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I brought this up a while back when Apple first announced the store, but now that analysts are estimating possible revenues of $1+ billion in 2009, I think it's worth repeating.

Apple's App Store could emerge as $1.2B business by 2009 AppleInsider

Investment bank Piper Jaffray is urging investors who typically focus only on Apple's hardware announcements to also pay attention to the company's iPhone software strategy, particularly its upcoming App Store, which could balloon into a $1 billion market by next year.

Once you've gone to the trouble of setting up all the infrastructure necessary to sell, deliver and update applications—why stop with just the iPhone? You've done the hard work, everything else is just incremental costs. The Macintosh is the obvious next step, but there's no reason not to provide Windows applications as well. The market potential dwarfs that of just iPhone software.

The initial folks who stand to lose are places like Kagi and Digital River, who currently provide payment and (in some cases) delivery services for small software vendors. But they don't provide marketing, automatic updates, signed applications, and FairPlay copy protection. Apple is going to roll right over them; but they won't stop there.

See The iTunes Trojan Horse: Selling Applications for more thoughts on where Apple might go.


Disney World in general is nothing but a big ad, with the lowest point probably being the ABC cafe in MGM, where you are subjected to mediocre food and hundreds of television sets that do nothing but advertise ABC television shows.  (Which my 11yr old summed up as "Bad comedy, kissing, and guns.")

But Epcot has the hardest job.  It's supposed to remain on the cutting edge of the future.  I was reading a science fiction novel recently in which "cutting", as in "cutting edge" had become slang for "old fashioned"—I can believe it.  But the Innoventions section, although it has some fun stuff to do, basically has very little that you wouldn't find in someone's living room.  IBM was there advertising ViaVoice—a product I tried out at least three years ago.  There were some heads-up displays and videogames made larger, but nothing awe-inspiring.

The most ironic moment came as I was sitting in a quiet spot working on my laptop.  Periodically this guy would trundle by pushing a "robot" supposedly being taken somewhere for repairs.  He and the robot were having some ongoing banter over something.  This was supposed to be a glimpse of the future of course.  But as I watched him, a tourist walked by apparently talking to his coffee mug (he had a bluetooth cell phone headset on, but the mug was at his mouth), and a Disney employee zipped by on a Segway.  The guy pushing the robot on a two-wheeled lift looked positively cutting.

Originally posted on commons.somewhere.com/buzz, February 2004.
This paper was written for my 10th grade English class. We were given a choice of topics and allowed to argue either side. We researched the topics and made notes, but the final paper had to be written in class, which left no time for proof-reading or editing down. There was a problem with the file server, so I was unable to save my paper. This version was scanned in from the printed copy, and may have additional errors as a result.

Shireen Hinckley
Waddell/E Block

Wiretapping: Is it Worth the Cost?

Although the government often thinks that they know the best way to deal with threats, deciding to take the entirety of the problem into their own hands, this can often lead to more trouble than anticipated. The United States was set up by our founding fathers with checks and balances, and recently, these have been ignored for the cause to fight terrorism. As Bruce Schneier said, "Terrorism is a serious risk to our nation, but an even greater threat is the centralization of American political power in the hands of any single branch of the government. Over 200 years ago, the framers of the U.S. Constitution established an ingenious security device against tyrannical government: they divided government power among three different bodies... Since 9/11, the United States has seen an enormous power grab by the executive branch."(3) The executive branch responded to a terrorist attack by exciting the American public, and making them even more terrified by exagerrating the situation. Through manipulating this fear, the government was able to pass laws and form secret orginizations that before, would never have been sanctioned. One of these was permitting close surveillance of the American public, including wiretapping. Their excuse for this was saying that it would aid greatly in finding and capturing terrorists, and give the people more security. Uncontrolled wiretapping hurts security by providing too much unfocused information; leading to the arrest of innocent people, taking away constitutional rights, drawing resources away from focused investigations, and creating opportunities for abuse and corruption.

