Skeptic Geek

Skeptic Geek: Now on Facebook!

On July 28, 2010, in Personal, by Mahendra Palsule

Though I prefer Google Reader and Twitter as my news sources of choice, many others use Facebook.

A few weeks back, I decided to experiment with Facebook Like buttons on all my blog posts. The results were very surprising. Earlier, many of my posts became popular because they were shared by some influencers on Google Reader and Twitter. However, Facebook has surprisingly remained a significant source of readers.

More importantly, since Skeptic Geek is platform and company agnostic, posts become popular on different networks depending on the content. For example, my post on Is Windows Live Delivering What Google Buzz Promised? took a critical stance on Google, was not shared by any influencers I know, but has almost 950 shares on Facebook (at the time of this writing).

This is why I decided to put an end to my neglect of the Facebook Platform, and have chosen to leverage it. I remain platform agnostic, and will continue to be impartial in my critique of the social web. This is just another way of letting my readers have more choice in their preferred way of reading Skeptic Geek.

If you wish, you can become a fan on Facebook here.

Tagged with: facebook

How I Live and Breathe Twitter

On July 26, 2010, in Microblogging, by Mahendra Palsule

This is a companion post to How I Live and Breathe Google Reader. A few people have asked for some of my stats, so I am sharing them too.

Objectives behind using Twitter

Different people use Twitter for different purposes. My objectives are:

Get fresh tech news as fast as possible.
Learn what leading tech experts and analysts are reading and understand their opinions on current tech topics
Share fresh tech news and my views
Make a few friends and have fun.

I use @ScepticGeek as my professional account for my key goals, and @Palsule as a personal account for the last. The remainder of this post focuses on my @ScepticGeek account.

I think defining your objective behind using any network or service is important as it helps define the kind of social graph and relationships you build using it.

My Sharing Policy

I share tech news and opinion pieces about current tech trends. I try my best to keep my Twitter feed a relevant signal. I don’t tweet all of my friends’ blog posts just because they’re my friends.

I realize this may be construed as anti-social behavior among social media experts, but as I explained in Role of Curation in the Attention Economy, I don’t wish to increase noise for my followers and am more interested in curating my Twitter feed to keep it relevant for my followers.

My Follow Policy

My objectives drive my follow policy. I typically follow people who break tech news. I also follow people who may not break news themselves, but who constantly live in the breaking tech news world and are always sharing fresh stuff.

The key principle behind my Follow Policy is Relevance. Thus, I do not follow all experts and people I admire. A person’s greatness isn’t always proportional to the relevance of their Twitter feed to my objectives.

Because I follow relatively few people, some folks assume that I only follow “big shots”. That simply isn’t true. Sometimes, I also follow people who @Reply me with interesting comments on what I share.

I am constantly following new people and unfollowing some of them. This is a continuous process and I am brutal in curating my following list. Sometimes, I use the following benchmarks in deciding whether to unfollow someone:

Have I liked/retweeted any tweet or article shared by that person within the last month?
Can I explain to myself why I follow a person given my objectives?

Lastly, I don’t care if the people I choose to follow, follow me back or not.

What “Follow” Means To Me

To me, a Follow is more than a social gesture. A Follow means that I try my best to read tweets, read the articles being shared, listen, answer questions when I can, offer help where possible.

Twitter as a Conversation Platform

A great many people complain that Twitter is not suitable for having conversations.

On the other hand, a great many people I admire and respect, from top tech bloggers and editors of leading tech blogs, to VCs and media/journalism experts, unaware of this inherent limitation of Twitter, continue to use it for meaningful conversations. So do I.

My Reply Policy

I make an effort to respond to each and every @Reply, as long as it is being made in good spirit and doesn’t reek of fanboyism.

Attribution Policy

I try to attribute my sources as far as possible, as I described earlier in Thanksgiving via Attribution.

On Automated Tweets

From Google Buzz + Reader + Twitter + Facebook = Noise: “When you auto-share, you’re not a human on that network, you turn into a bot. Bots are what we call spam.”

I neither use any tool that automates tweets, nor do I typically follow those who do.

Tweet Format

I try to make each tweet meaningful for my followers. My usual format is:

“Original Post Title” <Link> by “Author/Blog” /via @source /my comments if any

Frequently, the original blog title is either too sensationalistic or entirely misleading or link-baiting. In such cases, I dispense with the original title entirely substituting it with my own.

My URL Shortener

I use Bit.ly as my preferred URL shortener. Here are my Bit.ly stats for the past month:

My monthly stats typically range between 500 to 3000.

