Age distribution in the United States.

Tonight, I asked Jeff Jarvis on Twitter if he intends to include cross-generational interviews/research for his in-progress book, Public Parts. To my surprise, he answered 15 minutes later, in the dead of night (east coast time difference and all), with an indication that he intends to look primarily forward.

Twitter shorthand and late hour  what it was, I presume that Prof. Jarvis meant that he doesn’t intend to focus on the technological or sociological generational gaps, and will instead attempt to observe/predict how the future will unfold.

Though I primarily agree with Prof. Jarvis’s thesis that publicity is the new default state, I would urge him to take a closer look at the generational problems. Based on personal, anecdotal, evidence that older generations – even people in my own millennial generation – I can say that society isn’t comfortable with publicness.

The average lifespan in the US is 78 years and the most of the population is over 30. The majority of the population doesn’t fall into Gen Y (which grew up with the Internet), nor the generation after us which doesn’t remember cassette tapes, nor most of Prof. Jarvis’ generation, that mostly, aren’t as well adapted to the social implications of the internet.

Professor – I am pretty much sold on your thesis, but I’d predict that most are not. I don’t think we can afford to wait 50+ years for those not acclimated to the Internet to be replaced by younger generations.

I’m eagerly looking forward to your book, even more so than the last. I am hoping, that you can make a case that my mother can understand and sympathize with. Without her generation’s, we’ll be waiting more than 50 years for your observations and predictions to become reality.

I don’t want to wait that long.

The above has been a late night post brought to you by a tired writer who has stared at too much PHP all day. Please excuse the sloppiness.

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The privacy débâcle is distracting us from the real problem: Facebook is dead in the water.

Privacy is too minor an issue to justify its complexity. As long as Facebook continues to make privacy hard to understand, and invisible to the user the issue will remain relegated only to users who are in-the-know. The latest round of privacy changes effectively obfuscated privacy settings, while encouraging users to pump even more data into Facebook _{(more ↓)}. Facebook’s reaction to privacy concerns has been a long-term PR strategy. The announced incremental progress toward a solution, which are out just minor feature additions that don’t address any of the real issues.

Zuckerberg’s challenges to conventional thinking about online privacy have become so predictable, it’s starting to resemble Moore’s Law.

—Fred Vogelstein (via Wired)

It’s sneaky and underhanded and leaves a slimy feeling, but if us users are too stupid to appreciate that writing could easily become evidence, or too appreciative of Facebook’s amazing and free features to care about the esoteric privacy issues, or smart enough to granularly control all our content we’ll stick with Facebook until something better comes along.

Facebook has two problems: privacy concerns leading to a lack of trust, and product development (what to do with all the user data they’re collecting). It’s the lack of product innovation that is Facebook’s huge problem. Despite all hype about F8, and the ensuing privacy backlash, we all missed the greater story: there’s nothing new.

All the things Facebook doesn’t do

That “like” button everyone is raving about? It’s just a more powerful share button – the kind that we’ve had for years. The semantic data they attach? Half of it duplicates current functionality, and half of it ignores existing standards _{(Google’s take on Open Graph)}. The move toward a more public facebook makes it a Twitter clone, and their attempt to control online identity is muddled by all the privacy issues. I say this not to bitch that Zuckerberg is immoral, but to point out: Facebook is lost. They don’t know where to go next.

Facebook's growth. Look at that J curve.

In something short of five years, Facebook has exploded with 500 million users, the world’s largest photo repository, highest site engagement ever, and its reach to 35% of the Internet. Facebook’s most valuable property is undoubtedly its user base – the network effect is difficult to replicate, and will continue to lend Facebook its value for a long time to come.

But we users are fickle. We only came to Facebook because it had better technology than MySpace [Zuckerberg's "elegant organization"], which itself had only become popular because it had better tech than Friendster [MySpace page design, music], which had better tech than Geocities [Friendster had a social graph].

Facebook’s great leap forward was “elegant organization” – Zuckerberg’s principle that boils down to clean design, and has become a standard. Other technology Facebook has built?