Too much unfocused information leads to arrests of unassociated, innocent people and through manipulating paranoia, the government takes away basic constitutional rights. Although government officials claim that wiretapping helps find terrorist workers all over the country, in reality it is messy and inefficient. As Schneier said in "Uncle Sam is Listening, the technology works similar to a vacuum cleaner, "sucking up a staggering amount of voice, fax, and data communications... from all over the world: an estimated 3 billion communications per day. These communications are then processed through... data-mining technologies, which look for simple phrases like 'assassinate the president"(9) These simple phrases will get caught up in casual emails or conversations and can put any innocent American citizen on the suspect list. This limits our rights of free speech and press. Many people do not care that the government is watching their every move, saying that they have "nothing to hide." This innocence cannot save a victim once he has arrested for terrorism, because the government throws out all normal procedure for criminals, such as a phone call or a trial. This was the case of Canadian software engineer Maher Arar, who also holds a Syrian citizenship. Arar, while switching flights in New York to return to Ottawa from Damascus, was detained in JFK airport in Brooklyn as a presumed Al Qaeda terrorist, and then sent to Syria where he was tortured for 10 months. "Arar, who denies any terror links and was never charged with a crime, charges the US government with violating the Torture Victim Protection Act and his Fifth Amendment right to due process."(7) Although Both the Canadian and Syrian governments now say Arar has nothing to do with Al Qaeda, or any other terrorist group, the US government it still adamant with its accusation, although it has presented no proof to the court. Arar was even named by the Canadian edition of Time Magazine as the "Newsmaker of the year," calling him "a symbol of how fear and injustice have permeated life in the West since 9/11 ."(7) His case is not the only one that accuses the US government of illegal workings; the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing them collaborating with the National Security Agency. This program's purpose was to wiretap Americans' communications without court oversight; violating the law and the privacy of its customers. These actions were in infringing the privacy safeguards established by Congress and the U.S. Constitution. Evidence soon revealed that the surveillance began before September of 2001, giving NSA no right to claim they were searching for terrorists, as it was not a valid threat at that time. "EFF 's case includes undisputed evidence that AT&T installed a fiberoptic splitter at its facility... in San Francisco that made copies of all emails, web browsing and other internet traffic to and from AT&T customers, and provided those copies to the NSA."(6) When the government and AT&T attempted to dismiss the case on the basis of state secrets, they were rejected, the judge saying, "the compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security." (6) The American public was violated and no amount of security is worth that destruction of privacy. The government cannot be trusted to always do right, as it is not run by supernatural beings. They too will make mistakes as with Arar. The more power the government has, the more they can misuse that power, and the bigger the mistakes can get.

Needless wiretapping and surveillance techniques cause more harm than good by drawing resources away from focused investigations and creating mistrust of the judicial system. The United States is not the only country wiretapping its people. After September 11th, other countries made similar precautions, such as Germany. Niels Sorrells explained the situation in Germany in "German Tap Lessons" saying, "German authorities cannot point to a single successful prosecution of a terror suspect identified from... blind wiretaps. The colossal volume of information produced from tens of thousands of these taps often obscures real threats, while dead ends are pursued. Authorities quite simply do not have the time to listen to and process it all. In the one case in which such surveillance was used to detect a terror plot... the authorities-thanks to old-fashioned investigative methods-already knew the identities of the... plotters. It's hardly a ringing endorsement for the kind of all-encompassing, warrantless surveillance that the United States government wants its citizens to accept. (4) Many times, rather than surveillance techniques aiding in investigations, it jeopardizes them. When certain laws are overlooked or broken, there are eventually consequences. Discoveries concerning organizations such as the NSA make many people question the true motives of other wiretapping programs that are supposedly put there to fight terrorism. "In criminal cases that can put terrorists behind bars, judges now have to worry that evidence was based on illegal wiretaps. Evidence might be excluded or convictions overturned."(8) Courts often do not know when to believe the government when it says where evidence has come from, and in numerous cases the government refuses to reveal even that, claiming it is a matter of national security, as they did in the case with Maher Arar. Judges who believe in the rule of law may feel obligated to be stricter with the government when they cannot trust its statements. This mistrust leads to lack of cooperation and less efficient trials, hindering the prosecution of terrorists rather than helping it. Not only does wiretapping hinder prosecution of terrorists, it wastes valuable investigative resources. "A January 17 story in the New York Times highlighted the huge amount of time and resources devoted to the program, apparently with minimal results. In the days after 9/11, the FBI decided to follow up on every lead... Long lists of phone numbers continued to be generated by the NSA program, however. According to a senior prosecutor: 'It affected the F.B.I. in the sense that they had to devote so many resources to tracking every single one of these leads, and, in my experience, they were all dry leads. "'(8) Even after September 11th, "the N.S.A. material continued to be viewed as unproductive, prompting agents to joke that a new bunch of tips meant more calls to Pizza Hut."(8) Although the government tries to convince the American people that their surveillance techniques are helpful to finding terrorists, the chance is one in a million. They are wasting resources and money chasing ghosts and dead ends, rarely finding any plausible suspects.