Though Twitter mostly works in real-time and I live in India, it is interesting that my followers are primarily based in the United States and EU.

Klout Score and Classification

For those who’re interested, my Klout Score varies from 58 to 62.

According to Klout, I am a “Thought Leader”:

I usually avoid ending my blog posts with the customary “You can follow me on xyz here” plea, but I will make an exception for this post. So if you’re interested in tech news, do follow @ScepticGeek on Twitter!

Tagged with: Twitter

Top 10 Signs You’re An Early Adopter

On July 23, 2010, in Miscellaneous, by Mahendra Palsule

Here are the Top 10 Signs you’re an early adopter:

10. You know the exact difference in features between Tumblr and Posterous and why you prefer one over the other.

9. You stalk the social web looking for alpha and beta invites.

8. You’ve lost track of how many accounts you have on hundreds of different websites.

7. You loved FriendFeed and still think that if it had held out, it would’ve become popular.

6. You accept Android fragmentation as a fact of life and don’t see what the issue is all about.

5. You have a Google Profile tailored to your needs and preferences.

4. You use your account on GetSatisfaction to report bugs and provide feedback.

3. You love Gmail and can’t figure out why anyone would want to use anything else.

2. You have RSS for breakfast.

And the #1 sign you’re an early adopter is:

1. You are still searching for the “perfect” Twitter client!

Tagged with: early adopter

Comparing Approaches to Information Filtering for Relevance

On July 15, 2010, in Social Web, by Mahendra Palsule

In a previous post, we looked at the big shift From Numbers To Relevance. There are dozens of apps/sites that are focusing on filtering information today, but which of them will succeed?

To attempt to answer that question, let’s first look at the different approaches employed by such apps/sites today in the search for Relevance. This is a topic that is usually the subject of scholarly research papers in academia; this is only a layman’s overview.

The different approaches I observe are:

Algorithmic Filtering
Filtering Based on Social Graph
Human Filtering
Crowdsourced Filtering
Shared Sources Filtering (Meta)
Influence Filtering
Social Search
Location Filtering

Algorithmic Filtering

If you tell us what you want or like, our software can show you what you will like.

Google Suggest

The predominant use of algorithmic filtering is in web search, where Google has dominated and driven the web economy for the past two decades. You search for something and Google’s search algorithm filters billions of web pages to find the most relevant results.

Google also uses algorithmic filtering to suggest items in Google Reader’s “Sort by Magic” feature.

Pros: Highest relevance when searching for information.
Cons: No serendipity. Only useful for goal-oriented task of search. No personalization (search engines typically unaware of demographic information).

Filtering Based on Social Graph

If your friends like it, you’ll probably like it too.

This is the dominant approach being used today by various apps and websites. For example, Facebook uses the EdgeRank formula to determine what to display in your news feed:

edgerankform2

The key driving factor is the affinity score between you and the source.

Google also uses this approach when recommending posts in Google Buzz.

Most of the apps listed in my previous post, as well as the new Digg, use this or a similar approach that employs your Twitter or Facebook friends to recommend items.

Pros: High serendipity. Helps being “in the know”, a socially cool factor. Higher personalization.
Cons: Relevance depends on social graph, which often is not optimized for relevance, as Kevin Anderson noted.

Human Filtering

I trust a specific person to share all of the good stuff I like to know.

Some people make it a habit to go through news items every day and share what they deem to be the most significant ones. Others begin relying on them as trusted news sources.

Pros: High serendipity. Easy to use. Quickly become part of social circle of an influencer.
Cons: Unreliable. Susceptible to preferences and agendas of other people.

Crowdsourced Filtering

Quickly see what’s most important to know.

TweetMeme, OneRiot, Digg, and many other social bookmarking services aggregate the actions of millions of people to surface the most popular services. Techmeme and MediaGazer add human curation to the aggregation of thousands of websites to surface the most important tech and media stories.

Pros: Be up-to-date with the most important/popular need-to-know information.
Cons: No personalization. Popular doesn’t always equate to relevant.

Shared Sources Filtering (Meta)

If you read from sources similar to someone else, you’ll probably like their other sources too.

Facebook uses this approach to suggest new Fan Pages that you may like because your friends like them. Google Reader also uses this to recommend new RSS feeds. Toluu also compares your subscribed RSS feeds with other users to help you discover new feeds.

GR Recommendations

Pros: Useful for discovering new sources in social networks.
Cons: Filters sources, not actual news items, hence limited in scope.

Influence Filtering

Only read what influential people are saying/sharing.

