Sunlight is working with you to build a national campaign that makes government more open and transparent at every level.

You can see where we are so far by visiting this page. Be sure to check out the wiki.

http://sunlightfoundation.com/campaign

We believe that a disaffected, disengaged, cynical public threatens democracy in the United States as few other things can. At its heart, our campaign is about building the political and community clout necessary to combat this problem.

We think we can invigorate democracy by coming together, demanding transparency with serious political muscle, using the very latest in technology to make government information more meaningfully accessible to us, and holding government accountable with it.

As we embark on this campaign, it’s important we’re on the same page about a lot of things, but there’s probably nothing more important to be clear about than our values and beliefs.

So here are five principles we will hold to in all our work.

1) Think and Act Like a Movement
2) Listen and Be Authentic
3) Create Beautiful, Compelling Content
4) Fail Harder…
5) Laugh As Often As Possible

Here’s what we mean.

1) Think and act like a movement.

At its heart, this “campaign” is facilitating the growth of a movement. This is not a command and control type thing we are building. To that end, we will share everything and build leaders.

Anything that is created or has success with this campaign – from logos and style guides to resources and training materials to tactics and lessons learned – will be open and shared across the network. With this approach we want to empower any person who is willing to take up the call of making government transparent with the tools s/he would need to be successful.

One of the best examples of this ethos is, oddly enough, embodied by the U.S. Marine Corps as they make “every man a rifle man” – or “every person a rifle person” as it’s been reworked in recent decades. In other words, if you’re a Marine, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the infantry, an officer or a cook; in all cases, you receive some of the best rifle training in the world and could take up arms on the front lines if required.

While we certainly aren’t militaristic, we can’t stress it enough:

In the open government movement, we want every single citizen to have easy access to all the tools and resources they would need to communicate the need for transparency at the local, state and federal levels, and be able to take actions that help bring it about.

2) Listen and be authentic

From our failures to our concerns to our needs and questions (big and small), we want to listen first and make statements second. We’ll be upfront and honest with each other, acknowledge what’s working and what’s not, and remember that we’re all on the same team trying to accomplish a very large mission.

3) Create beautiful, compelling content.

Making the case for anything in a way that gets hundreds of thousands of people to buy in and actively support takes a lot of convincing and influence. When it comes to transparency, we are trying to build public support and influence government with a relatively new, still relatively amorphous concept. To that end, image and message matter in a big way. We commit to making sure we deliver compelling messages in simple to understand, beautiful packages – from email to video to data visualizations to Web sites to text messages to …whatever we come up with.

4) Fail Harder.

Or: Fail “quickly and cheaply.” We are taking on a very challenging mission in making local, state and federal government transparent. If it was easy, it would have been done already. That means in order to succeed, we’re going to have to try some big things that have never been done before – and that means sometimes we’re going to fall on our face. The internet makes it possible to “fail” quickly and cheaply, and when that happens, that’s a good thing – as long as we learn and grow from it. If we’re not failing sometimes, we’re not pushing hard enough.

5) Laugh as often as possible.

Whether we are building a network of leaders, being open with each other, creating content, failing harder or dealing with jerks, laughter helps a lot. Just about always. Just because our mission is challenging doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be having fun along the way.

And to that end, a somewhat related principle to number 5 that is worth noting and will make all our lives easier:

6) Have no tolerance for jerks.

We adhere strongly to this rule. Please don’t be one. If it needs explaining to you, it’s possible you’re a jerk :)

With these values in place, there are a couple of assumptions we will have in the approach to our work, that we also want to be very clear about. I’ll discuss those in the post right after this one.

Youth social networking researcher dana boyd has observed that many people presume the way they use social networks is the way everyone uses them. "I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men," she says. "I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it's often hard to see beyond that."

Now picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. That's what a Ramen-eating, ex-Apple engineer named Pete Warden is about to release to the public this week.

Sponsor

This Wednesday, Warden will make friend, fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It's a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that's been complicated by Facebook's recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.

If what people call Web 2.0 was all about creating new technologies that made it easy for everyday people to publish their thoughts, social connections and activities, then the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness, and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. It's a very exciting future, and Warden is about to fire one of the earliest big shots in that direction.