Opportunities for abuse and corruption arise when the government suddenly has the ability to retrieve boundless information on any individual. The Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War made the government have to quickly cover its tracks by weakening the man who distributed them in the eyes of the public. Daniel Ellsberg turned himself in to the FBI, and the administration saw this as an opportunity to weaken the Democratic party. President Nixon decided the only way they could make Ellsberg and the Democratic party weaker was to leak damaging information to the press. The project was named the "plumbers" and their goal was to do surveillance on Democratic members of the government and collect information illegally that could potentially damage their reputation and prestige. On September 3, 1971, under orders from the White House, the "plumbers" burglarized the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding. Because of the resources the administration had at their fingertips, they were able to manipulate the power they had in order to hurt Ellsberg's reputation and claims in court. The burglary and other unlawful surveillance activities were discovered, and Ellsberg was let go on account "unprecedented' government misconduct" which had "incurably infected the prosecution of [the] case. (5) President Nixon complained; "the sonofabitching thief is made a national hero and is going to get off on mistrial. And the New York Times gets a Pulitzer Prize for stealing documents... What in the name of God have we come to? (5) With the power the American people give to the government, they can manipulate it to serve their own ends. They have the ability to incriminate any individual, never getting caught. The United States government is not the only thing that would be able to manipulate wiretapping and surveillance technologies. In fact, the very people that they were supposed to protect against are able to employ it, using it for their own means. In Greece, this is exactly what had happened; "Unknowns tapped the mobile phones of about 100 Greek politicians and offices, including the U.S. embassy in Athens and the Greek prime minister" and later evidence revealed that the criminals actually used the code that was designed into the system; "It's [the] eavesdropping code [that was] put into the system for the police. The attackers managed to bypass the authorization mechanisms of the eavesdropping system, and activate the 'lawful interception' module in the mobile network. They then redirected about 100 numbers to 14 shadow numbers they controlled."2 This code was put into place to search for these terrorists, and they managed to manipulate it to serve their own means. Installing these wiretapping devices harmed the government rather than helped it, and caused more problems than there was originally.

The administration and executive power has taken too much power and ignored the judicial checks that our founding fathers put into place two hundred years ago, and as Richard Posner said, "The government has a conflict of interest, because its paramount duty is to protect national security. If it could be trusted to hold national security and civil liberties concerns in perfect equipoise, there would be no need for judicial checks"(1). They are able to toss aside the Constitution, violating American's basic rights of free speech and press, and cannot be stopped or slowed. Should the government have uncontrolled power over wiretapping and surveillance? No. This power would detrimentally harm the American public, and cause grabs for power and control that would completely disrupt the balance of democracy, and throw the ideals of American into oblivion.

Bibliography

  1. Posner, Richard A. Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency New York: Oxford UP, 2006.
  2. Schneier, Bruce. "More on Greek Wiretapping." Bruce Schneier. 1 Mar. 2006. 21 Jan. 2008 <http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/more_on_greek_w.html>
  3. Schneier, Bruce. "NSA and Bush's Illegal Eavesdropping." Bruce Schneier. 20 Dec. 2005. 21 Jan 2008. <http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/12/nsa_and_bushs_i.html>
  4. Sorrells, Niels C. "German Tap Lessons." Foreign Policy. Sept. 2006. 21 Jan. 2008 <http://www.foreignpolicy.com/index.php>
  5. Stone, Geoffrey R. Perilous Times Free Speech in Wartime. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.
  6. Hepting Resources." EFF Electronic Frontier Foundation Electronic Frontier Foundation. 21 Jan. 2008 <http://www.eff.org/nsa/hepting>
  7. Regan,Tom. "Canadian Sent to Syria Sues US Over Rendition Policy." The Christian Science Monitor. 11 Aug. 2005. 21 Jan. 2008 <http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0811/dailyUpdate.html>
  8. Swire, Peter. "Legal FAQs on NSA Wiretaps." Domestic and Economy 26 Jan. 2006. Center for American Progress. 21 Jan. 2008 <http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/01/b1389573.html>
  9. Schneier, Bruce. "Uncle Sam is Listening." Bruce Schneier. 20 Dec. 2005. 21 Jan. 2008 <http://www.schneier.com/essay-100.html>
"Backchannel" communication mechanisms like Twitter are going to revolutionize everything from meetings and classrooms, to our day-to-day relationships… but first we have to learn to deal with them appropriately. At SXSW, the Twitter backchannel turned an audience into a mob. The session leaders, not having access to the backchannel, had no idea what was happening, or why the mood of the audience had changed so rapidly.

