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Sorry, but the Internet doesn’t change who you really are — it reveals who you really are

July 12, 2013 - 1:33pm

The more connected we get, the more we seem to hunger for disconnection. The more devices and services we use, the more we dream about how much better our lives could be — if only we could give up all of our devices and return to a simpler, less connected time. Those desires lead to efforts like Camp Grounded, an event put on in southern California last month by a group called Digital Detox, which offered attendees a peaceful environment without computers or phones, without the internet, without even the use of watches or real names.

As Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic noted in a recent post, these types of events cater to a certain anxiety that many feel about modern life — and a feeling that technology is to blame for our increasing restlessness, for our alleged lack of “real” or authentic relationships, for our inability to connect with others except via electronic means, etc. Hence the desire for someone who will force us to divest ourselves these barriers. As Madrigal puts it:

“There’s a move, cataloged in nearly every magazine, towards seeing the offline as authentic and the online as hollow, false, unreal. This may be a false distinction, digital dualism, as Nathan Jurgenson calls it, but it’s a widespread reaction to the technologies at hand. What was once an exciting new way to make friends now feels over-engineered.”

Returning to a Platonic ideal of our lives

The offer made by places like Camp Grounded is that by removing all of these technological impediments, we can somehow return to a more natural state in which our “true” selves are revealed, and that will allow us to connect with others in a more honest way — an offer that Madrigal rightly compares to the “back-to-the-land” movement that was popular in the 1960s (a movement that didn’t work out so well for many of those involved).

“The dream, I would offer, is that by stripping away the trappings of modern life, we reach a place where humans naturally fall into deep and honest relationships with each other. The vision promises that if it weren’t for all the damn new stuff (like watches), we’d all be sitting around sharing the parts of ourselves that we’re ashamed of, supporting others in their most meaningful endeavors, and paying mind only to worthy causes and ideas.”

Madrigal’s descriptions of Camp Grounded — which he got from a number of mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times and the New Yorker — reminded me of a recent project that technology writer Paul Miller engaged in, where he gave up using the internet for a year. The Verge writer said he did this in an attempt to clear away the distractions of the modern world and find the time to do all the things he wasn’t able to otherwise.

The internet isn’t the source of our problems

Unfortunately for Miller, his experiment turned out to be an abject failure: in a post written at the end of the project, he said that instead of spending all of his now-abundant free time reading the classic books of literature or deepening relationships and spending quality time with friends and family, he just found old-fashioned ways of wasting time — watching mindless television shows, playing video games, and so on.

What Miller realized is something I think we all understand on some deeper level: namely, that the internet and social networks and the web are not the source of our problems forming “real” relationships or making time to better ourselves in some way — and that most of the important flaws that prevent us from doing these things are internal, not external. In that sense, the online world is no more unreal or inauthentic than the offline world.

Is it good to disconnect from time to time? Of course it is. And there’s no question that the pace of modern life has accelerated over the past decade, with so many sources of real-time activity that we feel compelled to participate in, either because our friends and family are there or because our jobs require it. But disconnecting from all of those things isn’t going to magically transform us into better people somehow — all it will do is reveal us as we really are.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Serg Dibrova and Shutterstock Mikhail Menil

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The Manning trial grapples with the question of whether WikiLeaks is a media entity

July 10, 2013 - 7:17pm

Defence arguments in the trial of former Army private Bradley Manning — who stands accused of a number of crimes for handing over classified documents to WikiLeaks, including a charge of “aiding the enemy” — finished Wednesday with testimony from Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, who faced a number of questions from the judge and the prosecution about whether WikiLeaks is a media entity or not. Benkler’s answers highlighted some of the most contentious aspects of the trial, which in turn raise questions about what journalism and the media consist of in a networked age, and how we protect them.

Xeni Jardin, who writes for Boing Boing and is also a board member of the Freedom of the Press foundation (which has helped raise money for a number of public-interest journalism entities, including WikiLeaks) posted some details of Benkler’s testimony on Twitter, and it’s clear even from these snippets that both the judge and the prosecution were trying to figure out whether WikiLeaks was a journalistic vehicle much like a newspaper — and therefore deserving of some protection — or a lawless entity engaged in, or at least friendly to, terrorism. (A full transcript of Benkler’s testimony is here).

Advocacy and journalism

At one point, the prosecuting attorney — Capt. Joe Morrow — asked Benkler whether he would agree that “mass document leaking is inconsistent with journalism,” to which the Harvard professor said: “No, why would I agree with that?” Later, the prosecution tried to argue that WikiLeaks is not a journalistic entity because it has a political agenda: Morrow asked Benkler how one could tell the difference between a journalistic organization and one whose goals were political, and Benkler responded that the two are not mutually exclusive, noting that media outlets like Fox News have a “political perspective.”

Benkler: They're not always mutually exclusive. The Nation, Fox News, some have a political perspective & context for what news they follow.—
Xeni Jardin (@xeni) July 10, 2013

A similar criticism has been made about Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald and his reporting about the NSA surveillance program known as PRISM, which is based on documents leaked by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden. Some — including a number of traditional journalists — have suggested the Guardian writer is not a “real” journalist because he is a blogger who advocates a political viewpoint rather than remaining objective.

As I pointed out in a post about Greenwald, the debate over whether he is a journalist is important because there’s a perception that journalists and traditional media entities have special protections under the law, and so those who are critical of the Guardian writer — and those who want to convict Bradley Manning of “aiding the enemy” for giving classified documents to WikiLeaks — are trying to define journalism in as rigid a way as possible so their targets aren’t protected.

Benkler: “All the news that's fit to print” —which implies political neutrality—is one model of journalism but it's not the only one.—
Xeni Jardin (@xeni) July 10, 2013

The problem of defining who is a journalist

What this ignores, however, is something Benkler suggested in his testimony: namely, that there is no hard and fast dividing line between something that is a media or journalistic entity and something that isn’t. At one point, the judge asked whether “the fourth estate now includes bloggers,” and wondered whether anyone in the gallery at the trial — if they published information on a blog — would qualify as a journalist. Benkler’s answer: “That’s a hard line to draw. This is what’s problematic about defining the limits of reporters privilege. It depends.”

The Harvard professor then argued that the charge of “aiding the enemy” laid against Manning for simply providing documents to WikiLeaks doesn’t make much sense (the defence has asked the court to have this charge dropped due to lack of evidence). If a classified document is published on a website where theoretically an “enemy” can read it, does that mean publishing it somehow aids the enemy? If so, that would theoretically implicate the entire internet, not to mention every traditional media outlet.

“If any leak to media org is published online, where conceivably an enemy can access, it's aiding the enemy? That can't be correct.”—Benkler—
Xeni Jardin (@xeni) July 10, 2013

Although Benkler didn’t get into it in his testimony, the protections that journalists and media outlets are supposed to have under the law are also problematic at best — and always have been, although WikiLeaks and the Manning trial have focused more attention on the topic. The fact is that there is no explicit protection for journalists under U.S. federal law, which is why some legislators continue to argue for a so-called “shield law.” But that in turn would require defining who is a journalist and who isn’t, which raises a host of troublesome issues.

WikiLeaks and the “networked fourth estate”

The only real protection for the media is the First Amendment, which says nothing at all about traditional media or journalism or what they consist of, but simply protects a “free press.” This makes it even harder to argue that “real” journalists somehow have legal protection but bloggers or alternative media entities like WikiLeaks don’t. At least one judge has examined the logical extension of that as it applies to the web and to bloggers, saying in a 2011 decision that:

“Changes in technology and society have made the lines between private citizen and journalist exceedingly difficult to draw [and] news stories are now just as likely to be broken by a blogger at her computer as a reporter at a major newspaper. Such developments make clear why the news-gathering protections of the First Amendment cannot turn on professional credentials or status.”

Benkler looked at these issues as they apply to WikiLeaks in a fascinating paper he wrote for the Harvard Civil Rights Review in 2011, entitled “A Free and Irresponsible Press,” in which he argued that the First Amendment and its protections should apply to WikiLeaks just as clearly as they apply to the New York Times, saying: “As a matter of First Amendment doctrine, Wikileaks is entitled to the protection available to a wide range of members of the fourth estate, from fringe pamphleteers to major press organizations.”

What the Manning court thinks of Benkler’s arguments about how WikiLeaks fits into what he calls the “networked fourth estate” — and whether they will affect the judge’s decision on the “aiding the enemy” charge in particular — remains to be seen. The trial continues next week with prosecution arguments.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Caroline Georgatu

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The real villain in the ebooks case isn’t Apple or Amazon — it’s publishers’ addiction to DRM

July 10, 2013 - 1:27pm

After much back-and-forth, a verdict came down on Wednesday in the Apple ebooks case: a judge found the company guilty colluding with five of the big six major book publishers in a scheme designed to inflate prices. The publishers (all of whom settled with the government before the trial) have tried to argue in the past that they were forced to cut a deal with Apple because of Amazon’s monopoly — but when it gets right down to it, the real culprit is the DRM lock-in that the publishers themselves pushed for. In effect, they forged the chains that bound them to Amazon in the first place.

