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October 31, 2003

halloween vaginas

Ah, V-Day....

Category: gender & sexuality

Posted by zephoria at 11:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

furries

Tonight, when you see all of those people dressed up as cute furry animals out at the Castro or romping around town, you may think that they are all innocent, or trying to make the kids happy. But little do you know about the fun they have behind the costume. So, are you wearing fur tonite?

Category:

Posted by zephoria at 4:28 PM | TrackBack (0)

October 30, 2003

social informatics

A while back, i was grumbling about the not-so-social focus of information retrieval and a rocking woman wrote to tell me about social informatics (with lots of resources). I must look into this further.... [Oh, and one of my classes just switched focuses for the remainder of the semester to be concerned with social technology... i am a very happy camper.]

Category:

Posted by zephoria at 7:53 PM | TrackBack (0)

privacy & friendster

The Wall Street Journal published an article today entitled "Having Lots of Online Friends Could Mean Privacy Trouble." The article articulates some of the institutional privacy concerns that some users do have and suggests that more users should have.

Now, i do believe in privacy concerns and i'm genuinely worried about institutional misuses of private data, but i'm not the average consumers. As we all know, consumers will happily sell their privacy. They don't understand the implications of this. And thus, there's no incentive for corporations to not try to collect it and make money off of it. This is where the government should step in. But since the government is controlled by corporations....

Anyhow, i won't follow that rant.

The big thing to realize is that most consumers are far more concerned with local privacy, or intimacy concerns. They're worried about their friends taking their information out of context, about their mom seeing something intended for their friends, of a future boss seeing a drunken picture. Consumers are far more concerned with those who have limited local authority over them than institutional authority. [Yes, here's an opportunity for a study...]

> Having Lots of Online Friends
> Could Mean Privacy Trouble
>
> By JENNIFER SARANOW
> THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE
>
>
> More friends could mean less privacy.
>
> When Meredith Rosenblum first joined social networking site Friendster in
> July, she tried to find as many of her friends as she could. Now with 48
> immediate friends and more than half a million in her "network," the
> 27-year-old advertising writer from San Francisco thinks she may have too
> many pals.
>
> Two months ago, an online suitor she wasn't interested in, and had told
> so, entered her e-mail address in Friendster, found her and sent her a
> note: "Ha, ha. I found you." Turns out they were connected by one friend
> -- and though the mutual friend vouches for the guy, Ms. Rosenblum found
> the whole experience creepy.
>
> "When you first sign up you are so sucked into finding your friends, you
> don't realize how much access people have to finding you," she says. (She
> still occasionally uses the site.)
>
> Online social-networking services such as Friendster (www.friendster.com
> ) and Emode's Tickle (connect.emode.com) make it easy
> for people to extend their circle of friends and contacts, but privacy
> experts caution that the services make it easier than ever for strangers
> to find out who people associate with. While much personal information is
> available on the Web, lists of friends generally aren't. Amid these
> concerns, some networking sites have started adding tools to protect
> users' privacy.
>
> "We want to give the user control over all their information," says James
> Currier, chief executive of Emode Inc., which recently launched the Tickle
> networking site.
>
> Dating and other online services often encourage the user to divulge
> personal information and tastes. But what has privacy experts worried
> about networking sites is that they create visible maps of social networks
> for tens of thousands of people to view.
>
> "It's your extended social network out there, up for grabs in a more
> visible, concentrated way than it normally is in the fabric of every day
> life," says Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier
> Foundation in San Francisco. "These sites present a very rich source of
> association data, which is one of those things the civil-liberties world
> considers to be very important."
>
> Users join sites such as Friendster by creating a profile of their
> interests and goals and then invite friends or business associates to be
> part of networking communities. Users can click through their friends'
> profiles, then on those of their friends' friends and so on -- to various
> degrees of separation. Some, like Friendster, limit searching at four
> degrees while others, such as Tickle, are accessible to anyone signed up.
>
> Betsy Burton, who works in public relations in New York, has been a member
> of Friendster since June. "I just feel like you wouldn't join a site like
> Friendster if you were concerned about any kind of secrecy," she says. "I
> think it's a choice." Still, Ms. Burton, 25, says she knows "a lot of
> people who got really into it and then totally freaked out," feeling like
> people were keeping track of their friend counts.
>
> Ms. Burton views the site as a fun place to click around every few days
> when she has free time at work, taking a peek at people's friends and
> interests. "I think it's fascinating to look at people's social circles,"
> she says. "It's like a social climber's dream."
>
> Meanwhile, other users say they do have some concerns and have figured out
> their own methods of retaining an element of privacy. Marc Magnelia, a
> health-care consultant in Berkeley, Calif., joined Friendster six months
> ago. Concerned that so many people would be able to view his profile and
> potentially track him down in person, Mr. Magnelia, 35, purposely didn't
> include his location or details about his job, and wrote vague or
> imaginary interests (For example, Botox and competitive eating).
>
> "There are millions of people out there potentially and I didn't think
> [the information] was important enough to be put there when you weigh it
> against the potential for abuse," Mr. Magnelia says. Ms. Rosenblum, for
> her part, recommends creating a special e-mail address only for the
> networking site.
>
> Most sites specify in their privacy policies that they won't give away
> personal information unless required by law, but legal requirements can
> span from subpoenas from law enforcement to subpoenas in civil cases such
> as divorce proceedings and insurance, corporate and bank investigations.
>
> Users of networking sites, as they do with dating sites or instant
> messenger services, use pseudonyms or truncated names, providing a good
> degree of public anonymity. But subpoenas can ask a service to turn over
> identifying information, such as full name and contact information, as
> well as communications within the site.
>
> "I think there are good questions to ask regarding whether individuals
> understand first of all that law enforcement could gain access to the data
> and use it to identify suspects or people with similar ideologies, and
> that access could occur through the sites' consent," says Chris Hoofnagle,
> associate director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in
> Washington.
>
> The Federal Bureau of Investigation hasn't made use of social networking
> sites, according to spokesman Paul Bresson. He didn't want to comment on
> hypothetical situations, but said the Internet is another tool to help
> investigations, and noted that the FBI still uses old-fashioned
> communication mechanisms such as telephone records.
>
> But online lists of friends have been used by law enforcement. America
> Online spokesman Andrew Weinstein says buddy lists have been provided in
> law-enforcement investigations.
>
> Beyond possible legal access to online social networks, privacy experts
> say just the fact that so many people, including potential stalkers and
> criminals, can see the networks online raises concerns. In addition,
> people may unknowingly end up revealing information such as their sexual
> orientation to people they never intended to because those people are
> somehow in the same network.
>
> Aware of such concerns, many networking sites say they have started
> implementing new privacy tools. Three months ago Ryze.com, a networking
> site with 60,000 members, gave users the option of three levels of
> privacy: High, Medium or Low. High privacy consists of letting only people
> within two friends or members of "networks" (interest groups) contact and
> within four view, while medium means within four friends or members of
> networks and low, everyone on the site.
>
> "We know that people have different concerns in this area and some people
> are trying to promote themselves and their business to the world, but
> other people just want to keep in touch with small group of people," says
> Adrian Scott, Ryze.com founder, who adds soon there will be networks that
> aren't publicly visible on the site at all.
>
> Meanwhile, Emode's Mr. Currier says right now users can control who sees
> their data according to degrees, but eventually the company plans to let
> users control who sees what data, person by person.
>
> A spokesman for Friendster Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif., said there were no
> privacy issues on Friendster, and that the company couldn't comment on
> future features. Currently, users can only view profiles that are
> connected to them by within four degrees of friends. Users aren't required
> to post photographs to sign up, and are only required to have a valid
> e-mail address. Users can also choose how much or little information to
> include in their profile.
>
> To be sure, association maps aren't the only privacy concerns network
> sites pose. They also collect loads of data just like many other sites on
> the Web, raising the question of what they do with it. For now, most
> sites' privacy policies say they don't sell data entered in the site but
> may use it in an anonymous aggregate form to inform advertisers.
>
> Still, privacy experts say an important point to keep in mind, especially
> since most of these sites are free right now, is that privacy policies can
> change, for example, when a company changes its business model, is bought
> by another entity or files for bankruptcy. "Free services sometimes evolve
> into very marketing-driven services," says Stephen Keating, executive
> director of the Privacy Foundation in Denver.
>
> Write to Jennifer Saranow at jennifer.saranow@wsj.com
>
> Updated October 30, 2003