This is an article about the keynote interview at the 2008 SXSW Interactive Festival. If you haven't heard the details, you can do a Google search on "SXSW Lacy Zuckerberg interview", or read one of many articles such as Wired’s SXSW: 2008, the Year the Audience Keynoted.

First things first.

I am not going to make any comments here about whether it was a good interview, bad interview, inappropriate topic, inappropriate people… that's not the point of this article, nor do I think it was really the reason why the audience at SXSW got so upset. Please keep any comments on topic, and away from the details of the interview. In particular, keep in mind that this was not the only session at SXSW that ended up with an audience verbally attacking the panelists and taking over the session.

At the SXSW Keynote interview, an audience of conference-goers acted unusually; they became a mob. I mean that in the sense (as Dave Winer does in his "Twitter is not a chatroom" podcast) of a crowd out of control—a crowd doing things that individuals would not. This is the kind of behavior generally seen at political events; or meetings where the audience is emotionally tied to the subject matter. An interview or panel that seems off-topic usually gets a few walk-outs and a bad rating in the "What can we do better next year?" survey; not an audience revolt. I find that very interesting, and I have some ideas as to why it may have occurred.

“Where are the yellow comment cards?” - 51 minutes

In the nineteen-sixties, psychologist Stanley Milgram ran a series of experiments which are probably familiar to anyone who has taken Psychology 101. He asked subjects to inflict pain on a person when that person made a mistake on a test. A number of interesting results came out of the experiment, but one variation in particular is relevant here. The willingness to administer shocks increased when the recipient was more remote. It's hard to de-humanize someone who is right next to you. On the other hand, if you can't see them, and don't know them, your emotional attachment is greatly reduced, and you will do (and say) things you would never do in person. This isn't news to anyone who has been involved in an email flame-fest, or posted something online that later got quoted face-to-face. We say things online that we would never say in real life.

“sarah lacey is in love with zuckerberg, me thinks”- 11 minutes
“someone offering me $20 to yell "Beacon Sucks". paying for my night of drinking if I do. I definitely should.”- 17 minutes
“Someone just yelled out, "BEACON SUCKS!" - yes, that's how this is going...u should be here :)”- 18 minutes
“Holy cow, whoever this is interviewing Mark is horrible! I think she is in love with him. Hold on...she might go in for the kiss!" - 20 minutes

Mobs form when individuals feel anonymous, and believe that their feelings and behaviors are shared by others. When the behavior becomes visible, and when nobody reacts negatively to it, the behavior gets amplified, with more and more people joining in. But why would this happen in a technical conference on a relatively unexciting keynote topic?

The blame, of course, has fallen on Twitter, because it was through Twitter messages that the revolt first began to appear. More and more, services like Twitter are being used as "backchannel" communications mechanisms by which the audience can provide non-interruptive feedback to each other, and to the people running the event. In this case, the people running the keynote obviously weren't tracking the backchannel (perhaps "sidechannel" would be more accurate in that instance). Rationally, there's no reason to get frustrated that your Twitter comments are being "ignored" by someone whom you know isn't reading them, but frustration probably did play a role here as well.

One thing that wasn't clear to me in the discussions about the keynote, was whether the Twitter phenomenon was "real", or whether it was just the result of a lot of posts by a few (prolific) individuals. So I decided to see if I could gather up a collection of all the Twitter messages sent from the keynote, during the keynote.

There's a detailed methodology section at the end, but this is the quick summary.

  1. Searched for all users who mentioned "SXSW" between Thursday and Sunday the week of the conference.
  2. Searched for all users who mentioned "facebook", "lacy", "zuck" or "keynote" within a few hours of the event.
  3. Manually narrowed down the resulting 4000 messages.

The final result was nearly 2000 Twitter messages, sent by 500 users. I know that some of the messages I included were irrelevant, and I'm sure I missed others. But overall, that comes to an average of close to one message every two seconds! There is no question that backchannel communications were very active during the keynote.