Nerds in Space: Social Graph Analysis For Solving Large-Group Problems

Pete Warden studied Computer Vision in college in the UK, then got into game development. After moving to LA, he spent 6 years building graphics drivers for the original Playstation and the XBox. Then he started his own independent business, where thankfully he open-sourced much of his work (something he's still doing today).

When he found out that starting his own business wasn't going to work with his immigration status, he was very fortunate to have also caught Apple's eye with the software he had been releasing to the public. Apple bought his company in order to bring him on board. The proceeds of that small sale are now sustaining his next project after leaving the company.

After spending 5 years at Apple struggling to navigate the maze of people and connections and types of expertise in order to get the information he needed, Warden decided to go independent and build a company that solved exactly that kind of problem. "I can't think of a better big company to work for, but it was still a big company," he says. "It was hard to find the right people to talk to, whether for particular expertise or for contacts at external companies." And so Pete Warden left Apple to build a company that would use social graph analysis to solve problems like that. He called the company Mailana.

We've written here a number of times about Mailana's tool to analyze the social graph of any Twitter user. Enter the username of someone on Twitter and Mailana will show you which 20 other people they have exchanged the largest number of reciprocal public @ replies with. Find someone interesting or important? Mailana's Twitter analyzer will tell you who they most regularly interact with. See, for example, The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Rockstars on Twitter.

Pulling Down the Facebook Social Graph

Now Warden is about to unveil a much larger project along the same vein. For the past 6 months he's been crawling public profile pages on Facebook. He now has more than 215 million of them indexed and updated about once a month. When he began he was using webcrawling service 80legs but in time he had to build his own crawling infrastructure.

When I talked to him this afternoon, he had already begun uploading 100 GB of user data onto his server to make available for academic research starting on Wednesday. Warden says he's removed identifying profile URLs but kept names, locations, Fan page lists and partial friends lists. All those fields of data are just waiting to be analyzed and cross referenced. That's one very rich resource.

Yesterday Warden posted some of his own initial observations from the data on his personal blog. Those included:

• God is in almost every state in the Southern US the #1 most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the LA, San Francisco and Nevada regions? "God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren't that popular either," Warden writes. "Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot." In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is #1.
• In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.
• The bulk of Warden's posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the Western US tend to have Facebook friends all over the country, people in the Southern US tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area.

Taking a Deeper Look

These observations are interesting, but they are only the beginning of what's possible. Name, location, friends and interests are great data points to analyze. Warden has written a program that will estimate gender as well, based on names. All these data points can be cross-referenced with outside data, too. Members of Facebook's own staff did this kind of analysis when they compared last names on the site to US census data about the likelihood of people with particular last names reporting particular racial backgrounds in order to estimate the changes in Facebook's racial composition over time.

"I'm mostly thinking 'What do I try first?'," Warden says. "There's so many interesting ways to slice the data - especially as I'm starting to get changes over time. I'm also trying to map out political networks in aggregate; how polarized the fans of particular politicians are - so how likely a Sarah Palin fan is to have any friends who are fans of Obama, and how that varies with location too. One of my favorite results is that Texans are more likely to be fans of the Dallas Cowboys than God."

Warden says he hasn't talked to anyone from Facebook since he started crawling the site, but he did get an email from someone on the security team asking him to take down instructions he'd posted exposing a security hole that made harvesting peoples' email addresses easy. So the company is paying attention. "I'd love to see them put me out of business by putting decent data out there," Warden says. He says his Amazon Web Services bill was over $5k last month.

Why is he indexing all this content and why is he going to hand it over to the academic world later this week? "I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we're just littering the internet with," Warden says.

"Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."

For a great example of the kind of social impact that data analysis can make, Warden points to some of the fascinating ways that GIS data is illuminating the intersection of race and public services. Data has shed light on social injustices for decades and measurable information about the interactions of hundreds of millions of people every day on Facebook offers opportunities to discover both good and bad news about the contemporary human condition.

Warden says he's not yet been able to interest any investors in his ideas for businesses based on this data, so his girlfriend Liz Baumann, a former insurance actuary, stepped in to help and is now running much of the crawling. He says he's now focused on "working on ways of presenting all this information in a form that answers questions for people willing to pay." His first experiment along those lines is the very interesting FanPageAnalytics.com.