Category: friendster

Posted by zephoria at 7:37 PM | TrackBack (0)

a 2nd WSJ article

Powerful Connections is another Wall Street Journal article on Friendster. This one focuses on the attraction of venture capital.

Venture Blog has a great little rant on these articles (and other good links and business comments)

Powerful Connections

Social-Networking Web Sites
Attract Venture Capitalists,
Evoking Memories of 1999

By ANN GRIMES
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Friendster has friends where it counts.

Although still in its "beta," or testing, phase, the popular social-networking Web site has closed a $13 million financing round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital. Battery Ventures also participated in the funding, pushing the valuation of Friendster to around $53 million, say people familiar with the matter. Among those joining the Sunnyvale, Calif., company's board: Kleiner's John Doerr, Benchmark's Robert C. Kagle and Yahoo Inc.'s former chairman and chief executive, Tim Koogle.

Launched eight months ago by a former Netscape engineer, 33-year-old entrepreneur Jonathan Abrams, Friendster is one of several social-networking start-ups. Among the others: LinkedIn.com (www.linkedin.com), Tribe Networks Inc. (www.tribe.net), Meetup.com (www.meetup.com), Emode Inc. and Ryze.com (www.ryze.com). Some of these sites already have raised money from Silicon Valley venture capitalists; others expect to do so shortly.

"Does it feel like 1999 again?" asks Andrew Anker, a general partner with August Capital in Menlo Park, Calif., and a backer of Emode. "In social networking, yes. I haven't seen anything like this in four years." Another venture capitalist who has steered clear of the sector cautions: "It's very bubblesque."

Most of the social-networking sites operate on the same basic idea: connecting people to new people. In the case of Friendster, an individual -- say person A -- creates a personal profile and invites friends B, C and D to join with their friends; B accepts and brings in his buddies, as does C, who brings in her friends, and so on, enabling person A to meet friends of friends of friends. Friendster connects to "four degrees of separation," Mr. Abrams says.

The networking is free; Friendster plans to add revenue-producing premium services -- perhaps video and sound capabilities. It also plans to link up with other online companies like Google and Overture Services Inc. (recently purchased by Yahoo) to exploit their search and ad capabilities. (Google recently considered buying Friendster, people close to the situation say.)

Friendster Web page shows a sample user profile; man in the photo is site's founder.

Meanwhile, a lot of meeting has been going on. The site has attracted 1.5 million unique visitors as of September, up from 110,000 in April, according to industry tracker comScore Media Metrix.

"They're obviously growing by leaps and bounds and spending no money on marketing," says Mr. Doerr. "That they're using very powerful human relationships to connect is really at the core of what makes this for me quite compelling."

Ethan Watters, author of "Urban Tribes," a recent book that examines friendships among young, unmarried urbanites, says Friendster has caught on with this group because the complicated tasks that confront them -- finding a job, a friend, an apartment, a date or a used-car deal -- are facilitated by connections.

Christian LesStrang, 33 years old, relied on Friendster recently when he moved from San Francisco to Chicago to take a new job with Seven Worldwide Inc., a marketing-services company. He didn't know anyone in Chicago, but "in less than three months, I had a social circle almost as good as the one I had in San Francisco," he says. "I had friends in San Francisco who had friends in Chicago and leveraged that," he explains. "It made the whole process of finding friends easier. I met dozens of people I wouldn't have otherwise."

Friendster's users have eclectic aims, but some networking sites specialize. LinkedIn and Ryze.com, for example, focus on matters of employment. Tribe.net functions like online classifieds. (How better to buy a used car than from someone you know?) Meetup.com helped Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean with successful grass-roots fund raising.

Emode gained steam as a place where users could take personality tests and then connect with like-minded friends. But whatever motivates the connections, a draw for investors is that the members themselves provide the site's content and spread its attractions by word-of-mouth. This is in stark contrast to Web sites of the late 1990s, which burned through cash for content and marketing.

"It's viral. You get infected and infect others," says August Capital's Mr. Anker of the sites' exponential growth.

August Capital invested $8 million in Emode in 2000, at the height of the bubble. When the economy soured, he adds, Emode "went underground" but survived.

Emode's business model has evolved, Mr. Anker says. The site initially relied on advertising, then moved to charging a monthly $12.95 subscription fee for personality profiles, then $19.95 to pay to connect to a dating service. The closely held company has had about six profitable quarters, Mr. Anker says. This month, it launched a social-networking service called "Tickle" that brings together people whose profiles -- schools, interests, hobbies, and personality results -- mesh. The company plans to rename itself Tickle Media Inc.

At Friendster, Mr. Abrams says he plans to use the cash infusion to improve the speed of his site and expand the number of employees to about 30 from 12. After that will come the new features that Friendster hopes will be income-producing. "Consumers will have a huge voice" in determining these features, says Mr. Kagle. Investors hope to keep the basic service free.

Both Messers. Kagle and Abrams are light on specifics in part because competition is stiff. More established sites, like USA Interactive's Match.com (www.match.com) and Yahoo! Personals, already boast steady monthly totals of between five million and nine million unique visitors.

