blandness. Twitter offers diminishing returns, thanks to Audience. Facebook continues to survive, but only if you "friend" people you stand a chance of recognizing in a police lineup, which severely limits scope. LinkedIn has gone from a way to connect to people with specific skills or knowledge to ways to connect to people with a mail address. Now there's value.

I see MetaFilter is charging a nominal amount ($5.00) to create an account, mostly to keep the spam out. Maybe this is the kernel of a good idea. Maybe the cost of joining a community should increase as the membership grows. Maybe someone will develop an automated value ranking system that makes connecting to a site a low cost proposition for high value individuals, and vice versa. I'd sign up for that. Screw the audience.

One of the great things about maintaining your own domain is the ability to put up a good fight when it comes to spam. It's a real battle. This domain has been registered since the late 90's, when an open Internet meant that just about anybody could harvest contact information from domain registration databases.

The result is that my main personal mail address has been inundated with spam for nearly 15 years. It's not just inbound. This domain has been used as a forged mail source more than once. In one incarnation, the home page here maintained a debunking of various bullshit claims that appeared to have come from me, so at the very least those with the wherewithal to visit the site would not get scammed. Like it or not, I'm on the vanguard of the spam fight.

For the past decade or so I've created a unique forwarding address for every thing I sign up for. Over the years it's gone from a simple "name of service at ambit online dot com" to incorporate a random string, to eliminate the "anyone could have guessed that" defence.

This has led to some interesting results. From exposing criminal theft of data at two companies, to partner misbehaviour at Salesforce (see my Don't Trust Salesforce.com post).

This morning I was met with two pieces of spam from my tracking address for ZoomInfo.com, both personally addressed using my name. One was from audio@execwebtraining.com, one from audio@webcareertraining.net. Clearly both are from the same source, and the body of the message includes the same contact information: Executive Education, P.O. Box 31, Devault, PA 19432, 1-888-669-6067. My opinion: anyone who does business with a spammer using a generic name and running out of a post office box is a complete fool.

This spam not only contained my name, but it was addressed to an address that contained "zoominfo" plus six random alphanumeric characters. Obviously this is came directly from Zoominfo's databases. The odds of a guess on the random string alone are over one in two billion.

When this sort of thing happens, I normally contact the source and try to find out what the issue is. It's either theft of data or unethical behaviour from a partner. Both are serious, and possibly criminal, bad behaviour. So I went to the zoominfo.com site, started down the "support" path. Zoominfo is structured to deflect support away from anything that requires them to expend staff time. That's an early indicator of a poor customer service philosophy. Honestly I just don't have the patience to eventually get to some form buried five levels deep, only to get an auto-response suggesting I consult the crap I just waded through. It's just easier to go public.

So here's the simple bottom line: Either Zoominfo has been hacked and has a big problem, or they have lousy partner selection criteria, which is possibly a bigger problem. Either way, they need to come clean in a public way, and fast. Their credibility with me has just taken a huge hit. Not that that makes for much of a change, really.

Meanwhile, I'm off to update a tracking address. If the spam follows the address, I'll know it's a partner problem. Unless Zoominfo is completely asleep at the switch, there are likely to be updates to this coming soon.

In The Conference Board of Canada's Deceptive, Plagiarized Digital Economy Report Michael Geist attacks the Conference Board for a variety of faults that call its claims of objectivity into question. Subsequently, in Conference Board of Canada Responds, Stands By Its Report he comments on their inadequate response.

What is perhaps most informative is this quote from the response "The Conference Board regularly produces custom research. Our guidelines for financed research require the design and method of research, as well as the content of the report, to be determined solely by the Conference Board." [Note to conference board: that is how you cite sources.]

This quote suggests that they take full responsibility for the incompetence, sloppy methodology, poor fact checking, and many other faults in their work. They appear to either be completely disconnected from reality or to be fully aware that they have no credibility whatsoever.

I suppose it doesn't matter which.

As either a younger member of the boomer generation, or an older member of Gen-X, I'm a member of a big demographic that seems to have a hard time understanding social media. The most common reaction I get to mentioning something on Facebook is "I will never have a Facebook account!"

I realize now that part of the bad reputation that social media has with middle-aged adults is due to the fact that most of these people are parents, and everything they know about social media sites has come from their kids.

