I’m back studying at Queen’s University, and last weekend was Homecoming. In recent years, Queen’s Homecoming has become an annual pilgrimage for Southern Ontario’s Net Gen. Thousands of them, from Ottawa to Windsor, descend on Kingston for a 24-hour party that begins with 9 AM pancake keggers and culminates with a booze-fuelled riot that sees hundreds arrested, dozens injured, and three years ago, a car flipped over and lit on fire.
A group of Kingston residents, fed up with students’ intolerable behavior and the inability of police and university administrators to stop it, have turned to transparency as a weapon. On Homecoming, and for the past month, members of SaveOurNeighborhood.ca have been patrolling Kingston’s student neighborhood to take pictures of young people committing debauchery and posting them online for the world to see.
Here’s the situation: you are at home watching your favorite television program and just as the scene ends you exclaim, “I KNEW that was going to happen!” Well if you ever wanted to put your powers of prediction to the test, then tvClickr is a great way to showcase your television smarts. As mentioned in my previous blog, tvClickr is a Facebook application that was developed by LiveHive Systems and it is based on the idea of NanoGaming.
As a competitive person I was intrigued by the idea that you could play against other viewers for points and prizes by answering questions about a live television show. Throughout the week I thought about testing tvClickr on a show that I was already familiar with (such as Greys Anatomy) but I decided that my review might be a little biased because I was already engaged by the show and not necessarily by the application. Instead, I opted for a show that I don’t normally watch to see if my attention waivered or if I stayed focused on the show. Enter the test subject: The Amazing Race. Read More »
Portal is my favorite videogame, it came out just about a year ago. For the uninitiated, the game is built around a new gameplay mechanic: portals. In a twist on the standard First Person Shooter (FPS), instead of having a bang-bang gun, you have a portal gun. It shoots two things, a blue portal and an orange portal. The portals form on any flat surface and anything that goes in one instantly comes out the other. Here’s the trailer:
Valve, the company who developed Portal, has a long history of openness with their games. With their first game, Half-Life, Valve released a Software Development Kit (SDK) that allowed amateur game designers to build their own games on top of the existing engine. Counter-Strike, arguably the most popular FPS game ever, was the result of a fan-made project built on top of the Half-Life engine. Valve ended up hiring the team behind Counter-Strike, and eventually made a sequel. Read More »
We all know the stories about 2-3 year olds playing Playhouse Disney on the computer with mom and dad. Just this weekend my 8 year old nephew and 10 year old niece showed me the websites they built on freewebs.com where they posted a few of their favorite games (it was great to see classic Pac-Man included!), as well as some cute quizzes and guest books to sign. So the question is not when do children start using the computer because I think we have more than enough proof that use of computers starts pretty early, but at what age should our children get social online? What messages do parents need to communicate to their kids? How good are the security policies on places like Facebook and MySpace AND are parents even aware of them?
When speaking with a few other GenX/Boomer parents this week it was interesting to hear that they were all aware of the dangers of letting their 12-15 year old children…especially their daughters on social networks, however not one of them could talk about the different security options on the sites. I was amazed that people that claimed to be very involved parents had not even visited the sites to see what they’re all about. Even if you “ban” a site from your home computer, do you think your kids aren’t logging on from their friends’ computers, or other places?
Look, I know there are crazies out there that take advantage of children online, but kids will get online one way or another so parents need to get involved sooner rather than later. As many internet safety sites state, in the end it all comes down to the time tested policy of open and honest communication with our children. Speaking to them about how the internet works, what is and is not appropriate behavior online and what concerns you have. Simply cutting off access or “spying” on your kids is not the answer. So, put away the PDAs and cell phones and have a straight forward talk to your kids. Am I preaching to the choir here? How do we reach those parents that are not electronically connected?
To those readers with pre-teen or teenage children please share your thoughts. What has worked/not worked for you?