Sites like Friendster have to be careful about how they grow, says Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc. in San Francisco. "The social networks are great as long as they are small," she says. But "in order to have a business model, that requires scale, typically," she adds. "Those two things are inherently in contradiction. It's a fundamental challenge."

Another potential obstacle: privacy. While the social-networking sites make it easy for people to connect to a wider circle of friends, privacy experts say the same holds true for strangers. Conceivably, law-enforcement officials or stalkers could obtain information about a user through these online social circles.

Mr. Abrams, for one, says that the information users put on the Friendster site "shouldn't be sensitive" beyond what they want to expose to their network of friends. "We keep e-mail addresses private and don't sell them. We are approved by TRUSTe [a privacy group backed by the technology industry]."

As for making money, Benchmark's Mr. Kagle describes the investment as a "leap of faith." Still, he maintains: "If you've got this level of engagement, and people spending upwards of an hour at a time [on the site], that will translate into a set of economics that will support this business model."

--Jennifer Saranow and Mylene Mangalindan contributed to this article.

Write to Ann Grimes at ann.grimes@wsj.com

Category: friendster

Posted by zephoria at 5:46 PM | TrackBack (0)

yafro

Hot or Not folks just launched a neat little YASNS site: Yafro. My favorite is that they have this bit at the bottom called "Friend Trends" that lets you see all of the new F-o-Fs, testimonials, etc.

Category:

Posted by zephoria at 2:56 PM | TrackBack (0)

October 29, 2003

first, admitting suckage

second, admitting that i made up the word suckage, except that it seems to be common vernacular. Or at least results in 19,200 Google finds. As if that defines common... well....

*ANYHOW* So, i've been a bad blogger. Ack. (But i'm not a blogger.... more on that in a moment.) I've been dreadfully busy, overworked, stretched thin and otherwise feeling like my brain has been split into a million pieces, isn't operating efficiently, critically or otherwise providing useful thoughts. Lately, i've been "blogging" in my notebook because i can't deal with the issues of presenting things publicly. (More on that in a moment too...)

Anyhow, i've decided that it's time to pour my rambles into my blog. But this means that i'm going to be a bad citizen and confuse your RSS feeds. Because i'm going to put things up in the date range that they belong in. But, you can feel free to ignore them. Most of them are danah rambles anyhow.

Category: reflections & rants

Posted by zephoria at 10:17 PM | TrackBack (0)

visualizations, INWYK

OOhh. It's Not What You Know is the first site to integrate a visualization tool into your network. When you login, click on "Network" and you can see your version. Mine:

Category:

Posted by zephoria at 8:59 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Institute for the Future

Today, i spoke on a panel at the Institute for the Future's gathering of its sponsors. It was odd to be there because it had a flavor of Media Lab sponsor events, only i was an invited speaker not a slave doing demos who had been up for weeks on end. The Institute is a great resource for thought on technology - where it's headed, what people are doing with it, why... Basically, it's a collection of really really smart people who get to think through tough problems. [Needless to say, it sounds like an ideal job for a researcher.]

The whole event was around the ideas of cybernomads... how is mobility changing the way we operate?

For the panel, i had the great opportunity to ask questions of Schuyler Earle. He's been working on this project called noCat Wireless which is a community of people in Sebastapol working on gaining wireless. It's fascinating because we always talk about technology letting us remove geography from the equation, but this project allows us to connect to people in a given region. It's also built a "community" through a traditional form... diverse collections of people gathering for a shared need.

The other fun thing about the panel was that i actually had the opportunity to speak with Howard Rheingold (who was on my panel). I very much enjoy Howard's synthesis of ideas so having the opportunity to get face time was just fantastic.

Anyhow, it was great to spend the last two days thinking about the future, critiquing conceptual models. I felt like i was back at Intel. I forgot how much fun that was.

Category: digitalness

Posted by zephoria at 7:42 PM | TrackBack (0)

understanding an audience

In questioning if i was a blogger, i started wondering about conceptions of audience in blogging.

Somewhere i once read that there are two types of bloggers. The first produces material in a journalist-esque fashion. They see their audience as public and are always a bit surprised when those close to them read their stuff. The second produces material in a journal fashion. They see their audience as private and are always a bit startled when the world reads them.

I'm definitely in both camps, or neither. My audience is primarily me. Even my best friend doesn't read my blog. In fact, most of the people that i truly think of as only friends (and not also colleagues) never read my blog. I'm always absolutely surprised to go to a party and be told about my blog. I'm also surprised to hear from strangers about my blog.

What is an audience? So, while i say that my audience is me, that's not really true. Most of the tone of this blog is veiled. It's pretty non-controversial. It's fairly boring. I don't write about my adventures, my sinful engagements or my emotional trials. Sure, folks make guesses about me as a person based on my content, but that's often misleading. For example, the reasons that i pay attention to drug and sex and teenager culture have quite rich explanations, but it's easy to make assumptions. I allow that slippage though because i don't want to appear so wholesome. Thus, the i know that the constructed identity is biased and i often encourage that bias

Audience is *so* essential. There is no way to present information without understanding who is reading it, what their biases/experiences are, and how you are being read. We write in a void, unlcear of how people are reading us. We write to the ether, yet i take for granted so many assumptions about my audience. I assume that i'm speaking to educated, conscientious people with like minds... i assume i'm preaching to the choir (but all readers of misbehaving will know that i'm learning this lesson the hard way).

In order to blog, we need to either define our audiences on our site (locally controlled context creation), be totally low self-monitors, or be really consciously uncontroversial. Usually, i tend towards the latter. I'm a complete high self-monitor and security through obscurity isn't working... somehow, i stopped being obscure.

I worry about this aspect of blogging. Will bloggers just be the low self-monitors and those of us who don't put our vulnerabilities forward? What's the impact of putting your vulnerabilities forward. Have others gotten hurt?

Hmm...

Category:

Posted by zephoria at 12:51 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

am i a blogger?

I got to meet an amazing woman last night. Dina Mehta is someone that i met through the blogging world. Her ideas are so crisp and her politics are so righteous. I've had so much fun reading her ideas, so i was delighted to be able to make it. I met her amidst a group of other bloggers. And i will admit that i was bouncing full of energy and disrupted the flow of conversation, but it was so fascinating to hear all of the ideas about blogging.

But it made me think... am i blogger? I never identified as such actually. I mean, i've been writing rambles online since 1996, inspired by my dear friend jcn. In 1997, my Zen teacher required that i write down my reflections of the day for me. I did so digitally because he was living in a different city. I wrote journals for friends (under htaccess), started a live journal and eventually switched to MovableType. As i've gotten "older" and "wiser" my public rambles have become less emotional... or actually, they just make me feel less vulnerable than the emotional rambles i shared with friends.