What does Pete Warden hope for from this week's public release of all this Facebook data? "Hopefully I'll get to see a bunch of interesting [academic research] papers come out of it, worst case. And I'd like to be the guy people turn to when they need stuff like this."

Already well-respected among a fringe group of bleeding-edge geeks, we hope that Warden's work on social graph analysis will end up impacting a far larger number of people than may ever know his name.

Discuss

The US government filed its Statement of Interest regarding the revised Google settlement yesterday with the District Court in New York. While the statement was signed by an attorney from the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, several agencies including the Copyright Office reportedly contributed to it.

As you may recall, the judge has only 2 choices: he can approve the settlement, or send it back to the parties for revision. He cannot modify it himself.

The US government statement advises the judge that the public interest would be best served by sending the settlement back, and points out that the revised version still suffers from the "same core problem" that afflicted the first version: "an attempt to use the class action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the Court in this litigation."

The press reports that I've seen take the government's statement as an emphatic thumbs down.

The judge has scheduled a hearing for February 18 in his Manhattan courtroom.

It is very unlikely that the judge will approve this version of the settlement. Also, he may once again decide postpone a full-fledged fairness hearing-although the many objectors, large and small, are eager to have their day in court. Because the parties withdrew the proposed settlement before the originally scheduled fairness hearing occurred in October 2009, the judge has not yet formally considered the many objections filed to date on the revised settlement and filed in anticipation of the fairness hearing cancelled last October.

Bottom line for the long term: even if the judge sends the settlement back, and even if the parties agree to deadlines as short as the deadlines for this presumably ill-fated revision, there is no resolution in sight for the litigation.

Whether the case is tried or the settlement discussions continue, the legal end point will not be the trial judgment or settlement approval issued by the district court judge. The end point will be the disposition of the final appeal from that district court judgment or approved settlement, and that disposition is years away.

It's hard to imagine what relevance the final legal disposition would have then, as public and private innovators are not sitting on their hands, waiting for the judge to sort this out.

Get the big picture with the Column Navigator

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

RIM's BlackBerry platform is still the most popular mobile smartphone platform in the U.S., but Google's Android was the big winner in the last quarter of 2009. According to comScore, Android's share of the U.S. mobile market more than doubled from 2.5% in September 2009 to 5.2% in December. While the Nexus One might not be a bestseller just yet, it's clear that the Android platform is poised for rapid growth in the next few months, as more and more manufactures continue to release Android-based phones.

Sponsor

Good News for Android - More Bad News for Palm

Among the top 5 mobile platforms (RIM, Apple, Microsoft, Palm and Google), Palm lost the largest amount of market share in the last few months. Palm, the current number four, now owns 6.1% of the U.S. mobile market (down from 8.3% in September). With Google's Android rapidly growing in popularity, it's only a matter of time before Google will overtake Palm in the United States.

As we reported in January, according to ChangeWave Research, a growing number of U.S. consumers plans to buy an Android device in the next few months. In September, Android was still tied with Palm as the least-preferred mobile platform. Today, Palm remains in last place, with Android now being the second-most preferred platform (right behind Apple).

Discuss

Since my attempts at capturing web developers’ hearts and minds by publishing fundamental research have failed miserably but my thirst for attention continues unabated, today I will once more shout at iPhone developers. That’s proven to work.

More specifically, today I will shout at web developers who think that delicately inserting an iPhone up their ass is the same as mobile web development.

Before we start, a little thought experiment. Suppose I proposed the following:

1. IE6 is today’s most advanced browser. (Note: this was actually true back in 2000. Please bear with me.)
2. IE6’s market share is about 80%.
3. The other browsers are way worse than IE6, and developing for them is a pain; something we’re not interested in and are a bit afraid of.
4. Therefore we will develop websites exclusively for IE6.

Would you agree with those sentiments, even if we’re back in 2000 and IE6 is really the best browser we have?

Or would you reply that our sites should work as well as they can in all browsers through the use of web standards, progressive enhancement, and all the rest of the best practices we’ve been preaching for the past ten years?

I distinctly remember a time when we web developers cared about such concepts. But those times are long gone.