For those interested, below is a small sample of the many internet safety sites available for both kids and parents:
Wired’s Threat Level has a story up about how researchers have created a facebook application that’s capable of delivering Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks using nothing more than a facebook application and its users. The application, Photo of the Day, is installed by users who want a daily photograph. When users load up the page/photo of the day, the application sends a server to a third-party server (the one being attacked) and requests a large file from it, usually a high resolution image. This high resolution image is silently downloaded to the user’s computer, and not displayed. The effect of this is that by simply using the application, users are draining bandwidth from some targetted server. If enough users are using the application in this way, the server could get overloaded with requests, and rendered inaccessible to the people who are actually trying to visit it. Read More »
At our June conference in Boston, CEO and founder of Legal OnRamp Paul Lippe started his presentation with a little pop quiz. Without stealing too much of his thunder, I thought I’d post one of the more interesting questions from his deck:
“Name a comprehensive information resource, written by random people and commentators all over the world (the #1 contributor was condemned as insane), that is only distributed online?”
I blogged earlier about how I was running out of space for contacts on LinkedIn. You see, after you have 500 contacts, the actual number is no longer listed on your profile — instead, it says 500+. I suppose this to discourage people that want to pester add people they don’t know. IMO, 499 looks like “wow, that guy is really networked”, where 501 looks like “wow, that guy is really needy.”
From now on, when I add people, my plan is to delete someone to make space for them, at least as long as I have people in my network that I don’t remember why they are there.
Another social networking “embarrassment of riches” program is the friend wheel. I’ve blogged before about how too many friends makes the wheel unreadable. They’ve addressed this by allowing customization. The wheel above only includes friends with whom I share at least two links. Not only does it make it readable, it is also richer as the single dot looked a little lonely. And, yes, Thusenth Dhavaloganathan, you can still easily find your name.
I wrote a few months ago about Facebook’s translation initiative launched to get Facebook translated into many, if not all, languages around the world. I was in a meeting with Don Tapscott the other day and he mentioned a talk he had with the top Facebook people who told him a bit more about their experience with the translating application so far.
They started with the Spanish translation which was finished in less than a month by about 1,500 volunteers – since then it’s had around 8,594 translators and 66,274 translations submitted. It has been so popular that Facebook has introduced translations for specific Spanish locales like Spain, Mexico, Chile and Venezuela…The German translation was next and took less than two weeks with around 2,000 contributors. The French translation of Facebook took a few days to complete and involved close to 10,000 people! A total of 67,445 translations have been submitted so far.
There are currently 63 languages open for translation on Facebook and they will be adding translation capability for languages that read from right-to-left such as Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew.
Now that’s pretty impressive, how much money and how much time do you think it would have taken if Facebook had hired a person, or even a team of people to translate their site into French or Spanish (let’s not even start thinking about 63 languages).
If your dog doesn’t already have a Doggyspace account it may be missing out. This site was launched in mid July and already has a big following. According to the site “Doggyspace is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who love dogs. People use Doggyspace to keep up with friends, upload funny dog videos, and to give their dogs their own cyber place.”
It’s a novel idea… A place for dogs and their owners to connect and interact. I checked out the site, and to be honest it seemed very sparse. I’m a dog lover and I’m not opposed to getting JD (best dog ever) his own page, but the site didn’t seem to offer much. There are very few features or networking tools to speak of. There are a few pics and videos: They were all about as exciting as Tylenol PM.
The idea isn’t bad but it is likely that they are just trying to capitalize off the success Myspace and Facebook have achieved.
Take a look at the site and let me know what you think. Does your best pal spike need his own page?
Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.
In case you missed it, you can catch last week’s roundup HERE. Friendly reminder: the Wikinomics Roundup has a nice new home on the left side of the page, under Regular Features.
If each person is their own brand, like my marketing professor says they are, then your online identity is a large, integral part of that brand. But how do you manage all of the content, yours or otherwise, that becomes attached to your name?
Take, for example, the other Brittany Creamer. She’s a blonde basketball player in a state several hundreds of miles north of the unathletic, brunette me. I was a little surprised, when logging in to Facebook one day a couple of years ago, to see pictures posted of me with blonde hair surrounded by foreign faces. Although quickly untagging these pictures resolved my mini identity crisis, how do you prevent and manage larger, more serious cases of mistaken identity?
Blogger Esther Dyson suggests the idea of curating your online identity in her blog in MIT’s Technology Review. She raises thought provoking questions about new complexities of personal identities that are less than private-say when your information is hosted on a platform or stored in a database. While she concluded that less vague and abstract user agreements and privacy settings are the quickest fix, I’m still a little skeptical. More specific user agreements could solve disputes about ads tailored to your interests, but I’m not sure how they could help manage user-generated content.
