HighContrast » social media

Wikipedia lessons

Simeon Simeonov — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:49:45 +0000

A comment on my recent post about social commerce pointed to the Wikipedia article on social commerce, which was started in September of 2007, according to the history. Which is funny because I started the first Wikipedia page on social commerce in December of the previous year but, despite the help of multiple friends interested in the space, we couldn’t prevent the Wikipedia police from taking the page down. The reason for the takedown was that they wanted citations and not just of blogs and links to startups that were in the space.

Wikipedia is nearly infinitely more flexible and up-to-date than its precedessors–the multi-volume encyclopedias. Yet, still, here is just one example of how it refused to accept new knowledge because it was stuck on looking for validation from the very same backward world of paper.

Tagged: diffusion of knowledge, Social Commerce, social media, Wikipedia

The pressure of money

Simeon Simeonov — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:17:10 +0000

In some markets, the presence of even a few players willing to do shady business can have a profound effect on the ecosystem. Advertising, particularly the hard ROI kind, is one of these markets.

Here’s what ad networks struggle with—to either run what ads make the most money or else be forced out by other ad networks willing to be shadier than them.

via How To Spam Facebook Like A Pro: An Insider’s Confession.

Tagged: Advertising, social media, social networks

Do social networks care about your privacy?

Simeon Simeonov — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:57:41 +0000

Following my post yesterday on Twitter having to think carefully about privacy, a friend pointed me to a study that shows how social networks leak deep personal information, allowing third parties to combine what you do with who you are. Read the story here.

By itself, this may be absolutely OK depending on how much of this data is collected and how it’s used by third parties. However, most of the entities (targeting companies, ad networks, etc.) operate in a rather opaque manner for most consumers. First, you often don’t even know who those third parties are because they have no visible presence on the websites you visit yet your browser makes HTTP requests to them and they typically set multiple cookies on your machine. Many of them don’t even have a web site for a consumer to visit, for example, to figure out which business sits behind the URL and read their privacy policy.

A good (random) example is ad.yieldmanager.com, requests to which are typically hidden in the HTTP redirect chain. You need a tool like Live HTTP headers for Firefox to see them. If you make a browser request to ad.yieldmanager.com or yieldmanager.com you get nothing. The WhoIs record shows that Yahoo owns the domain. If you go to www.yieldmanager.com you’ll be redirected to the HTTPS version of the page https://www.yieldmanager.com which Firefox will refuse to display because it has an invalid security certificate. You’ll have to go through several dialog screens in Firefox to make a security exception and see the site. It will show a login screen for RightMedia (an advertising exchange bought by Yahoo) but no information for consumers. If you hit the home page of RightMedia, you’ll see a tiny link to “privacy” on the bottom which takes you to the privacy policy of the corporate site. At the end of the third paragraph, there is a link to the privacy policy on ad.yieldmanager.com. If you click on that, you’ll finally get to find out what RightMedia collects from you and what they do with it. Well, sort of.

The privacy policy says “Non-personally identifiable information is automatically sent to the Yield Manager technology by a user’s web browser. This information includes the date and time of the ad request, the user’s Internet Protocol Address, browser type, and the web page that the user is visiting.” How can they be sure that the web page I’m visiting doesn’t have personally-identifiable information? Does my Facebook URL personally identify me? Do my LinkedIn, blog, FriendFeed, Twitter URLs personally identify me? You bet they do. I have no idea whether RightMedia operates on those sites but if they do and if they can see links that can be tied to my account I’d certainly argue that their privacy policy is misleading.

Oh, one more thing. Do you know what’s the title of the privacy policy? “CONFIDENTIAL” Huh? Somebody better fix that.

<head>
<title>CONFIDENTIALtitle>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://my.yieldmanager.com/styles/css.php" type="text/css">
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://my.yieldmanager.com/images/default_icon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">if (top.location != location) { // if in frame
	top.location.href = document.location.href; // break out!
}
script>
head>

Do you think most consumers care about their information being potentially misused? I haven’t seen the studies but I hope lots do. How many of them do you think will be able to find out that yieldmanager.com/RightMedia exist and get around to finding the privacy policy and understanding it? Right.

In a world where it’s hard to even know who these third parties are let alone what one of the them says they are going to do with your information, how can anyone one be certain whether they’ll actually do what they said they would? Is it too much to ask that consumers have an easy way to (a) find out who collects data as they browse the Web and (b) have the privacy policy of those entities at most one or two clicks away?

Tagged: Advertising, Digital Media, Facebook, OBA, online behavioral advertising, personally identifiable information, PII, privacy, RightMedia, Social Advertising, social media, social networking, social networks, Twitter, Yahoo, YieldManager

Get in on Brizzly

Simeon Simeonov — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 02:22:32 +0000

Now is the time to get in on the new thing from Thing Labs (makers of Plinky). It’s called Brizzly and it’s a new, cool and very simple way to experience the social Web. See a screenshot + demo.

Tagged: Brizzly, Plinky, social media, social Web, startups, Thing Labs, Web 2.0

A look inside Twitter

Simeon Simeonov — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:03:24 +0000

Interesting report by folks that mined the Twitter stream.

The section on publishing tools is particularly interesting. Less than half of all tweets are made through Twitter’s web interface and I bet this includes some posts made through the API. Apprently, users much prefer to use desktop or mobile applications to post to Twitter.

