broadstuff

It had to happen - porn on the iPhone that is - but its indicative of the iPhone's geek market that porn became available on the iPhone long after geek software and "useless" joke apps that poured beer for example. TechCrunch:

Apple has apparently decided that with the new parental controls now built into the iPhone 3.0 SDK, nudity is now okay in iPhone apps. The first such app, Hottest Girls, has actually been around for a little while. But an update today “upgraded” the pictures from girls in bikinis and lingerie, to topless and completely naked girls.

What has interested us is the "what will Porn do" question after User Degenerated Content took over and sites like YouPorn et al took the bottom out the market by offering it all for free. Here is one of those answers.

I can't wait for the plethora of huffy comments from fellow commuters as early adopters start watching iPorn on the buses, trains and so on......

(Video at the top "The Internet is For Porn" from Avenue Q)

Update - it would appear that this was all a hoax. But it is, er, coming......

Results of the Broadstuff 3 month survey on Mobile Advertising's possible future 2009. 327 respondents who read this blog. Better luck in 2010. Not strictly scientific but I reckon our readership is a dsignificantly diverse and well versed audience to derive a meaningful result.

Next month's question - "Will Social Media penetrate Enterprises in 2009/10?"

This is interesting from the Telegraph:

Traders are using software developed by US-based technology StreamBase to monitor "tweets" for price sensitive information.

The software plugs into Algorithm-based automated trading platforms that have been used by traders for years. But rather than searching Reuters or Bloomberg the software now scans Twitter.com.

Streambase – whose client base includes Royal Bank of Canada and London-based hedge fund BlueCrest Capital Management – was commissioned to develop the software by several "unnamed" clients.

The software allows traders to take into account "event-based" information published on Twitter in their automated equity, bond and foreign exchange trading.

This interests me because it combines 2 streams of realtime value which up till now I thought separate, to wit realtime financial data and realtime consumer data.

I recall Guy Kawasaki interviewing Chris Anderson at SXSW and asking how come a book extolling the virtues of selling things Free was not itself going to be free (see here for some squirming moments). Now it appears that the book has also used that other great foundation of the Free movement, Copying - ie grabbing other people's stuff without necessarily paying for it (or in this case, it would appear, acknowledging Wikipedia CC). The Virginia Quarterly Review:

In the course of reading Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion, $26.99), for a review in an upcoming issue of VQR, we have discovered almost a dozen passages that are reproduced nearly verbatim from uncredited sources. These instances were identified after a cursory investigation, after I checked by hand several dozen suspect passages in the whole of the 274-page book. This was not an exhaustive search, since I don’t have access to an electronic version of the book. Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia. Anderson is the author of the best-selling 2006 book The Long Tail and is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. The official publication date for Free is July 7.

The article goes on to show a whole lot of sectons of text. There is nothing new here of course - for your enjoyment I have put up the Tom Lehrer song "Lobachevsky" which tells you the secret of success in (academic) mathematics:

"Plagiarise, Plagiarise, Plagiarise - only always to call it please Research"

There is an apology of sorts from Mr Anderson of the "publishing software ate my links" variety at the end of the article. The comments to the post make interesting reading by the way.

Do as I say, not as I do - by their deeds shall ye know them. I wonder who will be first to digitise the book and put it online for free*, in this best of all possible worlds

* Young @badgergravling tells me 'tis Chris Anderson himself who will do this, see here. Guy extracted a promise from him to do somesuch at SXSW, and to Chris's credit he has.

Fascinating article in New Scientist, looking at the dynamics of how email network behaviour changes in different conditions:

Ben Collingsworth and Ronaldo Menezes at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne identified key events in Enron's demise, such as the August 2001 resignation of CEO Jeffrey Skilling. They then examined the number of emails sent, and the groups that exchanged the messages, in the period around these events. They did not look at the emails' content.

Menezes says he expected communication networks to change during moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before. For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.

Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.

One of the issues for researchers is getting access to enough emails to study as privacy regulations prevent this, even for academic study. Another study by Yahoo shows:

Duncan Watts of Yahoo Research in New York managed to obtain anonymised university email records - though he is not able to share them with others - and used them to show that instead of varying continuously, [different] individuals' emailing behaviour falls into distinct clusters:

We find that the resulting best-estimate parameter distributions for both data sets are surprisingly similar, indicating that at least some features of communication dynamics generalize beyond specific contexts. We also find that variability of individual behavior over time is significantly less than variability across the population, suggesting that individuals can be classified into persistent "types". We conclude that communication patterns may prove useful as an additional class of attribute data, complementing demographic and network data, for user classification and outlier detection---a point that we illustrate with an interpretable clustering of users based on their inferred model parameters.