This approach uses influence scores of sources to filter the news feed. An example of this is HootSuite, which uses Klout to let you filter tweets according to their Klout scores.

Klout Filtering

Pros: Flexibility. High serendipity. Helps being “in-the-know”.
Cons: Influence metric is unreliable. Currently only available for real-time feeds like Twitter.

Social Search: Algorithms + Social Graph

Let your social circle find the most relevant results for you.

Social Search uses a combination of algorithms and social graph to find relevant results.

Social Search

Pros: High relevance. Combines goal-orientation of search with serendipity of social. Very useful for news items from recent past.
Cons: Requires searching. Lesser utility for fresh, real-time news.

Location Filtering

If we know where you are, we can help you find relevant results.

Location is a treasure trove for relevance. As the mobile web explodes, services that provide information about nearby businesses or friends are gaining increased adoption.

Pros: High relevance. Can be serendipitous with real life impact.
Cons: Privacy concerns. Limited in scope.

Conclusion: Which Approach is the Best?

None. Relevance is dependent on the requirements of an individual at a specific moment in time. These requirements change from time to time and from person to person. There is no killer approach to relevance.

Which app or service is likely to succeed? I think the following factors will make a difference:

Support for multiple approaches
Flexibility of degree of filtering
Number of Mobile Platforms supported
Next Step: What can you do with the info? (e.g. Siri lets you take actions)

What do you think? Are there other approaches that I missed? Which other factors matter?

Tagged with: relevance

NYT Profiles Techmeme

On July 12, 2010, in Personal, by Mahendra Palsule

From The New York Times:

One of the first Web sites loaded on Silicon Valley’s laptops and iPhones each morning — and then again and again throughout the day — is Techmeme.

Couple of factoids:

260,000 readers who check it 3 million times a month
Techmeme plans to include cogent 140-character Twitter posts written by influential people as headlines

Thanks to Marshall:

“You definitely get a lot more traffic when you’re the lead story in a cluster on Techmeme, and it’s super high-quality traffic because it’s where a lot of industry thought leaders go to get their news,” Mr. Kirkpatrick said.

In the photo on the article, check out what’s lying on that sofa chair in the background.

Tagged with: Techmeme

Googler’s Take on Social Networking Reveals Chinks in Facebook’s Armor

On July 7, 2010, in Social Web, by Mahendra Palsule

Paul Adams, lead for User Research for Social at Google, shared a presentation a few days back that was picked up by Venture Beat among others. I am sharing it here along with my own thoughts as I think it deserves a closer look.

Why? Because:

Paul currently works on Buzz and YouTube
Google is rumored to be working on Google Me, a rival network to Facebook

The Presentation

The Real Life Social Network v2

View more documents from Paul Adams.

Key Points

A single umbrella group of “Friends” in an online network doesn’t mirror real-life and leads to problems. Support multiple independent groups of friends.
Focusing on technology is a wrong strategy. Focus should instead be on Motivation and Goals.
Design needs are different for different relationship types – strong ties, weak ties, and temporary ties. One solution doesn’t fit all.
Different communication channels are needed for different types of relationships.
Role of influencers is over-estimated. Also need to focus on network of person being influenced. Influence works most within close ties.
Network should support multiple facets of identity and also anonymity.
We think people care less about privacy because they misunderstand complicated privacy settings.
People underestimate the size of their audience and persistent nature of their conversations online.

My Thoughts

There is no mention of any geeky stuff here – Open ID, standards, protocols, etc. It is refreshing to see truly social insights coming from Google.
For each of the problems identified with current online social networks, Paul uses Facebook as an example. Most of them also apply to Google’s Orkut, but Paul chooses to ignore Orkut as if it doesn’t exist.
While its heartening to see these insights from Google, their real challenge is for the Product Managers and Head of Social to take what they’ve got and build on this vision.
Google needs many more Paul Adams.
The critical insight is how Paul (and by extension, Google) thinks that there can be no one size fits all approach to social networking. Facebook users already experience the problems Paul describes by mixing close friends, acquaintances, and online strangers together in common conversations.
Taking this forward, Google may well be saying that Buzz is a network designed for your acquaintances and weak ties. And if Google Me were indeed under development, looks like it will be a network designed for close ties – family and close friends – which is how Facebook initially started.

Tagged with: buzz • Google Me

Skeptic Dope: “Influencer”

On July 2, 2010, in Skeptic Dope, by Mahendra Palsule

[Starting a new series of posts – Skeptic Dope. These are meant to be fun posts that cut through the hype and simply tell you what some things really mean. I hope to make them a mix of The Straight Dope and The Devil’s Dictionary.]

