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Question 351 of 365: Should we ask for database access?

Published on December 18, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.

Databases are magic.

The front end of every website that you go to is based upon a layer of databases working hard in the background. Each database holds the keys to your passwords and to your conversations. They are the places that context is captured and value is assessed. With a simple query of a well organized database you can archive more information than you could ever hope to understand. They are magic because they let everything that we do connect to everything else. They are also magic because almost no one knows how to understand them.

Even database experts have to sit down with intense documentation in order to figure out how tables function and how information is being written and rewritten. We never see the databases that make Facebook function or gmail work. We just expect them exist and do the things that we want. In essence, the database is the man behind the curtain. We must never know what the real nature of our reality. We must never see the rules that are being outlined by the formatting of fields.

We must simply go by and use the API’s that companies open up for us. We must only look at the data that is presented and not pull it for ourselves. We must attach meaning only to the information that is given and not to the millions upon millions of searchable fields that could be open to us if someone would just let us in.

The front end is fine for most of us. Most of us are not interested in seeing how our social networks actually manipulate our information. Most of us couldn’t care less about not being able to match up users to uses or friends to functions. And yet, I think we should ask anyway.

I think that we should ask every service that we encounter if we can take a look in the back room. I think we should be able to demand that they reveal the infrastructure that is at work and the processes that will define the future of our data.

I don’t want to simply be able to export. I want to be able to manipulate and massage. I want to be able to see just how my information is affected by everyone else’s. I want to be able to measure the network affect and search through what influence really measures up to be. In short, I want co-own everything that I have shared and all that has been shared with me. I want to write a query to show my engagement and then see how it fits in with the rest of what I have created. I want to see the whole spectrum of my interaction, I want the full picture of who I have been online.

And that can only happen if I get access to the database. It can only happen if I can see the back end of every application I use. It can only happen if I have a relationship with my data that allows me to manipulate it on a level that is independent from the uses that others have invented.

I want to be the architect and archivist. And I want everyone else to be the same. Security, copyright, privacy and intelectual property issues issues aside, I want access to manipulate the world’s data. Are we getting closer or farther away from that ideal?

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Question 344 of 365: Are we ripping the right information?

Published on December 11, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.
HandBrake icon.
Image via Wikipedia

A DVD was supposed to be one of the most encrypted physical media types to ever be created. It was supposed to have been the best form of Digital Rights Management, one that would stop pretty much everyone from copying software and movies. The days of dubbing VHS tapes was going to be far in the past and we were going to evolve into this brave new world of legitimate content.

As it turns out, when you make anything into a digital version (like a DVD) it becomes infinitely easier to make copies than its analog cousins. It took one single person to reverse engineer the technology and start us on the path of making legitimate backups of the media that we supposedly owned. Now with things like Handbrake, ripping a DVD is easier than recording a movie on TiVo. The one problem is that no matter how easy it has gotten, we still don’t always know where to start ripping. If we rip the wrong sections or the chapters aren’t in the correct order, we end up getting a jumbled mess of media that neither makes sense nor is watchable.

It isn’t enough to have the information. It isn’t enough to have it in a format that is easily transfered. The most important element is putting the puzzle pieces together.

The key for making a good rip of a hard to figure out DVD is to watch what a DVD player does when it plays the movie. If you can see how it navigates on the disk (just by observing the chapter numbers in the right order) you can figure out just how the sneaky disc engineers had constructed it. Once you have all of that chapter information, it is only a matter of dictating what comes next.

That is why we need such good examples of learning for us to rip. We need to be able to watch others who have figured out how to learn and do business and create something new. We need to stop watching those that get the order all wrong and jumble up their intentions so that they are left with no expertise or fulfillment at the end of their projects. We need to stop looking at success as the only factor in determining value.

We need to stop looking at Facebook as something to emulate.

If I rip Facebook, I am going to get the same kinds of unease and mistrust that users all over the world feel toward the service. I will get the mixed-messages of legitimacy and infantilism that are rampant in the millions of Facebook applications available. I will see everyone as a major competitor and no one as a partner. I will not build things that transfer value, but only things that consume it.