Amidst this, "blogging" happened. I didn't identify as a blogger because my habits didn't change. I still rambled; friends still made fun of me and i still used the site primarily to lookup my own thoughts. But then something changed. This summer, i became a participant in some community of sorts. My voice was suddenly being read by strangers. My ideas were being critiqued. People were commenting about concepts not just being supportive. It was weird. I didn't know how to take it.

Through this, i kept attending conferences. People would ask me if i was a blogger. Well, i blog... But it dawned on me that to "be a blogger" meant something entirely different. It's a state of mind. People walk around and see knowledge floating in the world that they must blog... a compulsion. Well, i have a lot of compulsions, but to archive my observations is not one of them. In fact, it's a constant struggle of mine. I actually do this because i *should* not because it's easy. I mean, i always loved Anais Nin, but i could never understand how she wrote so much!

In fact, every time people mention that they read my blog to me, i feel guilty... I mean, i feel like it's a neglected child. It's so far from representative of all of the thoughts that go through my mind, all of the critiques that i spew, all of the ideas that i have. I'm embarrassed by the design which is about as adhoc as it gets (thank goodness for RSS feeds).

To "be a blogger" means to identify with this "community of bloggers." People who are pushing the edge, changing the way people interact with information. I didn't start blogging to do that, but people keep attributing my work as such. I read so many blogs, although i'm a dreadful commenter. All the same, they are the best ethnographic study. But am i just an observer. Somehow, i seem to have become a participant... perhaps i have "become a blogger" accidentally.

Category:

Posted by zephoria at 12:34 PM | TrackBack (1)

is Friendster a dud?

OK, this is the *best* biline ever:

"Friendster's inspiration -- online matchmaking via friends of friends -- has been a runaway success. Human nature may be the only bug."

So, i admit... i like this article. Finally, someone in the press is teasing apart the fundamental structural problems of Friendster (not just the Fakester problem or the Jonathan Abrams sucks problem or being all positive). In particular, they take aim at two of my favorite issues:

1) The assumption that your friends are transitive links for dating. [There is no doubt that people are often more compatible with people that are friends of friends. But the inverse logic is not always true. Just because they are a friend of a friend doesn't mean you have any interest in dating them.] They bring up the issues with friends being counterproductive because they don't always know what's best... i.e. your friends shouldn't try to help by setting up dates - this is always a disaster (this is age old wisdom that seems to have been forgotten in Friendster).

2) Friendster assumes equality. A friend is a friend is a friend, right? Ha! Particularly when there's an issue of "public face."

Is this a sign of more negative press to come? Is the honeymoon with Friendster over? (It certainly is for many of the users i've been tracking...)

A Dud in Cupid's Online Quiver?
Friendster's inspiration -- online matchmaking via friends of friends -- has been a runaway success. Human nature may be the only bug

Friendster may be the hottest dot.com to show up since Google. Silicon Valley entrepreneur John Abrams started Friendster.com as a way of making it easier to meet friends of friends and avoid the "creepy" feeling he associated with online dating -- and his concept quickly caught fire. Abrams hasn't spent a penny on marketing, yet Friendster has attracted 1.8 million members since its launch last March -- 1.7 million more than Barry Diller's Match.com (IACI ) attracted in its first year. It has even spawned a clone from online dating service eMode -- a new site called the "Tickle Network."

The way Friendster works is simple. To join the online community, someone either has to be invited by an existing Friendster member or form a new Friendster group and ask people to join. Friendster members have to post profiles full of personal information plus their rationale for using the network. And to keep things genteel, members have to ask for an introduction before they can talk to a friend of a friend inside Friendster (see BW Online, 6/10/03, "Finding Love Online, Version 2.0").

PREBUBBLE LATHER.  The service remains free so far, but Abrams has repeatedly hinted at a paid model in the near future. That could involve charging Friendster members to message each other or requiring a monthly fee to use the site. Perhaps to make a paid membership more valuable, Abrams has expanded Friendster's circle to social networkers, people seeking activity partners, and even folks trying to build business networks. So far, though, Friendster looks likely to live or die as a dating service.

The "viral" adoption of Friendster has impressed the dot-com elite, who are whipping themselves into what can only be described as a prebubble lather. Former Yahoo! (YHOO ) CEO Tim Koogle, former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel, and Google board member Ram Shriram have together sunk more than $1 million into the company, Abrams told CNN in October.

Rumors have been floating around the Valley that Friendster has bagged $10 million in seed funding from powerhouse venture capital firms Benchmark Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers. Neither of those outfits could be reached for comment, but Friendster is listed among Benchmark's portfolio companies, with managing partner Bob Kagle sitting on the board alongside Koogle and Abrams, who declined to comment for this article.

Could so many smart, rich, powerful people be wrong? In this case, perhaps.

LINKS IN THE CHAIN.  Undeniably, the online dating market is one of the closest things there is to a pot of gold. According to the Online Publishers Assn., U.S. consumers forked out $214.3 million for online dating in the first half of 2003, up 76% from the same period the year before.

That's all well and good, but the Friendster froth could be a classic case of Valley disconnect with the vox populi. Essentially, it's an attempt to apply the economic theory behind eBay (EBAY ) -- bringing buyers and sellers together to create commerce -- to a far more complex social phenomenon. And in that context, the Friendster model for dating, while fun, has a number of flaws that don't plague the personal-ad approach favored by most successful dating sites.

For one thing, Friendster assumes that friends are a good screening mechanism for quality dating partners: You like your friend, so you will like your friends' friends. This isn't a new concept. Most singles have gone on a date set up by mutual friends. Trouble is, friends may not be very good matchmakers, according to Mark Thompson, a psychologist who has studied dating and human interaction for decades and is now CEO of Weattract.com, a dating search engine that -- full disclosure -- works with Friendster rival Match.com.

DUBIOUS PROPOSITION.  Thompson says despite some research on the subject, no empirical evidence shows that dating friends of friends results in more successful coupling. In fact, friends may be counterproductive, because they think they know you better than they actually do. "Friends don't know systematically what matters," says Thompson. "Friends don't bring a lot expertise in dating other than good intentions -- and you know the old saying about where those lead."

Friendster also assumes that relationships between friends are roughly equal, which is rarely the case. This can make for uncomfortable situations, such as when Friendster members invite someone into their network who doesn't really want to be there. In the offline world, people can make an excuse not to come to a party. In the asynchronous online world, there's no viable excuse aside from the truth.

Telling the truth -- no, I don't want to be your friend -- is uncomfortable, so most people acquiesce. But the worth of networks built on such dubious or unwanted connections likely isn't terribly high. "I'll get friend requests from people I haven't spoken to in over a year," says Wade Tinney, a sometime Friendster user and co-founder of video-game company Large Animal.