Influencer

- [noun] Traffic Driver

- [Archaic] Person (or entity) who influences

Modern Usage

In today’s social media and online context, an influencer is a person or entity (blog, etc.) who drives traffic. When such influencers link to or share a blog post, article, or video, a lot of bots and people follow them to read or view it.

These influencers become very important to Internet marketers and Social Media Experts.

Some ingenuous folks take the concept further to drive more traffic by writing about how to become influential, how to measure your influence, how to attract the attention of influencers, how to influence the influencers, and so on. This leads to more and more traffic bringing smiles to the ingenuous folks.

Old Usage (In Technology)

Steve Jobs drives a lot of traffic to Apple Stores in the form of human queues, and is an influencer in Technology. The engineers working behind the scenes on high-traffic websites such as Google Search influence a lot of people’s lives in how much time they spend on them. Similarly, the Microsoft engineers whose code resulted in the dreaded Blue Screen of Death have wasted (and thus influenced) countless person hours of productivity in human history. These are just a few examples of how people can be influential in technology.

Since such people are usually not active in social media, only a few old-fashioned people may refer to them as influencers today.

Archaic Usage (In Real Life)

People who influenced your thinking and life decisions, such as your parents, mentors, teachers, peers, and friends were referred to as influencers in a bygone era. These also included giants who altered the course of human history in politics, science, and philosophy. However, this usage of the word is now generally considered outdated.

Does Traffic = Influence?

Curious readers may wonder how the modern usage correlates with the outdated one.

Nokia sold 21.5 million smartphones in Q1 2010, while Apple sold 8.8 million iPhones. Which company is more influential?

Mashable has more traffic and Twitter followers (2 million) than TechCrunch (1.3 million). Which blog is more influential?

The next time you encounter the word “influencer”, check the context in which it is being used, and ask yourselves which of the above is more important to you.

Tagged with: Influence

Is Windows Live Delivering What Google Buzz Promised?

On June 28, 2010, in Social Web, by Mahendra Palsule

While everyone has been dissecting the Google Me rumor, I’ve been taking a look at Microsoft’s Windows Live Wave 4. Here are a few key features with my thoughts on how they contrast with Google Buzz.

User Base ~300 million

Google tried to leverage its Gmail user base when it launched Buzz. What ensued was a privacy nightmare. Microsoft has had no such issues when leveraging its Instant Messaging user base.

Windows Messenger has a user base of 299 million, compared to Gmail’s 173 million. I also think that a greater proportion of Windows Messenger users will actively use its social features than the proportion of Gmail users who actively use Buzz.

Open Standards Support: Activity Streams

It’s difficult to read any Buzz propaganda without encountering the mention of Open Standards.

Windows Live uses Activity Streams-compliant feeds from Facebook, MySpace, and a dozen other partners.

Superior Privacy Settings

Read this post from the Inside Windows Live blog for a comprehensive look at the privacy options. Here are a couple of screenshots:

Windows Live Privacy Options

Windows Live Advanced Privacy Options

Not only are the options very granular to a deep level, they’re presented in a very intuitive, easy-to-understand fashion. If you customize your settings to an intricate level, you can also quickly view a Friend’s profile and see exactly what he will see from your updates.

Commitment to Data Portability

Microsoft, unlike Facebook, has unequivocally made it clear that you own your data.

…if you would like to access your Windows Live data from a different third party service, or even take your data completely to another service, you should be able to do that. To enable this, we give you ways to export your data from Windows Live into common formats, so that you can import it to wherever you like…

Developers and third-party applications can use Live ID for authentication, and use Public APIs for accessing public information.

Aggregating Other Social Networks & Web Services

At last count in Nov 2009, Windows Live had partnered with 74 services from around the web to pull in updates to your feed.

Windows Live Services

These include Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, and a plethora of services for video sharing, photo sharing, blogging, reviews, ratings, etc. Further, these are localized in 35 languages.

Ex-Friendfeeders have migrated in large numbers to Buzz. Surprisingly, Windows Live is more Friendfeeder-friendly than Buzz, at least at present.

The process for adding your profile from another service to Windows Live is extremely simple and easy-to-use, compared to the tortuous approach in Google Buzz.

Two-Way Integration with Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn

The Salmon protocol is not here yet, and we don’t know if Facebook and others will support it. What we do know is that you can interact with your Facebook feed from within Windows Live today.

Your status updates, photo uploads, etc. can be pushed to other networks such as Facebook, MySpace, and soon, LinkedIn as well. You can comment on your friends updates in those networks from within Windows Live.