• A website that can handle the quantity of traffic is impressive but repeatable.
• The software platform doesn’t appear to be that unique – we see Facebook clones all the time.
• Facebook’s plan seems to be a take over of the web with like buttons has been done before – including by Facebook itself.
• In a continuation of the stagnated advertising industry, Facebook’s ‘revolutionary’ ad platform only serves ads with the most basic of demographic targeting
• The most valuable piece of technology Facebook appears to have built is their EdgeRank algorithm which does a shockingly good job of automatic curation.

So, Facebook has two problems: privacy complaints – a PR issue that they can shrug off as long as it remains complex, and product stagnation. Facebook has the user-base of Microsoft (roughly) with the data of Google (probably).  What impressive technology have they built to leverage this huge power base? Just EdgeRank.

What we have, is a failure to analyze

With access to nearly 7% of the world’s human population, and one in five people who access the internet using Facebook there is a lot of very significant data that they could be drawing on – and aren’t.

By way of example:

 

 

 

 

• Amazon leverages their user base to make recommendations to you, most of which are scarily accurate.
• Google is astoundingly good at using their collection of user data to guess what you intend.
• NetFlix paid a million dollars just to improve their recommendation algorithm by 10%.

FWIW, I’m horribly disappointed with my ability to articulate my argument in this post, but I felt it was time to publish and be done.

• A Web Design Critique of Google News
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• Newsflow: How Journalism Is and Will Be Generated
• Google Tries Tighter Aim for Web Ads – NYTimes.Com

Jay Rosen might be a self-proclaimed introvert, but he had my rapt attention as I watched the TEDx talk he gave last month. Listening to the speech, which has just been posted to YouTube, Professor Rosen builds a picture of crowdsourcing that is so close to complete you can taste the open internet goodness. The 18 minutes are packed with all the clues necessary to create a perfect crowdsourcing strategy.

Prof. Rosen doesn’t actually give a bulleted list, but a collection of best practices seems to emerge from his examples. The underlying message, is that crowdsourcing is just a method of data collection. Expect results to be data, not an answer to your original problem.

Here’s my crack at sorting the speech into a coherent checklist:

Crowdsourcing Checklist Inspired by Jay Rosen

1. Open your data. If the data needs to be collected, expect to open source it as it’s gathered.
2. A community must have a common problem. The community doesn’t have to be geographic, but it helps.
3. Divide the problem into small, well defined, tasks that can be filled out on a form and done in minutes.
4. Publicize. Use an established platform to ask for help, and keep asking.
5. Have a timeline. Tweak as the presentation as necessary to meet the goal.
6. Continuously coalesce the data. The result is data. It needs to be compiled into a human-readable format. This should be an ongoing and public process to let the community know how close they are to reaching the goal.

Those are the lessons I gleaned from Prof Rosen’s talk. I plan on seeing how they fair against, projects like today’s SETI announcement that they would release their data to the public. It seems that their brute-force approach of creating one of the world’s largest super computers didn’t work out. They’re hoping that open sourcing the problem of literally finding signal in noise will find the extraterrestrial life for them.

SETI was originally following the checklist pretty well (they didn’t have a clear timeline, but it’s a little hard to blame them for that). It didn’t work out for them, we’ll see if this new approach – which seems to ignore the list  – is any more successful.

For all those asking, the answer is yes. I am willing to be the secretary of the Jay Rosen Fan Club. ;)

• Links for January 6th Through January 7th
• How Not to Do Newspaper Video
• BATTLE | Planning a Budget ‘New Media’ for Feature
• Steve to Craigslist: Open Up!
• Google Wave for Journalism, a #Hackshackers Event

I’m a news junkie. And I don’t do that Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson, or Paris Hilton crap either. I only do the hard stuff – elections, Iranian nuclear weapons, health care reform.

Aggregators to the rescue

Why trust NewsTrust?