"It's hard to say no, so you don't, and maybe you catch up a little. But eventually you realize there's a reason I haven't spoken to that person, and that's because I didn't need them in my life," says Tinney. Much less, pay to share time with them.

NOT-SO-FRIENDLY COMPETITION.  Friendster's approach also overlooks the social costs involved in making an introduction. If a date goes horribly wrong, then the friend in the middle may feel the wrath of the other two. Moreover, dating is often a bloodsport driven by egos and sexual appetites. Lots of alpha-daters might be loath to connect their friends, much less friends of friends, with partners they may view as prospective mates for themselves.

"Your friends are prepared to help you because they are your friends," says Duncan Watts, a Columbia University sociology professor and the author of Six Degrees: The Science of the Connected Age (Norton, 2003). "But we are also competitive with our friends, and sometimes we aren't prepared to help them."

None of this is to say Friendster isn't a fascinating experiment -- one that legions of people find fun. The site continues to grow quickly. And maybe, in the not-too-distant future, some people will pay to participate.

My guess, however, is that the audience quirks that separate a Friendster from an eBay will make Abrams' baby a tough sell. That still leaves selling advertising on the site as a way for Koogle, Thiel, Shriram, and the venture capitalists to recoup their investments. That could earn them a modest return. But I wouldn't bet on Friendster becoming the category killer that Silicon Valley's elite seem to think it'll be.

Salkever is Technology editor for BusinessWeek Online and covers Internet issues weekly in his Nothing But Net column

Category: friendster

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October 28, 2003

designing social software

[From Many-to-Many]

I had the awesome privilege of attending the Intimate (Ubiquitous) Computing workshop at Ubicomp this year. The attendees grappled with issues of intimacy, the relationship between people and the impact of technology on intimacy. These issues are so relevant to social software, but so rarely addressed. For example, what is the impact of social software on intimacy? How does it affect our mechanisms of relating to people?

It's so easy as social software developers to think about people's hypothetical needs and design towards them, without really processing what impact we've had. Yet, the structures we create fundamentally affect how people interact, both offline and online. How are we changing people's ability to engage offline because of their digital presence? How are we changing our understandings of the public sphere?

Ubicomp made me reflect on how easily we slip into a technocentric point of view. It's so easy to assume that there is a perfect set of technologies, that they will solve all of the world's problems and that they will produce nothing but good.

My take-away from the whole thing was to remember that we must think about the domains that we impact. We as social software developers/designers have the opportunity to dramatically impact social behavior. But we must approach this cautiously because if we fail to consider our impact, we could cause more harm than good.

[Remember: guns don't kill people; people kill people. But they *use* guns and those guns were designed by people, and designed to kill.]

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usability as a science

Tonight, i listened to a well-known software designer articulate his view of usability, ubiquitous computing and interface design. He spoke of usability as a burgeoning science. From his worldview, it would one day be possible to truly test what was the best way to do something. This conversation reeked of technological determinism* - one correct way... universalist notions of science... eek!

Now, i take issue with usability tests in general. When you run a usability test, you assume that 1) people will use it in the intended way; 2) people's use won't change over time; 3) people's in-lab use will be identical to their social use at home. All of these are fundamentally WRONG. Thus, i just don't believe in usability testing for social software because the goal is not to see if some feature works better than another, but to see if they "get" it.

Oh, my other favorite quote from the discussion concerned cell phones and their hideous user interfaces (which are worse in Japan from his perspective). "In Japan, it's a social mystery that people buy these tools." The connotation was that the social factor was superfluous and without value. ::shaking head::

* Technological determinism has been on my mind lately because it's been a topic on one of my classes. My professor stated that no one would admit to being a technological determinist nowadays. I argued back stating that most of the technological determinists that i know know so little about social critiques of technology that they wouldn't know that term so as to label themselves accordingly. I told her not to worry - there are plenty of people who still believe this problematic philosophy.

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There's a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex

There's a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex is a terrifying NYTimes article that discusses the convergence of branding / product addiction and neurological science.

These are the kinds of articles that remind me to be wary of academic science being sponsored by industry and cranky that psychologists and other trained professionals use their knowledge to help corporate control of people.

There's a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex

By CLIVE THOMPSON

Published: October 26, 2003

When he isn't pondering the inner workings of the mind, Read Montague, a 43-year-old neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, has been known to contemplate the other mysteries of life: for instance, the Pepsi Challenge. In the series of TV commercials from the 70's and 80's that pitted Coke against Pepsi in a blind taste test, Pepsi was usually the winner. So why, Montague asked himself not long ago, did Coke appeal so strongly to so many people if it didn't taste any better?

Over several months this past summer, Montague set to work looking for a scientifically convincing answer. He assembled a group of test subjects and, while monitoring their brain activity with an M.R.I. machine, recreated the Pepsi Challenge. His results confirmed those of the TV campaign: Pepsi tended to produce a stronger response than Coke in the brain's ventral putamen, a region thought to process feelings of reward. (Monkeys, for instance, exhibit activity in the ventral putamen when they receive food for completing a task.) Indeed, in people who preferred Pepsi, the ventral putamen was five times as active when drinking Pepsi than that of Coke fans when drinking Coke.

In the real world, of course, taste is not everything. So Montague tried to gauge the appeal of Coke's image, its "brand influence," by repeating the experiment with a small variation: this time, he announced which of the sample tastes were Coke. The outcome was remarkable: almost all the subjects said they preferred Coke. What's more, the brain activity of the subjects was now different. There was also activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently, the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink -- in a word, its brand -- to shape their preference.

Pepsi, crucially, couldn't achieve the same effect. When Montague reversed the situation, announcing which tastes were of Pepsi, far fewer of the subjects said they preferred Pepsi. Montague was impressed: he had demonstrated, with a fair degree of neuroscientific precision, the special power of Coke's brand to override our taste buds.

Measuring brand influence might seem like an unusual activity for a neuroscientist, but Montague is just one of a growing breed of researchers who are applying the methods of the neurology lab to the questions of the advertising world. Some of these researchers, like Montague, are purely academic in focus, studying the consumer mind out of intellectual curiosity, with no corporate support. Increasingly, though, there are others -- like several of the researchers at the Mind of the Market Laboratory at Harvard Business School -- who work as full-fledged "neuromarketers," conducting brain research with the help of corporate financing and sharing their results with their sponsors. This summer, when it opened its doors for business, the BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences in Atlanta became the first neuromarketing firm to boast a Fortune 500 consumer-products company as a client. (The client's identity is currently a secret.) The institute will scan the brains of a representative sample of its client's prospective customers, assess their reactions to the company's products and advertising and tweak the corporate image accordingly.