A major new winter storm is headed east over the U.S. today, and threatens to dump a foot or more of snow on Philadelphia, New York City, and surrounding regions Tuesday and Wednesday. Philadelphia is still digging out from its second top-ten snowstorm of recorded history to hit the city this winter, and the streets are going to begin looking like canyons if this week's snowstorm adds a significant amount of snow to the incredible 28.5" that fell during "Snowmageddo...<br /><a href="http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1427">Read More</a>

Sunday I sat down with a small group at the Government 2.0 Camp LA to pow-wow about how to get more women involved in the movement that has many names: e-government, open government, government transparency, and finally government 2.0. While the conference took on many forms, but one of the primary goals laid down by conference founder Alan Silberberg was to make sure women's voices were heard. As a result, we convened a break-out session to brainstorm practical solutions for reaching more women beyond just inclusion in conferences like this one.

Here are some of the main points from that discussion, from a perspective that anyone in government, private sector, media, or advocacy organizations can take to heart and apply to bring greater diversity to e-government and reform movements:

1) Don't just tell women to act more like men; help shift the paradigm so that women can feel comfortable to engage in the e-government aspect of our political process in a variety of ways. It's not all about going to crowd sourcing government websites. It's about engaging on a deeper level in the political process using the power of social media. This creates endless possibilities.

2) Treat women's issues like all issues. Don't just shove them in the "Living" section of the newspaper, for example. Stop assuming that just because someone has a long-haired avatar or a 'mom' in her handle that she's therefore less relevant. Look at the content, not the moniker. (You think PunditMom or MOMocrats write about mom stuff? Think again. They may happen to be moms, but they're all about the same issues as everyone else: the economy, healthcare, the environment.)

3) Recognize the power many women have in the world of social media. Arianna Huffington, Dooce and Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake may be the names most people know, but there are thousands of other powerful women in social media with expertise in a wide range of topics far beyond the few who make it onto the talk shows.

4) Reach out across sectors to women. Don't just engage the women in elected office. They're already busy enough juggling a million projects. Think about the woman in her first job out of college with marketing skills and a lot of energy. She could be extremely valuable to boosting the conversation to the next level, and engaging younger members of the citizenry only helps it grow faster. This goes for the government agencies especially. They have what one of my colleagues described as the "legal and moral framework" to handle this sort of thing. They can engage in outreach like affirmative action programs in order to make sure more women are informed about government innovation.

5) Give women tools that are more collaborative. These could include the most simple of reaching out in communities where the women already are, like iVillage, BlogHer, and Facebook. Or it could go deeper to the design level, providing options on government websites for women - and anyone else, for that matter - to configure their user interface to whatever design style they like.

6) Take advantage of identity-neutralizing environments, like Twitter. In these spaces, no one needs to know everything about you. Here, anyone can choose your topic and create a platform. Technology is a neutral tool if it's used that way. Anonymity, neutral images, neutral tone can all create spaces where readers and listeners are forced to only concentrate on the raw content presented. As a result, new ideas can surface and be heard without the filter of gender.

7) Invite men to find ways in which they are most comfortable helping engaging more women. For men active in social media, this could mean adding more women's blogs to their blogrolls or making sure to follow Friday an equal number of women as men on Twitter. For others, it could just mean listening more to women and taking a few minutes every week to think about how to get more women involved in the projects they're working on in government.

8) Amplify the quiet voices. This goes for the men and the women. Millions of people out there have incredible ideas about how to improve government and society if we can find them and listen to them. Giving attention to those with 20 followers as much as 20,000 can remind us all about the fundamentals of democracy and why we're in this movement using social media to reinvent government in the first place.

...
Sarah Granger is the Director of New Media for WomenCount and founder of PublicEdge. She also writes for techPresident, the Personal Democracy Forum and BlogHer.

I love my iPhone and I love Apple (cue images of flag pins and “I love muh countray!”), but I believe they’re blowing it with the App Store gate keeping. That’s of course not a new opinion. Developers left and right have been decrying the broken process. But there’s nothing like feeling it on your own bones to make the point.

We have a couple of new features in the wing for Campfire. They’ve been done for more than 10 days now. Why haven’t we released them yet? Because the iPhone app Ember needed to have a simple regular expression updated to support the features. We really like Ember, so we decided that holding back the features until this pro forma update went through was prudent. We’re still waiting.

