User Centric design and identity with Beacon
Uno as Identity, Online, Social Networks
Nov|30|2007
Facebook Beacon has brought up a lot of issues - almost all bad of course.
What’s been happening with Identity 2.0 will hopefully solve this issue, and it also relates to personal information that other companies have. Jason from Bokardo started me on a thought process.
Personally, I have no problem with companies knowing my spending habits, but I want to know what spending habits they know. I want that to be transparent, and also changeable at any point. I want to have access to my user profile on Blockbuster (US example) and I want to know what data they are capturing. And this is for two reasons: I want to be able to see what dirt they have on me, and then I also want to be able to change that data so that Blockbuster can provide me with a better experience. In the case of movies, sometimes I rent only comedy’s, but I’m also actually interested in documentaries, specifically documentaries on street art and modern urban architecture and how public space facilitates discourse and society. But they don’t know that because they don’t stock it, and I’ve never browsed/searched for it because I know they don’t stock it. If I can tell them this somehow (I can mail them, but who does that? For all my services?) then perhaps they would start stocking these movies.
Back to user centric design
This is perfectly solvable with APML. What does APML do?
It’s great. Here’s what it does:
APML allows users to share their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between News Readers. The idea is to compress all forms of Attention Data into a portable file format containing a description of ranked user interests.
That is exciting. APML is nothing else than your own piece of market research, but the great part is that it sits with YOU. Not Truworths, Stuttafords, NIKE or Facebook. These services inevitably only have a limited view on your attention - they only track your interactions with their own products. NIKE has an APML file for you, but it’s only for you using their products. Facebook Beacon was an attempt to aggregate all of this, and they are in a very good position to do this - they already have a very good profile of you, and now they’re starting to gather market intel on you.
Marshall Kirkpatrick has a pretty good argument behind how Google botched this up with their new Feed Recommendations. Why do I think? Because I didn’t have access to that Attention Profile that they have on me. I’m sure they have VERY good algorithms etc, but at the end of the day, me reading icanhascheezburger.com daily, every single update, doesn’t really mean that lolcats are high on my attention list - it’s only that one blog. And I think only I can tell you that.
It’s got 1565 of my RSS subscriptions, thousands of Gmail messages (32k unread ones, in fact), several Google Custom Search Engines, my GCal life history, search history and more I’m sure - all tied to my Google Account and all it can give me is 20 new sources?
Basically, I want to be able to control that data and construct my OWN profile, and know which sites know what from me. At the moment these attention silos are not being centered around the user, they are being centered around services that a user uses. Woolworths has a different profile of me than NIKE does, which is sometimes good, but they aren’t cross selling properly.
Back to OpenID and OAuth
Principles behind OpenID and OAuth aim to solve this. OpenID allows me to login to all these sites using a single sign on (in a strict sense of the word). OAuth allows me to tell these sites what I want them to know about me. So, I sign in to Flickr and it asks a bunch of details from me. I have already filled in all these details on my OpenID server, http://unodewaal.identitu.de. I then point Flickr to my OpenID server, telling it, get the details there. I then get asked on my OpenID server: Hey, Flickr is asking for a whole bunch of data of yours, what do you want to tell it? Name, Surname, Email, Country, Time Zone (cos that’s always a hack), etc etc.
All this data is transferred with a click of a button. But not only that, I can then manage what info Flickr has of me, from my OpenID server (not sure if Identitu.de can do this yet).
We’re trying to do this with Utterbuzz. You will have multiple profiles, on multiple sites, all managed from a single interface. So, you join a network for online dating, that has a specific profile that you play up (you’re taller, healthier, leaner, increased your salary by 10x and your breast by 3x), but you don’t want any of that data to cross over to the school network that you’ve joined. But it’s still managed in a central profile. Ning has done a similar thing with their profile management - it’s basic (you can set different profile pics for different networks), but it’s an idea.
OAuth is the technology behind all of this for standardizing the authentication process. Listen to this podcast on Oauth with Larry Halff, Eran Hammer-Lahav and Chris Messina for more:
Three of the minds behind the Oauth initiative join us to tell us about this emerging “open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and web applications.”
Back to Facebook Beacon
I believe the Beacon experiment shows that users want this kind of transparency. They feel pissed off to know that Blockbuster and Starbucks might be sharing data via Facebook. But, if you knew what data they had, and you could control that data, would it be different? I believe it would. Every time I access Amazon, it asks me: “Hey Uno, I have no idea what books you like. Do you want to give me access to your APML data?” I say yes, and I flag my APML manager to “Always allow Amazon Access” so that I don’t have to do this all the time. I also say, “Only give Amazon access to this data, not the other. They don’t need to know that.”