This led me to a great insight. Good social media sites are malleable to individual users, and that's what makes them so powerful. I am certain that my Facebook experience is vastly different from that of your average teenager's, and that's a good thing.

A middle-aged friend recently asked me about Facebook and Twitter, with the subtext "I don't 'get' either of them." I've reworked my response a bit in hope that it will be helpful to others:

The main purpose of Facebook is to get found by people you already know but have lost touch with, think of the people you would invite to a high school reunion. Simple as that. It's also good for keeping up on the big stream of small things that winds up being news in a nominally mundane life. It works well if you're not "always on" the net. You can pop in every week or so and catch up. If you ignore the clever little time-wasting applications and notification noise, it's a useful tool. In short, Facebook is good at making an electronic link to people you already know.

Twitter is much more geared to making new connections and is really something for those of us who are "on the 'net" most of the time. What it's best at is finding new clever people, and getting breaking news. Information travels very quickly in Twitter, and to a large extent it's filtered to the interests of the people you follow, which means you get more information about the things you care about. As a writer, it's also superb at making you edit things down. The 140 character limit is brutal, but it enforces the practice of a clarity that can carry into other writing.

So how did I do? Is there anything else that "defines" these sites?

I've been "hanging out" on Twitter for about three weeks now. My interactions with it have evolved quite a bit over that time.

When I first got on, my attitude was "what's the point?" That became "okay, so this is the best part of Facebook minus the dumb applications and a lot of FB's cool-but-useless user interface." But along with this functionality came a challenging signal to noise ratio. How can you decide who to follow? It's certainly not by popularity. Some of the most followed accounts are little more than posts of the form "(hook text) (external link) more on (topic) at (posters_site)." In other words, "Here's something vaguely interesting on a topic we cover. Hopefully the first link will generate the expectation that our site has even more useful information, and you'll start using us as a source."

If that's all Twitter had to offer, I'd be gone by now. But despite the noise, there's quality in the signal when you find it. I have interacted with people with unquestionable intelligence, people with expertise in interesting areas, and people with humour and insight. Twitter is also undeniably a superb source for news, both global and local.

The other problem is that few of us are consistently brilliant, so even on an individual level there's no telling how many mundane posts you'll have to read before encountering the gem that makes it worthwhile.

So I have developed a list of user types for Twitter that I use as a guideline when deciding who to follow:

• The "I am a Channel" type is interested in their follower count above all else. Every post they make returns to a gateway on their site, so they can pump up their traffic stats. Some are more subtle, but the ultimate goal is to make their web properties a destination.
  
  
• The "monetize" type is intent on convincing you that they know how to monetize your online presence. Inevitably this leads you to a pitch for their e-books and/or training courses. Somehow I get the feeling that these people are all modern equivalents of the "Make $1 Million from Classified Ads" artists. why do I get the feeling that the way you monetize is by selling e-books telling people how to monetize?
  
  
• The "I am a social media maven" type — which is distinct from an actual social media expert — is a variation on "monetize". All you have to do is buy/subscribe, and they'll show you how to get to the top of the social media heap. By and large, these folks would fare far better if fewer of them appeared to be laid off auto workers living in their mother's basements. The ones who seem to have some class wind up being the ones who value connections above all else. As I've said before, there's something unsettling about "hook up with me on LinkedIn as a trusted source, even if I don't know you from a serial killer".
  
  
• The "random link" type finds purportedly interesting information and tweets it with a useless explanation, as in "wonderful (link)". I suppose that somewhere out there, the simple act of posting makes the link worthwhile, but in my experience so far, 85% of the links go to stuff that is old, dull, boring, or just plain not interesting. A complete waste of time. Explain what's interesting about the link, please.
  
  
• The "topic feed" type usually picks a well-defined topic to post about and either relates facts about that topic or posts links with information relevant to the topic. Focus is the key to success here. If the topic is pig farming, it no good can come from posting random comments on abstract art.
  
  
• The "expert" type goes one better than the topic feed. These are people with a real interest and some expertise in their field, and they regularly post observations and insights along with the "topic feed" fare. A significant number of posts from these people reference original content that hey have compiled or authored.
  
  
• The "personality" type is someone who has a real world profile and is using Twitter as another channel for communicating to their audience. Think Obama.
  