Friends vs. Acquaintances

A nice little feature lets you perform a “reluctant accept” or a “polite decline” of friend requests.

Windows Live Polite Decline

Selecting the “Limit the access…” box lets me accept the friend request as an acquaintance who only sees the updates I set for All Friends, and not all my photos or contact information.

To me, this feature shows that Microsoft is “getting social” like nobody else today.

Mark People as Favorites

In any news feed, whether Facebook, Buzz, or Twitter, I wish there was a way to choose people whose updates I don’t want to miss. Windows Live allows you to do that.

Windows Live Favorites

Filters

Note the Highlights, Recent, etc. links in the above screenshot giving me quick access to key filters for my news feed.

One of the features much wanted in Buzz has been the ability to filter out updates based on the service imported – Twitter, Flickr, etc. Windows Live lets you do that today:

Windows Live Filter By Service

You can also set many other filters for what you wish to see in your news feed:

Windows Live Filters

See this post by Dare Obasanjo for more on how Windows Live is designed to reduce noise and focus on the signal.

Windows Live on iPhone

The free Windows Live Messenger iPhone app has chat, aggregated social feed, photo upload and email. Microsoft will have something better when Windows Phone 7 comes out later this year, but it’s noteworthy that they didn’t shun the iOS platform just because they have a rival mobile OS.

Closing Thoughts

Windows Live may not support as many open standards and protocols as Google Buzz does, but do end users really care? Windows Live doesn’t present an either-Facebook-or-Buzz dilemma, and doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel by building a network from the ground up. It leverages Messenger’s large user base without compromising on privacy and data portability. These can be important lessons for any Head of Social.

Most importantly, unlike Buzz, it keeps things simple, stupid!

Tagged with: buzz • windows live

PayPal Completes Online Payments Domination: Accepts Credit Cards

On June 26, 2010, in Social Web, by Mahendra Palsule

In a blog post largely unnoticed, PayPal announced that ‘Guest Payments’ are now live:

Guest Payments allows developers to collect credit card payments without requiring their customers to open a PayPal account, eliminating the complications merchants, developers and startups face in accepting credit cards.

Guest Payments are now part of its Adaptive Payments API and have been a much requested feature. Any app developer can now let users pay using their credit card, irrespective of whether the user has a PayPal account. This opens up the platform to virtually everyone as a buyer. PayPal

At the same time, Facebook – who partnered with PayPal for ads and credits – has started accepting PayPal for ad payments.

With the backing of an almost 500 million user social network and an ability to accept payments from users without an account, PayPal has further cemented its domination over the online payments space.

MasterCard and Visa are struggling to make some headway, but they may be too late to the party.

Tagged with: online payments • paypal

10 Questions for Google’s “Head of Social”

On May 11, 2010, in Social Web, by Mahendra Palsule

GigaOm reports that Google is looking to recruit a “Head of Social”. I welcome the move and present a few questions Google should be asking of its new hire:

In 2008 and 2009, we let people believe that iGoogle was our social platform. In 2010, we placed all our bets on Buzz. Is there any way we can integrate iGoogle and Buzz?
What should be Google’s ONE social homepage? iGoogle? Buzz? Profile Page?
What do we do with Google Friend Connect? We need an answer.
How do we leverage Google Social Graph API?
We added social sharing features as an afterthought to Google Reader. Later we invented Buzz. Now, Buzz largely consists of Google Reader shares, where you can easily comment and like them. Except that you can’t share from Buzz to other networks, like you can do in Reader.
We need clarity on how to move forward with these products so that there’s no overlap and distinct product roadmaps.
We realize that Facebook wouldn’t have grown to its present gigantic size without frivolous but sticky apps like quizzes and games. Stuff like this can be added as gadgets on iGoogle, but not on Buzz.
We need to consider where and how we can provide sticky apps that attract mainstream users.
How do we let developers monetize their apps for our social platform?
We have a millions of people using Orkut in Brazil and India. How do we consolidate these into the Buzz umbrella?
What incentive do we provide web publishers to use our social platform? Can we leverage our core search results page to highlight results from our social platform?
Facebook is a one-stop-shop for discussions (Buzz), photos (Picasa), videos (YouTube), friend network (Profiles/Orkut), and sharing (Reader). We are all over the place, with a different set of active users of each product. How do we consolidate all of them?

These questions may sound tough and embarrassing. I hope they’re not avoided, because Google is in a tough and embarrassing position. A blind-folded approach isn’t going to help. And we desperately need Google to challenge Facebook.

Tagged with: buzz • google • igoogle • orkut

Impartial Observations on Technology and the Social Web