When I browse Amazon they create a profile set for me, kept on their servers. I want that kept on my server, or at least have access to that file, because when I go over to Blockbuster, I can say: “Hey Blockbuster, I’ve been looking at these books, do you have any similar movies?” And Blockbuster spits them out. I then flag Blockbuster as: “No, I don’t want to give Blockbuster permanent access or allow them to keep my data” because I’ve heard that they resell data to spammers. Also, I don’t want to let all my friends now about the products I’ve bought, that option should sit with me.
At the end of the day Dave Winer says it best:
Long-term, however they both have problems because advertising is on its way to being obsolete. Facebook is just another step along the path. Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that’s good!
If Facebook Beacon went the way that OpenID is going then we would have better Attention Data and we would all be better off.
Google Maps mobile disappoints
Nov|29|2007
I’ve been checking out the Google Maps LBS feature on my mobile and I’m a tad bit let down.
Vodacom is launching The Grid soonish, and that also uses LBS to pinpoint your position. I haven’t been able to get either of these to work properly on my phone (Sony Ericsson M600i) but have played a bit. The Grid is a case study in bad user experience - although they are working on it and it seems like each iteration is getting a bit better.
While the new Maps feature is of course groundbreaking for the GoogleMaps app, it does leave one lacking. I can’t use any of my other apps with LBS. I want Opera to build this into their next release. Opera will then send my location (permission based of course) to the webservice.
That’ll be cool. I hope Android will be able to solve this.
Technorati Tags: mobile, maps, location, gpps, lbs, vodacom
New Updates to linkedIn
Nov|27|2007
Ooh, what’s this I spotted?
A new update to LinkedIn:
What does this show?
Is this on all the LinkedIn profiles?
It looks like LinkedIn is launching some kind of news clipping service
What metrics and analytics to track with Social Networks
Uno as Online, Products, Social Networks
Nov|27|2007
If you are community manager/owner, what kind of stats would you like to get from your community to measure growth and activity?
I’ve tried doing some research, but it’s difficult to find specifics.
Dave McClure has written a pretty cool summary on some aspects, saying that User engagement is a depth, not a Breadth, metric. What does he mean by that?
#Unique users or#Active users are a bad measure:
They don’t measure activity/interest and don’t tell you how active your network is.
Pageviews/User are good, but not great
Ajax wipes this metric out - you can have a high number of interactions on the same page.
Clicks count
How many times did people click on stuff on your site?
Now, I’m not thinking about metrics in the way that Dave is thinking about them. I want to know, as a community manager, how active are my users? So that this will make it possible for me to focus my efforts (do I need to offer incentives for interaction/different sections of the site)
I’ve figured there to be 2 types of stats, Fluid rates, and static rates. Growth rates are rates that would typically grow, as in user count, total time on site, etc. It’s only really User count that grows, and then anything up from there (as most are dependant on that)
Static stats are those that you’d want to keep constant, or as close to a variable as possible. Something like your Bounce rate for e.g. is something that you’d want to keep static and not grow (unless it’s downwards).
So some of the stats you might want to track:
Fluid
Unique Users
Sign ups
Page views/Unique (this is a difficult metric to grow - you’d ideally
want a LOT of page views, but realistically you should keep this low)
Avg Time/Session (Also something you want to grow, but something that is difficult to do)
Average logins/Week
Static rates
Bounce rate for Signups
Actions/Visit
Actions/Minute
Number of Referrals
Messages between Users
Comments between Users
My measurements are still a bit fuzzy, and there are overlaps between Static and Fluid, but it’s more or less what I’m thinking of.
Apart from these. What are the stats that you’d like to get from your user base? Imagine the Facebook Ads, but you can define the results.
Apart from the basics like Male/Female, Locations, etc, what are the other cool stats you’d like? Dead pages? Pages with high bounce rates?
Technorati Tags: social network, metrics, analytics
Daily blog reads
Nov|22|2007
In response to Charl sharing some of his daily blog reads, I’ll share some of mine as well.