We've seen work that shows that a customer's benaviour online can give away the "shadow of future intention to defect" and Telcos have been able to infer a lot from their own users' behaviour. In other words, there is much further to go here.

Gracious me - no sooner do I read an article in the WSJ today that Google is having to change its processes to ensure promising new ideas are not strangled by the GoogleOcracy (or go elsewhere), and to stem the talent heading for the door as the share price kicker ebbs (many were underwater till their options were repriced), than I read that Kevin Marks, the best known Google Open Social Media blogger is also off to pastures anew. Where to next?

I'll still be working on web standards through the groups above, the Open Web Foundation, the Open Rights Group, and more. Professionally, I'll be coding, writing and speaking on the social web via several new projects.

Best of Luck, Kevin.....its unclear exactly what the to-ing and fro-ings in this situation are, but it highlights the issues the WSJ mentioned. What do you do when you are no longer fast growth, high stock appreciation, or even cool, and you are in the middle of an entire ecosystem that essentially funds new companies to make their employees very rich if they succeed. Why would anyone stay at a corporate?

I recall years ago researching what pre dotcom geeks did - they worked at R&D labs - and in New England / New York / New Jersey there was rampant competition for people. Cable Labs set up in Denver, and essentially replaced competitive options with lifestyle benefits. I understand Microsoft apparently benefits from being in Redmond.

Google to Denver?

C:Net notes that the Federal Trade Commission is planning to crack down on flackers* - bloggers who review or promote products while earning freebies or payments:

The Associated Press reported Sunday.

This would, for the first time, bring bloggers under FTC guidelines that ban deceptive or unfair business practices.

"New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers--as well as the companies that compensate them--for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest," the article explained.

Good plan, and very necessary - a few bad apples can spoil trust across the blogosphere, and if it is stopped in its tracks a whole host of cheat-ecosystem behaviour is stopped in its tracks. As you can imagine, some are trying to obfuscate the issue (we wonder what their motives may be :

But some bloggers, the AP article mentioned, are concerned that the FTC's efforts could go too far, possibly generating probes into posts that were written without any compensation, and possibly leading bloggers to post with more restraint. And some believe it would be better if bloggers created their own standards based on niche and industry.

Then there's this: does the FTC realize just how many small-time bloggers are out there? Championing business ethics is a worthy goal, but, um, good luck getting much done when there are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there and new ones popping up more or less daily.

Yadda Yadda - this shows a misunderstanding of the blogonomics - blog readership follows a power law, a small number of blogs garner most of the traffic and most of the readers so there is a strong 80/20 - more like a 95/5 - split, ie they only really have to watch about 5% of the blogs to catch 95% of the material abuses.

By the way, Gawker points out that magazines do not have the same rules. Well, it wouldn't be hard to include them.....

*Strictly speaking a Flacker is a PR type schilling for money and a Shiller is a blogger flacking for freebies

It had to happen, but surprising to come from such a quarter. Habitat is a "designer" midrange UK furniture & furnishings store, and it has committed one of the worst (or best, depending on your point of view) social media marketing faux pas so far - it spammed the Iranian Election hashtags on Twitter.

You can see what has happened - some enthusiastic but inexperienced idio....sorry, "social media expert" has decided to monitor the trending topics on Twitter and then spam those topics with the Habitat marketing message.

There are two risks with this approach:;

- You spam people, which pisses them off and does not help the punted product. This may surprise social media marketeers, but most people don't like spam

- You get the context massively wrong - trending topics on Twitter can be extremely, um, varied and its not clear just how relevant trendy furniture and house tat is in many of them.

But to spam the Hashtags of those trying to get data about the Iranian protests out seems to be a Perfect Storm of stupidity.

You would have thought they may have put some form of "relevancy" filters in the spambot (for such I am sure it was), but oh no. Anyway, as SocialMediaToday (see the link above) reports, even though they later removed the messages (which will still stay cached in search engines for ages of course), they could then still have done things better:

So what could HabitatUK have done instead?

1. Individually @replied everyone who complained to them publicly, and apologised for the spammy behaviour
2. Apologised in public. They could have sent out generic tweets to say sorry for not knowing what they were doing when they hijacked the trending hashtags for their marketing tweets
3. Given Twitter followers a special offer discount voucher that could be redeemed via the web.
4. Asked Twitter followers what kind of information/offers HabitatUK could offer, that would give value and build interest.
5. Its ok to fail. Do it quickly and apologise publicly. People are a lot more forgiving when you admit to your mistakes rather than deny any wrongdoing.