This has made me think about all the ways the app store process sucks and how little we get back in return. The argument I keep hearing for why this terrible process is worth it is quality control. Here’s a breakdown of each argument:

• Applications will be more stable: No they won’t. Echophone still crashes on me all the time. It’s not like the iPhone is immune to crash bugs. And why would it be? You’re writing native Objective-C here. Shit is going to crash every now and then. No 10 minute look-over by a App Store clerk is going to help that.
• The App Store will be free of malware: That’s certainly no given. If you really wanted to be evil, you could very well hide your malice underneath a cute game and have a time bomb or a remote trigger installed. Do you think the App Store clerks are combing through source code to look for security issues? Ha!
• Only good stuff in the App Store: Ha! The App Store has some 140K+ applications. I can guarantee you that the bulk of that is less than average. There are some 100 fart apps for christ sake!

We’re paying for the inconvenience of quality control without the quality part. In fact, lots of software has lower quality because of the App Store process. Developers can’t easily get bug fixes out and they certainly don’t release new versions as often as they otherwise would. This harks back to the era where software was really cumbersome to release on CDs, so you did it much less frequently.

Contrast this with OS X and the web. Both platforms are much more open and on a mac you have very little trouble with stability or malware or even quality. In general, the market is pretty good at sorting this stuff out. If you make a crappy application, people don’t buy or recommend it. And OS X seems to be holding up well as a secure platform compared to, say, Windows, so malware isn’t much of a concern either.

What I think Apple should do instead is to reserve the power to nuke apps that prove troublesome. Have a “if you fuck it up, we’ll yank it” policy rather than a “we’ll review everything poorly and slowly and still not catch it all” policy. They’d be able to get by with a much smaller App Store clerk staff, developers would be thrilled to escape the needless gate keeping, and consumers would enjoy more applications updated more frequently.

What’s there to loose except for the feeling of powah?

Orkut. Used it? I did back in 2002, but since then? No one I know uses it.
Jaiku. Used it? I did back in 2006, but since then? No one I know uses it.
Dodgeball. Used it? I did back in 2006, but since then? No one I know uses it.

These are just a few of the failures Google has had trying to figure out the social space.

Tomorrow they’ve invited a ton of journalists to see a new social effort. The headline on top of Techmeme screams “Twitter killer.”

Um, I’ve learned in life that past behavior is the best predictor of future results.

So, why is Google going to succeed THIS time when its past experiences into social networking have failed and failed miserably?

I’ve identified a few:

1. This time they built everything in house. All the efforts above were purchased companies that were bolted onto existing infrastructure. This time? Look at the foundational pieces that Google has put in place. Google Profiles lets you enter the social networks you’re on. Check out mine, I’ve told it more already about myself than I’ve told Facebook. Then take a look at Google’s Social Circles. Social Circles is a clue that Google is studying ALL social networks, not just Facebook and Twitter. Some of my friends’ entries there have hundreds of websites and social networks listed there. It’ll be very interesting to see what Google does with those tomorrow. Hopefully a feed like FriendFeed had, along with real time search that’s filterable.

2. Employees on board. In 2006 whenever I talked with a Google employee about social stuff like Twitter or Facebook they’d turn their noses and say something derogatory. “That’s lame,” is what I heard over and over. It was clear that the rank and file Google employee just didn’t think Twitter or Facebook would ever challenge Google in any real way. I haven’t heard that attitude for quite a while now. You just have to look at Compete.com for why.

3. Mobile has made social more important. Look at the average mobile phone ad in the United States. A good percentage of them mention both Twitter and Facebook. Google can’t ignore this fact, especially now that Google is pushing Android on small devices and Chrome OS on bigger ones. Google knows that carriers see social networks as important things to push, so if Google can bring something new and interesting that will get people and brands to even talk about switching from Facebook or Twitter, it will be interesting to watch. Look for Google Contacts to add much better integration with all of the social networks that Google’s Social Circles algorithms are collecting. Yes, Palm got there first, but Palm doesn’t really matter, so look for Google to exploit that fact with really deep integration with contacts.