It is my belief that what happened was a combination of standard mob behavior with the side-effects of the behavior observed by Milgram. People sent messages, using the usual level of rudeness that occurs in electronic communication. Those messages were read by people also at the keynote. As the level of vitriol rose in the twittersphere, it also fed back into the people in the crowd. "Surrounded" by other people feeling the same way, the animosity and feeling of anonymity moved from the virtual world into the real world; and a virtual mob turned into a real one.

Is that what really happened? It's impossible to say for sure. Twitter is not a real-time protocol, and people take time to type messages, so it was impossible to directly connect a particular message to a particular time during the talk. Also, there is no way to tell who in the audience saw the messages (or heard about them from a seat-mate who did).

What I have done, is gather up the Twitter messages from the keynote, and overlay them directly on a video of the interview. I used the video posted on Viddler by allfacebook. It cuts off somewhere near the end, but was the most complete version I could find.

The following video is annotated with all the Twitter messages I collected. In some cases you'll have to pause to read them, since they go by too quickly. I grouped together any posts that occurred within one second of each other to make it a little easier to scan. Since I saw apparent lags of up to fourteen minutes between what some tweets described and what happened, I finally settled on a five minute lag for all tweets. So keep in mind that the tweets do not directly correspond to the current scene in the video, and two adjacent tweets were not necessarily written, sent, or recorded at the same time.

Because this version of the video is hosted at Viddler, you can not only comment on my blog, you can also make comments in the video, attaching them to particular frames. Please feel free to do so.

The Annotated Video

Note: The annotations will be easier to read if you expand the video to full size (click in the upper right hand corner of the video).


The Annotated Data

The following charts show the relationships between messages ("tweets"), users, content and time. I have actually done a minimal amount of analysis. Most of my time was spent filtering the data and annotating the video. If someone wants to examine things some more, I'd be happy to turn over the data and my (very) motley collection of Perl scripts.

The charts are all plotted against time, usually expressed as HH:MM and sometimes just MM. All values are the sum of the activity over a minute, or in some cases, five minutes.

Number of Messages Sent and Number of Users

The blue area shows the total number of messages being sent each minute. The red area shows the total number of new users (i.e. those who haven't previously sent a message). I actually have not spent much time examining what happens in the video vs. what happens in the tweets. Does something interesting happen around 45 minutes to cause a spike, or is that a conincidence?

The final total was 512 users and 1857 messages.

First and Last Sending Times (With Count) Per User

The following two charts (attempt to) provide a view of how often and how long people were posting messages. I could have done a standard mean/median/mode chart, but I wanted to include the start and stop times. In both charts the vertical axis represents the time at which someone sent their first message, and the horizontal axis indicates when they sent their last message. (So the diagonal line represents people who only sent one message.) The first chart uses the size of the bubble to indicate how many messages the person sent. The second chart uses the color of the square.

The most messages sent was 65 (by three people). A quick check indicated that the frequent posts seemed to be from people providing a running report on what was happening.

PostTimeFreqBubble.png

Anatomy of a Mob - Start/Stop Posts by Frequency (Heat)

Frequency of Top 50 Words over Time

You'll probably want to click on the image and view the PDF version.

This chart shows how often each word appeared during a given five minute period. The most common words appear on the right. For instance, we can see that the words "audience", "people" and "crowd" grow in popularity over time; probably indicating that people were tweeting about the behavior of the audience as the interview progressed.

Anatomy of a Mob - Word Frequency Over Time

Frequency of Top 50 Words by User over Time

This chart addresses the question of whether the messages were being sent by just a few people, or many. Here the value for each five minute period is the number of people who used a word. Where the previous chart counted all instances of a word, even if used multiple times by a single user; this counts only one use per user. The chart appears very similar to the previous one, indicating that the use of the top fifty words was quite wide-spread.

Anatomy of a Mob: Word Use by Users Over Time

Top 50 Words, Total Frequency, and by User

Like the previous chart, but showing just the totals. The red bars indicate the number of people who used a given word. The blue bars indicate the total number of times the word was used. Again, the usage appear to be fairly evenly distributed.