  
• The "community" type is a member of a smaller community that uses Twitter to keep up to date. This is what Twitter seems to have originally been designed for. Some of these communities have "personality" types, who have a significant profile in within the scope of that community.
  
  
• The "shared mundanity" type posts nothing but tidbits from their life. As in "listening to x while doing y". There's a fine line here. Much of the charm of Twitter is getting a snapshot into other people's lives, but we don't need the whole film; odds are that you're just not that interesting. If none of these posts have any meaning, if they don't transcend mere observation, then the unfollow button is not far away.
  

The real challenge here is that most people exhibit a mix of these types, and probably a few more that I haven't identified yet. Twitter is all about constructing your own community and becoming a part of it. It's social media at its most fascinating.

Writing on ojr.org, Getty Storch asserts that "Papers must charge for websites to survive". There is a lively debate in the comments that follow, most of them are in disagreement with Storch's analysis.

This includes mine, which I reproduce here.

Anyone who thinks newspapers can survive on local content needs to spend a few weeks on Twitter. Here is a medium where news arrives in near real time, is reliable (since misinformation is rapidly corrected by others), and relevant. This applies just as well in a global environment. I have seen real reports from people on the scene of demonstrations in Thailand and Athens, and learnt about the supply of gas from Russia to Slovakia from people in cold buildings. Twitter and similar channels tell me about traffic jams on my route downtown, about power outages and emergencies in ways that no newspaper or even television station can ever dream of achieving.

Twitter has merely brought something that has been happening for a very long time into the mainstream. As a case in point, I learnt about the death of Princess Diana via an international online chat almost three hours before the local media picked it up. This is a decade ago. Times have changed.

Information is now free and it will remain so. Any attempt to charge for access to it is absolutely doomed. The only hope that news media, particularly "print" media have for survival is by adding value. This means aggregating sources, adding perspective, and performing astute analysis. Even so, most of the revenue from these activities will be derived from online advertising, and those revenues will be orders of magnitude below what the industry currently sees as normal.

The newspaper as we know it is dead. There is no model that will resuscitate it, period. Rigor mortis has set in, the patient just doesn't fully realize it yet.

For those who don't know, a favicon is the graphic that shows up in the location bar and bookmarks of modern browsers. They're great visual clues that help you remember what's on a page.

It is possible to have this icon animated, at least for some browsers. DON'T DO IT.

Animated graphics are designed to catch your eye. Once your attention is caught, you're supposed to understand a message and respond. That response takes you to a web site. If a favicon is up, then you are already on the site, so animation just catches your eye and distracts you from the site. Anyone who thinks distracting viewers from paying attention to their site should get out of the business and consider a career as a utility pole.

The other possible thought behind an animated icon is that in a sea of tabs and bookmarks, the animation calls attention to your site. That might work, but if every icon is animated, then the result is a sea of irritation, so it's not a strategy that will work for long. As far as tabs are concerned... I just visited these sites, I can recognize your icon without having it wave at me. In fact, the second time it interferes with my attention, your tab will get closed.

Summary: Animated favicons have lots of drawbacks and little upside. Just say no.

I've been hanging out in Twitter for a couple of weeks now. It's generally amusing, and in some ways I can see it as useful. In a way, it's simply the most interesting part of Facebook (status updates) without the lame and cloying attempts at "fun". But one thing that's irritating about it is the "social media experts" and the "u 2 cn get rich" crowd. I would go on about this, but Michael Pinto has done a great job already in his post Social Media “Experts” are the Cancer of Twitter (and Must Be Stopped).

Instead I want to focus on a subset of Twitter users, the "Friend Troll". These people post multiple tweets, encouraging everyone to connect with them on other social media sites, usually LinkedIn. Now the premise of LinkedIn is that people use it to build connections between people that they know and trust. Obviously someone who gets the bulk of his or her connections from random Twitter followers is not adhering to this principle, which debases the entire concept.

I'm pretty sure that LinkedIn introduced the "Recommendations" feature as a way to combat this, but there's nothing to stop a savvy user from trolling for those, so it's of limited usefulness.

So what's required is some way to measure the level of respect that someone has for the sites that they inhabit. I have decided that, at least for sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, that the friend count / number of connections is a good metric. Unfortunately, LinkedIn generalizes the connection count, so "500+" is the best we have to work with. Let's run with that for a moment. Assume the person is 40 years old, and has been working for 20 years. That's just over two friends per month, for every single month. Roughly two weeks per person.

