Posted by Joseph Peart 3 Dec '11

Hidden among the stats of a new analysis of a new analysis of how journalists use Twitter was a change that surprised me.  Launched in July 2006, Twitter was reported to have 200 million users by 2011.  But Fortune magazine recently noted research showing only about half those with Twitter addresses were using them.  I was therefore surprised to read the Pew Research Centre’s data, which showed online Americans using Twitter actually increased from 8% to 13% between November 2010 and June 2011.

  However, the real purpose of the Pew researchers http://www.journalism.org/node/27311 was to examine the way in which mass media journalism is merging with what we still call social media.  They looked at 13 news outlets, from major newspapers to websites and cable channels.  Leading the way on Twitter in the week measured (Feb 14-20, 2011) were Washington Post (664 tweets) and Huffington Post (415 tweets).

Nearly all of the outlets used tweets to drive visitors to their home sites; three big newspapers devoted 98% of their Twitter stream to this purpose.  And the news agenda promoted on Twitter closely resembled that on their legacy platforms.  It was the news agenda that interested my colleague, AUT PhD student, Merja Myllylahti , who is looking at how ownership might influence the news agenda www.aut.ac/jmadreport_.  Perhaps most intriguing was that Fox News was the only news organisation in the sample that used Twitter to actively encourage interactions.

A colleague, Helen Sissons, who is studying this behaviour tells of kiwi radio sports journalists who tweet each other during events, partly for their own amusement and what are currently small numbers of followers.  She also discusses media outlets imposing protocols to ensure that their journalists don’t report on Twitter what should be on the website or broadcast first.

All this implies that Twitter has currency beyond its social use in ways that maybe eluding Facebook and Google.

Yes, the big two in social media are still slugging it out after several false starts by Google, and despite some arrogant blunders by Facebook.

It seems that, after the embarrassments of Orkut, Wave and Buzz, Google has finally come up with a viable social network in the form of Google+.

It is such a well-designed offering that Facebook went into lockdown to try to find a counter punch, partly because Google+ had a strong range of better features.  Some similar options soon appeared in Facebook.

In social media, Facebook’s 800 million members dwarfs the 10 million on Google+, but the Google parent has a 2011 revenue of $US38 billion, compared with Facebook’s $US4.3 billion.  That means Google can invest a lot into this fight as it sees advertising migrating from search engine activity into social media.

Mind you, we humans can be digitally social without Facebook.  The Independent newspaper has been looking at text flirts and notes that more people are trying to be sexy by cellphone: But not all are successful.  One expert regarded text messages as too bland for romance, while another suggested texts are ideal for manipulation, as they are seen as intimate communication.  That also means texts can create disproportionate anxiety, as well as misunderstandings.

Most of us find that even emails can cause accidental meaning and misunderstanding, because they are so sparse in both content and context.  It seems to me that texts are even less suitable for the nuances of relationship building.  What do you think?

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Posted by Joseph Peart 26 Oct 2011

Recently the sense of smell has been defined as one of the strongest emotive senses as it is so evocative of flower gardens, hayfields and summer beaches.  As yet it cannot be sent over the internet, so we settle for sound, images and text.  Among these, music often arouses memories and emotions in a grand and inspiring way: “Do you hear the people sing … [they] … will not be slaves again”, from Les Miserables is one such musical setting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWzmYhiu-zs .

It fits Victor Hugo’s story, and it also fits the determination of groups, such as the Internet Governance Forum.  It reminds us of the political vulnerability of the wired world, discussed recently at the UN-organised conference of 2000 Forum delegates from 100 countries who met in Nairobi. 

This latest round of talks highlighted the differences between governments want to have more say on the running of the internet and the OECD countries which support of the ‘multi-stakeholder’ model.  This model of internet governance, is based on an eclectic mix of participants (operators, academics and ‘netheads’, as well as government representatives) all of whom have an equal say in decisions that are reached by ‘rough consensus’.

The ‘multi-stakeholder’ model is a concept which gives one both a visceral and spiritual surge of pride in humanity, not unlike the emotion of Les Miserables.  But it also brings an intellectual satisfaction that common sense and logic can survive political ideology and expediency.

However the model is under threat, according to the Economist (Oct 1 2011), because it the same approach which is used by the manager of internet domain names – the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).   ICANN is also a target for governments who want a greater say over generic top level names, such as .com.  They point unhappily to new domain names like .xxx and .jesus as justification for a strengthening of their existing right to object.

Whether it will be governments or the might foursome – Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft – who rule the web remains to be seen, but we can all continue to support the open-access and random creativity of social media while others strive to monetise web content.