My GigaOM and paidContent colleagues Jeff Roberts and Laura Owen have written about the details of the judgement itself, and also about the potential impact on Apple and the ebook business as a whole, but what really interests me is the broader landscape in which the lawsuit sits, and how much of that has been determined by the digital-rights management infrastructure the Big Five publishers put in place. Without it, there likely wouldn’t have been a trial at all.

Publishers locked themselves in

Tech writer Rob Pegoraro commented on this in a perceptive post last year, in which he noted that DRM locks provided the foundation for the Amazon monopoly that book publishers were complaining about so loudly:

“So long as DRM stays part of the plot, every Kindle reader sold, every Kindle app installed and every Kindle title purchased will strengthen Amazon’s hand… if you could buy an e-book in a standard format that, like an MP3 music file, would be playable on current and imaginable future hardware, it wouldn’t matter which store sold it. There would be no lock-in.”

That’s not to say Apple and Amazon weren’t willing participants in the DRM game, because of course they were. It was in their interest to adopt measures that would (theoretically at least) prevent copying of content just as much as it was in the publishers’ interest, since that would help keep consumers locked into their respective platforms. And this was particularly important for Amazon because its whole business model is predicated on using the Kindle as a cheap delivery system for content.

But the publishers’ desire for DRM locks was what gave Amazon the bricks and mortar with which to construct that business model. In effect, as author Charlie Stross put it in 2011, by pushing for DRM so strenuously, the publishers gave Amazon the stick it subsequently used to beat them:

“The Big Six’s pig-headed insistence on DRM on ebooks is handing Amazon a stick with which to beat them harder. [Their] insistence on DRM has proven to be a hideous mistake. Rather than reducing piracy, it has locked customers in Amazon’s walled garden, which in turn increases Amazon’s leverage over publishers.”

The Big Six gave Amazon the keys

Imagine for a moment if an ebook wasn’t locked to a specific platform, or even to a specific retailer. It may sound far-fetched, but only because we have all come to accept that the way the digital book business works now is the only way it could possibly function. That’s not the way physical books work — we are free to buy them from whatever retailer we wish, and while publishers have exclusive deals with certain chains, that doesn’t prevent us from doing whatever we want with the book after we have bought it.

By contrast, DRM locks — and related restrictions on things like lending or moving ebooks to a different platform — make the whole process of buying ebooks so complicated and unfriendly that many book lovers don’t even bother doing it in the first place. That’s arguably as big a problem as Amazon’s control over prices, if not bigger. How much larger could the ebook market potentially be if publishers hadn’t built those DRM walls around their content and given Amazon and Apple the only keys to unlock them?

Instead of seeing the ebook market as one that could grow their market in different directions, or offer different opportunities for revenue generation, most publishers saw it instead as a threat to their existing business, and did whatever they could to protect themselves from that threat. That’s where the impulse for DRM locks came from, and they have been paying the price ever since. In that sense, the Apple case is more of a sideshow than it is the main attraction.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Ben Cumming and Giuseppe Bognanni

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A tip for Uber: Sometimes the best PR strategy is to do something that isn’t rational

July 9, 2013 - 6:34pm

What the car-hailing service Uber likes to call “surge pricing” makes a lot of sense as a way of managing the supply of cars: during periods of high demand, the company boosts the price of a ride booked through its app, as a way of encouraging more drivers to respond. When disaster strikes, however, that kind of rational explanation doesn’t fly for a lot of users — instead, they like to call it “price gouging.” It happened during Hurricane Sandy, and it happened again during the massive floods in Toronto on Monday, and the result was a great lesson in how not to do PR for your startup.

Toronto, where Uber has been operating since last year, was hit by a record-setting storm on Monday: the Canadian city of 2.6 million people got as much rain in two hours as it usually gets in an entire month — an estimated 75 millimeters, or about three inches — and the rainfall for the entire day exceeded the record amount that was dumped by Hurricane Hazel in 1954. Much of the city’s subway system was shut down for at least part of the day, and large parts of the downtown including major highways were under water.

http://t.co/CFCzT7zw83 floods #stormTO—
Hassan Ouda (@Hassan_Ouda) July 08, 2013

Surge pricing in a storm looks bad

Not surprisingly, many residents went looking for alternative forms of transportation, and Uber was one of those alternatives — and just as it did during Hurricane Sandy, demand surged to the point where the company started charging as much as 2 times the normal amount for a typical fare. After criticism of the startup began to circulate on Twitter, a company spokesman responded (as the company did during Sandy) that boosting prices was the best way to get more cars on the road, but this seemed to fall on deaf ears.

The company also pointed out a number of times via its Twitter account that Uber’s regular taxi service — as opposed to the “black car” or livery service that it also offers — maintained the usual pricing levels despite the storm, but this didn’t seem to calm the waters much either.

Shameful… RT @lauraserra: So @Uber_TOR is doubling the rate because of high demand? Way to help in a crisis. #badpr—
Sarah Barker (@sarahbarker) July 08, 2013

During the flooding, Toronto-based entrepreneur Aron Solomon sent out a number of critical tweets about the company’s pricing behavior, and then followed up on Tuesday with a post on Medium about the damage that Uber was doing to its reputation, entitled “The Don’t Be An Ass**** Rule.” In it, he made what I think is a good point: namely, that while surge pricing might be a legitimate strategy for managing a scarce resource, it just looks bad during a flood or other disaster.

In other words, while it may be a completely rational approach, the downside of doing so still outweighs the upside from a marketing point of view — in the same way that raising prices for bottled water, blankets and generators after a hurricane or earthquake might make sense economically, but still isn’t a very nice thing for human beings to do to other human beings. As Om has pointed out, data without a soul is meaningless. And as Solomon put it:

“When a really bad storm hits a city, people are stranded and very upset, and you provide transportation services to the citizens of said city, you should not dramatically raise your prices at that exact moment; if you do so, you are an ass****.”

Rational, and yet not advisable

Uber tried to find a middle ground during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, by first subsidizing the rates it was paying its drivers (which wound up costing the company as much as $100,000 in a single day) and then eating the fees that it normally charges. But from a PR point of view, the damage was already done by the time it decided to do so — thanks in part to some highly critical coverage of the initial surge pricing, such as the piece entrepreneur Paul Carr wrote.

Please note that the price for Hailo's service has NOT been increased due to the storm. Standard pricing is, as always, in effect.—
(@HailoToronto) July 09, 2013

The undercurrent to Solomon’s post is that Uber can’t really afford to have too much bad publicity when it is fighting against several other players in markets like Toronto — including Hailo, a British startup that works with regular taxi services, and made a point of talking about how its prices remained stable throughout the flooding — as well as an existing taxi industry and regulatory environment that are less than welcoming.

For Uber, surge pricing makes rational sense. But that doesn’t make it a good marketing or PR strategy — in fact, it arguably makes things worse, because a commitment to a rational, algorithm-driven approach during a time of tremendous emotional turmoil like a natural disaster can make you seem, well… inhuman. And no one is going to remember how efficient Uber was when they think about the company’s service during the flood: all they will think of is how it was criticized for taking advantage of its customers.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Stephen Brace

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Snowden maintains the NSA has direct access to company servers, which means someone is lying

July 9, 2013 - 12:15pm

Ever since The Guardian and the Washington Post first revealed the existence of a top-secret NSA surveillance program known as PRISM in June, there has been a glaring question mark at the center of the documents leaked by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden: namely, how much access the spy agency has to the servers and systems of companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

All of these companies have strenuously denied that they provide any access at all, direct or indirect — but in the second half of an interview with the Guardian, released by the newspaper on Monday, Snowden maintains that PRISM gives the NSA “direct access” to company servers.

In the interview, which he did in early June with Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald and independent documentary film-maker Laura Poitras from his hideout in Hong Kong, the former CIA staffer repeats the allegations contained in the PRISM slides about tech companies willingly providing direct access to their servers — and doing so in an automated way so that they can deny any involvement:

“Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft — they all get together with the NSA and provide the NSA with direct access to the backends to all of the systems you use to communicate, to store your data, to put things in the cloud, and even just to send birthday wishes and keep a record of your life. And they give the NSA direct access that they don’t need to oversee, so they can’t be held liable for it.”

Identical denials from every tech company

The slides that were originally published by the Post and Guardian describe how government agents could get “data collected directly from the servers” of what the presentation called “partner” companies such as Google and Facebook. This triggered a series of almost identical denials from the companies implicated in the story, all of which maintained that there was no such “direct access” provided — and that any NSA requests or orders to provide information on users were routinely resisted and handled via other methods.

A New York Times follow-up story, based on anonymous sources — including those at companies named in the PRISM presentation — said that several of these tech giants had set up secure “lock box” or “drop box” style servers or locations where they could send data requested by the NSA, as a way of automating the process of responding to court orders under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

This seemed to explain the denials from Apple, Facebook and others about providing “direct access,” while still fitting the general description of the PRISM system contained in the NSA slides — suggesting that the argument over the meaning of the term “direct access” was mostly semantic. But that was before Google doubled-down on its earlier denials, both in a Wall Street Journal story and in a public question-and-answer session that Google’s chief counsel David Drummond did with The Guardian.