Strategically, Twitter will be stronger with a Web front end that people actually want to see. Twitter’s greatest strength is its greatest weakness. The most-recent-first, single column layout is very simple and easy to consume. It’s perfect for beginners. The more people you follow and the more you search, though, the more the default Twitter interface’s simplicity starts failing. For example, I follow less than 50 people but some of them tweet many times per day (a few are businesses). It is very easy to lose tweets I’d have otherwise found worth reading and I often find myself wishing for more and better organization of tweets. That’s especially true when consuming Twitter through a mobile device as I usually do–catching up with what’s happening in-between other parts of my life.

A couple of questions I’d love answers to from Sysomos or anyone else who has the data:

What percentage of the 45.7% of tweets contributed through “the Web channel” came through the API w/o an identified client?
What’s the distribution of consumption tools (since reading is much bigger than writing)? (An interesting su-question is how does one measure consumption…)

Tagged: research report, social media, Sysomos, Twitter, Twitter analytics

The beauty of asymmetric relationships

Simeon Simeonov — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 01:04:41 +0000

Thoughful post on the difference between symmetric (Facebook) vs. asymmetric (Twitter) relationships, courtesy of Wes @ Plinky. Advantage to Twitter for enabling attention inequality (receiving more attention than you give). Bottom line for me is that edges in the social graph should have (dynamic) meta-data as opposed to being hard-coded to “friendships” or “following” or whatever. Of course, this will be hidden from users in simple abstractions such as connecting/friending/following.

Tagged: social media

Measuring Conversational Media

Simeon Simeonov — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 15:30:08 +0000

Many panels at the conferences I go to end up being drab affairs with softball questions, way too much agreement and way too little insight. Which why I was pleasantly surprised by the Measuring Conversational Media panel at the conversational marketing summit yesterday. The panelists were:

James Lamberti, SVP, Search & Technology, comScore
Steve Rubel, SVP & Director of Insights, Edelman Digital
Don Springer, President & CEO, Collective Intellect

Debra Aho Williamson from eMarketer, who was the moderator, didn’t have to ask too many hard questions as the panelists were more than happy to disagree with each other. There were three key issues:

The difference between measurement and insight
Approaches to measurement
The role of standards

“Measurement doesn’t necessarily lead to insight” was a point Steve Rubel made a few times. He was implying that much of the new-fangled data collection and measurement focused on social & conversational media brought little value and insight to brand marketers. That may be true in general but in fast-changing environments it is rather difficult to say a priori what data one must collect and what analysis one must perform to achieve insight. Insight tends to be serendipitous and in my experience I’ve found that serendipity tends to correlate well with data availability. It’s hard to see what you can’t look at.

comScore’s Lamberti was emphatic that measurement doesn’t need to be reinvented. Although conversational media and traditional media are rather different on a number of axes–reach vs. engagement campaigns, large vs. low volume, targeting value vs. targeting advocates, pushed messaging vs. dialog, etc.–the fundamental measurement is the same. Don Springer’s take was that one does, in fact, need fundamental advancements in measurenment in order to track key metrics such as number of conversations, share of voice and sentiment change. I think I fall on the side of Springer here. What’s the equivalent of sentiment change measurement in traditional Web analytics? Tracking star ratings or equivalents is insufficient since they won’t tell you want a blogger is thinking about a product or brand.

Steve Rubel and Don Springer really got into it when they discussed standards. Steve’s take was that w/o standards much of the measurement conversations are meaningless as they are about apples vs. oranges. At one point Don said “standards stifle innovation.” Both positions have truth in them but that’s topic for a longer post. I have to catch a flight back to Boston.

Update: the panel was also covered by PaidContent.

Starting Up Plinky

Simeon Simeonov — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 17:10:46 +0000

Om Malik broke the news today about Plinky. Plinky is the brainchild of founder/CEO Jason Shellen, a former Googler who worked on Blogger and shipped Google Reader. Jason and I partnered up last fall and just raised our seed round from my partners at Polaris Venture Partners. I’m co-founder and interim CTO. We have a small, sharp team of Web developers who are busy building cool things. We can’t tell you more at this point–you know how it goes–but you can sign up at Plinky.com to keep in touch. Thanks go to the dozens of people who provided great feedback along the way. We listened. You’ll like what you’ll see.

In my six years at Polaris, Plinky is the fourth company that I have helped launch and the second company I have co-founded. Last fall I decided to switch my focus fully to helping entrepreneurs launch companies. Many of the entrepreneurs I’ve talked to are looking for help. There are not that many people in the venture business who both know how to do this and have the bandwidth to do it well. Think of me as a serial co-founder who helps shape the idea, raise capital, build the team and execute. I have founding equity in the companies, which aligns my interests with the entrepreneurs’. In order to have time to partner and engage deeply with my co-founders, I have stopped doing traditional investments and taking board seats, although I remain a partner at Polaris and 100% dedicated to building companies that Polaris invests in. My partner VCMike did the Plinky investment and will be on the board.

Amazon Funds AWS Darling Animoto

Simeon Simeonov — Thu, 15 May 2008 12:39:54 +0000

My friend Stevie Clifton, CTO at Animoto, pinged me early this morning with the news that Amazon has funded his company. This comes on the heels of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos using Animoto as a great example of how to leverage Amazon Web Services. Get the full story from Stevie who recorded a video telling how Animoto scaled from 50 server instances to 3,500 server instances after their Facebook launch.

Congrats to the Animoto team. They’ve built a very cool service and deserve to get a little breathing room.

Viral Dictionary

Simeon Simeonov — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:54:39 +0000

I met the folks at Pandemic Labs a few weeks ago at a MITX event. Great small team–a technology-leveraged agency specializing in viral and social marketing. Their new site launched over the weekend and the viral dictionary caught my attention–I guess the science of viral distribution requires a new vocabulary.