In that regard, the Kindle is consolidating Amazon’s rout of top bookstores and is being reinforced by the Kindle Fire, which has Wi-Fi connectivity and gives access to e-books, films and music.  Like Apple’s iPad, the Kindle Fire allows users to store content in the cloud, but it costs $US199 compared with the cheapest iPad, at $US499.  (Shoppers in America and Auckland tell me the cheaper Kindle e-reader is priced at $US79 or $NZ99.) 

Amazon’s warrior strength is even more apparent in a survey by Wiliam Blair (an investment bank) which notes that Amazon’s prices for hundreds of general items range down to one-third cheaper than retail stores and other websites. 

What’s more you may not need Wi-Fi to reach Amazon in urban areas if current development of visible light communication (VLC) progresses beyond the laboratory.

According to New Scientist (July 23 2011) researchers at Heinrich Hertz Institute in Berlin have reached data rates of 500 megabytes per second, by using white-light LED to send binary pulses via line-of-sight (another of our primary senses). While many are cautious about the possibilities for VLC to provide an alternative to fibre, it is seen by others as a way to solve the bandwidth crisis.  Also, because it does not need radio-frequency signals, it can be used safely in aircraft, hospitals and even under water, where Wi-Fi cannot go.

If wireless and visible light provide alternative transmission channels to cable, they may also allow activists to bypass roadblocks set up by governments to suppress dissidents.  Many of the governments who want more say in the governance of the internet are those same governments who would like to disconnect their own citizens when they see the internet being used to organise revolution.

When Egypt’s former regime shut down their country’s main internet services, the P2P Foundation (a group which monitors how data is shared online) began work on a project called ‘Chokepoint’.  It’s an app which allows users to identify the exact location of a network outage on a map, enabling people to reroute through open paths, or use services located abroad, such as Telecomix, which converts messages sent to fax machines into emails.

It brings to mind another musical cue, this time from ‘Evita’, in which the following phrase has an ironic twist.  But I can’t help thinking when it comes to the internet’s governance and its infrastructure for social media: “The voice of the people cannot be denied” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbPVMsrjeTc .

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                                                                                                               Posted by Joseph Peart

There’s an interesting global dimension to the war over internet territory, which is now focusing on social media.
Diverse sources comment frequently on the extent to which mobile technology socialises our experience shopping and travelling.  And one of the fastest changing experiences will be that of regular travellers carrying their ubiquitous smart phones. 

Unlike occasional tourists, frequent flyers will be networked via NFC (near field communication) and RFID (radio-frequency identification) from the moment they enter the terminal (if not before). 

According to the journal Business Traveller (July/August 2011), their phone will say things like: “Your gate is five minutes away.  Walk straight ahead and turn to your right”.  After security, it will add: “You are cleared to board” and will act as your boarding pass as you enter the plane.

Your mobile receiver will also give you foreign language translation at the swipe of a screen.  The temptation is to place ourselves in greater dependency on one of those social media pretenders who would be our king.

For example social media platforms, Facebook, MSN, Twitter and Yahoo will give you a free translation service through Ortsbo (www.ortsbo.com) from a person who speaks the language.  Outlook has an add-on which translates emails, while Penpower Technology’s Worldictionary is available from iTunes for your iPhone.  There’s also Google Translate and Android apps free from Holfeld.  Possibly the biggest such service is Amazon’s Travel Toolkit (US$11.95), available for Kindle e-readers.

All this is but another skirmish in the giant social media war between the combined forces of Facebook, Microsoft, Nokia and Skype, versus Google, in alliance with Apple and Twitter.

An Australian Associated Press-sourced article on the NZ Herald website (Thursday September 8, 2011) quotes Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as saying during his announcement of the Skype deal that Facebook had passed 750 million users.  That puts Facebook in a seemingly unassailable position on the battleground of the social internet.  But search engine dominator, Google, is massing its cavalry around its high ground position in the form of Google plus (Google+).

This is not like an old-fashioned war on a clear ground, well away from the towns and villages: civilians are involved, and there could be what modern generals call ‘collateral damage’.  For instance, after a recent uprising by Facebook users, we were given a new suite of privacy settings, not before some casualties.   But we are now adding more and more pictures, videos and private information about our daily lives to Facbook, while Google tells us that if they supply more information, we will get better search results.

Like most wars, the social media conflict is about sovereignty, and the protagonists depend on our social media profiles as their foot soldiers. That means our choices will get more hazardous as mobile technology seeks to rule us by making our lives easier.

September 2011

 
Hack attack 08/25/2011
 
 
Hack attack 08/25/2011
 
                                                                                                     Posted by Joseph Peart

“On Sunday evening Salander opened Asphyxis 1.3 and went into the mirrored hard drive of MikBlom/laptop.  He was not online...”