4. Twitter looks attackable. For the past few months we’ve all been watching Twitter’s engagement, traffic, and new feature releases. So far Twitter just hasn’t stepped up to the plate and lifted the drawbridge off of the moat surrounding their castle. Yes, Twitter is the best place now to find real time news, look at my list of world news brands for a great example of that. It’s also the best place to follow companies in real time, look at Dominic Jones’ list of 499 public companies for a great example of that. But look deeper and you’ll see a limping Twitter. Engagement just hasn’t taken off for a whole lot of reasons (let’s be honest, most people come to Twitter looking for celebrities, but look at Listorious’ list of Twittering celebrities done by Pete Cashmore and you’ll just see mostly lame tweets that don’t hook users much at all). I can see a whole lot of ways to beat Twitter, and if me and others, like Dave Winer can see ways that Twitter is beatable, then so can the engineers at Google.

5. Normal users are hungry. Normal users I talk to have now figured out Facebook. Most have played with Twitter and found it lacking, they tell me, but they are interested in other uses of social networking now. The market is primed for a new service to come along that shows us something new. Will Google deliver that tomorrow? Well, we only have a few hours to wait. But there is a latent unsatisfied interest, especially because Facebook has made its privacy stance confusing with its founder saying that we are in a post privacy world.

6. Location-based services are gathering attention. Well, at least they are being adopted by early adopters and, thanks to deals with TV networks and others, Foursquare, at least, is starting to move out of the early-adopter echo chamber and into the mainstream. Even Yelp has copied Foursquare’s “check in” metaphor and has primed the market for Google to come in and demonstrate some real leadership here. Interesting to note that Google Latitude has largely failed too when compared to the smaller upstarts. Will Google turn around its failures here?

7. Google HAS won in video and done fairly well in blogging. YouTube is a huge adoption success, even if it hasn’t yet made Google much money. That said, most of my friends are noticing that more and more users are coming into YouTube (indeed, even I’ve switched much of my video publishing to my channel there and I’m seeing strong subscriber and engagement growth). While services like Redux or Tweetmeme show you just videos that have been shared on Twitter and Facebook, look for Google to build on this strength.

8. Google has the best email and collaboration suite users. Whenever I speak at a conference of early adopters most people say they are now using Google Mail. That’s huge because these early adopters are the types that are willing to try new things and, better yet, are willing to tell their friends how cool they are. Look at how Google Wave — despite a crappy user interface — became very popular very quickly. Why? Because of this army of early adopters. See, email users are NOT all equal. Next time you are on a plane, look around you. Is the guy who is using Outlook 2003 using anything else that’s bleeding edge? Not very likely. Now look at the Gmail users, they are more likely to have a bleeding edge mobile phone, they are more likely to have a Windows 7 or Macintosh laptop. They are more likely to try things. They are more valuable because of that and is why Yahoo or Microsoft never were really able to capitalize on their hundreds of millions of email customers. Plus, look how Google integrated Docs and Spreadsheets into Gmail. Look for them to do the same thing with their social network efforts. It’ll be nuanced and addictive. If I were Gist or Xobni you bet I’d be worried about what’s coming tomorrow.

Anyway, this is all a long way of me saying that don’t expect Google to keep failing at this social networking thing. Its past behavior is NOT a predictor of what’s coming tomorrow.

Gmail is set to become Google’s next major push into social media. According to The Wall Street Journal, the popular webmail service will soon launch a new feature for sharing content and status updates with friends. [Update: We think Google might announce these features on Tuesday]

As WSJ points out, Gmail users can already update their statuses — sort of — through Gmail’s chat feature. Currently, this feature is more akin to the traditional IM “away message.” However, with this new social push, Gmail will offer a timeline-view of your friends’ status updates, just like on Facebook and Twitter.

Those updates might come from both Gmail and third-party services. According to WSJ, Google-owned YouTube and Picasa will be integrated into the stream. The huge question then is whether or not the new feature will include updates from Twitter and Facebook.

If so, the new features could be thought of more like a TweetDeck or Seesmic, looking to provide an aggregate view of your friends’ social media activities along with the ability to push status updates to the services you use from inside of Gmail. If not, it could be thought of as a major competitor to Twitter and Facebook as Gmail looks to covert its millions of e-mail users into adherents to a whole new breed of social media service.

An issue with the latter, however, is that Gmail has historically added people to your contacts based on e-mail interactions. Hence, this contact list often varies significantly from your friends on social sites where relationships need to be made explicitly.

In other words, your Gmail contacts aren’t necessarily the same people you want to share status updates, photos and videos with. This is an issue that shouldn’t be overlooked in evaluating the new features Google is soon to unveil.