Not long ago, M.R.I. machines were used solely for medical purposes, like diagnosing strokes or discovering tumors. But neuroscience has reached a sort of cocky adolescence; it has become routine to read about researchers tackling every subject under the sun, placing test subjects in M.R.I. machines and analyzing their brain activity as they do everything from making moral choices to praying to appreciating beauty. Paul C. Lauterbur, a chemist who shared this year's Nobel Prize in medicine for his contribution in the early 70's to the invention of the M.R.I. machine, notes how novel the uses of his invention have become. "Things are getting a lot more subtle than we'd ever thought," he says. It seems only natural that the commercial world has finally caught on. "You don't have to be a genius to say, 'My God, if you combine making the can red with making it less sweet, you can measure this in a scanner and see the result,"' Montague says. "If I were Pepsi, I'd go in there and I'd start scanning people."

The neuroscience wing at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta is the epicenter of the neuromarketing world. Like most medical wards, it is filled with an air of quiet, antiseptic tension. On a recent visit, in the hallway outside an M.R.I. room, a patient milled around in a light blue paper gown. A doctor on a bench flipped through a clipboard and talked in soothing tones to a man in glasses, a young woman anxiously clutching his arm.

It was not a place where you would expect to encounter slick marketing research. And when Justine Meaux, a research scientist for the BrightHouse Institute, came out to greet me, she did seem strangely out of place. Clicking along in strappy sandals, with a tight sleeveless top and purple toenail polish, she looked more like a chic TV producer than a neuroscientist, which she is. Her specialty, as she explained, is "the neural dynamics of the perception and production of rhythmic sensorimotor patterns" -- though these days she spends her professional life thinking about shopping. "I'm really getting into reading all this business stuff now, learning about campaigns, branding," she said, leading me down the hallway to the M.R.I. chamber that the Institute uses. Three years ago, after earning her Ph.D., she decided she wanted to apply brain scanning to everyday problems and was intrigued by marketing as a "practical application of psychology," as she put it. She told me that she admired the "Intel Inside" advertising campaign, with its TV spots showing dancing men in body suits. "Intel actually branded the inside of a computer," she marveled. "They took the most abstract thing you can imagine and figured out a way to make people identify with it."

When we reached the M.R.I. control room, Clint Kilts, the scientific director of the BrightHouse Institute, was fiddling away at a computer keyboard. A professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory, Kilts began working with Meaux in 2001. Meaux had learned that Kilts and a group of marketers were founding the BrightHouse Institute, and she joined their team, becoming perhaps the world's first full-time neuromarketer. Kilts is confident that there will soon be room for other full-time careers in neuromarketing. "You will actually see this being part of the decision-making process, up and down the company," he predicted. "You are going to see more large companies that will have neuroscience divisions."

The BrightHouse Institute's techniques are based, in part, on an experiment that Kilts conducted earlier this year. He gathered a group of test subjects and asked them to look at a series of commercial products, rating how strongly they liked or disliked them. Then, while scanning their brains in an M.R.I. machine, he showed them pictures of the products again. When Kilts looked at the images of their brains, he was struck by one particular result: whenever a subject saw a product he had identified as one he truly loved -- something that might prompt him to say, "That's just so me!" -- his brain would show increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex.

Kilts was excited, for he knew that this region of the brain is commonly associated with our sense of self. Patients with damage in this area of the brain, for instance, often undergo drastic changes in personality; in one famous case, a mild-mannered 19th-century railworker named Phineas Gage abruptly became belligerent after an accident that destroyed his medial prefrontal cortex. More recently, M.R.I. studies have found increased activity in this region when people are asked if adjectives like "trustworthy" or "courageous" apply to them. When the medial prefrontal cortex fires, your brain seems to be engaging, in some manner, with what sort of person you are. If it fires when you see a particular product, Kilts argues, it's most likely to be because the product clicks with your self-image.

This result provided the BrightHouse Institute with an elegant tool for testing marketing campaigns and brands. An immediate, intuitive bond between consumer and product is one that every company dreams of making. "If you like Chevy trucks, it's because that has become the larger gestalt of who you self-attribute as," Kilts said, using psychology-speak. "You're a Chevy guy." With the help of neuromarketers, he claims, companies can now know with certainty whether their products are making that special connection.

To demonstrate their technique, Kilts and Meaux offered to stick my head in the M.R.I. machine. They laid me down headfirst in the coffinlike cylinder and scurried out to the observation room. "Here's what I want you to do," Meaux said, her voice crackling over an intercom. "I'm going to show you a bunch of images of products and activities -- and I want you to picture yourself using them. Don't think about whether you like them or not. Just put yourself in the scene."

I peered up into a mirror positioned over my head, and she began flashing pictures. There were images of a Hummer, a mountain bike, a can of Pepsi. Then a Lincoln Navigator, Martha Stewart, a game of basketball and dozens more snapshots of everyday consumption. I imagined piloting the Hummer off-road, playing a game of pickup basketball, swigging the Pepsi. (I was less sure what to do with Martha Stewart.)

After about 15 minutes, Kilts pulled me out, and I joined him at a bank of computers. "Look here," he said, pointing to a screen that showed an image of a brain in cross sections. He pointed to a bright yellow spot on the right side, in the somatosensory cortex, an area that shows activity when you emulate sensory experience -- as when I imagined what it would be like to drive a Hummer. If a marketer finds that his product is producing a response in this region of the brain, he can conclude that he has not made the immediate, instinctive sell: even if a consumer has a positive attitude toward the product, if he has to mentally "try it out," he isn't instantly identifying with it.

Kilts stabbed his finger at another glowing yellow dot near the top of the brain. It was the magic spot -- the medial prefrontal cortex. If that area is firing, a consumer isn't deliberating, he said: he's itching to buy. "At that point, it's intuitive. You say: 'I'm going to do it. I want it.' "

he consuming public has long had an uneasy feeling about scientists who dabble in marketing. In 1957, Vance Packard wrote "The Hidden Persuaders," a book about marketing that featured harsh criticism of "psychology professors turned merchandisers." Marketers, Packard worried, were using the resources of the social sciences to understand consumers' irrational and emotional urges -- the better to trick them into increased product consumption. In rabble-rousing prose, Packard warned about subliminal advertising and cited a famous (though, it turned out, bogus) study about a movie theater that inserted into a film several split-second frames urging patrons to drink Coke.

In truth, marketers only wish they had that much control. If anything, corporations tend to look slightly askance at their admen, because there's not much convincing evidence that advertising works as well as promised. John Wanamaker, a department-store magnate in the late 19th century, famously quipped that half the money he spent on advertising was wasted, but that he didn't know which half. In their quest for a more respectable methodology -- or perhaps more important, the appearance of one -- admen have plundered one scientific technique after another. Demographic studies have profiled customers by analyzing their age, race or neighborhood; telephone surveys have queried semi-randomly selected strangers to see how the public at large viewed a company's product.