Someone is not telling the truth

In the Journal story, the company said that it provided data primarily via a secure FTP program, and refused to participate in any program that required it “to provide governments with access to our systems or to install their equipment on our networks.” In the Q&A session, meanwhile, Drummond said that Google was not “in cahoots” with the NSA or any other government agency, and strenuously denied that the company provided any kind of access — direct or otherwise — to its equipment, saying:

“There is no government program that Google participates in that allows the kind of access that the media originally reported… there is no free-for-all, no direct access, no indirect access, no back door, no drop-box.”

The inescapable fact is that there’s no way of squaring Drummond’s statements and Google’s other denials with Snowden’s specific claims in the video interview the Guardian just released. And it’s not just Snowden reiterating that the program involves “direct access” to servers: in annotations to several new slides from the NSA presentation, Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman said they confirmed the existence of a program that allows security agencies to tap directly into FBI-operated equipment installed on company premises.

Either Snowden and those whom Gellman has spoken to in the course of his reporting — not to mention the sources that the New York Times used for its “lock box” story — are lying about what kind of access the NSA gets to company servers, or the companies involved have repeatedly lied about their participation in the program. There is no other explanation.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock / Lightspring

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Doug Engelbart and the vision thing: Is Silicon Valley suffering from a failure of imagination?

July 5, 2013 - 12:29pm

The word “visionary” gets thrown around a lot, but Douglas Engelbart — who passed away earlier this week — arguably deserved that title more than most. His research into how computers could augment our ability to think and collaborate led to the development of the computer mouse and many of the other innovations we associate with personal computing. At a time when innovation in Silicon Valley often seems to consist of inventing a new iPhone app or another walled garden for showing people ads, it’s worth remembering that we need those who are thinking farther ahead than just their next round of financing.

He was best known for inventing the mouse, but that was just one tiny part of what Engelbart contributed to the computing revolution. And his vision was not centered on what kinds of products he could develop and how they could be monetized — or how he could patent his innovations and charge others for using them — but on what they could allow people to do and how they could increase our ability to understand the world around us.

Doug Engelbart did a lot more than invent the mouse. It would be a shame if that became all he was known for.—
Mitch Kapor (@mkapor) July 03, 2013

A vision of a better world

Engelbart — who was influenced by Vannevar Bush’s visionary 1945 essay “As We May Think,” and the idea of a personal workstation with all the world’s knowledge connected to it — believed that only by collaborating via computers would scientists be able to process the vast amounts of information needed to solve the problems of the modern world. As he put it in one of his manifestos, prepared for the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in 1962:

“By augmenting human intellect we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble.”

With the incredibly powerful technologies we have in our hands — wirelessly-networked supercomputers many of us use to look at funny pictures or play Angry Birds — it’s almost impossible to fathom just how far ahead Engelbart was thinking when he started the Augmentation Research Center and began developing the technologies that he demonstrated in 1968, in a legendary presentation at Stanford University often called “The Mother Of All Demos” (video of which is embedded below). At a time when computers were still room-sized behemoths that used punch cards, Engelbart was already thinking of a network of individually-controlled desktop computers and what it could do.

1 guy in the 60's pioneered the mouse, video conferencing, word processing, and hypertext. Today, people invent Bang With Friends.—
Aaron Levie (@levie) July 04, 2013

Another “Facebook, but for X”

As former Apple designer and developer Bret Victor points out in a post about Engelbart’s legacy, despite almost a half a century of innovation around computing and collaborative technologies, we have still only scratched the surface of what he originally had in mind. And while it’s difficult to say for sure what he would have thought of Facebook or the iPhone, it’s not hard to imagine that he might have been disappointed by how little they take advantage of what is possible with a vast network of interconnected users, just as Sir Tim Berners-Lee is concerned about what we have managed to do with the web.

It’s not that building commercial technologies that people can use to buy things or play games is bad, but when you look at the sheer size and scale of the resources devoted to those things versus the amount of money and time spent on collaborative intelligence or other tools that Engelbart dreamed of, it can get depressing. Do we really need another “Like Facebook, but for X?” or “Like Pinterest, but for Y?” Do we need to spend as much time as we do patenting things like rounded corners on smartphone icons?

Jeff Hammerbacher: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." http://buswk.co/eCdfFp—
(@finitor) April 15, 2011

It’s easy to blame the venture-capital industry for failing to put enough money behind truly innovative technologies or concepts — and on that point it’s worth noting, as Tom Foremski pointed out, that Engelbart struggled to get funding for much of his life — but VCs have their eyes on the bottom line just as many entrepreneurs do, and it often seems as though the easiest way to generate a blockbuster product or service is to imitate a previous blockbuster. So why not just do that, if that’s where the money and/or the glory is?

Where have all the visionaries gone?

Even Steve Jobs, who turned Apple into one of the most valuable companies in the world, seemed more like Engelbart in some ways than he did a modern CEO or entrepreneur: yes, he commercialized research from Xerox’s PARC research center (much of which was based on Engelbart’s work) but he always seemed to be motivated more by a vision of the future and his own personal design aesthetic than by dreams of how much revenue he could generate or how much advertising he could help Madison Avenue sell.

Clearly there are still those who qualify as technology visionaries — a group that would have to include Elon Musk of Tesla and probably Jeff Bezos of Amazon. And Om is right when he says that there is innovation happening on the fringes of Silicon Valley, whether it’s research into using big data for genomic analysis, or augmented reality, or new chip technologies.

But at the same time, we seem to have lost the kind of big-picture thinking that Engelbart and others specialized in: the kind that didn’t have as its focus a specific market where things could be sold, or a better way of targeting advertising, but a vision of a world that could be changed for the better in some dramatic way through the use of technology — and a way of connecting the dots to show us all how we might be able to get there. And we are poorer for that.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / alphaspirit

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Research shows Twitter could be a tool for aid workers during events like the Boston bombings

July 4, 2013 - 5:17pm

Twitter came under fire for its lack of credibility as a real-time news source during the bombings in Boston earlier this year, thanks to a variety of hoaxes and erroneous reports that were spread about those who were allegedly responsible for the attacks. But despite these obvious flaws, researchers with the Harvard Medical School who looked at information flow on Twitter during the bombings argue that the network could be a valuable tool for emergency workers and others during such disasters.

The research was published earlier this week by PLOS One Currents, an open-access journal that is part of the Public Library of Science, and was based on the work of several scientists who are affiliated with the Harvard Medical School, as well as one researcher from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA.

Entitled “Twitter as a Sentinel in Emergency Situations: Lessons from the Boston Marathon Explosions,” the study used the public Twitter API and looked at a set of messages whose geolocation data showed that they were posted within a radius of about 35 miles from the Boston Marathon finish line. The researchers looked for messages that contained words beginning with ‘explos’ or ‘explod,’ as well as ‘bomb,’ and found that some were posted within minutes of the explosions, well before any official sources.

A real-time emergency information network

Because the use of these terms was grouped so tightly together around the site of the bombings, and occurred so quickly after the explosions, the researchers argue in their paper that using these kinds of tools to track certain terms could help emergency workers discover where people need their help — and help police and others track down what exactly happened and when.

“Because of their proximity to the event and content of their postings, these individuals might be witnesses to the bombings or be of close enough proximity to provide helpful information. These finely detailed geographic data can be used to localize and characterize events assisting emergency response in decision-making.”

The study adds that “caution in the use of social media reports is warranted” because social-media data can provide false-positive reports that could have negative effects. But at the same time, the researchers note that “crowd-sourced information may uniquely provide extremely timely initial recognition of an event and specific clues as to what events may be unfolding.”

A number of other studies have come to similar conclusions: after the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, for example, one of the researchers involved in the Boston study — Dr. Rumi Chunara, a research fellow at Harvard — looked at how quickly reports of cholera spread via Twitter, and found that they were able to pinpoint outbreaks two weeks before official sources.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

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Marissa Mayer has been on a shopping spree at Yahoo, but is there any sign of a strategy?

July 4, 2013 - 12:07pm

Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer has been snapping up companies so quickly that it’s almost hard to keep track of them all: in just the past week alone, deals have been announced for three companies — Qwiki, something called BigNoggin and Xobni — with a total cost estimated at more than $100 million.

Xobni, an email inbox-management service that has been around since 2006, was Mayer’s most recent purchase, with an estimated price tag somewhere between $30 million and $60 million. But beneath the shopping spree, is there a strategy that ties these acquisitions together?

One obvious answer is mobile, something Mayer said early on would be a major focus for the company as it tried to revitalize its faded business: of the 17 acquisitions that Yahoo has announced since she took over the chief executive job, many have something to do with mobile. Qwiki, for example — which the company bought for an estimated $50 million earlier this week — is a service that allows users to create videos on their phones

Trying to play catch up

Other purchases, however — such as the $1-billion acquisition of Tumblr, and even the acquisition of Xobni itself — aren’t as obviously about mobile. The Tumblr deal seemed to be designed at least in part to restore some luster to Yahoo’s reputation as a cool web company, and to try and generate more traffic for its advertising properties.

Xobni is clearly meant to help Yahoo’s mail product improve, and yet the company has also been languishing on the sidelines of the tech sector for some time now (as has Qwiki). To some extent, that deal seems to be about trying to catch up with Microsoft and Google on features.