Tags: facebook, gmail, Google, trending, twitter

Earlier this weekend, someone used the Alexa web stats service and compared the daily reach of GigaOM with that of my friends at Techcrunch and that on Mashable, and wondered if I was sad.

Now I could have easily answered this question over on GigaOM, but instead I am leaving that for what it is for — news, analysis and the unfolding story about business of technology. For everything else, I have this blog and that includes questions about my perceived sadness.

For now I wouldn’t bother to point out that we are actually a network of seven blogs and are syndicated to mainstream publications such as The New York Times, BusinessWeek, CNN Money and Salon. Instead, I will just focus on our philosophy and business strategy which doesn’t revolve around mere page views.

When we relaunched the brand new GigaOM design in November 2009, I wrote that “we’ve tried to do is strike a fine balance between what is a blog and what would be an online magazine.” It was so because we wanted to focus on more analysis and in-depth posts. It was not to just compete with other technology publications, but was also standout amongst what has become a very crowded market.

That is why I have admiration for Michael Arrington and his team at Techcrunch and what they have been able to do to dominate the technology news market. Everyone from Techcrunch to Business Insider to Venturebeat to Readwriteweb and not to mention technology blogs from mainstream publications such as AllThingsD and Bits have their own unique playbook to covering technology industry. We have our playbook. What we do is focus on what we do best: take years of experience, a professional approach and use our sources to present the best news analysis and informed opinions in near realtime. In a post last year, I wrote:

As Twitter has become increasingly ingrained in our everyday lives, its value as as source of information tidbits has become clear. Think of it like that plate of chips and salsa you get before the entree arrives: tasty — spicy, even — but not entirely satisfying. Meanwhile, blogging has become the main course — the source of context. And the evolution into that role has injected new life into the blogosphere.

In this age of instant information, thanks to the rise of Twitter and Facebook, the demand is for tools of context, and that is why I think we are on the right path. Jeff Jarvis, a noted media critic and veteran of the publishing business writes:

If you are selling a scarcity — an inventory — of any nonphysical goods today, stop, turn around, and start selling value — outcomes — instead. Or you’re screwed. Apply this rule to many enterprises: advertising, media, content, information, education, consultation, and to some extent, performance.

That is what we are offering to our readers: value.

You know the biggest reason why there is no reason for me to be sad: our community of readers know exactly what we stand for and what they get when they come to GigaOM.com. In response of the said post , several commenters on the Hacker News reflected how we think of our publication. To them I say thank you for making it all worthwhile by noticing our efforts. That is precisely the encouragement we need to keep doing better for you.

To me their comments are a reason to be elated: we are in sync with the needs of those who we serve.

By Josef Adalian

Sunday's Dave-Jay-Oprah Super Bowl ad might have been a foursome -- but an early notion to include Conan O'Brien in the spot didn't work out.

Rob Burnett, executive producer of David Letterman's "Late Show," said he approached Team Coco about O'Brien appearing in the promo.

"There was an initial thought of having Dave, Jay and Conan together in the spot," Burnett told TheWrap. "I did call Jeff Ross ...

Here's the view out of my hotel this morning. TED2010 is held in a beautiful theater inside the Long Beach Performing Arts Center. In front we're building spaces for people to gather during breaks. The tent right in front of it is an eco-village, to the right the domes will house high-tech exhibits, the big tent front left is a "global village" and the registration area is right at the front.  Much more inside...!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

The average American is expected to spend nearly $1,000 on services like cable, Internet and online video games.

Rajendra K. Pachauri and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change face accusations of scientific sloppiness and potential financial conflicts of interest.

As more and more of our friends and favorite organizations start publishing updates online, being able to organize them well is becoming even more important. Niche-popular desktop social media stream-reader Tweetdeck issued a software update this morning and the most striking change is in its handling of user groups. It's beautiful. The new Tweetdeck is faster, more flexible and easier to navigate.

Groups, we have argued, are the secret weapon of the social web. Here are five ways that the new Tweetdeck gets groups right and that Facebook, the world's dominant social media stream reader by a long-shot, could learn from what Tweetdeck is doing. That would drastically improve Facebook's own user experience.