Fans of Stieg Larsson will recognise the characters and possibly the storyline from The girl who played with fire.

Instead of sending emails, the character Lisbeth Salander simply hacked into her friend's computer, so she could leave messages without them passing through an ISP.

Such benign hacking can occur but is very unlikely; much more likely is a malicious intrusion.  According to Time magazine, roughly a billion US dollars were stolen last year, using the Zeus malware program.

One of the scariest news items lately has been about a botnet, called Stegobot, which was created by computer scientists at the University of Illinois to show how easy it might be for criminals to enter your computer through a swapped Facebook picture.  The bot makes use of steganography, which allows it to hide data in picture files, so it can enter your computer undetected.  It can then mine your passwords and account numbers, or jump into a Facebook friend’s computer within the picture (New Scientist, 23 July,2011).

Closer to home, AUT University issued a warning to staff about spear ‘phishing’ – a hacker entering an internal network via a single member who has lots of contacts within that network – exposing a weakness in internal social applications.

That’s what is fascinating about the direction that hacking seems to have taken more recently.  It’s going social.  Phishing used to be that query from a site that pretends to be your secure supplier (retail or bank) which asks for your account number and password.  Spear phishing looks more innocent, as it simply wants to access your email database.  However, once inside, the hacker can wreak wide damage because of the social nature of that database.

Social media applications and social behaviour on the web have increased the likelihood of a viral spread of a malicious code, in the same way as a flu epidemic.  It’s more pervasive as social media becomes more pervasive.

The most prominent attack so far was the ‘robin hood’ break into Sony’s Playstation Network.  It was thought to be the work of ‘hacktivists’ called ‘Anonymous’, but they denied responsibility for the shut-down that cost Sony $US173 million.

Once Sony was operational again, the more benign hacker group LulzSec found holes in its web security using SQL (structured language query) injection and tweeted triumphantly: ‘We accessed EVERYTHING…’ They weren’t there to vandalise so much as to tease Sony about its poorly designed query language interpreters. 

SQL also has a social aspect in that it manipulates a database, including users and passwords, without having administrative access. 

This emergence of hacker groups into the social media community is now amplified by a network of human participants – not simply a captive network of computers as in a botnet.  Time quotes Dave Jennings, chairman of web security company Iron-Key, ‘They have a social element to bring people together to create more sophisticated attacks than we’ve ever seen.’

This points to the wisdom of using all your privacy settings on Facebook as well as your usual caution of ignoring all messages that ask you for your account numbers or passwords.   As for the password you choose…  Well, Time magazine publishes the familiar tips to make your own password harder to hack, including: Use a mix of upper and lower case; use numbers and special characters, and the longer the password the better. 

It’s all worth thinking about.

 
 
 
 
The latest deal by Facebook, incorporating Skype into its services got me thinking about how many times Facebook can reinvent itself to continue its pre-eminence among social media.  But right now Facebook’s greatest death threat appears to come from coupons.

It seems to me that the future of social media is repeatedly being obscured by the dogged pursuit of profit – not that I’m opposed to entrepreneurship. 

Virtually every social space (sports field or concert hall) has been colonised to some extent by promotional activity (did you see the film festival’s “Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” by Morgan Spurlock?  It dramatises the ambient marketing techniques which ensure product and service propositions appear in places where we least expect them.

But any threat to Facebook can be tested against what has already happened to Twitter.  Stats from Fortune magazine note that:
·        47% of those who have Twitter accounts are no longer active on the service.
·        The time spent per month has dropped from 14min 6sec in 2010 to 12min 37sec in 2011.  (Fortune magazine, May 2, 2011 (pp42 – 45).  “Trouble @ Twitter” by Daniel Roberts)

I estimate that if usage continues to drop at 1½ minutes a year; by 2020, there will be no Twitter users.

Whereas coupon mania has spread just about everywhere else, even onto Facebook.  Could it eventually swamp Facebook?

According to moneymakerdiscussion.com, you can design your own coupons for your Facebook fan page to offer special deals. You can even schedule your coupon promotions ahead of time so the offer on your fan page will update automatically.  Furthermore, PCWorld reported in March 2011, that Facebook was expanding its own ‘Deals local business discount’ service to compete directly with so-called ‘social buying’ coupon sites such as Groupon and Living Social.

The social coupon business model has really taken off.  As soon as other companies recognized that in Groupon’s business the money is delivered up front, they couldn’t wait.  Now we have Couponmeup, GrabOne, Yazoom,  Spreets, Treatme, Vouchermate, Onedaydeals, Ezycoupons, Yellow Vouchers etc.