Anatomy of a Mob: Total Word Use by Users

Conclusion

The Twitter transcript makes it clear that there was an early and constant stream of negative comments flowing from a large number of senders. The lack of accurate timing information makes it impossible to tell for certain whether that was something that started small and spread, or exactly how it erupted into real life. However, it is clear that the conversations in Twitter did lead to the same level of real life behavior and dialog. While it could just be attributed to the general decline of societal mores, I believe my original assertion as to the connection and influence of the virtual and real worlds is potentially valid. It would be interesting to see a more detailed and rigorous study of future events. (Sounds like a good Sociology/Psychology/Anthropology thesis for someone. :-)

Twitter provides a communication channel which augments, rather than interrupts, existing communications. As such, it makes it possible for people to communicate both within a group, and (in structured events) to the leaders of a group, all without disrupting the normal progress of the activity. If that sounds like too much for a panel discussion or interviewer to manage, consider that most reporters in traditional media (not to mention football quarterbacks) have similar mechanisms for receiving information while they work. Whether increased multitasking is a good thing from a quality standpoint is a different issue. For that, look at the research that Howard Rheingold has been doing in the areas of multitasking and backchannels.

The Twitter backchannel can definitely have a positive influence. As a remote observer of SXSW I was not only able to receive ongoing summaries of sessions, but I could suggest questions for attendees to ask, and provide resources to panelists while they were in an active session. The backchannel can provide a low-key mechanism for alerting presenters to issues, offering support, and of course organizing and coordinating group actions. The issue, is how to keep group actions from growing out of control. I believe that requires education (or perhaps just a new generation of users) about the differences between virtual and real communication, and the dangers of transporting emotions directly from one to the other. I believe it also requires responsibility on the part of backchannel spectators.

There is a tendency in online discussions to let flames burn themselves out. After all, it's the virtual world, not the real one. "Getting involved" can be a pain. But as the SXSW events show, the boundaries between real and virtual get thinner every year, and virtual emotions can cause real-world harm. I greatly admire Sarah Lacy's ability to deal with the abuse she has gotten and move on. A reporter has to have a tough skin, but it still can't have been easy. She didn't deserve the abuse that was dished out on Twitter, let alone what happened in the auditorium.

As citizens of the online world, we have a responsibility to step forward when we see people misbehaving. It doesn't take much to tone things down. People need to be reminded that the target of their frustrations is a real person. They also need to be reminded that their persona, though virtual, has its own reputation to think about. The members of an online mob are in fact far less anonymous than those in a real mob. I was rather shocked when I happened to notice that one of the tweets I quoted above was actually made by someone I follow on Twitter. It was more sophomoric than mean, but it still contributed to the overall mood. Finding out who said what during the conference is a simple task for anyone with access to Google. We need to live our online lives under the assumption that everything we say, and everything we do, no matter how private it seems, is going to contribute to our overall reputation. That's a good thing, but it takes getting used to.

“So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses.... That proves something - that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children.” –– Jean Louise (Scout) Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Finally, when we misbehave online (as we all invariably do at one time or another) we need to own up and apologize. Fortunately, the same attributes that make it easier to screw-up online, also make it easier to apologize online. You don't have to do it face to face, a quick tweet or email message works just fine. If you were at the SXSW keynote, you might consider that.

Predictions

This experience, and the past month that I've spent intensively using Twitter, have led me to a few beliefs about where this all is leading us.

The first one easy. Anyone who runs a conference, panel or large meeting without monitoring the backchannel is simply asking for trouble. Ironically, SXSW did have an official chatroom for the keynote, but that did not receive as much traffic, nor was it being monitored as a backchannel should be.

The second one is longer term. For several generations social networking on the computer has been derided as not having the depth or value of real life social interactions. Tools like Twitter (and Facebook), which blur the lines between work and home, important and trivial, and which deliberately create a malleable and ambiguous set of simple tools ("status", "poke", "what are you doing") are the primitive forerunners of what the next generation will take for granted. The always-on aspects will surely migrate to phones and become a constant part of our online life. The interfaces may be crude, but I am already more connected to the lives of people halfway across the world than I am with my next door neighbors. That knowledge extends from the trivial (I'd love to have dinner at Adam Engst's house, he cooks a lot of interesting stuff) to the critical (Susan Reynolds' fight with breast cancer has led to a wonderful support group and a great funding effort). It isn't a matter of not spending time with the neighbors, it's that I don't have a real-time, ongoing conversation with my neighbors day in and day out! The next generation is going to look back at pre-computer-mediated social interaction and say that we are the ones who had no depth in our relationships.