That’s one of the problems with many of Yahoo’s acquisitions: they seem to be attempts by Mayer to get Yahoo caught up to other major players, and that’s a strategy that rarely comes with a big payoff. Is the addition of Xobni going to cause dramatically large numbers of people to switch to Yahoo Mail, or to remain with Yahoo Mail instead of switching to Google or some other service?

At worst, this kind of approach could easily create a sort of “Franken-Yahoo” with disparate parts that fit together but don’t work very well.

Adding services like Qwiki, meanwhile, could generate some more heat and light for Yahoo’s mobile efforts, and so could acquisitions like the news-summarization app Summly, which Yahoo paid an estimated $30 million for — despite a complete lack of any revenue, let alone any profits. But at the same time, the frenzy of deals seems to be more like a scattershot “buy anything that says mobile in its feature set” approach than one that is guided by an overall vision of what Yahoo wants to be on phones and tablets.

Can acquisitions change Yahoo’s DNA?

As Om pointed out recently, Mayer has the luxury of a deep pocketbook with which to finance her spending spree: Alibaba, the Chinese portal that Yahoo owns a 23-percent stake in, has continued to increase in value to the point where it could be worth as much as $100 billion, and that — plus some hopes for improved performance based on Mayer’s arrival — has helped Yahoo’s stock price improve over the past six months. So the acquisition binge could well continue for the foreseeable future.

YHOO data by YCharts

Yahoo has suggested that many of its acquisitions have been about acqui-hiring smart developers and entrepreneurs that it can add to its staff, presumably as a way of injecting some fresh blood into the company and its businesses.

However, Om has also argued in the past that even Mayer and her acquisitions will likely prove to be incapable of changing Yahoo’s core DNA, a cultural miasma that has stymied the efforts of several CEOs before her and made the company a synonym for snatching failure from the jaws of victory. Can the former Googler stitch together the startups she has acquired into something approaching a winning strategy? That remains a rather large question mark.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Getty Images

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Doug Engelbart, American inventor and computing legend, has passed away

July 3, 2013 - 2:10pm

Douglas “Doug” Engelbart, a legendary American inventor and computing icon who invented the computer mouse and helped develop much of the modern PC user interface, passed away last night, according to family sources. News of his passing was shared on Professor David Farber’s email list, where Engelbart’s daughter Christina said her father died peacefully in his sleep at home. His health had been deteriorating of late, she said, and he took turn for the worse on the weekend.

Engelbart, who was born in Portland, Ore., was 88. It is hard to describe Engelbart’s role in the personal-computing revolution in mere words — he was well known for his work on human-computer interaction, including the invention of the computer mouse. His research and efforts led to the development of a diverse set of technologies such as hypertext, networked computers and the graphical user interface.

Engelbart joined Stanford Research Institute (which would later become SRI International) in 1957, where he filed for over a dozen patents. His report “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Concept Framework” led to the establishment of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC). He (along with others) worked on ideas such as bitmapped screens, collaborative tools, and the precursor of graphical user interfaces.

Invented the mouse and the desktop interface

An obituary in the New York Times quoted Engelbart’s wife Karen as saying the cause of his death was kidney failure. According to the NYT, Engelbart became interested in creating a new way of interacting with computers after reading Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” while serving as a radar technician in the Philippines during World War II.

In 1967, Engelbart filed for a patent for a rudimentary form of computer mouse — SRI patented the mouse and licensed it to Apple for about $40,000. Later, ARC would become involved with ARPANET, the precursor of the internet. In December 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Engelbart the National Medal of Technology.

Embedded below is a video clip of a live demonstration that Engelbart did on December 9, 1968 at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., assisted by a group of researchers from the Augmentation Research Center — a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system they had been working on since 1962. This was the public debut of the computer mouse, but it was only one of the many innovations the group demonstrated, along with hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration.

Tributes to a computing legend

From Howard Rheingold, an author and early web pioneer, former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and former editor of HotWired, and a research fellow at the Institute for the Future:

I'd say that most of what I've written was inspired by the day I met Doug Engelbart in 1983.—
Howard Rheingold (@hrheingold) July 03, 2013

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

RIP Douglas Engelbart, 1925–2013. We gave him our Pioneer Award in 1992, but it's impossible to express his impact as a computing pioneer.—
(@EFF) July 03, 2013

And from Paul Saffo, a computer-industry forecaster who worked for the Institute for the Future for more than two decades:

Heartbroken at the news that Doug Engelbart passed away last night bit.ly/14qVRHi he was ahead of his time to the very end.—
Paul Saffo (@psaffo) July 03, 2013

Blogging pioneer and RSS developer Dave Winer said that Engelbart — whom he met once for dinner — was “a real computer genius [whose] accomplishments and contributions are a foundation for all that we do with computers today.”

From Doc Searls, co-author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto” and a former fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society:

I met Doug Englebart just once, and he blew my mind. What a good, deep, inventive and wonderful dude. He augmented us all.—
Doc Searls (@dsearls) July 03, 2013

And from Dan Gillmor, author of “We The Media” and also a fellow at the Berkman Center:

Doug Engelbart wasn't just a technology great. He was a wonderful human being. An honor to have known him… nytimes.com/2013/07/04/tec…—
Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor) July 03, 2013

From Mitch Kapor, creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Doug Engelbart, a personal hero, to whom we owe virtually everything in computing, passed away this morning—
Mitch Kapor (@mkapor) July 03, 2013

And from John Perry Barlow, Grateful Dead songwriter and co-founder of the EFF:

RIP Doug Engelbart, inventor of the computer mouse & much more. He was also one of the kindest men I've ever known.—
John Perry Barlow (@JPBarlow) July 03, 2013

Rheingold wrote about Engelbart and how he came to found the Augmentation Research Center in a chapter of his 1985 book “Tools For Thought.”

“Doug is neither rich nor famous nor powerful — not that these were ever his goals. All he seems to hunger for is all he ever hungered for — a world that is prepared for the kind of help he wants to give. Ironically, his office at Tymshare in Cupertino, California, is merely blocks away from the headquarters of Apple Corporation, where icons and mice and windows and bit-mapped screens and other Engelbart-originated ideas are now part of a billion-dollar enterprise.”

Excerpts from “The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart,” a book of interviews with Engelbart about his vision for the future of computing, are available free of charge under a Creative Commons licence here.

Former Google engineer Brad Neuberg worked with Engelbart on an NSF project called the “HyperScope Project” that tried to reconstruct parts of his original hypertext system, and described working with him in a blog post:

“Silicon Valley can sometimes be so focused on enfant terribles and excessive riches; Douglas Engelbart is a reminder that part of the founding story behind the computer was Doug’s quest to literally accelerate human evolution. He thought that computers would be as important as writing and language have been in terms of shaping human evolution.”

Former Apple designer and developer Bret Victor also wrote about Engelbart, and how his contribution to software and interface design is often misunderstood — as was the vision behind his inventions and his pursuit of true collaborative technology:

“Engelbart had an intent, a goal, a mission. He stated it clearly and in depth. He intended to augment human intellect. He intended to boost collective intelligence and enable knowledge workers to think in powerful new ways, to collectively solve urgent global problems.”

If ease of use was the only requirement, we would all be riding tricycles. – Douglas Engelbart—
The Quote (@thequote) June 07, 2013

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Google Reader’s shutdown, the rise of walled gardens and the future of the open web

July 3, 2013 - 12:17pm

Oceans of digital ink have been spilled already about the demise of Google’s Reader service, with most of the coverage devoted to moaning about the loss of the tech blogosphere’s favorite RSS reader or talking about the pros and cons of various alternatives. But there is a deeper issue at stake that Instapaper founder Marco Arment put his finger on in a post about the Reader shutdown: namely, what Google’s behavior says about its shifting focus, and what that in turn says about the increasingly disconnected and impenetrable platform silos that now make up a majority of the web.

Arment starts with a question that has occurred to just about everyone who has thought about the decision, including Om: Why did the company bother to shut down a service that had a devoted user base (albeit a small one) and likely wasn’t using up much in the way of resources?

One theory is that Reader was just another victim of the kind of housecleaning that has killed off dozens of other Google services over the past year, as CEO Larry Page puts “more wood behind fewer arrows.” Google itself has said that it decided to close the service because usage had been declining — and there’s no question that RSS readers have always been something of a niche product.

Was RSS just too open?

Arment, however, thinks the closure is part of a much larger phenomenon — one that involves a move by Google away from open standards and towards its own closed and proprietary platform, and how that is just part of the closing down of the open web:

“Google Reader is just the latest casualty of the war that Facebook started… the battle to own everything. While Google did technically ‘own’ Reader and could make some use of the huge amount of news and attention data flowing through it, it conflicted with their far more important Google+ strategy: they need everyone reading and sharing everything through Google+ so they can compete with Facebook for ad-targeting data, ad dollars, growth, and relevance.”

In many ways, as Arment points out, RSS is the antithesis of this platform-focused, walled garden approach. Developed by blogging pioneer and open-web advocate Dave Winer, it is about as wide open a technology as you could possibly imagine — and it has unquestionably done more to promote the “democratization of distribution” that Om has written about than just about any other product or service in recent memory.