Ripping the right information means watching those who listen to the right people and make things work for everyone involved. We should rip writers of great young adult fiction. They have looked into our condition at our most vulnerable time of change and they have figured out what is important to pull out for the rest of our lives. We should rip those who tell the story of Coming of Age because it is all that we ever do.

We should rip those that sing to their children. They have figured out just the right ways of being themselves and playing a part. They have pursued a consistent sense of wonder in children and they persist in the belief that they can hold on to it. If we can rip that moment of shutting the door on the a contented child’s bedroom as they drift off to sleep then we will be one step closer to figuring out being fulfilled.

We should rip those that make up new card games and sports. They have written the rules for complex systems and then they look for ways to win. They have laid out all of the important moves and then they methodically make them. They are masters of using the same 52 items and presenting them in new patterns. If we are to learn anything about the systems we believe in, we must first rip the systems we create.

We must rip all of these elements because we need to copy and remix what is right in this world. We must emulate and augment the reality that we want to see more of. Being the change doesn’t do any good if your change is based upon the wrong information. Rip the good stuff, and being the change becomes the only option.

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Question 335 of 365: Will the future be double spaced?

Published on December 1, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.

I used to write research papers in a single evening. I would slog on through 20 pages, even if it meant pulling an all-nighter. To me, it wasn’t a question of sleep or of planning, it was a matter of continuity. I wanted the first draft of anything that I was doing to be done in a single mindset. Surely, it would get better over time, but plowing through a set of research and having a single thesis could only be done in one night. I would write out starts of sentences, I would rewrite the first paragraph 20 times. I would brainstorm behind my cursor for hours. And then I would write. I would write so much and so fast that it seemed there was nothing more important than the next words coming across the screen. All of my fast typing skills from instant messaging my friends on IRC in middle school payed off in these long sessions. When I had a thought, it would almost create itself, coming shooting out of my fingertips across those keys. It was all I could do to keep the momentum and the pressure of my mind on the topic at hand. It was all about the rest of the clean white page. I had to fill it, at all costs.

The one thing I never did, though, was fill it with extra space. I would never double space my work until I was finished. I knew that writing two pages with narrow margins and double spaced paragraphs was cheating. It was letting the length limit dictate my writing. It was letting the confines of the platform tell me when to stop. And stopping wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to write until the ideas would no longer come. Until I proved my point, I couldn’t be done. That moment, though, of selecting all of the text I had just crafted and pushing the lines away from one another was sweet satisfaction. It was made everything right, even if I knew there were still grammatical and logical errors in my work. That decision set more than the type. It made it so that everyone could see just how expansive my arguments were and just how much work I had done in my overnight experience.

And I would print out my essays and reports and short stories so that they could be read and commented on by my capable professors. They required this convention so that each one of them could add their critique within the letters I had cobbled together. They literally wanted to read and write in between my lines.

I wonder if this experience is a lost contentment. Will those in the future of digital submissions and blog post reflections ever know what it is to be done, to double space and set things right with the world? Will they ever be able to write on their own without the distractions of Facebook messages or texts? Will there be a moment in the early hours of the morning where the triumph over a single topic is so absolute that you can grab each line and stretch it out into two?

Probably not.

Probably the future of text is in the hyperlink and not in the format. Double spacing probably won’t mean anything to my children. Hand written comments will give way to metadata. It will be tagged and annotated, not red penned. I think this is overall a wonderful advance into a brave new tomorrow where there is no such thing as losing a story due to hard drive failure or losing a notebook. The blog, though, is no substitute for the quiet victory of typesetting a momentary masterpiece. The moment where content gives way to margin play is one I will miss. It is a subtle loss, but a loss just the same.

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Question 333 of 365: When should we make buttons?

Published on November 29, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.

As I sat in my grandmother’s dining room table, I knew that there was something very different about the evening’s events. There wasn’t going to be a rousing game of cards or a big football game to watch. There was something much more subdued going on that was difficult for my 6 year old brain to put together. At one point, my aunt came out with these buttons that had a big red circle with a line going through it. The drawing of what they were against was ominous but entirely unfamiliar, though, so I asked what was happening.