Methodology

  • Searched for all users who mentioned SXSW between Thursday and Sunday the week of the conference (4068). For this I used the Terraminds Twitter Search API with a filter for the correct dates.
  • Searched for all users who mentioned "facebook" (256), "lacy" (80), "keynote" (290) or "zuck" (111) between 1pm and 4pm on the day of the interview.
  • I then took the list of 4232 unique users from the previous searches, and gathered every message they posted between 2:05pm and 3:15pm. (I initially gathered more, but then narrowed it down to those times as my best guess for the start/end times of the interview, as well as the most likely lag time for tweets.) The Terraminds search doesn't do per-user searching, so I used Tweetscan. Tweetscan doesn't provide an API, so I screen scraped the results.
  • Narrowed down the resulting 3562 messages by splitting them into two groups. The first group matched the previously searched keywords (2039), the second did not (1523). I scanned the first group for messages that didn't look like they belonged (wrong topic, different session). I scanned the second for things that I might have missed. Those were quick scans and sloppy. The end result was to remove 66 entries and add 30.
  • I should note that there are several things I didn't do but could have. That includes searching for additional keywords, and also checking the communication chains. E.g. If user @a sent a message to @b, then I should check @b's messages as well. I also did not include the Meebo transcriptsin the results, although that would be easy to add.
  • The final result was 512 users and 1857 messages. (One user was removed in post-processing, when I realized that "twitgeistr" was a bot that simply reported on keywords that it found in the public stream.)
  • I then spent an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to subtitle the video, including attempts at two different sub-title formats. The final solution involved Final Cut Pro and programatically generated XML files that specified text-effect overlays with differing offsets depending on the number of lines. If anyone at Apple wants to write a bit more documentation on FCP XML files, and provide a few more examples, that would be just fine with me. The annotations have all @user references changed to "@", and all links replaced with "[LINK]". The data is public, but I see no reason to make it easy to embarrass individuals.
  • The keyword processing is also done with a Perl program. Lingua::StopWords was used to remove common English words from the list. Lingua::Stem was used to stem the words (e.g. make "improve", "improves" and "improved" all map to the same word). Stemming exceptions were made to ensure that the words in the top fifty were all spelled correctly (stemming programs don't really care if the result is a real word, only that the mapping is correct. "improves" normally gets stemmed to "improv"). In addition, I added some other common mappings. "sarah", and "lacey" both map to "lacy". "mark", "zuck", "z" and "zuckerburg" all map to "zuckerberg". "fb" maps to "facebook", and so on. I also added some additional stop words. I tossed "just", "like", "now", "can", "go", "got" and a number of other words that were very common but which didn't really carry any emotional content.
  • The same Perl program generated the XML files, as well as a set of tab-separated data files for processing by DeltaGraph. DeltaGraph is a very powerful charting software (particularly if you are dealing with data sets with missing data), but some better (dare I say, "prettier"?) defaults and an updated UI wouldn't hurt.

If anyone is feeling particularly masochistic, I would be happy to package the whole mess up and make it available for download. Let me know.

Postscript

All the data gathering and analysis here were done by myself and for that, and any of the errors that are inevitable in such a rushed project, I am solely responsible. However, I'd like to thank a few people who contributed, knowingly or unknowingly.

  • Jeremiah Owyang, Robert Scoble, Marshall Kirkpatrick and Dave Winer all discussed in detail what was happening, and why, on Twitter and on their blogs.
  • Howard Rheingold is doing some very interesting work on backchannels and multitasking. His tweets on the daily progress of his Virtual Communities/Social Media class are quite interesting and relevant to this discussion.
  • At a recent Boston Tweetup someone from the SOURCEBoston group suggested that I do a word analysis; a suggestion which added several days to the project, but was definitely worth it. Unfortunately I don't remember who it was, let alone their name.
  • Also at the Boston Tweetup, Dmitri Gunn reminded me of the name of the other SXSW session which had a Twitter dustup, "Social Marketing Strategies Metrics, Where Are They?" (apparently that's what the audience wanted to know too) which in turn led me back to Jeremiah's excellent article on the different sessions where Twitter played a role.
  • Dan Byler gave me feedback on a preliminary version of this article and brought up the mob scene in "To Kill a Mockingbird".
  • Brett Peters reminded me that I hadn't gotten around to proving my claim that it wasn't just a few malcontents; thus sending me off to create two more charts just when I thought I was done.
To all of them, and all the wonderful folks I've met online and off this past month. Thank you.

