Help the Honey Bees
Haagen Dazs site to build awareness around “Colony Collapse Disorder” and how it effects us. Heavy flash site but important issue.
Homemade porn… handle with care.
The details are not the details. They make the design.
Brightkite & Privacy
I’ve been playing with Brightkite lately and while I’m not sure exactly why, it has been fun. Really, this is just Dodgeball 2.0 and had Google not let it languish, who knows where that would be, but woulda’, shoulda’, coulda’, right? There aren’t many people on Brightkite yet but in NYC, it’s interesting to see who else has been at a location or to look who is near you. As I said, I’m not sure exactly what’s there, why people are going to actively use this or where the money is, but if Twitter can get an $80 million pre, who am I to nay-say?
Like I said, Brightkite has been fun, but a site that allows me to publish my location constantly and follow other people’s locations certainly does ring privacy bells. To be fair, the site apparently has all sorts of levels of authorizations that I haven’t checked out yet and even without that, what people choose to do with the Brightkite service is the responsibility of that individual. I have a friend whose mother won’t even use credit cards for fear of being tracked and here I am on facebook, linkedin, flickr, and twitter just to name a few. Even with all of that, this latest toy gives me pause.
I was sitting in a web cafe playing with Brightkite, when I decided to check out who was “around me”. Well, not 2 minutes later, I was looking at a picture of this girl in the area just after she had jumped out of bed. It wasn’t particularly scandalous and the inter-web certainly has spicier just a click away. What made me feel a little creepy was that while viewing this picture of an absolute stranger, I knew exactly where she currently was.
I had a similar sensation a couple months ago when sending an email to someone I’d previously met. He is an MIT Sloan alumnus from an earlier year and I was simply looking to touch base and maybe get some job hunting advice. After our first meeting, I started to follow his flickr photo stream. As a result, in my email, I was able to congratulate him on his recently born, second child. I do know this person to some extent, he does live a semi-public life and I didn’t feel I had crossed any lines in reaching out or in getting information. However, it still felt a little odd about how much I knew about someone I don’t really know.
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures recently touched on this as well. My point is simply, it will be very interesting to see how people make their choices about their own preferred balance of privacy vs utility. Megan Smith, in charge of New Business Development at Google, came to speak at MIT Sloan and I asked her about something related. I theorized that those growing up with Facebook and the rest of the social tools don’t appreciate that the information they put out there for their “friends” to see is really out there for any and everyone. Her response was that it isn’t that they are unaware, it is that they simply do not care. They have never known anything different. Do you remember when you weren’t able to publish every thought?
Brad Fitzpatrick’s Thoughts on the Social Graph
I just finished reading Brad Fitzpatrick’s Thoughts on the Social Graph by way of Anil Dash’s post on it. (It took a couple of days to get through with all of the Hurricane Dean excitement here in Kingston.) The notion is that both users and site developers would be best served by the development of a neutral, third-party application to do the heavy lifting for storing information about your connections (the social graph). Users are tired of having to try and find their friends on every site they consider. On the other side of that same coin, new sites would be able to compete on the basis of their new offering and be able to worry a little less about the network effect necessary to make their application truly useful.What I like most about this document is the recognition that because it sounds like a great idea from a technical or business standpoint, does not necessarily mean it translates to anything of use for a user.
Most users don’t care about XML, protocols, standards, data formats, centralization vs decentralization, silos, lock-in, etc. You, the reader of this document, are not a normal user. To reach the normal users, we must provide them value: some functionality, ease, bling, utility that they can’t get elsewhere.
That’s what it’s all about. People use a product not necessarily because it is technically better but largely because of the incremental utility those products provide. So provide that utility, and you might win those customers. Might. Incremental utility, right?
Fitzpatrick mentions as an example another initiative that he was responsible for, OpenID. OpenID is a decentralized single-signon system very similar in intention to Microsoft’s Passport attempt, but decentralized and based upon open standards. Now, I know I have an OpenID account somewhere. But even with my computer science undergrad, I haven’t taken the time to figure it out. I only mention this because if I’ve hesitated to embrace it, there’s no hope that my parents or someone less technically comfortable will consider it. Not only does there need to be a functional improvement over current solutions, it needs to be immediately apparent to the lay-person. Fitzpatrick, I’m sure, is aware of the challenge, but it’s still a significant obstacle.
Lastly, let me don my little tin-foil hat for a second and ask do I really want any single entity, open or otherwise, being so entrenched in my life? It’s interesting to watch how we sometimes willingly and other times unwittingly give up greater and greater amounts of information about ourselves for greater functionality. For instance, having GPS in my phone would make a host of services possible but do I want anyone to know where I am all the time? Fitzpatrick mentions a great degree of controls over who gets access to what data and what friends are linked where. I think that would be necessary for adoption, but I also hope that the controls don’t make it so complicated that it is intimidating to use. It’s clearly easier to ask questions and search out problems than it is to offer up solutions. The former is what I’m doing and the latter, Fitzpatrick. Very cool idea. I hope it works out.