My mother told me that some people wanted to put in a trash incinerator near my grandmother’s house and that a few people were going to get together and talk about how they could make them stop. She said that they were wearing those pins to show that they didn’t want the incinerator. Immediately, I wanted to wear a button too. In my head, I imagined the trash burner being right next to the bedroom I slept in while I stayed ay my grandmother’s house every December. I did not want to smell burning trash as I was going to sleep.

I wanted to start my own 6 year old’s crusade throughout Chillicothe, Ohio. I knew nothing about the political, economic, or social underpinnings of either side of the argument, but because my family was against it, so was I. And we would have buttons to prove it.

That was the first time I saw how a single idea could be so universally understood as to have everyone immediately on board. The framing of the problem was simple. The answer to the question of “Do you want burning trash next to your house” is always going to be no. The other side doesn’t have buttons. Their case can only be made with cash in hand. The only way incinerators are built near housing is by way of compensation to the local government and the residents. It is a harder case to make, even so. There is no community that is going to stand up and fight for their right to burn trash. There are no after dinner meetings with concerned citizens who discuss ways to get more incinerators to be built in their community.

And yet, none of the things I believe in are causing people to get together in living rooms and make buttons. There is no big, anti-busywork campaign that has children and adults alike in an uproar. There is no one beating the collaboration drum from dawn until night so that we make sure that tomorrow is filled with more ways of connecting with one another instead of less. There is nothing so concrete as an incinerator to rally against, no symbol of everything we do not want. There is no image of a child sitting in his bedroom playing with his toys and being overrun with the smell of burning trash and the possibility of being consumed by the fire itself.

But, perhaps there should be.

All we would need would be a few people to frame our debate so that arguing against it would inherently be corrupt. We would need to break down our arguments for authentic learning and networked spaces into something that a 6 year old could understand and promote to all of her 6 year old friends. Most of all, we need a story that can be told on a button, not by simplifying it beyond all recognition but rather projecting a haunting image.

If I were starting a homegrown organization to sit around dinner tables and talk it would be called something like, Inquiring Minds for Learning Reform

If I were making buttons for that organization, here is what they would say:

“What do you want to know?” – An image of an inquiring mind would be opening up to a world of possibilities.

“Did learning happen TO you today?” – An image of an inquiring mind would be forced to sit in a seat.

“Tell me a story.” – An image of an Inquiring mind would be listening to people all around it.

“Let me Google that for you.” – An image of an inquiring mind with a smart phone, googling a current event

“Who is in your learning network?” – An image of an inquiring mind being networked to other inquiring minds that have different hats on representing all of the things that can be known through networked learning.

“Did you stop learning after Graduation?” – An image of an inquiring mind pushing away a laptop with Wikipedia up.

“Inquiring minds unite!”- An image of a locked inquiring mind with a big red circle with a line through it.

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Question 291 of 365: What is the new Eugenics?

Published on October 18, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.
"Eugenics is the self-direction of human ...
Image via Wikipedia

I once had a conversation with a man I didn’t know during which he extolled the virtues of Eugenics and the idea of a master race. Because I was 13 at the time, this line of thinking was absolutely new to me. With my rudimentary understanding of how good and bad genetic traits were passed on, I considered what this man had to say. I continued this conversation for about 45 minutes, probing him to continue his persuasive exposition. I was using a new software program called Freetel back in 1996 and everything seemed to be lining up. I had connected with this man from across the United States based upon similar interests in computers. By the time I was done with the audio and text chat,  my father was home from work. I spoke with him about the encounter and he was shocked (to say the least) about some of the claims that this man was making. He helped me to put a context to some of the ideas I was hearing. He gave me a history lesson, genetics lesson, and sociology less all rolled into one 15 minute speech about what I had gotten myself into. Still the man’s words had hit me in a place that got me questioning what I really believed about the nature of people. He got to me first and then my father had to reframe it. It wasn’t the other way around. I wasn’t already on the lookout for people who were trying to convert young children to the Aryan cause. I was just looking to talk to someone in the very early stages of VOIP.