BitStrips is getting hot

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I get the distinct impression that Link/ is getting hot. Design your own cartoon character so friends can put it in cartoons, or make your own cartoons using characters (and yes, there are plenty of political ones) that others have designed.

Once Apple has set up iTunes as a software store for the iPhone and iPod Touch, there is no reason they shouldn't leverage that functionality and presence to become the dominant software reseller for both Macintosh and Windows platforms.

iTunes has got to be the most inappropriately named application on the planet. Sure, you can play music, but it also synchronizes your photos, sends contacts to your phone and iPod, synchronizes your calendar with different services, let you buy games for your iPod, and now; will let you buy applications for your iPhone and iPod Touch. it is this last feature which particularly interests me.

IPhone applications will only be available via the iTunes store, to which the only interface is the iTunes application. All applications have to be approved by Apple, and all applications are digitally signed. This means that when you install an application on your iPhone, you know that it hasn't been modified from time the application developer first gave it to Apple. That's a very nice feature from a security standpoint, and one that is also available to programs written for the Mac OS Leopard operating system.

When Apple started selling music, the record companies didn't take them seriously, and never really saw what was coming. As a result, they lost control of the market for their music, and Apple gained the ability to become the number two music reseller in the United States. The only reason that Apple wasn't able to do this to the movie industry as well, is that the movie industry had been forewarned, and limited Apple's access to their content.

When I look at everything that Apple has to do in order to become a software reseller for the iPhone; I wonder whether they're really going to restrict their software to just the iPhone. The hard work in selling software for the iPhone has nothing to do with the iPhone itself. Apple has to set up marketing, digital signing, software evaluation, developer tools, download servers, software upgrade mechanisms, alpha and beta test processes, policies for handling sales and variable pricing, and all the other features that are expected of an online software store. After having gone to all this trouble, why is Apple going to stop with just selling software for the iPhone? Why not use the same software store to sell software for the Mac? For that matter, Windows Vista, also has digital signing support. Given the vast numbers of computers, both Windows and Macintosh, that have iTunes on them, Apple automatically has a huge distribution mechanism for software, and a pre-installed application for marketing, advertising and downloading that software. On top of that, because of the digital signing, Apple can advertise the software is being safer to download than the software that is downloaded off of other download sites.

If I worked at Kagi, Digital River, or one of the other companies that currently handle software sales and distribution (but not marketing), for independent software developers, I would start looking in my rearview mirror. Because iTunes is coming up fast, and has pulled out to pass.

(As a side note, this article was written using MacSpeech Dictate after only five minutes of training. It has worked extremely well, and I'll be writing a review shortly.)

Meebo and Adium developers give their reactions to Open AIM 2.0. Link

The initial reaction seems to be that the provided libraries come with restrictions which make them unsuitable for use in most open source clients (like Adium) that use libpurple—a GPL'd multi-client IM library. However, the documentation of the Oscar protocol may open the door to new implementations, and those in turn might finally be able to support audio and video chat. That would certainly be good news for users, as the lack of a video and/or audio solution is the one thing that leaves people torn between using default solutions like iChat and AIM as opposed to multi-platform solutions.

If you're a heavy user of twitter, you know how overwellming it can be. Twitterrific is a great (Mac) program, but sometimes all those tweets in that one little window are bit too much. For a while I've been using a script which grabs all the unread tweets in Twitterrific and brings up a browser window with them. Yes, this seems a bit silly—why not just go to the twitter site? The main reason is that this window contains just the tweets I haven't read. But also, I have more control over how they are displayed. If people actually find it useful, I'll see if I can't provide template support so that it's easy to customize how your tweets display. Let me know in the comments.

The second tool is more recent. There's been a lot of buzz about Pownce lately, and people have been facing that far too frequent question of "how do I manage postings on multiple social networks. There are some applications that can handle both, but they aren't Twitterrific… So I wrote this little application which monitors Twitterrific and every time it sees a post that you have made, it resends it to Pounce. Since this was a quick-and-dirty application, it doesn't actually do the hard work itself. For that it uses MoodBlast. So if you want to use this one, you'll need to download MoodBlast as well. (That has some added advantages, which I describe in more detail on the software page.)

So if either of those sound interesting, you can check them out here, on the TechnoSocial software web site.

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I'm the CEO/CTO of Somewhere, Inc., a company building a unified social networking layer that gives people the means to track their friends across multiple social networks.
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