Ariel Waldman

photo by Sami Niemelä

In addition to SWAT Summit, I had the pleasure of attending one of PSFK’s conferences in San Francisco this past week. PSFK is known for trend insights and bringing together unique and intelligent people from a variety of disciplines.

After a brief introduction by PSFK founder Piers Fawkes, Ed Cotton (BSSP) talked about why you should care about trends. Ed stated that trends are just stuff, from guerilla gardeners to cupcakes. Super-saturated society is not a new concept and inspiration for trends can come from anywhere, whether it be an RSS feed or a flower. The presentation talked about other “not new” concepts like how consumers own a brand and not the brand itself. This old concept got me thinking about the web 2.0 landscape and how social networks quite possibly are a smidge behind brands in learning this lesson. Many social networks/services/apps are still struggling with the idea that the community owns the service and not the service itself (a statement for a separate post that I intend to write more at length about).

Next on the agenda was San Francisco Snapshot with Colin Nagy (Attention), Amit Gupta (Photojojo), Jeremy Townsend (Ghetto Gourmet), Kevin Allison (Financial Times) and Liz Dunn (Funny Or Die). After living in San Francisco for almost a year now and loving it, this was a great session for me to sit in on. San Francisco is fairly unique - despite being geographically smaller, it tends to hold its own internationally. The panel discussed how the time shift of the Pacific Time Zone from the rest of the world (e.g. we wake up later and are the last ones to go to sleep in the U.S.) allows for innovation. Someone in the audience asked about how SF residents come off as very smug about everything and I really enjoyed Liz Dunn’s answer. Liz smiled and said (I’m quoting from memory), “well, it’s like LA has the celebrities and New York has the financial power, and we (SF) are like the nerds saying “well, I didn’t want to hang out with them anyway!”. Our celebrities in SF are like Steve Jobs, a nerd, and I think that says a lot about who we are”.

The rest of the conference featured more brilliant minds and inspiring talks. Andrew Hoppin (NASA) and Ezra Cooperstein (Current TV) discussed how they engage and collaborate with individuals and communities from around the world. Gareth Kay (Modernista), Eric Corey Freed (Organic Architect), Frank Striefler (Media Arts Lab) and Josh Morenstein (fuseproject) gave examples of how to make inspiration matter. One of the most notable examples was an architect asking about the menstrual behaviors of a client - the client confessed that she wanted a wall that was three feet in front of the toilet because when she experienced cramps growing up, she would put her feet on the wall in front of her. By taking the time to learn such intimate details about the client, the architect was able to design a house that truly worked on a custom level.

Listening to so many positive examples and people was inspiring and comforting to know that many are dedicated to making positive changes across the world on a one-by-one basis.

The first ever SWAT Summit kicked off this last week in San Francisco. The aim of the conference was to help advertisers effectively enter and work with social networks.

Due to unfortunate scheduling, I was only able to make it for the last half of the one-day event (earlier in the day I was attending PSFK’s conference). My friend and colleague, Steve Hall of Adrants, had the honor of speaking at two sessions, one of which was The Science of Measuring Campaign Success (User Metrics and Engagement). The session included Ian Swanson (Sometrics), Kim Kochaver (Federated Media), Troy Young (VideoEgg), and Anna Banks (McCann Worldgroup). Steve grilled everyone on if the case studies they were presenting actually worked at the end of the day, and it was obvious that some of the panelists were agitated by this question.

The panelists discussed how demographic targeting/analyzing tools in Facebook were making it easier for clients and ad agencies to measure success in social media. I couldn’t help but raise my hand and ask if this was actually considered progress. By these standards, it seems like advertising is making little to no progress by taking the same solution (demographics, impressions, etc.) and trying to force-fit it into a new problem (social media). I’ve been ranting for a while that demographics are dead. It seems like advertisers are taking the easy way out by using traditional metrics and refusing to spend effort towards educating clients about what is relevant in social media. Additionally, I never once heard the panel mention the idea of building custom metrics based on social media analysis and relevance to the individual project.

I think it’s important for conferences like SWAT Summit to talk about these issues, but I wish there was more representation from the social media side (for the half of the day I was there, it seemed very advertiser-heavy).

Day 2 of Supernova 2008 kicked off this week with a variety of panels to choose from. While many of the Web 2.0-ers were getting settled in the Open Flow Track, MC-ed by Tantek Çelik, , I joined the alternative crowd for the Privacy and Security in the Network Age panel.

The session started with the overarching ideas around privacy. Online, everything we do creates data and/or a transaction. A lot of privacy concerns are no longer about who you are, but what you do. Typical “duh” factors exist such as technology is always moving faster than laws. Even when laws are made, they risk being ineffective, as many have seen in the case of the CAN-SPAM Act, or lacking true protection, as with the company-not-user-data-protection under Sarbanes-Oxley. Bruce Schneier, of BT Counterpane, brought up various points about how he views the reality of privacy. In the “security vs. privacy” argument (e.g. you have to give up your privacy to gain security) Schneier stated that you should call bullshit on that false dichotomy, giving examples such as burglar alarms, and that the reality is about “liberty vs. control”.