Eugenics is one of those ideas that, at least on the surface, is perfectly plausible. If we have more and more healthy people mating with one another, better genetics and better people will result. This theory has been redressed in so many different outfits that it seems new to every generation that takes up the cause. From family planning to the creation of new religions, the idea that we can make the future better just by treating humans more like farm animals is so neat and tidy. And it is appealing for those who aren’t interested in telling the whole story. Somehow, it conveniently leaves out any human connection or the need for flaws in genetic pools to create disease resistance. Still it persists, even if under the surface in every discussion of societal class or race. And most people don’t have a father standing right next to them after they experience it for the first time to tell the rest of the story.

The newest version of this Eugenics conversation, though, is much more abrasive than the one I had with the man in 1996. The new Eugenics isn’t the engineering of human beings in test tubes or in the bedroom. It is the manipulation of what it means to be a person online. It is clear to me that the conversation about what should go online to represent us is being engineered to include only the best traits. We are convincing one another, as an entire society, that the only things worthy of our names and identities are the things that speak well of our past. We are supposed to put up successes and artifacts of our lives that show the generation of new people that don’t really exist.

We are supposed to tweet out what makes for a positive viewpoint and we are supposed to post pictures that are sanitized for alcoholic beverages. We are supposed to tell the stories that reveal a certain benevolence that is only possible online. In family blogs and on Facebook walls we are unethically editing who we are into these aspirational beings. We chastise one another for allowing too much information to leak out. We unfriend and unfollow those with unsavory bits to share or when swear words are too prevalent. We aren’t striving for truth in our conversations, we are striving for digital Eugenics. We are striving to let our perfected versions of ourselves reproduce online, having perfect little babies of ideas and projects. We let our offspring be devoid of the humanity that created them and then we stand back and wonder why they don’t hold up to scrutiny.

When a PR facade creates a document rather than a person, there isn’t truth in it. It is just an extension of that facade. When we can only “like” things and never “dislike” them, we are setting ourselves up for a level of dishonesty that can only be created in the pursuit of Nazi-like perfection.

I’m not advocating for the great underbelly of the internet to rise up and consume the good stories going on. I simply wish to question our purpose. Is our purpose to be ourselves in a new space or is it to be better than who we can ever hope to be in our current space. If it is the former, then let’s be honest about that. If it is the latter, then the man who I spoke with over FreeTel was much more honest about  his intentions than we are currently. There is something to be said for that. At least in that case, I had the option of my father talking some sense into me. If we are trying to do Digital Eugenics, no one will be able to give us a greater context because after a while we won’t know anything else.

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Question 272 of 365: What are we not paying for?

Published on September 29, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.

In thinking about budgets in tight times, it may be easiest to think about all of the things that we are paying for and then see exactly what it is that we can cut back on. It makes sense that we wouldn’t spend much time at all agonizing over what we do not pay for, but I am finding myself feeling entitled to everything that I am not paying for. I am finding myself reliant on the free things that are simply the fabric of my everyday existence. And it makes me think about just how many systems I have surrounding me that support my way of life. Even with all of my overpowering responsibilities, I know that the things that really open up possibilities are the ones that I don’t have to pay a monthly fee for. And as I consider what to cut out, I must also think about what is essential.

Things that are free that I could never live without:

  1. WordPress blogging software- This has become a part of my habit of thought and reflection. Everything that is a seed of an idea is run through this piece of free and rapidly expanding software. It sometimes makes me wonder what I used to call publishing and what I used to call brainstorming. How was it that I was able to focus my attention on a single document that sat on my hard drive?
  2. Google Documents- Sure, this may not always be free and there are other services that are like it, I am finding that there is no reason to go anywhere else for my collaborative needs. I share links to edit documents on a daily basis (having almost completely forgone inviting individuals via e-mail address at this point). When I am connected to Docs, I literally have a record of nearly every collaborative project I have undertaken in the last 4 years. It says something about what I value to be able to literally replay the revision history of my life.
  3. Libox – I have listened to more music in the last few months than I have for the past 3 years combined. The simple sharing of music with my friends is a beautiful thing. The fact that it is a better looking (and much lighter) player than iTunes makes it so much more essential. I need to hear what other people are listening to and not just the radio stations that they frequent. I want to hear the actual music that is shaping their lives because if I let it, it will shape mine too.
  4. Free Wifi – The internet is in the air and I expect the air to be free. I understand that bandwidth costs something for someone, but I can’t at this point imagine going into a public place like a library, coffee shop or school and expect to pay for access to my communication system. Just as we have free access to the public radio frequencies and tv frequencies, I am starting to believe in free access to the wifi frequencies too.
  5. The Jabber Protocol and Adium – I started using AIM in 1997, but I fell out of love with Instant Messaging until quite recently. I now feel much more connected to everyone I care about because there is a single protocol and program that allows me to stay in touch. While I like twitter and facebook for staying connected and I enjoyed Skype for a time for video calls, I am finding that much of the meaningful conversations of my daily life are happening as a series of rapid messages. Adium connects me to my gmail contacts and their Jabber server as well as the Facebook chat that seems to be a favorite of many folks who spend a lot of their networking time in there. The fact that this is all open protocols and open sourced means that I will never have to give it up, even if my network moves on like they did from AIM.
  6. Search – I don’t really care that it is Google that is running my search now. I must say that I have all but stopped categorizing or folding things away in any of the services I use. Search is so good now that it almost seems unnecessary. As long as it has taken for me to figure this out, it has taken me almost no time at all to drop services that don’t enable absolute search ease. I can’t handle milling about in a repository (or even in iTunes) trying to find what I am looking for. If it isn’t right there, I no longer see the value in looking further (with a few notable exceptions like important benefits information in legacy systems). Search algorithms I am dependent on and they are freely available to all, and hopefully always will be.
  7. Zemanta – Along with search, I have come to rely on  the power of suggestion. Zemanta recommends images, links and ideas based upon whatever I am writing in an e-mail or in a blog post. This is the killer addition to my brain which is looking constantly to connect to other things that are out there. Making these connections is now a great part of my life and whenever I have something to help me in the process, I feel the support of a network even if it is just a semantic analysis of the things I am already writing.

Things I pay for that I could live without:

  1. DirecTV service – I have really enjoyed my time using their DVR, but I really only record shows on about a dozen networks. Much of this content is now on Netflix and local stations which provide HD content free of charge.
  2. Home Phone Service – I know that many people have forgone this luxury, but the bundling of services has really kept this one in the mix for me. It makes other things cheaper and it is always nice to call someone back on a “landlane” when all else fails. Cell phones and VOIP have all but killed this one off.
  3. All of my hardware – I could give up my cell phone, my ipad, my ipod touch, my laptop, and my netbook. While none of these things have a subscription cost associated with them, none of those individual pieces of technology hold my most important information or workflows. I now have a copy of my entire workflow syncing between browsers, cloud-based folders, and housed on a series of easily copied usb sticks. I don’t have to worry about anything getting lost. So long as I have a single device that connects to the internet, I can respond to e-mail, edit documents, and generally be productive.

If I ever had to pay for the things on the first list, I would. I wouldn’t be too happy about it, but they are too important to let go fallow in my life.

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Question 267 of 365: How much are we willing to share?

Published on September 24, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.
Image representing AOL as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

My first email address that wasn’t tied to a major online provider like AOL was pacer@cyberdrive.net. It came from this local ISP in my home town. It was this cute all you could download on a 14.4 modem affair for about $25.00 a month. The reason that this ISP was surviving was that they were one of the first to offer the unlimited model, rather than the hourly rate for logging in. I thought that this was the best of all possibilities because I had been mowing the lawn for years just for the chance to log in a few more hours. This plan, however, came with one major drawback: the email address had to be shared. Everyone in the family had access. They might not have checked the address all that often, but they had access to it. Most importantly, my father had access to it.