Starving the open ecosystem

While RSS is not going away, every step that giants like Google take away from that standard makes it harder and harder to build a business or content strategy around it, and that in turn sucks the energy out of the entire ecosystem.

Former Twitter CEO Evan Williams discussed this phenomenon back in 2010 with Om during an interview about the evolution of the web, and talked about how building a business was increasingly about where to “rent” property rather than building a separate island of your own — in other words, piggy-backing on Apple’s iOS or on Facebook or on Google as a way of getting leverage. As he put it:

“Things get consolidated because it’s more economical and there are network effects in all these things. The idea of creating something from scratch, which is independent from the web… no one will ever create something that is wholly their own. There is some risk to the Internet becoming more closed — although it’s not really about closed. It’s that there are fewer players who own, sort of, the land. And that will have implications long term for everything.”

Who will fight for the open web now?

The cruel irony, as Arment notes in his post, is that Google and Facebook and even Apple wouldn’t be where they are today if it wasn’t for open standards and the open web. But now that they have used those standards to develop a dominant platform of some kind, “everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down… get it out of the way so they can get even bigger, and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.”

The Instapaper founder says he is having none of that, and that everyone who cares about the open web should keep building and supporting “new tools, technologies, and platforms to empower independence [and] interoperability.” And it’s worth noting that others are also concerned about the increasing closure of the web, and moving away from open standards — including the web’s creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who has spoken passionately about the silo-ization of the web and what it means, and how we need to fight against it.

One of the depressing things about Google’s move away from RSS and from other open standards is that the search giant used to be one of the few large players on the web that seemed to be strongly in the open and interoperable camp — to the point where it fought a very public war with Facebook over the issue of giving users the ability to export their data. Now it seems there is more interest in duplicating a Facebook-style walled garden than in fighting for the open web.

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New PRISM slides say the program allows NSA to eavesdrop on live conversations

June 29, 2013 - 11:05pm

As controversy continues to swirl around whistleblower Edward Snowden and his whereabouts, the Washington Post has published several more slides from the NSA presentation that the former CIA staffer leaked to both the Post and the Guardian — slides that provide further details about the surveillance program known as PRISM and how it functions.

Among other things, the slides highlight the large discrepancies between the way the program is described and the strenuous denials from tech giants such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook about their participation in such a program.

For example, according to annotations from the Post — based on what the newspaper says is its own reporting, as well as other slides that haven’t been published yet — PRISM involves “government equipment on private company property” that is used to retrieve information from “participating companies such as Microsoft or Yahoo” that is then passed on “without further review” to the NSA.

The equipment that is installed on company premises — referred to as an “interception unit” — is reportedly managed by the FBI, which then passes the information to one or more “customers” such as the NSA, CIA or FBI.

In what could prove to be an explosive revelation about the extent of the PRISM program, the Post reports that “depending on the provider” of the information, the system allows the NSA to “receive live notifications when a target logs on or sends an e-mail,” and also allows the spy agency to “monitor a voice, text or voice chat as it happens.” Real-time access to conversations and communication was hinted at in earlier reports, but the new slides provide the first confirmation that it is possible and even routine.

Most of the major technology companies that are mentioned in the PRISM slides — including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Skype and AOL — have denied repeatedly that they provide any kind of “back door” or other method that gives the NSA direct access to their servers. Stories in the New York Times and elsewhere have described a kind of “lock-box” that the companies have set up, which would fit the description given by the latest slides, but Google’s chief counsel has specifically denied the company is involved in any such system.

One of the slides notes that PRISM contained more than 117,000 “active surveillance targets” as of April 5, presumably meaning foreign nationals who were being surveilled for their potential role in attacks on the U.S. A number of reports about the program have said that information — primarily “metadata” about phone calls, emails and other communications — about American citizens is also collected through such systems, but the NSA and other agencies try to expunge it before reading it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Lightspring

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Are you a dissident choosing between Facebook and Twitter? Here’s why you should definitely go with Twitter

June 28, 2013 - 6:12pm

Facebook has gotten a lot of credit for the role it played during the Arab Spring revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that if you are a dissident group trying to fight for your rights against a repressive government — regardless of what country you happen to be in — you are likely far better off with Twitter than you are with Facebook. The latest sign of this came from Turkish officials earlier this week, as they tried to put pressure on both companies to provide more information about dissident activity.

According to reports by the Guardian and the BBC, transport and communications minister Binali Yildirim said the Turkish government had asked Twitter to set up an office in the country, or to provide someone they could work with directly when “information is requested.” Although he didn’t specify what kind of information he might want, Twitter has been singled out by Prime Minister Erdogan as “a menace to society” for its use during recent protests. Yildirim added:

“We want to see someone in Turkey who can provide this … there needs to be an interlocutor we can put our grievance to and who can correct an error if there is one. We have told all social media that … if you operate in Turkey you must comply with Turkish law.”

Twitter refused Turkey’s request for info

According to officials at the ministry who spoke to the Guardian, the government had asked Twitter for the identities of users who posted messages deemed insulting to the government or prime minister, or that infringed on people’s personal rights. Twitter — which has made a point of describing itself as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party” — refused to respond to the request, and the Guardian quoted a source as saying the company had no intention of opening an office in Turkey.

And what about Facebook? The company doesn’t have an actual office in Turkey, but it does have staff in London who respond to government requests, according to a report from the BBC. And when asked about the Turkish government’s interest in co-operation from the giant social network, the communications minister gave the kind of endorsement that would make many companies cringe:

Facebook has denied providing data

Facebook quickly moved to squash the inevitable suspicions that it had been providing data on its users to the Turkish government, suspicions that have likely been heightened by multiple reports that Facebook has been providing a kind of “back door” access to the National Security Agency as part of its PRISM surveillance program (which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has denied).

The company said in a statement that it has closed down pages related to Turkish activism, but only because they had “fake profiles,” and added that “we reject all government data requests from Turkish authorities and push them to formal legal channels unless it appears that there is an immediate threat to life or a child.” The statement also said that the company was planning to meet with Turkish officials to express concern about government attempts to force it to provide data.

Whatever the reality might be of Facebook’s co-operation with the Turkish government, there’s no question that Twitter has the upper hand when it comes to resisting official attempts to compel it to provide information on users: Not only is the network the only major service that doesn’t show up on a list of “partners” for the NSA’s surveillance program — something it rejected strongly, according to the Guardian — but it has also fought requests for user data from both the French courts and the U.S. government.

Twitter has a history of resisting governments

In the French case, Twitter was sued by a group of Jewish students over anti-Semitic messages that appeared on the network in, and was ordered to provide personal data about those users because anti-Semitism is against the law in France (Twitter appealed the decision but ultimately lost). And in the U.S. case, Twitter fought for the right to inform several users associated with WikiLeaks that the Justice Department had filed a court order compelling it to release personal information about their account activity.

It’s also worth noting that removing accounts for “fake profiles” the way Facebook did — which likely refers to using fake names, a breach of the network’s terms of service — rarely happens on Twitter, and in most cases only when someone is using the name of a celebrity or a brand without permission. Facebook, by contrast, has been repeatedly criticized for censoring or removing various kinds of content, including some relatively innocuous varieties such as breastfeeding photos, which is why some prominent free-speech advocates such as Rebecca MacKinnon refer to it as “Facebookistan.”

Can you use Facebook anonymously? Yes, using tools such as Tor, or other tricks to disguise your real identity (Facebook blocked Tor recently, but this was apparently a technical glitch). And the company may be totally sincere in its rejection of Turkey’s requests for information about users. But if you’re looking for the social network that has the best track record of fighting to protect your speech and your identity, that would have to be the one with the little bird icon.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Hoggarazi and Shutterstock Andrea Michel

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Circa looks at news the way other companies look at code — as something to build with

June 27, 2013 - 6:40pm

There’s been plenty of talk in media circles about how the “story” needs to be disrupted, so that news can be rendered in a way that makes more sense for a real-time, digital and mobile age — but so far all we have is more listicles and slideshows, or streams of headlines that mimic a wire service. About the only company that is really trying hard to disrupt the idea of a news story from the inside out is Circa, the news startup co-founded (and funded) by Cheezburger founder Ben Huh, and it is doing so by thinking about news the way programmers think about code, or scientists think about atoms.

Circa founding editor Dave Cohn talked about the company’s approach in a recent interview with Fast Company Labs, which has been running a series on technology and the news industry. He described it as “object-oriented journalism,” a term used by journalism professor and media theorist Jeff Jarvis in discussions about how the traditional story format needs to be re-engineered (and an idea that actually dates back to at least 1997, as Cohn noted on Twitter).

This was written in 1997. Start at graph 7 "In Object Oriented Journalism"
bit.ly/1crxJpw cc' @circa Mind…blown.—
David Cohn (@Digidave) June 27, 2013

That analogy in turn comes from the “object-oriented software” movement, which got its start in the 1970s and 80s, and was designed to make programming easier and more efficient by using the concept of data objects — which could then be assembled based on certain rules into higher-level software packages.