I use stringent limited profile settings on Facebook to prevent my colleagues from seeing my less-than-professional side. My work friends can’t see my wall (no offense!) because I can’t control what my friends post. With Facebook’s redesign, though, a person’s wall is now the page a viewer lands on when they click through to see that person’s profile. The content I created about myself is hidden in secondary tabs. So much for creating your own Facebook persona, now your friends do it for you. So what do my poor work friends see when they land on my new profile? My tight privacy settings now result in my profile looking like a barren desert.My solution? Well, I don’t have one yet. But I’m working on it.
My plan of last resort, should it come to that, will be to generate a fake identity and start all over. It only takes a click of the mouse.
Scrabulous has, of course, been removed from Facebook. It seems that Hasbro had some problem with EXACTLY copying Scrabble. Couldn’t they make the J worth 7 instead or something?
Anyway, since it was such a big hit (one of the most popular Facebook applications), its removal caused a fair amount of angst. See here, here, and here for the standard protest groups.
Well, it’s back! Wordscraper provides the Scrabulous experience…and it’s no longer an exact duplicate of Scrabble. There are some key differences…for example, the tiles are no longer square, they are round(ish).
Somehow, I think Hasbro might still find some similarities. Reminds me of a classic scene from a 80s movie where the proprietor of McDowell’s restaurant describes the differences between his establishment and the Golden Arches.
Look… me and the McDonald’s people got this little misunderstanding. See, they’re McDonald’s… I’m McDowell’s. They got the Golden Arches, mine is the Golden Arcs. They got the Big Mac, I got the Big Mick. We both got two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, but their buns have sesame seeds. My buns have no seeds.
In the spirit of a blatent pandering for comments healthy competition, the first person to identify the movie and tell which two future Academy Award winners appeared in cameos wins an audio version of Wikinomics narrated by the fabulous Alan Sklar.
Many enterprises are eager to take their first steps with Web 2.0 technologies. However, many of our [nGenera Insight’s] clients have cited legal as a major barrier to implementing these new technologies.
It’s understandable that lawyers would be leery of these services. Because these technologies are new, they are often not well understood and have negative perceptions attached. When professionals hear the term social networking they automatically think of Facebook and university students posting pictures from wild parties. But if you look a little deeper, the enterprise benefits to these types of technology are obvious. Not only are they more efficient in many ways (see Anthony William’s previous post of Wiki collaboration leads to happiness) they also help reduce costs.
Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review!In this week’s roundup, I will capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.
In case you missed it, you can catch last week’s roundup HERE. From now on the Wikinomics Roundup will have a nice new home on the left side of the page, under Regular Features. Come visit!
An article in today’s Financial Times describes how a private citizen has been ordered to pay £22,000 for starting a group called “Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?”
From the article:
In a legal ruling likely to send a chill through the -global social networking phenomenon of Facebook, a British businessman has been awarded £22,000 ($44,000) in damages from a former school friend who created a fake profile of him on the website.
Mathew Firsht brought the landmark libel action after coming across a Facebook group titled “Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?” as well as a profile containing false claims about his sexuality, religion and political views.
It is significant because: a) the defendent is a private citizen, not a newspaper or other entity that is typically held to a higher standard and b) there are thousands of groups like this on Facebook. Some are in good fun (see here for one about a childhood friend of mine), others get a little nasty (no example provided…see title of blog).
Is this a one time event? Will it vary by jurisdiction? How many lawsuits are currently underway?
If you logged onto Facebook this morning, you may have noticed the new interface that we wrote about a couple of weeks ago. What’s really exciting though, is what’s going on behind the scenes. A few months ago my colleague Alan wrote a paper called “Social Networks as Operating Systems,” in which he stated that:
“Social networks and Web 2.0 technologies herald a new collaborative platform that will be very different from our experience of the Web today. Social networks are destined to become the new “operating systems” (OS) of the collaborative Internet. User identities, attributes, and relationships are all pivotal assets for the networked applications within this new platform. End users, social networks, application providers, and technology vendors will face a looming battle over the ownership and use of these assets and indeed, the question of whether they can be “owned” at all.”