Upon the occasion of my posting to a newsgroup with less than desirable users, I received an absolute torrent of email. Per our arrangement with Cyberdrive, my father received those emails too. After quite a long discussion about cyber safety (which didn’t really have a term at the time, so I’m pretty sure we just called it safety), he decided to shut down the account and I decided that sharing an e-mail address with my father was just about the worst idea ever.

I didn’t want him to know everything that I was up to, and I’m sure he didn’t really want to know either. We both realized that there was a level of trust and privacy that had to be built into our relationship. We had to figure out a way for the model of not sharing an account to work. I’m not sure we ever talked it through, but a few weeks after that incident (I had been grounded for a bit during that time), we both stopped checking that account and we moved on to our separate ones. It made sense to do so, but we knew that something had been lost. We used to be able to view the state of things from our family email account. I would get my updates from my newsletters and my father would get his. Sharing the email account made it easier to appreciate the things that we were both a part of. Now we didn’t have that.

I know other families that still do this. Everyone logs into one gmail account. It is something that prevents anyone going too far off the deep end of perversion or illegal activity. It focuses our attention on the family itself rather than the individual conversations. The privacy loss, though, is hard to swallow. When anyone makes a mistake or signs up for a ridiculous list-serve, we all pay the price.  We want to send out a united message from a single source, but we don’t want to be pigeonholed into a single identity or be unable to develop our own interests.

I wonder if there is a compromise that exists. I wonder if Facebook and other social networks might help us to maintain that level of inclusion without the headache of solely a family identity. They have shifted our expectation of what should be our own. They have let us connect to family members but not be swallowed by this association. Already, these services are stating the default sharing to be public rather than private. This allows me to group my family’s responses on walls and in twitter lists. I can see the communication and I can watch it grow. Somehow, this simple act of making more things public has allowed my family to share the things that they might not think to do, but keep hidden the things that are none of my business.

Social networks are just better at communicating what is yours, mine, and ours. Email just dumps everything into one pot and forces us to sort it out. This may be inciting in order to completely control what we are all getting into, but it spells disaster for the relationships we are trying to build. We need autonomy. We need trust and respect. In short, we may need Facebook.

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Question 245 of 365: What is our social media policy?

Published on September 2, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.

An institution will be known by its use of social media. They will be seen through the lens of every contributor in their ranks. They will either be well represented or incredibly absent, nothing in between. The identities of every Facebook and Twitter user will build into an army of advocates for the institution, so long as the institution doesn’t squash that reality.

Social media policies govern what can and cannot be posted, connected, and learned from the networks that drive many of our work and personal decisions and plans. And mostly, they do it rather badly. These policies tend to confuse guidance with enforcement. Here are my biggest infringements with social networking policies that have been floating around for the past few years:

  • They are overly long. There is no reason to have a 4 page social networking policy. Either people will follow the guidelines or they won’t. There is no reason to have a stipulation for blog posts that is different from Facebook updates.
  • They try to regulate privacy settings for employees. By asking people to hide certain parts of information about themselves, you are asking them to not represent themselves completely online. You are asking for less real interactions than if they had the option to reveal more.
  • They try to separate professional and personal life. While this may have been easy to do in the past, it is nearly impossible to sanction when “working hours” happen for many positions. I wake up at 3:00 am some days (because my daughter felt it was a good time to get up, mostly) and get started on answering emails and working on the things that require most attention. These kinds of policies would mean that I couldn’t tweet out about anything else but work during those times. It also means that connections that are made based upon work can never become more than those connections. Some of my best friends are a part of my twitter network as well. They aren’t one or the other. They are real people that live and work really hard. Let’s not regulate that out of them.
  • They dictate (or try to) what company ownership of ideas is. Many communications and legal departments see anything that is done on company time as being a part of the company’s assets. Their understanding is that there is very little co-ownership of reflections, annotations, or conversations about the work that is going on. In essence, they claim everything. And at least according to my understanding of copyright law, unless they have signed something to that affect (which most places, unless there are strict non-disclosure agreements) this is not the case. The one thing that claiming everything does to employees is that they decide to save their best ideas for themselves. They don’t post things that could help the company, but rather they separate out what it is that is beneficial and they take it elsewhere. This drains value from the organization and takes away a big incentive for staff to want to contribute in a collaborative way to the projects that are in front of them.
  • They impose disclaimers for all social media that do not have any basis in what social media is or can be. By putting a disclaimer on everything that says you can in no way speak for your organization is incredibly disempowering. The whole point of social media is that you are speaking for a unique perspective that others will want to listen to. By adding this disclaimer, you are essentially saying that you don’t want any of the value that others are creating to reflect back upon the employer that helped him/her to grow. These disclaimers are superfluous in a day when everyone has a profile and the profiles most certainly are not official. It is clear that when John McCain is tweeting, he is not speaking for the entirety of Arizona or for the whole senate. He is bringing his unique perspective to bear on the events of the day. This is what social media does; it gives a voice to everyone. Those voices are ones that we should celebrate and reward, not cut off at the knees in the hope of getting disavowing the disgruntled employee.