Sponsor

Internet startup investor John Borthwick of Betaworks has told us that he invested in Tweetdeck specifically because its column metaphor represented a drastic break from the page-based metaphor of the rest of the web and the Instant Messaging metaphor of most other Twitter clients. That's how Tweetdeck works: it lets you put your friends and contacts on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn into grouped columns across your screen. It's a powerful system and the clear leader in the ecosystem of interfaces built around Twitter. Competitor Seesmic has a similar offering and is also based on columns for groups.

These applications may be more overwhelming than many mainstream users are looking for, but the principles could be adapted to Facebook's own interface in some very interesting ways.

The Problem With Facebook's Group Support

Groups of users, which Facebook calls Lists, are extremely helpful in prioritizing messages by their source. They enable users to subscribe to more sources of information in total without fear they will miss high-priority content. Groups help contextualize messages in a stream and with good search support they can help you target queries and unearth the information you're looking for within a limited space of trusted, topical sources of information. Last month, Facebook suggested its users subscribe to news organizations on the social network and put those updates in a special list called News, for example.

Unfortunately, Facebook has never treated Groups with the respect that they deserve. The newest redesign pushes friends Lists a click removed from the front page of the site, even. (It took me three clicks from the home page to see the view pictured on the right, for example.) The company is instead focused on serving up content from favored sources using the new News Feed (vs Live Feed) algorithm. This algorithm says that the more you've interacted with a source of information in the past, the more likely you are to want to read that person's updates in the future. News Feed is a self-reenforcing paradigm that simplifies and narrows a user's universe by taking editorial control out of their hands and putting it in the hands of a black-box formula.

How could Facebook better handle groups? Let's take a look at how Tweetdeck does it.

Tweetdeck's Superior Handling of Groups

• Buttons to navigate directly

  The new Tweetdeck update today added a series of buttons at the bottom of the application for your group columns. Hover over them and you'll see the column name. Click on that button and you'll be brought immediately to that column, a much nicer experience than the awkward old scrolling. The hover display does show some information that's probably not useful to anyone (API calls remaining) but putting rapid group navigation in a good place in the app makes a big difference. It would also be nice if those buttons were configurable in some way - like the red one or #3 is for my @ replies column. But Tweetdeck now makes it much, much easier to navigate between groups than Facebook does. Facebook almost seems to be discouraging use of groups by burying them several clicks below top level options.

  
  
  
• Different Notification Priorities

  Tweetdeck makes it easy to set up different levels of notification for different groups. For example, my "high-priority" Twitter group sends full messages as a pop-up in the corner of my screen when it updates, but my column for people I actually know in real life on Facebook (like my family members) throws a pop-up and an audio notification in Tweetdeck when there's something new. That's awesome.

  Facebook is all about the notifications, why not let me get a special notification when someone in a particular group has posted an update?

  
  

• Shareable Groups, Suggestions etc.

  For years Twitter has been fundamentally public and Facebook private, but for better or for worse that's changing on Facebook. Isn't it time for Facebook to offer bundles of pages or people that you can follow all at once? Twitter and Tweetdeck make this easy with lists, sharable lists and the Tweetdeck directory of recommended lists to follow. Facebook users would love something like that! My college newspaper staff as one big list of Facebook users to follow? My football team? Suzy Bright's curated list of top sex writers to follow on Facebook? People would eat that kind of stuff up.
  

• Keyword Filters

  Last week I was working when the season premier of Lost came on TV. I'm likely to watch it later on DVD. Tweetdeck let me add a filter to all of my groups to hide any posts that included the word Lost! Sick of hearing about the iPad? No problem! Tweetdeck does a great job of building value on top of these groups of contacts: filter for, filter out keywords, analyze a group for its most-used words. There are lots of possibilities. Facebook users would probably like these same options.
  

• A Group for New Friends

  Tweetdeck has a great feature that lets you create a column to display the bios of people who have just started following you. From there you can click once to follow them back. Facebook could easily do something like that, bring new friends and/or recommended friends up higher into a very visible place in the interface. Facebook wants users to go beyond connecting with people they already know in real life (sorry, users, that's what Facebook has decided) so why not create a "group" that's made up of people who are fans of the same pages you are or are otherwise recommended for connecting with?

There are all kinds of ways that Facebook could offer meaningful support for user groups and turn the News Feed into a more powerful tool, with more control for users and more value in the long run. Tweetdeck is doing a pretty darned good job of exactly that.

Discuss