Fran Maier, of TrustE, went on to elaborate that a lot of the current architecture for privacy online is a question of “choice or consent”. Examples like Facebook were given as case studies of more granular privacy controls. I have recently made similar remarks about FireEagle’s consideration of location privacy. Focusing on overall online privacy (not just focused on social networking), the panelists agreed that intrusion issues of spam and phishing were not about privacy, but rather about control. With issues of control, entrepreneurs can often take advantage by providing anti-spam/virus products. This made me question why, with the open APIs on social networks, no one has built a similar solution for blocking spammers/trolls/stalkers from friending you? It has been discussed before with all the chatter around data portability and XFN to include the ability to port your “block list” from network to network as well, but we’ve yet to see this come to fruition.

More importantly, the panel called for a system of accountability for privacy and security. It was stated that security includes how you live everyday (e.g. living in fear). Public shaming of companies used to work as one of the only ways to get them to increase their lack of security measures, but with data breeches being reported more often now, the press barely makes a mention of it anymore. While that is certainly a negative, the positive effect has been that it’s now a lot easier to resolve identity theft. Since identity theft is so common, companies know how to deal with it. On average, a victim of new account fraud loses only about $40 and 10 hours to clean it all up. Again, I have to wonder if the Web 2.0 companies will ever reach a time where dealing with identity theft, stalking, harassment, abuse, etc. will become so common that they (like credit card companies today) will know how to deal with it without putting their victim consumers through more trouble? I raised this question to the panel, who seemed pessimistic about that prospect. Unlike credit card companies, social networks have little if any financial incentive to provide security, and as such, it will most likely always take a second priority.

In the end, Schneier said that society may not be ready to handle privacy - similar to pollution, it may take a good 20 years or so for the masses to truly wrap their heads around it and do something.

Supernova 2008 held day 1 of the three-day conference yesterday in San Francisco’s Mission Bay Conference Center. The opening session tackled “defining the challenges”, which was admittedly a fairly vague title. Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, started off the session taking about the characteristics of organizing groups online and offline. Shirky pointed to prospering examples of organizing groups online such as the Meetup Alliance.

The presentation pointed out a number of case studies to gain insights from. From a flashmob being arrested in Belarus for organizing a collective “everyone eat ice cream at the same time” event to Xerox’s lack of source code in 1980, characteristic contrasts were made between the ease of online versus offline. It was explained that density and continuity in niche groups used to exist due to inconvenience, but those same aspects need to now exist by design online in order to be able to network and organize effectively.

Questions from the audience asked for advice on “community management” (or, lack of a better English phrase, as Kevin Marks stated). Shirky said that a self-policing communities often take care of the problems that arise. Later, Shirky clarified, to my concern of the possibilities for a community run by mob rule, that this mostly works and works when the community knows they can “call a cop at key moments”.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Google I/O, a two day developer gathering in San Francisco. The first session I sat in on was OpenSocial: A Standard for the Social Web with Patrick Chanezon, Kevin Marks, and Chris Schalk from Google. The session aimed to answer “what does social mean?” and “how do we socialize objects online without having to create yet another social network?”.

While APIs provide data for friends, profiles, and activities in social networks, different APIs make it difficult for developers. This is where OpenSocial comes in. Based on HTML+Javascript+REST+OAuth, OpenSocial was promoted in the session as an easier way to develop applications for a variety of participating social networks at once. With upwards of 275 million user distribution, OpenSocial can definitely be seen as an API that opens the flood gates.

While OpenSocial is great for developers, what do users get out of it? Chanezon, Marks, and Schalk explained that the users are able to then use more applications. More applications aren’t necessarily a good thing, however, like in the case of Facebook where many users are experiencing the fatigue of using applications that lack relevance.

Marks discussed how containers (e.g. social networks) don’t choose users - they simply grow through homophily and affinity, sometimes bringing unexpected user bases. Because of this, OpenSocial provides a sense that specialization is no longer required. Though the lack of specializing may benefit the developers, I think it may hurt the users in the long-run. A lack of application specialization based on each individual network often overlooks the intricacies and quirks that resonate with the individual userbase, thus creating a less-than-ideal user experience and a lack of unique value propositions. OpenSocial may represent progress for open standards, but not if it means an outbreak of “Zombies vs. Vampires” starts following you from network to network.

(artwork by Cindy Li)

The first ever CupcakeCamp (inspired by BarCamp and the constant cupcake gatherings in New York) is coming to San Francisco this Sunday! CupcakeCamp was created by Cindy Li, Lynn, Marianne Masculino and myself with support from the cupcake-loving community.

To RSVP to CupcakeCamp, go here. We also have a wiki here.

Cupcakes Take The Cake recently interviewed me about CupcakeCamp and my personal cupcake views.

Can’t wait!