Mostly, the world of social media is so new that many places do not understand how to embrace a different paradigm of communication. The communications department can not control the message simply by putting out an reactionary policy. By assuming the worst of people, they are creating an environment of distrust and miscommunication. They are taking all of the bad things of social media out of context and convincing those with power that social media is bad for business. It isn’t. It is one of the things that will save your working life. It is engaging and invigorating because it brings all of our personality into a one space. We can be real people in social networks, and that is what we should want for our employees.

One of the best social networking policies I ever saw was this, from the blog Gruntled Employees. It is an entire policy put into a single tweet:

Our Twitter policy: Be professional, kind, discreet, authentic. Represent us well. Remember that you can’t control it once you hit “update.”

It is simple and authentic. It is exactly what we need for our organizations. Let’s do that and nothing else.

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Question 244 of 365: Why do users revolt?

Published on September 1, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.
Image representing Digg as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

Over the past week, something strange has been happening on Digg. Ever since they changed over to a new format for the website and a different submission process, an absolute torrent of users have decided that this site no longer has their best interests in mind. Whether it is the removal of the bury button (the ability to demote stories that are not relevant or interesting) or in the total site redesign, users have given more than an earful to the makers of Digg, including spamming the site with articles from competing news aggregators. They want it to go back to the way it was before, or at least to fix the glaring errors that are starring them in the face every time they use the site.

In the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t matter. A single web portal changed its platform and a few users (mostly hipster geeks) aren’t happy about it. It isn’t a tragedy or a massive privacy breach. It isn’t a power grab or a diabolical plan for torture. The website changed. That’s it. It is a blip on the timeline of the web, but it may be a symptom of a much larger problem. User revolts are becoming more common and more pronounced.

Facebook‘s privacy changes prompted congressional letters, a number of different startups to be created, and huge numbers of users to up and quit. Google‘s inclusion of Buzz into gmail without any notice prompted huge shifts in our understanding of what a company can do with a product that we have all come to rely on for our daily workflow. Even something like Microsoft‘s use of the .docx standard for all current generation word programs has been a slow burning user revolt that has many saving files in open formats or uploading them to Google Docs for fear of not being able to open them on other’s computers.

This may just be the fear of change that is the same in every generation, but I feel as though there is something different going on here. Users are revolting based upon the idea that their requirements for a service are no longer being met. This type of change is akin to an employees benefits being changed via a form letter, with no recourse whatsoever. One day, a switch gets thrown and the services we have come to expect have changed because the company responsible has other motives.

Users revolt because their trust has been compromised. They revolt over not knowing what the future holds and believing that the direction and progress is all wrong. Fear of change is warranted when the process for change is secret. Companies have every right to introduce new features and to try and advance into new markets, but their interests should still be to collaborate with users (all users) to find out what their needs are. Too many companies are advocating for fictional needs rather than focusing on the core pain that their software or service actually eases.