How MyNews Works

• Editorial curated stream of stories (like Newser)
• Crowdsourced story gathering with a ranking system for quality (like Hacker News)
• Automated web scraping for the latest stories (like Memeorandum)
• Personalized rankings based on user preference (Google Reader‘s “Sort by Magic”)

1. Your social graph: Connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts and MyNews will pull in the links that your friends share. The algorithm doesn’t appear to rank these stories too highly though. NewsTrust seems to have made the conscious choice to rank the sources they know to trust higher. I think that is a mistake. If I take the time to link my accounts, I’d really like to see NewsTrust put a lot of weight behind what my friends say I should read.
2. Trusted sources: The whole point of NewsTrust is to determine which articles and news organizations are trustworthy. Based on the wisdom of the crowds and editorial review you’re nearly guaranteed to see only high quality stories.
3. Topics you’ve selected: one downside to MyNews is the effort it takes to setup. You don’t have to, but putting a bit of effort toward telling the system what you like to read and who you trust, will create a highly customized experience.

The Content

Trial Run

1. It was a Sunday so the weekly editions with long form journalism were coming out.
2. The House was passing Health Care Reform and breaking news was coming in left and right.
3. HCR finally passing meant that there were many cool interactive graphics and longer articles that newsorgs had been sitting on were finally released.

Now I see…

Disclosure: I worked NewsTrust, and left my internship in August 2009. I still converse with the folks there and think they’re a great team.

Thank you to Rachel Fus and Fabrice Florin for assisting with this post.

• Auto-Aggregation Needs Real-People Editors
• A Web Design Critique of Google News
• Joey Joining the NewsTrust Team
• Connecting Another Dot(s)
• Newsorgs Should Offer Freemium Live Interviews

Listen to This Week in Google #34. Cue to 37:00~ish.

PC vendor revenue.

*worth noting: I’m an Apple Fanboi

• How Apple Got Everything Right by Doing Everything Wrong
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• AppleInsider | Apple Announces iPhone 2.0 Software and SDK Beta
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• BATTLE | What We Need, Is Infastructure

—via Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web

Updated with a section re: workflow related to creating new waves and privacy one day after the original post.

Before I go any further – a sincere thank you to Google and the Google folks who were very gracious hosts. Providing a very comfortable meeting place, staying late to answer questions, let alone taking the time to talk with us at all is a step well above what most any other company is willing to do. It’s a brilliant feather in Google’s cap, and speaks well of their commitment to transparency and the Wave product.

‘Can we have an off-the-record conversation so the Wave won’t be in the caught in the Google cache?’

‘What does a Wave journalistic workflow look like?’

Hindsight

A Hole in the Wave Workflow: Copy to New Wave

The copy to new wave function.

Notes

• The pre-meetup wave. With polling data!
• The Google-created, post-meetup wave. With minutes!

• The reason given for Wave’s playback feature was to allow users first joining a complex Wave to catchup. This makes me realize – Waves shouldn’t be so complex that you need to catchup. Wikipedia, for example is always an organized page to look at – though it hides the discussion in a separate tab. What Wave needs to do is enable two views: one that presents the final product, and one that shows the inline discussion and misc blips.
• Twitter was the back channel, not wave.
• Google envisions wave as the single inbox
• Great point from Google folk about bots in Wave: they can be used to pull content in. This is a pretty good case for Waves being used as Topics.
• Rosy is  an extension being worked on for live translation.
• The solution to hiding your work is to create a new wave, but this seems non-embed friendly.
• Google will allow read only, anon, public, access
• The pitch to use wave as a conference back channel sounds identical to twitter – and almost a total failure to recognize that Twitter is being used for that already
• Basically all the use cases we’ve already heard presented: event planning, meeting notes, panel notes
• One hour, seven minutes into the talk we officially see some real journalism examples finally getting to real jour. examples
  • A magazine on wave – looks crappy, but does lead to a good question about Wave allowing customizable, and better looking waves (e.g. text-wrapped images) – and isn’t answered.
• Google folk sounding very zealot like, politically correct, with good PR, but almost… oblivious.

• Google Wave: The End of the Wild Web
• Links for January 16th Through January 19th
• Signed and Released: Side Projects Are So Good
• They Do Care, Right?
• You’ve Noticed the ‘Links’

Couldn't resist this photo of Prof. Rosen. Seemed apt.

The need to remain relevant

Objectivity means detachment

“This was a news story, an attempt to report what’s happening out there, as accurately and fairly as possible. Which is not the place for the author’s opinion.” Or: “I was trying to describe the Tea Party movement, and to understand it, which is hard enough; I’ll let others judge what to make of it.”