This is about as unsexy a metaphor as you could possibly come up with, but it fits the Circa model. The service breaks stories down into their component parts — it sees individual facts themselves as the atomic unit of the news, or the objects that need to be manipulated in order to convey information as efficiently as possible. That allows Circa to dispense with the traditional media habit of recapitulating all of the old details about a story in every version, which is massively inefficient. As Cohn puts it:

“I call it news amnesia. If you do articles, you have to do this since you need something new today. I think it’s as frustrating for journalists as it is for the readers. What we do is say ‘Here’s the latest fact and the story it belongs in.’ Maybe it belongs in two stories. We will then point these stories to each other.”

A related innovation at Circa — which recently hired former Reuters social-media editor Anthony De Rosa to be its editor-in-chief — is the idea of “following” a story, which allows the service to notify users when there is a new fact or update to a developing news event. This is not only more efficient for Circa itself, Cohn suggests, but also more efficient for readers as well.

The idea of “object-oriented journalism” isn’t the only connection between Circa and the world of programming: Cohn notes that the co-founders of Circa wanted to take what Github has done for programming and code — that is, created an open repository where developers can “fork” software projects to create their own, or add their own suggestions to an existing project — and apply the same principles to news.

So could Circa’s database of fact objects eventually be extended in the same way, allowing readers or even other news outlets to “fork” a story or recombine those elements in a different way? That remains to be seen, but Cohn said the service is already thinking about incorporating other atomic units of news, such as tweets, and De Rosa suggested that Circa may even start doing its own original reporting on the news stories it picks up and atomizes.

Embedded below is a video clip from our paidContent conference in April of Circa co-founder and CEO Matt Galligan talking about what the company does:

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / violetkaipa

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Texas and Turkey show why Twitter is often the only media outlet that matters

June 27, 2013 - 11:46am

By now, it’s become pretty obvious that Twitter can be an incredibly useful — if also somewhat flawed — source of real-time news during catastrophic events like the Boston bombings or the shootings at Sandy Hook elementary school. But in most of those cases, Twitter is just one of hundreds of different media sources, all competing for attention. I think the network shows its real power as a media entity when traditional media is nowhere to be found — and that became abundantly obvious during two recent incidents: the demonstrations in Turkey and the filibuster of an anti-abortion bill in Texas.

The epic tale of Texas state senator Wendy Davis and her passionate stand against a proposed abortion bill is a classic example of a news story that didn’t really become obvious until it was well underway — so in a metaphorical sense at least, it was a little like a bomb going off somewhere — and it was also a story that was to some extent off the beaten path for news agencies. You might think that a state legislature would be covered like a blanket by traditional news sources, but in fact that’s rarely the case.

Lolz RT @jdubs88 Does anyone at CNN, MSNBC or FOX follow Twitter? Yet another major fail by cable news nets right now.—
Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) June 26, 2013

As Carl Franzen pointed out in a piece for The Verge, and media watcher Rachel Sklar also noted in a piece about the filibuster on Medium, many of the usual mainstream sources people would go to for real-time news — CNN and the other major broadcast networks, for example — had virtually nothing about the Texas legislature battle. And why would they? It was a typical bill being tabled through the afternoon and into the evening hours on a Tuesday. Who would have predicted that the story would explode in a way that gripped viewers and readers not just in Texas but across the U.S.?

In a post at Salon, writer Roxane Gay talked about how she experienced the filibuster as a news event, and how Twitter became a much more important — and relevant — source than anything else she could find. And that’s not just because there were plenty of people at the legislature tweeting about the event (including some local media sources such as Austin American-Statesman reporter Mike Ward, as Sklar noted in her piece) but also because of the communal feeling of involvement that a stream of Twitter news brings to such a phenomenon. Which traditional media outlets offer that? Very few.

“I cannot think of a significant event from the past three years I did not first learn about via Twitter [and] when these major news stories are breaking, there’s always a significant difference between what’s being shared via social media and what major news outlets are covering. That difference becomes more pronounced and more pathetic with each passing day.”

As it turned out, for the Davis filibuster, the only news source apart from Twitter was the YouTube channel of the Texas Tribune, a three-year-old non-profit media outlet that is only available online — and from a media analysis point of view, this story is also an excellent example of the benefits of having a quick-thinking entity like the Tribune that focuses exclusively on state news. One of the weaknesses of national networks like CNN and others is that they simply can’t move quickly enough when something unusual happens.

TX Tribune's live stream sat on YouTube, mostly ignored, for months. Until the stream was set ablaze.—
Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) June 27, 2013

Twitter is citizen journalism in action

Twitter, however, has reporters everywhere — if by reporters you mean people who are on the scene of a news event and can report what is happening, and have that information transmitted instantly to thousands or even millions of people. In the most important sense, that is what we mean when we say “citizen journalism” (although I prefer the term Andy Carvin of NPR uses: “random acts of journalism”). And that is why I would argue that Twitter is one of the most important media companies in the world right now, even though CEO Dick Costolo continues to protest that it isn’t a media company at all.

We saw much the same phenomenon take place during the recent demonstrations in Turkey, which began with just a few disgruntled protesters but quickly became a national and international story of repression — again, a story that may have snuck up on many of the traditional media who are supposed to cover such things. In Turkey, however, there’s an additional aggravating factor: namely, a media industry that is widely seen as beholden to the government and therefore unlikely to question it. As I noted in a recent post, that combination of factors made Twitter a crucial news source about the event for days.

While Twitter may not see itself as a media entity — or may not want to promote itself as such, for fear of irritating its potential partners — the reality is that it is often the only media outlet that matters, because it can do two things that even large mainstream media players aren’t all that good at: it can marshall and distribute coverage by eyewitnesses almost instantly, and it can connect people emotionally to a news event in an incredibly powerful way.

If you are in the media business, that is what your competition consists of. How you adapt to that — or make it work for you rather than against you — is probably the most important question you have to face right now.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

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A Kickstarter tip for journalists from ProPublica: Crowdfunding is a lot of work

June 26, 2013 - 6:16pm

Although it is still far from being a mainstream approach to financing journalism, more media companies are experimenting with crowdfunding through platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and some are having significant success. Every project is different, however, so it’s always useful to look at some of those that have succeeded and try to learn why — which is why I’m glad that ProPublica is talking about its just-completed campaign to raise funding for an investigative feature into unpaid internships.

ProPublica launched the campaign at the end of May, and set a goal of raising $22,000 by the end of June. The campaign ends on Thursday, but as of mid-day Wednesday it had already exceeded the goal by several thousand dollars, which it had raised from more than 675 individual backers. As the Kickstarter page describes, the site plans to investigate the “emerging intern economy” in the U.S., so it decided to hire an intern to help.

As with most Kickstarter projects, ProPublica had to come up with different tiers of rewards to offer those who donated to the campaign, so it made some T-shirts and tote bags with the icon of an “Eager Beaver” on it — a graphic that was designed specifically for the intern investigation — and added some special features to try and entice larger bids: one person donated more than $1,000 and now gets to have “a private training workshop on social media and community-building for your organization led by ProPublica’s engagement team.”

Crowdfunding takes a lot of work

That kind of effort reinforces one of the main points that ProPublica made in the blog post about its campaign: namely, that running a crowdfunding project is a lot of work — “close to a full-time job,” as Blair Hickman of the media outlet’s community team put it.

“We sent a minimum of one, if not two project updates via our social media accounts every day. We emailed all of our existing listservs, crafted project updates for our Kickstarter backers and emailed organizations with an interest in the issue asking if they might be willing to share our project with their listservs. In short: Marketing a Kickstarter is a close to full-time job, so make sure to budget the time.”

Some of ProPublica’s other tips included defining the scope of the project that you have in mind as clearly as possible, since as the company points out, one of the biggest hurdles for journalistic entities planning to use crowdfunding is that “campaigns work best for concrete, defined projects – a documentary, another season of a podcast or a new level of a video game. But investigative journalists often don’t know what their reporting will yield.” Focusing on a specific story like internships helped, it said.

Define the project as much as possible

For much the same reason, when National Public Radio decided to crowdfund a project, it picked a specific documentary it wanted to produce about tracking the production of a T-shirt all the way from the cotton fields to the storefront — and wound up raising over $300,000. Other successful journalistic projects include the 99% Invisible podcast and a longform science-writing platform called Matter that was ultimately bought by Medium.

Coming up with creative rewards is also key to getting a good response, Hickman said in her ProPublica post — and in that sense, the lessons from crowdfunding are very similar to the lessons that the company drew from its foray into crowdsourcing when it put together the “Free The Files” project during the election: in order to get as broad a response as possible, members of the crowd who participate have to feel as though they are having fun or being rewarded in some way, however small:

“The best rewards make backers feel like they’ve benefited from a project they helped make possible. For journalism projects, this could include access to the editorial process, tote bags or t-shirts with custom project designs or special, real-time updates on the reporting.”

It’s probably not surprising that ProPublica and NPR are among the first media organizations to experiment with crowdfunding platforms, since donations from the audience and/or prominent supporters are the foundation of their business model already. It would be nice to see some more traditional media outlets apply some of these lessons to their own crowdfunding experiments.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Christian Scholz

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Do we need more kinds of social media that self-destruct the way Snapchat content does?