Maybe I'm a poor judge of character, but two weeks of accumulated interaction with a person is, in my experience, not enough time to build a stable trust relationship. By contrast if I take as an example a very personable fellow who I have worked with, who I trust, and who is CEO of a publicly traded software company, I see just under 100 connections.

So after surveying my connections profiles, I have developed the "LinkedIn Connection Credibility Metric".

• 1-10 Connections: You are either antisocial, or don't "get" social media.
  
• 11-100 Connections: You're "regular folk" and consider your connections before making them.
  
• 101-250 Connections: Difficult. If you have a customer facing job, your connections could be credible. If you don't, then you probably include anyone you've met in business and thus your connections are questionable.
  
• 251-500 Connections: If making connections with people is your only full time job, then this is possible, but still your connections are met with scepticism. If there are solid, meaningful recommendations to back up your connections, then maybe.
  
• 500+ Connections: Give me a break. If I connected with you, either I knew you before you went over to the dark side, or for some reason I thought you might be useful as a portal to someone I want to work with. Yes, I'm using you. But then again, you probably think that's what social media is about.
  

I'm well aware of the value of site analytics. Most of my sites make extensive use of them. But at the same time I'm aware of a user's absolute right to not be tracked, be it anonymous or not. When it comes to my personal information, I'm usually happy to let most sites drop in a statistical tracking cookie, but I almost always set the lifetime of those cookies to "session only".

Basically, I'm happy to let someone know how I navigate their site, because that information is likely to result in improved usability. What I don't like is disclosing how many times I visit a site over a period of time, and what my multi-visit user patterns are like.

With browsers like Firefox and now even Internet Explorer providing easy tools to manage cookie acceptance and lifetime, more and more users who don't want to be tracked are limiting cookies. This is giving marketers a more challenging time and skewing their statistics. Poor babies.

Some marketers are fighting back. What's not commonly known is that Adobe's Flash Player lets sites store cookie-like information as well. Now Adobe hasn't quite caught up with the concept of individual liberties, so the default configuration of the Flash Player is to allow local storage without any explicit user permission. Adobe pretty much has a monopoly when it come to this sort of thing, so there's little incentive for them to change.

So now marketers who claim to seek to improve customer service have a method where they can gather data even if their customers have taken explicit steps to prevent it. News Flash: That is NOT good customer service! It's really rather offensive customer abuse.

Some time in the past few months, TD Bank decided to join the ranks of companies who have elected to bypass their customer's wishes. I recently connected to my online banking site, and got asked for permission to allocate local storage to an invisible bit of Flash. So I cranked open the page and found this link: https://easyweb46w.tdcanadatrust.com/dojo111/dojox/storage/Storage.swf?baseUrl=/dojo111/dojo/. At least its name reflects its purpose.

Anyone familiar with the big Canadian banks has become accustomed to dealing with these arrogant behemoths, protected from significant international competition by legislation, and reading from some version of a dictionary where the meaning of "service" is very different from the commonly accepted definition. Really the only surprising thing is that they haven't found a way to charge me 25 cents per byte of information that they want to store on my computer.

But you don't have to be subject to corporate whims. These things are configurable. Don't go looking through your browser, plugins or program settings for the control panel, though. Follow this link to your Flash Player control panel. This looks like a screen shot of what a control panel might look like, but don't be confused: it's a live presentation of your current settings. Click on the second tab, "Global Storage Settings". There's a reasonably good explanation of the settings below the panel, but if you move the slider to the left until it reads "None", then every site that tries to save data in flash will have to get your approval first. If you don't want to be asked, set the "Never Ask Again" check box. Then go to the last tab, "Website Storage Settings" to take a look at which sites have left tracking codes on your computer. Delete all the ones you don't trust.

Now you have control of your information again.

This one probably isn't new, but it's worth noting. An associate recently got this bogus "security warning". Appropriately named "irony", the message warns the user that "Security Center has detected Malware" and directs the user to a site where they can download a patch. Click on the image for a full sized version.

The "patch" will install malware on the user's computer. At least they can't forge the link as belonging to Microsoft, but this could easily fool an unsuspecting user.