So far silence, and certainly no discount vouchers

Don't know who Habitat's "Social Media Experts" were, but if I were Habitat I'd be sorely tempted to sue for damages on the grounds of total incompetence - though its interesting whether one could prove it or not (and sadly, people who do know what they are doing with Social Media get caught in the collateral damage). A public flogging* of the flackers may also assuage some of the people who feel this sort of spamming is outrageous. If the plan was to "go viral by being outrageous", it has probably misfired - big time! (Wilde's "only one thing worse than being talked about" nostrum has its limits....)

Sadly however, it is clear that this is the Future of Twitterspam, from now on. Like email, Twittermessaging will now be an arms race between those who want a useful messaging service and those who want to , ahem, "assertively" market their wares on it. I eagerly await my first Nigerian 419 Scam.....

But its not the Emptor who should Caveat in the use of AdSpam, its the Seller. Habitat has f*cked up big time, the spam is there in (semi)perpetuity and the damage to the Brand is going to take quite a lot to fix.

*of the social media-ted sort, of course

Thinking about what is coming out of Iran, a thought occurred to me - what we saw was not a "river of news" but a huge number of individual points that have to be actively put together to get a picture of what is going on.

This is a new way of getting news - the role of the reporter of the news is not to seek the story, but to sort out the data and find the correct patterns in it to build the picture.

In that respect it reminded me of pointillism, a technique of painting where you use many coloured dots to build a picture - up close its just dots, but as you stand away, the many dots make the picture clear (as in the Paul Signac painting above from the Musee D'Orsay)

Issue is, that unlike the painting, the the emerging picture is not clear at first, and requires the picture to be put together on the fly.

However, the tools to do this are still in embryo form. Real Time search is just the beginning, filtering and pattern assembly will the real challenges.

Update - article in a similar vein from BoinBoing with a superfiltered stream - great minds eh

Update 2 - interesting article from the Economist on how US and UK twitterers rendered the election hashtags near useless by their abuse of it to "show solidarity" and made it not so much pointillist as pointless:

Meanwhile the much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do. Even at its best the site gave a partial, one-sided view of events. Both Twitter and YouTube are hobbled as sources of news by their clumsy search engines.

Much more impressive were the desk-bound bloggers. Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic and Robert Mackey of the New York Times waded into a morass of information and pulled out the most useful bits. Their websites turned into a mish-mash of tweets, psephological studies, videos and links to newspaper and television reports. It was not pretty, and some of it turned out to be inaccurate. But it was by far the most comprehensive coverage available in English.

And thus a new type of spam is born, "whuffiespam" where the aim is to jump on to a good cause and get social capital by being visibly (and risibly) more caring than thou. 'Nuff said....

There has been quite a bit of hype about Twitter of late, if you hadn't noticed. However, what tends to get lost in all this is that it works so well in spite of the vapids , PR Ho's and the slebs who spam it. As Jonathan Zittrain noted this week that:

It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.

Its useful to just list what these qualities are. It has a rather unique architecture, something between a chatroom and social net, with a lot of hard edged Unified Messaging too. Here's a starter for Ten

1. Publish/Subscribe push system - efficient, as no need to request stuff. Scalable as it lends itself to everything from broadcast to one on one comms

2. Asynchronous - you do not have to be online to get the messages (same as email)

3. Asymmetric- you don't need permission to follow someone to get their messages - makes it very flexible, and very quick to set up to listen to many sources.

4. (Near) Real Time - news moves as soon as it is input - makes the system very responsive. Twitter search massively outperforms Google for "new" news for example

5. Unified Communications - can take messages in and pass them out in multiple formats - text, email, web, mobile, computer.

6. Simplicity - 140 character simple messaging format makes Unified Comm easier to do in multiple networks

7. Low Transaction Cost - This short message also makes messaging easy for users as very low transacation costs both to write and read, and promotes heavy usage

8. Multi-Media - carries text, photos (twitpic), voice, video (clips), links

9. Open Applications Interface - leads to huge creative effort leading to rapidly building functionality on top of the transport architecture - and outsourcing this to "the community" makes it very fast to evolve. Also, develops organically with customer demand so stuff is immediately useful

10. Increasingly forcing other systems eg Facebook to mirror them, and then sucks in those messages as well

One of the interesting thing is to watch the evolution of social nets, as one generation builds on the lessons of the previous one. Twitter launched with quite a few competitors, but it got that mix of features more "right" than the others. It was the most boned down and simple to use initially and that allowed it to win out. There must be a Zen thing about that, surely?

Be interesting to see what builds on top of Twitter.

(Update - interesting article on Twitter in Iran etc with another 6 points orhogonal to these above)