I have few buckets or folders which have completely no relevance to the feeds that are in them. They were general folders that I setup ages ago and just haven’t gotten round to re-organising them. They are still relevant to some extent…
I’m not including any links… You can get that if you ask me… and I might send you the OPML file. I have 2 folders for
_Local and _Bloggers (the _ is so that they are at the top of my feeds list):
Plaxo Pulse Open Social Stats = Bullshit
Uno as Social Networks, Web2.0
Nov|20|2007
I was very pleasantly surprised to hear about the great success that Plaxo achieved with using OpenSocial.
The graph was testimony to great things.
It meant that Open Social was a success! And that if we adopt it in our social software that it would be just as a success as well.
In trawling through Alexa though, we can see this:
I’d like to know now, what does that drop off mean? They’re dropping off to nearly the exact same number that they were at. Sure, they got a hell of a lot of connections, but it doesn’t look as if those connections were sustainable, nor the traffic.
Technorati Tags: open social, plaxo, pulse
I also want my news on my terms (from Sunday Times)
Uno as Web2.0
Nov|9|2007
I just read Mike’s post on his news after I had sent a mail off to Sunday Times because they aren’t giving me news on my terms.
This is the mail I sent to them:
Hi there,I’ve recently subscribed to Sunday Times - my actual purpose is to receive The Times daily, but that’s besides the point.
I’ve had a lot of trouble with your delivery service. Initially, I didn’t receive any papers. Not a daily, and not a Sunday. I complainedand then I started receiving the Daily papers, but no Sunday. Icomplained again and then everything stopped - I haven’t receivedanything since (this was about 2 weeks ago).
This week sometime (I think on Tuesday) I got a letter from the post office telling me that I have a parcel that I can go pick up at the Green Point Post Office.Today I finally had some time to go around there and pick it up. I wasastonshed to find last weeks Sunday paper waiting for me, nicely bundled. Presumably this was because last week’s edition was a bumper 2KG’s worth of newspaper and it could not be delivered. I would have liked to read this. On Sunday. It is now Friday.
Would you be able to tell me what you presume my consumption habits tobe? I can tell you now that I don’t go down to the post office on Sunday mornings to stand in a queue and pick up my paper.
Please can you change whatever setting it is that makes my papers not reach me.
I live at:<Not getting that>
Here is a Google Maps screen shot for you:
<Not showing that>Please can you ensure that my papers get to me, because at the moment it is completely pointless for me to subscribe to The Sunday Times.
Thank you.
Mike, I think you’ll probably be irritated by the SMS’s. I know I would be. Why don’t you just check the WAP version of the sites when you have time?
Technorati Tags: sunday times, delivery, bad service
OpenSocial is like the pimply fat kid clubhouse
Uno as Web2.0
Nov|8|2007
Allen Stern has a great little summary of OpenSocial at the CenterNetworks blog.
Towards the end of the post he mentions something that most of those people playing with Open or Portable Social Networks (take note the capitals there) take notice of, and something that is often levelled as criticism against such a movement:
How many users really use multiple networks? Perhaps a smattering of geeks but mainstream? C’mon, let’s be real here.
Which is true… I’m not really entirely sure why OpenSocial would be so great for me… My network (social graph) is in Facebook. All my friends (who I would want to use my social apps with) are in Facebook. That Ning (”one of the biggest roll-your-own-network” services) supports OpenSocial means absolutely zip zero to me. I’m not on Ning. I don’t give a shit that Tagged and Hi5 supports OpenSocial. Are my friends there? Nopes, so neither am I.
And then this got me thinking about all the smaller networks… Facebook is still pretty massive. They’re huge and in my mind will eclipse most other networks in the not too distant future (I hear calls of fickle userbase etc…). In a way all the smaller networks taking a slice of the pie, Bebo, Tagged, Hi5 (all the Containers) are all fairly small in comparison (not only in user base, but also in tech scope - people don’t talk about Hi5 in the same way as they talk about Facebook - because Facebook is so much more damn innovative).
I get this distinct feeling that other networks are playing catchup and are trying desperately hard to piggyback on Facebook’s success - and they do this by rolling out a platform. Google just sponsored the Fat Kid Clubhouse. So all this equates to smaller networks (who have an inferiority complex either explicitly or implicitly) also being able to say “well we also have that”, while the bulk of the socialnet users saying “we don’t really give a shit cos Facebook already gives us all of that”.
I’ve written this out of the perspective of the way the bulk of my friends use the net - only Facebook and Google (if that lately…). I do actually use a little bit of Ning, Last.fm etc etc here and there. I think OpenSocial is a great step towards improving the web.
Technorati Tags: open social, facebook, google