— The Quest for Innocence and the Loss of Reality in Political Journalism

Fear of Failure

Once, they feared the press

All this complaining…

• Abandon the view from nowhere. Embrace journalists as the experts they are. Capable of expressing not an opinion, but conclusions.
• Allow for the possibility that the world might be round. Failure is an option if its not a habit. Wrongness isn’t a sin if its admitted and corrected quickly.
• Abandon objectivity in favor of transparency. This is an old one now, but it’s a cultural shift as drastic as Jeff Jarvis’s turning off the presses for traditional institutions and therefore a tough pill to swallow.
• Get some cajones. If journalists realize that sources going direct has freed them of many of the traditional, menial tasks, of reporting, they can focus on the isn’t the right way to do business – that sources on the inside aren’t the only sources – they can release themselves of the need to remain ‘objective’ and avoid access lock-out. Rely on old fashion reporting instead of softball access.

Update

Prof. Rosen– Thank you for writing this piece. I’ve attempted an answer to your last question on my own blog as it got too long for the comments, but I wanted to respond to your example of tyranny. I’m a moderate, registered independent, voter. The Tea Party goes down in my book as great fodder for The Daily Show but not much else. That said, the word “tyranny” though a bit exaggerated, shouldn’t so quickly be belittled. I’ll point to the rise of presidential power which has only increased over the last 80 years, and the last two presidents have dramatically increased that power. One of the greatest examples of this expansion of power is the use of signing statements. President Bush issued more signing statements than any other president. In these statements he affirmed that he wouldn’t enforce certain portions of bills because he believed them to be unconstitutional. Now, President Obama has said that he won’t be issuing some signing statements at all if he’s previously spoken against the issue. Tyranny might be a strong word for that in todays politically correct society, but I think anyone would admit, there’s something not right with a President saying he can make, enforce, and decide the constitutionality of the laws – especially if he’s not even going to write it down for us. (For those not keeping track, The Constitution states that only Congress can make laws, the President is obligated to enforce them, and The Supreme Court is solely tasked with decided constitutionality.) Of course, this argument is really just a good example of why the claim should have been explored in the NYT. I’m fairly certain it wasn’t because sources are going direct, the Fourth Estate has lost its teeth, and Objectivity is killing good journalism.

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Dear Mr. Baker: Thank you for writing to me about exclusivity agreements in the wireless market and your support for legislative reforms. As a wireless phone customer myself, I understand your concerns. I welcome this opportunity to respond. Although the market for wireless phone service has become increasingly competitive, some consumers have not seen the kind of efficient, reliable, and fair service that they want. Rather, according to the Better Business Bureau, wireless phone service has become the Nation’s most complained-about industry. I appreciate hearing your support for open access to wireless networks. I understand the frustration of purchasing a mobile phone that is locked and then not being able to use it with a different carrier. There have been multiple lawsuits filed by consumer advocates to prevent wireless carriers from locking their mobile phones, or at least to force carriers to find ways to guarantee interoperability of locked phones between networks. How the courts resolve these cases will impact what practices are allowed and whether legislative action is warranted. With our State’s large business sectors and diverse communities, any change in our telecommunications laws needs to take into consideration a variety of competing concerns since it will have far-reaching effects. Several states, including California, have enacted or are in the process of enacting laws to protect wireless phone subscribers. Nonetheless, federal legislation may become necessary so that all Americans are treated fairly. I believe that any workable solution for telecommunications reform should focus first and foremost on consumers and the public interest, while also balancing the needs of the network, service, and information providers. Please know that I will be sure to keep your thoughts in mind as the Senate works to address these issues in the 111th Congress. Once again, thank you for writing. If you have any further comments or concerns, please feel free to contact my Washington, D.C. staff at (202) 224-3841. Best regards. Sincerely yours, Dianne Feinstein