Advertising's main tool, of course, has been the focus group, a classic technique of social science. Marketers in the United States spent more than $1 billion last year on focus groups, the results of which guided about $120 billion in advertising. But focus groups are plagued by a basic flaw of human psychology: people often do not know their own minds. Joey Reiman is the C.E.O. of BrightHouse, an Atlanta marketing firm, and a founding partner in the BrightHouse Institute; over years of producing marketing concepts for companies like Coca-Cola and Red Lobster, he has come to the conclusion that focus groups are ultimately less about gathering hard data and more about pretending to have concrete justifications for a hugely expensive ad campaign. "The sad fact is, people tell you what you want to hear, not what they really think," he says. "Sometimes there's a focus-group bully, a loudmouth who's so insistent about his opinion that it influences everyone else. This is not a science; it's a circus."

In contrast, M.R.I. scanning offers the promise of concrete facts -- an unbiased glimpse at a consumer's mind in action. To an M.R.I. machine, you cannot misrepresent your responses. Your medial prefrontal cortex will start firing when you see something you adore, even if you claim not to like it. "Let's say I show you Playboy," Kilts says, "and you go, 'Oh, no, no, no!' Really? We could tell you actually like it."

Other neuromarketers have demonstrated that we react to products in ways that we may not be entirely conscious of. This year, for instance, scientists working with DaimlerChrysler scanned the brains of a number of men as they looked at pictures of cars and rated them for attractiveness. The scientists found that the most popular vehicles -- the Porsche- and Ferrari-style sports cars -- triggered activity in a section of the brain called the fusiform face area, which governs facial recognition. "They were reminded of faces when they looked at the cars," says Henrik Walter, a psychiatrist at the University of Ulm in Germany who ran the study. "The lights of the cars look a little like eyes."

Neuromarketing may also be able to suss out the distinction between advertisements that people merely like and those that are actually effective -- a difference that can be hard to detect from a focus group. A neuromarketing study in Australia, for instance, demonstrated that supershort, MTV-style jump cuts -- indeed, any scenes shorter than two seconds -- aren't as likely to enter the long-term memory of viewers, however bracing or aesthetically pleasing they may be.

Still, many scientists are skeptical of neuromarketing. The brain, critics point out, is still mostly an enigma; just because we can see neurons firing doesn't mean we always know what the mind is doing. For all their admirable successes, neuroscientists do not yet have an agreed-upon map of the brain. "I keep joking that I could do this Gucci shoes study, where I'd show people shoes I think are beautiful, and see whether women like them," says Elizabeth Phelps, a professor of psychology at New York University. "And I'll see activity in the brain. I definitely will. But it's not like I've found 'the shoe center of the brain."' James Twitchell, a professor of advertising at the University of Florida, wonders whether neuromarketing isn't just the next stage of scientific pretense on the part of the advertising industry. "Remember, you have to ask the client for millions, millions of dollars," he says. "So you have to say: 'Trust me. We have data. We've done these neurotests. Go with us, we know what we're doing."' Twitchell recently attended an advertising conference where a marketer discussed neuromarketing. The entire room sat in awe as the speaker suggested that neuroscience will finally crack open the mind of the shopper. "A lot of it is just garbage," he says, "but the garbage is so powerful."

In response to his critics, Kilts plans to publish the BrightHouse research in an accredited academic journal. He insisted to me that his primary allegiance is to science; BrightHouse's techniques are "business done in the science method," he said, "not science done in the business method." And as he sat at his computer, calling up a 3-D picture of a brain, it was hard not to be struck, at the very least, by the seriousness of his passion. There, on the screen, was the medial prefrontal cortex, juggling our conscious thinking. There was the amygdala, governing our fears, buried deep in the brain. These are sights that he said still inspire in him feelings of wonder. "When you sit down and you're watching -- for the first time in the history of mankind -- how we process complex primary emotions like anger, it's amazing," he said. "You're like, there, look at that: that's anger, that's pleasure. When you see that roll off the workstation, you never look back." You just keep going, it seems, until you hit Madison Avenue.

Clive Thompson writes frequently about science and technology. His most recent article for the magazine was about the future of kitchen tools.

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October 26, 2003

connecting urban tribes and friendster

Oh, yay - Ethan Watters connected Urban Tribes and Friendster in a Nerve interview. Now, if only we could show the tribes....

Category: yasns

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ubicomp, privacy and vulnerability

I wrote an entry for misbehaving on ubicomp, privacy and vulnerability, but forgot to link it here.

Today was the first day of Ubicomp (the conference for those interested in ubiquitous computing). Per tradition, the first day was a collection of workshops in which people submitted applications to attend. Much to many people's frustration, there were two opposing workshops with overlapping themes: intimacy and privacy. Perhaps they do not seem that overlapping, but they are quite intertwined and many participants were immediately curious about the others' workshop. In the Intimacy workshop, we noted towards the end that the explicity topic of privacy had not really arisen all day. In raising this point, we noted that we had been grappling with it as vulnerability, not explicitly privacy. In regards to privacy in intimate spaces, people were far more concerned with vulnerability than privacy.

The intimacy workshop was fascinating for Ubicomp, as its topic put quite a few people on edge. Yet its draw was significant.

Dinner was attended by a blend of folks from the privacy and intimacy workshops. One topic immediately surfaced. While the intimacy workshop was 2/3 women, not a single woman attended the privacy workshop. Perhaps the traditional approaches to ubicomp are a bit masculinized linguistically and culturally...

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social construction of technology

I just posted an entry about gender, technology and social construction at misbehaving.net, a great little blog that i'm playing at these days.

I have a tendency to point out when interfaces have gender biases in them. Lately, i keep getting asked what it would mean to create a separate interface for women. This question astonishes me, and i keep chewing on how to properly respond.

There are a lot of things that men and women do differently. For example, men are much better at spatial rotation, but their skills at differentiating shades are atrocious. Yet, there are certain tasks in the real world that men are better suited for and certain tasks that women are better suited for. The real world doesn't have a gendered interface; it simply allows for different readings, different levels of access. For example, we all manage to negotiate three dimensions, but the cues we use to do so differ.

Technology is socially constructed. In other words, technology does not exist devoid of its creators' prejudices, biases, cultural assumptions, etc. When men design and build toys and then have other men test them, it should not be surprising that the common experiences of those men get imbibed in the technology. (If this seems surprising, imagine what happens when you assume American roads, habits when designing a car for Amsterdam or Japan. Cultural dependence is not that different.)

The trick is not to design a separate interface (remember, separate but equal never really worked). The goal is to incorporate a wide variety of perspectives into the design and creation of a system, to create a system that people can repurpose to meet their needs. The goal is to encourage flexibility of expression, to not project a limited perspective into the technology. Designers must take into consideration the vast array of potential users, experiences, expectations, not simply their own. This is why things get tricky.