June 25, 2013 - 7:03pm

As we and others have reported, Snapchat is now worth close to $1 billion based on its latest round of funding, a valuation that baffles some and no doubt irritates others. After all, it’s just an app for sharing photos and videos that are programmed to disappear after a certain amount of time. Why has that proven to be so interesting, to the point where the growth of Snapchat’s user base rivals that of Instagram in its early days? Maybe we should be asking instead why more of our social content doesn’t do the same thing.

Before anyone rushes to point out that Snapchat pictures and videos don’t really disappear after their brief lifespan is up, it’s true that there are ways to save the content if you really want to: not only can you take a screenshot of the image with your phone with a little bit of work (something that used to trigger an alert on iPhones but may no longer do so with the latest version of Apple’s iOS, as my colleague Erica Ogg points out) but you can also in some cases recover deleted photos and videos from a device.

Why is all our activity so permanent?

All that said, however, Snapchat content comes as close to being deleted as anything we do on social networks or even on our phones. And there is clearly a massive interest in doing this, to the point where the service says that users are now sending more than 200 million pieces of content a day.

In a recent blog post on the idea of “disposable media,” Net Jacobsson — an early Facebook staffer who now invests in and advises technology startups — raised an interesting point about the permanence of much of our social-media behavior, which is stored and indexed and preserved by the networks we use. Having our ephemeral conversations and updates treated this way is unlike the way we treat virtually every other form of human communication:

“When you sit and chat with a couple of friends at a cafe, restaurant or bar etc, there is no permanent record of what you say. True, your friends might be witnesses to what you say, perhaps even passersby. At most, bits and pieces of the conversation might turn in to gossip and hearsay but there is where it stops. There’s no permanent record. On social networks this is obviously not true. Anything you express or write will have a permanent record.”

The idea that nothing is ever forgotten on the internet has become a truism — something we ruefully refer to whenever we read about someone who has lost a job because of a photo they posted of their youthful indiscretions, or been disciplined because of a remark on social media. And the permanence of that information was just reinforced by a legal opinion from an advisor to the European Court of Justice, who said Google should not have to remove content because of a so-called “right to be forgotten.”

A growing desire for impermanence

Jacobsson says he has suggested to both Twitter and Facebook that they implement some kind of similar feature (Facebook actually launched an app called Poke that was a virtual copy of Snapchat, but it hasn’t really taken off with many users). And as I argued in an earlier post about Snapchat, I think he is right that much of the appeal of the service comes from the fact that there is so little impermanence in our online lives — and even less now that the NSA is storing our emails and phone calls.

“It seems like in this age of over exposure of our private lives, perhaps people are getting weary about the long trail of record left behind of something that was supposed to be private and intimate from the outset? Will this give rise to a sea of new applications and features? Perhaps we are seeing the rise of disposable media?”

Although Jacobsson doesn’t mention it, the most compelling reason why many services likely haven’t implemented the same kind of disposable approach is that they rely — at least to some extent — on mining the information about the content and activity of their users to do things like serve up advertising (something that probably won’t work well in an environment like Snapchat’s).

As the old saying goes, if you aren’t paying for the product then you are the product. And while allowing your content and activity to disappear may be in your interests as a user, it’s not really in the network’s interest.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Reiner Plendl and Flickr user Balakov

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Is there room for another social network for sharing links with friends? Branch says yes, gives birth to Potluck

June 25, 2013 - 2:11pm

You’d think that by now we would have more than enough ways to share and talk about interesting things you find on the internet, what with Facebook and Twitter and Google+ and dozens of other services. But Josh Miller — founder of a discussion platform called Branch and a new service called Potluck — says it is still too hard to just talk with your friends about interesting things you find on the internet, not to mention meeting new people.

In a nutshell, Miller says that he wants Potluck to be a social platform like Instagram, but for talking about links rather than photos or videos.

Potluck launched Tuesday morning after spending some time in closed beta testing, and after reading Miller’s launch post about the new service, I decided to call him up and ask him to tell me more about why he built it, and what kind of need it fills that other services and networks don’t. Isn’t sharing links and discussing them with friends what Twitter is for, and the reason Google launched Google+? Can’t we already do that on Reddit and Facebook?

Where does this leave Branch?

I also called Miller because I wanted to know what the launch of Potluck means for Branch, a web-based forum for discussion that he launched last year with financial backing from Obvious Corp. (the company founded by former Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and early Twitter staffer Jason Goldman) as well as SV Angel and Betaworks.

Miller said that while Branch continues to serve a purpose — allowing publishers to host invite-only discussions — it wasn’t meeting the need Potluck is aimed at, which is making it easier for small groups of friends to discuss things they’re interested in.

“What we found out was that Branch was pretty much just being used by publishers, people who were already comfortable tweeting and blogging, and it was really good at doing that… but it hasn’t really been successful in getting my college roommates to use it or my siblings to use it.”

One of the things that keeps some users from engaging with a lot of these networks, Miller said — including many of his twenty-something roommates and their relatives — is the fact that they are so public, and seem so oriented towards gaining massive amounts of followers or contacts, with everyone obsessing about how many favorites or retweets they have. Some internet-native users may enjoy that, he said, but others don’t, and they can be intimidated by the demands of those kinds of networks.

Although Potluck is public, it is designed to seem more like a dinner party with friends and their friends, the Branch co-founder says — and it deliberately doesn’t show the identity or avatar of the person who originally shares a link, so that all a user sees is the topic or the headline. After they click on the link, then they can see an excerpt in a separate pane, along with the identity of the person who shared it and anyone who clicked on a heart to “like” it.

“In talking to my sister and her friends, for many of them sharing is an anxious, nerve-wracking experience — if you post a profile picture and don’t get 100 likes, it’s seen as being not okay… even on Twitter, you’re very conscious of your favorites and retweets… there’s no service where you feel like you can really be yourself with what you are sharing.”

Links are just an excuse for conversation

Although the focus in Potluck is on sharing of links, Miller says the real intent of the service is to get people to engage in conversation with their friends — and also to meet new people who they may share interests with, in a more non-threatening environment than Twitter or Reddit or some other internet forum — and the link is just an excuse to start that conversation.

He said Potluck is an attempt to take older internet social networks like BBSes and newsgroups and email mailing lists and reinvent them for younger users who are more comfortable with Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat.

But do people really need another social network? One of the issues that I and some others had when Google+ launched was that it seemed like just another place where we had to post our links and try to engage with people, when we already had too many of those competing for our time. Miller said that this is definitely a risk that Potluck will have to overcome, but that he believes none of the existing solutions work for the kind of user he wants to appeal to — the one who finds interesting links, but doesn’t want to share them on Facebook because it’s too spammy, and isn’t on Twitter or doesn’t want to use it for that purpose.

Potluck launched: potluck.it I've been using it for a couple months, it's a lovely mix of Twitter + 2007-era delicious—
Matt Haughey (@mathowie) June 25, 2013

In some ways, Potluck feels like it is trying to find a spot between private sharing of links — the kind that happens over Gchat or email or in private groups on a variety of services, which Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic and others have called “dark social” — and the kind of overly public sharing that occurs on Twitter and Facebook. But is there a large enough need for such a thing?

One other interesting aspect of Potluck is that Miller says his team deliberately chose to use the Facebook-style “mutual friend” or symmetric follower model, rather than the Twitter-style asymmetric model (where someone can follow you without you having to follow them back), despite the fact that the consensus among many startups and venture capitalists is that the latter model allows for much faster growth and a broader appeal. Miller says that’s because he wants Potluck to build a strong network, not necessarily a large one.

“Will it take longer for us to grow because it’s not a follower model? Yes, but I think in the long run it’s going to be a lot more powerful and defensible and unique… we’re not in this for a quick turnaround to sell to Facebook or something like that, we’re in this to build something that’s meaningful and long-term and differentiated from everyone else, and for that we think building a strong network is a lot more important.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Ryan Jorgenson

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Why I will never click on your Instagram video, no matter how much you want me to

June 20, 2013 - 6:33pm

On Thursday, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom introduced the Facebook-owned platform’s new video feature with the kind of hushed and reverential tones that are usually reserved for announcements about a new Pope, or a declaration of war. And in a sense it is a declaration of war: a war against Twitter, which wanted Instagram very badly and has its own short video feature known as Vine. But it is a war I refuse to take part in, and I don’t think I’m the only one — and that could reduce the likelihood that Instagram’s offering will ever truly become “the Instagram of video.”

Before someone brings it up, some of this is undoubtedly a “hey you kids — get off my lawn” response on my part. Not only am I old (so old I remember when phones couldn’t even take video) but I confess that I kind of liked Instagram the way it was, with just photos. It was quieter, more contemplative somehow. But I think there’s more to it than just liking things the way they were. Video and photos are very different animals in a lot of ways (the creator of 12seconds, an early video service, seems to agree).

Facebook and Instagram just gave you a new place to please not share short video clips.—
Dave Pell (@davepell) June 20, 2013

For one thing, video is very difficult to scan or browse quickly, which is something I (and I’m assuming other users) like to do with photos and other types of content. I browse Instagram while I’m waiting for a train, while I’m in line for something or at the airport — any time I have a couple of minutes to spare. I can scroll through a surprisingly large number of photos and get a sense of what my friends are doing, but there’s no way I’m going to be able to do the same thing with video clips.