A Response

• As covered in the New York Times last week, mobile carriers are making the us pay extra for simple services like voicemail. A bill to force carriers to allow users to set their own voicemail greetings, or one that forced them not to charge for listening to their service messages would go a long way toward controlling this out-of-control industry.
• In most other countries, customers are only charged for outgoing calls – much the same way landlines have worked in this country. In the US however, we’re effectively double charged – for both outgoing and incoming calls. This practice, effectively allows mobile carriers to  make twice as much off of each phone call. Legislation that enforced a “one charge per call” policy would go a long way toward straightening our backwards industry.
• As you may have heard, the FCC has just began an investigation of AT&T for potentially unfair exclusivity arrangements with Apple to the exclusion of Google and other VOIP providers. The issue is one of Net Neutrality: can AT&T control what data is allowed over its network? Users pay for access to “unlimited” data rates over the AT&T network. For them to disallow certain types of data because it competes with another aspect of their business is not only anti-competitive, it’s censorship. I urge you to support the FCC in this investigation and take a strong stance on Net Neutrality.

If you’ve gotten this far…

• The Wall Street Journal Has Their iPhone App All Wrong
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Google’s ChromeOS, might be vaporware, but the idea of a Google built OS is an interesting thought experiment in design. Knowing that Google is engineer friendly, have a business based on search, and a tendency toward minimalist design, leads me to the following guesses:

• The paper paradigm is antiquated. Navigation will be dead, this will be a search driven OS. That means that they’re gonna do something with the desktop, as in forget you had one. An analogy: If your current desktop is like the Yahoo homepage (cluttered, full of everything), a ChromeOS desktop will be like the Google homepage: a search bar.
• Apps? What apps? You’re not gonna be able to run photoshop on this. You don’t need to. This isn’t designed for people who need apps. It’s designed for people that do email, web, and word. All of which can be done in the cloud.
• You’re not gonna see ads all over the place. Think Gmail ads, not google search ads. Small, inline.
• Local storage won’t matter – the goal here, is to store all you data in the cloud. Besides, this is gonna be for netbooks, what data do you have that can’t be stored in the cloud? Think about the difference between the Palm Pilot and the iPhone. On a Palm, you had to sync all of your data to bring it with you. The iPhone can store it all (even your music) in the cloud. ChromeOS will operate the same way. I’d expect to see a 3G modem, similar to the Kindle, built into devices.

• A Web Design Critique of Google News
• Cloud Computing Is Well and Good, but It Can’t Beat the Desktop Computer. – By Paul Boutin – Slate Magazine
• How I Want My Data: Locality & Cloud Aware
• MobileMe Reviewed
• Google Wave: The End of the Wild Web

click for a larger version

The print layout is clearly, superior. It’s far easier to read, offers a summary of what the article is at an eye’s glance.

• Multiple Pages The online version requires the user to click to a second page to read the whole article. Yet, the print version fits handily on one page. WHY!? There is no newshole online! Stop making it difficult for us to get to the end of the article!
• Ads Admittedly, the print version shares a spread with a full page ad, but the content remains ad free. The online version feels cramped. There are two, small, intrusive ads, that serve to distract from the content.
• Styling is Gone This is a great example of why shovelware is bad for design. The print version nicely separates out questions, credits, and answers with font styles. The online version? Nothing. Someone just copy-pasted the content out of a text document. It’s much harder to read than the article, let alone tell that it’s a Q&A.
• The Sidebar is Distracting Even if Google is my homepage, there is far too much content presented to draw me in. The sidebar is full of irrelevant stuff that distracts me from the article. The clean, minimalistic design in print is far more eye-catching.

The Takeaway

• Use subheads Give the reader entry points. Especially online where people are used to reeading short blurbs of text are are prone to skimming as they scroll.
• Don’t forget the rule about one piece of dominant artwork It’s amazing how truly good design never changes. Presenting one place for the eye to center on that sums up the content is a design trait that goes to the way we think – regardless of the medium.
• Leave some whitespace Clutter on the page makes your content hard to read. Just because your CMS allows you to dump in your content and move on, it doesn’t mean you should. Giving this article the same amount of design time in both print and online would have helped a lot. I’d bet that the amount of design time for the web could be much less.

• Myth: The Smaller News Hole (at the NYT)
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• The New York Times’ Design Director Defends Its New Welcome Mat. – By Jack Shafer – Slate Magazine
• A Web Design Critique of Google News
• No, No, Newsprint IS Dead