It’s not only social media that are joining the feeding frenzy.  GrabOne advertises in its 50% shareholder NZ Herald to support its online promotions.  MediaWorks runs its own coupon venture, Cudo, in partnership with ACP Media, Microsoft's MSN and Cudo Australia.  CouponMeUp.com offers deals through its website or via its iPhone app.

NBR (April 26, 2011) reported a Nielsen Online Retail survey had shown two thirds of online New Zealanders received email alerts from daily deal websites, and a further 40 percent said they had made a purchase from such sites in the previous three months.  Kiwis are not alone.  My quick internet survey of the latest entrants world-wide came up with names and places as diverse as: allaroundsportsllc.com, Compras Peru, dngvitamins.com, efowl.com, herb-shack.com,  HockeyGiant.com, JapanVideoGames.com, Monsterjamsuperstore.com, N1wireless.com, ncesoft.com, passportvisasexpress.com, Puffitup.com, Statebicycle.com, and myfirstresponders.com.

This whole schmozzle points to a grim possibility that nobody in their right mind would suggest – the demise of Facebook.  But, if Facebook allows itself to be taken over by commercial forces, such as coupon offers, the only real social medium to survive past 2020, might be the one I predicted would be the first to disappear – Twitter.  Its failure to commercialise may save it.

Posted by Joseph Peart
 
 
Posted by Joseph Peart

"U R dumpt"

Remember when we first heard that this was one of the most common messages among teenage texts? 

Analysts, commentators and futurists now call this process the ‘techno brush-off’.  It’s so much easier to carry out unpleasant personal tasks remotely, as result of the temporal and spatial separation that cyberspace allows.  At the same time, connectivity enables us to increase our social circle and socialise more easily and frequently.  There are already 500 million mobile broadband users worldwide.

One of the constant questions posed by behaviourists, net-watchers and pollsters is whether we will direct technology, or whether we will let ourselves be directed by it and its overlords.  For instance, I’m sure you also read about CDA (cellphone deprivation anxiety) long before the latest Telegraph story was republished in the Herald (April 21, 2011). A sample of 1000 teenagers confirmed their addiction by reporting symptoms from anxious to panicked and paranoid after 24 hours without their mobiles.  Some couldn’t even last the length of the experiment.

Douglas Rushkoff has themed a new book around this question and titled it Program or be programmed. (2010). OR Books http://www.orbooks.com/our-books/program/

“Choose the former,” writes Rushkoff according to his publisher, “and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.”

That is, of course, overstating it, because there are laggards, resisters and luddites who can remain beyond the influence of digital socialising software.  And there are many others who understand social media well enough to manage their relationships on the net without Unix or Linux.

What Rushkoff appears to be warning us is that gaming sites such as Disney’s Club Penguin mean that children are developing social skills within virtual worlds along with ‘real’ relationships with flesh and blood friends and relations.  Perhaps they won’t be able to tell the difference.  But it doesn’t have to be one thing or the other. The Futurist (March-April, 2011) reminds us that the Internet can also strengthen traditional family ties.  In Norway, for example, ‘one study showed that college students were in touch with their parents on average 10 times a week’, via Skype, texting, Facebook etc.

The question that remains is how well people will be able to continue to distinguish between the virtual and the real.

In the same article Arnold Brown tells us that advances in brain research cast light on the nature of virtual relationships.  Brown notes that neural devices allow people to control wheelchairs and televisions and he accepts the Hollywood extension of that science that avatars may soon be controlled that way.

On the next page, an article by William Sims Bainbridge describes Elf huntress, Caylee Dak, who will bless any member of the Alliance in World of Warcraft who brings her a poem beginning: ‘Do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there…’

Bainbridge tells us that Caylee Dak is an active memorial for a player named Dak Krause, who died of leukaemia in 2007, dressed exactly as she was when she served as his avatar in this virtual world.  Caylee still exists, giving Krause a kind of life after death.

If that sounds weird, Bainbridge goes on to tell us that he himself had 22 World of Warcraft characters, and invested more that 700 hours of his own life in each of two of them.

He notes that their degree of artificial intelligence is low by not negligible, because they can learn which of their enemies are doing them the most damage and respond accordingly.  He draws a parallel with our everyday use of ‘information technology agents’ such as the answering machine, which speaks with your voice and records a message left by the caller.  There are also those ghastly voice recognition systems that try to direct your call according to key words that you speak when it invites you to do so.

In his penultimate paragraph, Bainbridge suggests that avatars, agents and other technology-based expressions of ourselves increase the possibility that we can all have some kind of life after death.  He quotes Buckminster Fuller’s observation, ‘I seem to be a verb.’

Based on his 22 avatars and the continuing existence of Caylee Dak, Bainbridge offers us his own conclusion: ‘I am a plural verb, in future tense.’

 
 
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