Facebook made up the need that people have for publishing all demographic information in a public (or easily monitized) way. Google made up the need that people have for having a social network in their e-mail (while I like this idea very much… it isn’t one that I hear a lot of people clamoring for). Microsoft made up the need that people have for proprietary document formats. All three of them did this because they saw a future opportunity based upon those fictional needs. Facebook could target better ads, Google could get more of the social graph information, and Microsoft could hold on to formatting standards. These are real opportunities, but they don’t necessarily lead to happier users. Because each of these needs are fictionalized, the cost benefit analysis that these companies are doing is severely flawed. The cost of the change is much higher for each user and the benefits are much lower for the company because the users revolt.

I understand that the vast majority of the services where users revolt are free. This may lead companies to believe that they can change anything they want to without repercussions from users. In essence, we should all just be glad to have the service at all. I would make the case that we have a social contract with Google and Facebook even if we don’t have a signature and a payment plan in place. This social contract includes the idea that major changes made to the service should be vetted. It includes working with users to establish needs rather than making them up. It also includes transparency. The process of creating something new should be an open one, and that is how revolts are stopped before they start. By making everyone a part of the new version, you will create buy-in and ownership and you may even find the elusive needs that are both beneficial to users and lucrative for the company.

Otherwise, we will continue to see more user revolts, more splintering of user groups, and more distrust of really great pieces of technology. I also like the idea of an undo button somewhere in the top left corner of everything, just in case.

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Question 237 of 365: Is the username dying?

Published on August 25, 2010, by in 365 Questions, Blog.
Hackers (film)
Image via Wikipedia

I remember Hackers, the awkward mid-90′s movie, fondly.

It represented a do-it-yourself future in which those who understood computers could game everyone else. And, for the most part it got that right. It also figured out that the hacker culture was going to drive an open source understanding of information and responsibility. We are all in this (online communities and privacy issues) collectively and no one person should wield too much power online. The part that it didn’t get right (and maybe it didn’t really attempt to) was the idea that we would all need handles to protect our identities (and to be cool). As one character put it:

 I need a handle, man. I don't have an identity until I have a handle.

And with names like Crash Override, Acid Burn, Cereal Killer, and Lord Nikon how could you argue. Their handles, or usernames, seem to represent a time in which we couldn’t share things out in the open. It represented a time when social networks didn’t exist and all forums and chat were done in pseudo underground spaces that only those with access and interest could take part in. Grandmas (mostly) weren’t online posting pictures and blogging hadn’t happened yet. Usernames were the ways that we separated ourselves from “real life” because we could choose them. We didn’t have to worry about being ourselves because this was a world that rarely crossed over into people who were honest with one another about their true identities. The two spaces were separate and we liked them that way.

At the time of watching Hackers in 1995, my handle was The Atomic Angel. Seriously. I was convinced that it made me cooler and more respectable than just using my name to identify me. I used it on Bulletin Boards and in AOL chat. In short, I was awesome. And now, I look at what I use and it pales in comparison. I am Ben Wilkoff pretty much everywhere. Online and offline, I don’t have a single space that I am not completely me.

That is incredibly satisfying in some ways, but also a little terrifying. I don’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not and I don’t have to splinter my personality for every given account or service I join. But, I can’t get away from my own identity either. There is no hiding from my history and my mistakes. I have to take responsibility for all of it. I also don’t have the choice to leave and remove myself. Google remembers me.

The username is dying because of Facebook. We are who we are on there. We can pretend, but it is hard to pretend an entire life. It is hard to fake pictures and videos and a network of people that you communicate with. We always end up just reverting to ourselves. We are people, not handles, not usernames.

We aren’t there completely, but with things like Google Profiles, Facebook Connect/Platform and Open ID, we will have a single login to rule them all. We will be able to share our network and our connections with every new application built upon the single authentication device. And when that happens, we will no longer be setting up new identities for each new thing that comes along. It will all be tied to a single name, our own. It isn’t the one we chose, but it is the one that we must use in this new space where we can’t hide behind a fictional character or absurd nome de plume.

Hackers didn’t get it quite right. I have an identity without a handle. Sometimes, though, I’m not sure I want the identity I’ve got.

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