The noise factor

There’s also the problem of crappy videos, because let’s face it, there’s going to be tons of them. As Om pointed out in an interview on BloombergWest TV, this is likely to be a serious issue for any Instagram user — and it’s a problem that is compounded by the fact that videos take a much larger investment of time. While six seconds (the time limit for Vine) or fifteen seconds (the limit for Instagram) might not seem like a lot, when you are trying to browse and the video is irritating or just poor quality, it’s like an eternity.

15 seconds feels *really* long when watching a crappy piece of content, btw (like most pre-roll ads).—
Ian Schafer (@ischafer) June 20, 2013

Drew Breunig, a blogger who works in advertising technology, described the problem well in a post earlier this year about Vine and the idea of an “Instagram for video.” Given his job, you might expect Breunig to see a short video-clip sharing service as a gold mine, since it would be perfect for video ads — but he points out a lot of good reasons why video isn’t likely to take off. In effect, he says, the math doesn’t work:

“The problem with video social networks lies in variable Y: it takes much too long and too much attention to consume a single unit of content. This results in less feedback, which dries up the volume of content, which needs to be high to maintain a cache of enticing videos. And the network fails.”

That’s not to say there can’t be video-sharing networks that many people enjoy — Vimeo is pretty good, and so is YouTube, obviously (although I would agree with Breunig that it is a very different beast from what Instagram is trying to create). But it reduces the likelihood that such a network will ever become as huge and mass-market as Instagram, because it won’t appeal to enough users.

Great for kids — and for ads

None of this is to say that Vine and even Instagram’s video feature won’t get users, because they clearly will. My daughter and her friends are obsessed with Vine, and I’m sure it will find a home with many younger users who want a place to share funny clips of them making faces or singing along to crappy pop songs or whatever amuses them. And there’s clearly some value for Facebook in appealing to that demographic, since most of them (in my experience) never use Facebook any more.

Massive excitement in the house over Instagram getting video. Apparently it's just what my graduating 8th grader & his friends need today.—
Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) June 20, 2013

There’s also no question that advertisers will be interested, and I think that is a big part of the reason why Twitter and Facebook/Instagram are so fired up about it: It is the perfect length for advertising, and therefore plenty of existing video assets from commercials and TV shows can be re-purposed for it, and video monetizes way better than simple banner-style ads (for now at least), which is why every media company is doing it.

So perhaps it makes sense for Facebook, and for Twitter, and for advertisers — but it doesn’t make sense for me, and I would suspect a large number of other users. And that’s why I won’t be clicking on your Instagram video, no matter how much you want me to.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / SueC

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Google’s legal counsel swears on a stack of bibles: “We are not in cahoots with the NSA”

June 19, 2013 - 7:01pm

Ever since allegations first emerged that Google and a host of other tech giants were providing data on their users to the National Security Agency, there has been a race to see who can be the most transparent about this story. Google appears to be in the lead — even going so far as to file a lawsuit claiming that forcing the company not to disclose FISA court orders is a breach of the First Amendement. On Wednesday, it stepped up the campaign by offering chief legal officer David Drummond up for a live Q&A hosted by the Guardian.

One of the first questions got straight to the point: a user named KhakiSuit asked whether Google’s show of transparency wasn’t just “a face-saving exercise,” given that the company was only protesting the FISA court orders (which it wasn’t even allowed to mention until recently) after it had been shown to be “in cahoots with the NSA.” Drummond’s response:

In case you haven’t been following the case (there’s an overview post here if you need to catch up), one of the most contentious issues has been what kind of access Google and other companies have provided to the NSA in order to comply with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The original stories from the Guardian and the Washington Post quoted NSA documents leaked by former CIA staffer Edward Snowden saying the PRISM program provided “direct access” to company servers.

Subsequent reports from the Post and elsewhere have modified this description somewhat (although the way these updates have been handled by the Guardian and the Post has not been to everyone’s liking), and a piece in the New York Times that quoted sources at several of the tech companies mentioned said that they provided a kind of “dropbox” or “mailbox” to which the government had the key. But Drummond denied any such system was in place.

Google: “We’re not in the business of lying”

Charles Arthur, the Guardian‘s technology editor, asked whether Google had ever pushed to be able to disclose FISA orders before the NSA leaks were published, and if not why not. Drummond didn’t specifically answer the question, except to say that Google has “long pushed for transparency” and was the first company to file a public “transparency report” on the requests for data that it gets from governments.

After promising another commenter that Google is “not in the business of lying” and is “absolutely telling the truth about all of this,” Drummond also responded to a question about how users can have trust in cloud-based services when governments have the ability to collect data as it passes through switches and other internet infrastructure. The Google lawyer said the U.S. and other countries need to agree on rules related to data collection and need to “give close scrutiny to any laws that give governments increased power to sift through user data.”

Finally, another commenter asked Google’s chief counsel how the company was going to “renew user faith in the security of your services” in light of the revelations about the NSA and PRISM, and said that rhetoric about transparency wasn’t really helping. But Drummond wasn’t having any of it:

Whether the Google lawyer’s protests will change anyone’s mind remains to be seen, but at least Drummond was willing to take on some questions in a public forum (although the Guardian noted that Google chose which questions to answer). And it’s fairly obvious why they would do so — because doubts about privacy of information in the cloud could hit the web giant right where it lives, as the company acknowledged in its First Amendment lawsuit.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Sam72

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Google’s Jeff Dean talks about infrastructure, focus and recognizing cats

June 19, 2013 - 3:46pm

Jeffrey Dean, the man who developed or co-developed some of Google’s biggest infrastructure innovations — such as MapReduce and BigTable — told attendees at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco that the best approach to infrastructure is to focus on one problem at a time. Google was forced to come up with its own software and hardware solutions, Dean said, because it was growing so quickly and had such huge data needs, and this helped it to focus on the important problems that needed to be solved right away and to come up with some innovative answers.

MapReduce, for example, came about because the company needed software that would scale, that would be robust and that could also run “across as many machines as we wanted to throw at the problem,” he said, and that led to designing a system that would allow for scalable abstractions. In a similar way, the company’s BigTable database software came about because Google had a lot of datasets with a number of different attributes — such as its web-crawling index of URLs, combined with what language the page is in, its PageRank etc. — and needed a better way to manage them.

A more recent example of designing something to fit a specific problem, Dean said, was the development of what Google calls Spanner, which is software that allows programmers to replicate data across all of the company’s data centers — and to specify where exactly they want copies of that data to be stored, so that they can work on it more effectively. “So we have one global namespace for data and you can specify how you would like that replicated at a fairly high level,” he said. “You could say you want two copies in Europe and one in North America, and so on.”

Dean added that with any infrastructure problem, “there’s always this tension… you could try to solve all problems for all people, but that usually ends up not being good for anyone.” So the best approach, he said, is to focus on one problem and work closely with the team that has the most need for what you are building. Newer companies also have the luxury of being able to use Amazon’s AWS and other cloud services to scale, he said, instead of having to create those physical resources themselves.

As for problems he is working on right now, Dean said he has been focusing on building machine-learning systems that are “biologically inspired,” in the sense that they are built layer by layer — so an image-recognition system has been built with layers that do simple things like recognize an edge or a corner, and eventually progressed to higher-level abstractions. Dean says the system can now recognize images that contain cats without ever having been taught what a cat is.

Check out the rest of our Structure 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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Museums and the Web

Museums and the web 2013

Giga.com [Matthew Ingram]

Sorry, but the Internet doesn’t change who you really are — it reveals who you really are

The Manning trial grapples with the question of whether WikiLeaks is a media entity

The real villain in the ebooks case isn’t Apple or Amazon — it’s publishers’ addiction to DRM

A tip for Uber: Sometimes the best PR strategy is to do something that isn’t rational

Snowden maintains the NSA has direct access to company servers, which means someone is lying

Doug Engelbart and the vision thing: Is Silicon Valley suffering from a failure of imagination?

Research shows Twitter could be a tool for aid workers during events like the Boston bombings

Marissa Mayer has been on a shopping spree at Yahoo, but is there any sign of a strategy?

Doug Engelbart, American inventor and computing legend, has passed away

Google Reader’s shutdown, the rise of walled gardens and the future of the open web

New PRISM slides say the program allows NSA to eavesdrop on live conversations

Are you a dissident choosing between Facebook and Twitter? Here’s why you should definitely go with Twitter

Circa looks at news the way other companies look at code — as something to build with

Texas and Turkey show why Twitter is often the only media outlet that matters

A Kickstarter tip for journalists from ProPublica: Crowdfunding is a lot of work

Do we need more kinds of social media that self-destruct the way Snapchat content does?

Is there room for another social network for sharing links with friends? Branch says yes, gives birth to Potluck

Why I will never click on your Instagram video, no matter how much you want me to

Google’s legal counsel swears on a stack of bibles: “We are not in cahoots with the NSA”

Google’s Jeff Dean talks about infrastructure, focus and recognizing cats

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