Well, Mark Z. and the Facebook team must have had the same idea, because on Wednesday the company announced that it would leveraging the relationship and identity assets on Facebook to build a very operating system-like hub for all applications on the Web. They are calling the initiative Facebook Connect. According to the company:
“Facebook Connect is part of the next iteration of Facebook Platform and allows users to ‘connect’ their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any website. Third party websites will be able to implement and offer more features of Facebook Platform to make their own site more social.”
If you’ve ever been to a Blue Jays game, you may have heard of the Ice Cold Beer Guy. For seven seasons, beer vendor Wayne McMahon has been walking the isles of Toronto SkyDome Rogers Centre with a signature call “ICE … COOOOOOLD … BEEEEEEEEEER” that has earned him local fame, Facebook fan sites, and a presence on YouTube.
Last week he was fired by concession company Aramark for not checking the ID of a 22-year-old “mystery shopper.” (The legal drinking age is 19, but apparently he is supposed to check the ID of anyone who looks under 30.)
In response, unhappy fans have joined forces on Facebook to demand that he be rehired. The Official Bring Back Wayne Facebook Group has grown from 2500 members on Wednesday, to 9000 on Friday, to almost 15 000 today. The momentum is just picking up. And now, if you search for Aramark on Facebook, Bring Back Wayne is the number one result.
In the last 20 some odd years corporate security has made some headway. Companies are now at the point where they are reasonably efficient at keeping ‘hackers’ out and letting employees in. The problem is that to get to this point the enterprise has had to put up walls in the name of safety and security, but at the cost of functionality and logic.
The current Jericho model of security (fitting name) is great a putting up impermeable walls to keep to dangers outside at bay, but not so at quickly adapting and reconfiguring them. Even inside the walls of the enterprise security has largely been based on group permission. Which is just a step up from the one size fits all XXXL t-shirts that get blasted out of an air gun at sporting events.
The problem is that organizations today need to be agile, reconfigurable, be able to leverage partners and third party expertise. Unfortunately to operate in this new environment security and permissions need to be dynamic and flexible both internally and externally. To become a next generation enterprise it will be increasingly important to both empower and trust employees when it comes to information and security decisions. Read More »
Most of us use popular social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter for staying in touch with friends and meeting new people, but have you ever heard of someone using one of these sites to free someone from jail?
That’s exactly what happened here. A photographer, James Karl Buck, and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were jailed in Egypt back in April. Buck used his cell phone to post the message “Arrested” on Twitter. Within a day, his school hired an attourney, and Buck was released. However, his translator was detained for an additional 3 months. Buck again went to his Twitter network, now with over 570 followers, for help in getting his translator freed. Over 900 signed an online petition which was used to free Maree.
Whoever thought the power of Web 2.0 could have an impact like this? Web 2.0 enables people to get the word out about a certain issue or topic that needs exposure. My colleague Komail Mithani wrote an entry earlier this week on how Web 2.0 enables people to have their voices heard in regards to customer service issues.
Freeing people from jail via a social networking site or other Web 2.0 technology may not be something one can expect to increase in occurrence in the future but I do foresee more and more interesting and unique uses of Web 2.0. What are some ways you’ve used a Web 2.0 technology for a unique purpose or goal?
A friend of mine informed me that you can check out the new facebook profile layout early (but you need to install the developer application to see it) — it goes live on the 17th of this month. In case you don’t want to install the application to check it out for yourself, here’s a screenshot:
I would actually go so far as to say that the screenshot and cropping job that I did actually makes it look a lot better than it does in your browser. If you don’t check it out now, you’ll see it when it goes live in a couple of weeks. My concerns are chiefly that things aren’t where you’d expect that they are, and wherever you do find them, they’re ugly.
The issue is that this new design doesn’t agree with existing user habits, and therefore gets in the way of simply using the platform. There’s quote that says that technology is anything that doesn’t quite work yet, it seems that the current version of facebook simply worked in so many ways that it ceased to be technological and was just useful. My concern is that this new layout will push the platform back into the domain of technology for its users, resulting in much frustration and many loud complaints.
Technology and the US election I've written several times about the impact of social networks on this year's US Presidential election - see here and here. And let's be honest, the use of such networks and new web 2.0 technologies has been dominated by Obama. He’s embraced social networks like no other candidate in an attempt to connect with [...]