Category: social software

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October 25, 2003

gargoyle & friends

OK... my friends who are addicted to the little psychological tests so need to stop telling me about them, because they are the *perfect* procrastination tool.

You are Form 4, Gargoyle: The Fallen
"And The Gargoyle mended his wings from the blood of the fallen so he could rise up from imprisonment. With great speed and resourcefulness, Gargoyle made the world his for the taking."

Some examples of the Gargoyle Form are Daedalus (Greek) and Mary Magdalene (Christian). The Gargoyle is associated with the concept of success, the number 4, and the element of wood. His sign is the new mooon.

As a member of Form 4, you are a creative and resourceful individual. You are always thinking of possible solutions to problems you face and you generally choose one that is right. Much of your success comes from your ability to look at things a little differently than everyone else. Gargoyles are the best friends to have because they don't always take things for face value.

Which Mythological Form Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

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playing with girls

I was out to dinner with my roommate and we were reflecting on Ubicomp. Apparently, there was quite a discussion amongst "the boys" about the presence of some very strong women at the conference. My roommate laughed as he recalled the discussion. At some point, he reminded these boys that this is what strong women looked like. For so long, strong women tried to fit into the boys' world, tried to be like men. (I was there, i remember.) But now, there's a whole new flavor of strong women. These women are not really feminine, not really masculine, but themselves. Their presence in the tech world is small, but powerful and they are fundamentally themselves.

As he described this, i smiled, thinking to the women that i know who can be described by this. It's so refreshing to see powerful women be themselves in the tech industry, but it's also terrifying. When we were following men's example, our direction was laid out for us. Now, we are trying to make up our own mechanisms for survival, for getting validated, for having our voices heard. Without an example, we tend to flail a bit. We're accused of playing too nice, of being too mean. Men's world has defined the balance; we have yet to find ours. It's this struggle, this confusion that still cripples so many of the women that i know.

There is no easy answer, no set philosophy. Yet, it is with this mindset that i've joined in on the team of women blogging at misbehaving.net, a blogspace where we can reflect on women & tech.

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October 24, 2003

good links, for reference

GeekBox wrote twogood pieces on the social software space that i forgot to blog on.

Tribe Tips is an analysis of Tribe behavior, identity performance and discussion topics

Blogger = DJ questions whether or not a blogger is like a DJ, linking just as one would spin records

He also references Six Degrees Away where snarkout talks about Erdos numbers and the mathematics of connections

Category: social software

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Are friends the key to privacy?

I'm With Stupid: How Having Friends Might Be the Key to Both Privacy and Identity is a great article by Robert X. Cringely. In it, he addresses what the key questions are when we talk about privacy and identity. He teases apart the difference between "is this accurate data" and "are you who you say you are." He addresses both extremists. And finally, he suggests how spam and other privacy issues might be addressed through a friends of friend network. A good read!

Category: yasns

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Amazon was sent from the heavens

Older friends of mine gasp at the realization that i've never done research without the web. Yet, despite the web, i've always had one problem that has haunted me. Sure, i can read many computer-related journals and articles, look up any book and read anyone's college essay on most topics, but there are so many books that i just stare at and scream grep.

Grep.

I just want grep to work on my books. Well, gosh darn, Amazon went and invented it. They were sent from the heavens i tell you. This will revolutionize the next generation of college students.

Category: digitalness

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October 23, 2003

lakoff on voting with your identity

In "The Frame Around Arnold," Lakoff (re)suggests that people vote their identity:

In 'Moral Politics,' I suggested that voters vote their identity – they vote on the basis of who they are, what values they have, and who and what they admire. A certain number of voters identify themselves with their self-interest and vote accordingly. But that is the exception rather than the rule. There are other forms of personal identification – with one's ethnicity, with one's values, with cultural stereotypes, and with culture heroes. The most powerful forms of identification so far as elections are concerned are with values and corresponding cultural stereotypes.

I don't think that i agree. I think that they *use* their identity to vote, but they don't vote their identity. For example, i used my identity to vote *against* a candidate in the recall and SF mayoral elections, not particularly *for* any candidate. In fact, i don't identify with any of the candidates i've ever seen... i choose the lesser of evils. Most candidates represent a very small percentage of people. Certainly, some of the represent what people would like to one day be (and if your ideal is to be the Terminator, goddess help you). In the States, they vote Protestant Ethic style. But seriously, who in California really represents the Mexican community? Who represents the disenfranchised migrant workers (oh, wait, they can't vote...)? And who on earth does Ahr-nold really represent? I'm sorry... but i don't buy that he represents the strict father morality to most people.

That said, i really appreciate a lot of Lakoff's arguments, particularly his deconstruction of the framing of the election.

Category: politics

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Techsploitation

Annalee Newitz's latest "Techsploitation" addresses reality RPG (role-playing-games) with a funny address to Tribe.net:

Yet another kind of reality RPG is Tribe.net, an uncensored online community that resembles Friendster in almost every way except for the fact that there is no autocratic dictator named Jonathan Abrams running the thing and deleting the accounts of people who freak him out. At Tribe.net you log in and create an identity for yourself, complete with as much or as little real information as you like. You can be an entirely fictional creation, complete with fake photos, or you can document your every little personality quirk, from a love of data mining to a predilection for farting quietly in movie theaters. The game of Tribe, such as it is, is to accumulate as many friends and tribal affiliations as you can. The more often you log in and post messages to tribe discussion boards, the more friends you'll get and the more satisfied you'll be. It's like creating a group of Sims characters. "You" watch "yourself" moving around in a social space, and "you" interact with a bunch of other "people" in "rooms."

Who are all these people on Tribe anyway? As if I were some wide-eyed social critic from the late 1980s, I find myself discovering once again that people are different online than they are in person. Shy people are eloquent. Sexy people are boring. I have two busy friends, whose presence I often miss in real life, whom I now get to see nearly everyday on Tribe.

"Wow, Jason and Liz are so cool!" I think as I read their Tribe posts. "I wish they existed in real life!" And then I realize they do exist; I saw them last year at a party, and they are indeed as funny and smart as their "selves" on Tribe.

Am I confused or just happy to see them? Am I going to the store or is this just a game? I'll have to decide.

(Bolding for the sentence that humored me the most)

Category: yasns

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October 22, 2003

Scary Party 2: Escape from the Castro!

I'm on social ban until i catch up on academic work or until Halloween (whichever comes first). Halloween is my favorite holiday - costumes, candy, absurdity. It's the one time per year when everyone is free to be creative and embody something from their imagination. Given this, i'm ecstatic to be spending it at False Profit's "Scary Party 2: Escape from the Castro" (watch the trailer). [Translation: crazy breaks party and haunted house with some of my closest friends]

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