Social Media

10 Apr 2010

FourSquare – Re-writing the Rules While Killer Application Remains Elusive

“Nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs.”
– Fran Lebowitz

I’m a believer that Location Based Services (LBS), coupled with the latest smartphones, will evolve a number of indispensible, and unexpected, killer applications.

That said, it’s pretty clear that those mission critical applications remain to be found. Essentially, the whole LBS opportunity, is a social experiment that early adopters are collaboratively helping to clarify.

It was with those thoughts in mind when I decided to start using some of the popular LBS social media applications, or should I say social games? These included FourSquare, Yelp and Gowalla.

Let me put this in context of other social media applications with which I’ve experimented. Back in 2007, I decided to try microblogging service Twitter, that was then in its infancy, I had low expectations. In fact, I expected to hate it, but mentally committed to give it a two week trial just for the purposes of self education. Over 3 years later, I’m still using it, love it and have found many applications which Twitter excels at – personal clipping service, early information and a sense of what my universe of followees is up to are among them.

FourSquare, although popular, hasn’t (yet) passed my personal usefulness test. And, I suspect most others still consider it more a game than a mission critical application. While there is an element of fun, it seems to be the sort of thing you could easily drop without much loss.

In that context, it surprises me that FourSquare recently pushed a new version (1.7.1) to my iPhone that checked my actual proximity to locations Since then, almost half of my check ins fail to pass this new proximity test, even though I was physically at the location in question. Below, I have re-posted my support request that gives more background.

But, suffice it to say, an application change that, on the surface, seemed sensible, made the application way less attractive to me. That’s doubly deadly in a space which is still finding it’s spot. I’m interested in comments on both the major issue (startups alienating early adopters) and even the specific issue.

I’m surprised the FourSquare has re-written the rules of an emerging LBS service without any notification. I am referring, of course, to the latest upgrade on my iPhone on which checkins deemed too distant from the intended location (by an undocumented and new algorithm) are suddenly deemed ineligible to accumulated points or badges. Because it is so fundamental, I’ve also decided to re-blog this as well, because it illustrates how the law of unintended consequenes can have a huge impact on a young service’s future prospect. Translation: this wasn’t a well thought out change in so many ways.

Why do I saw this? Here are just a few reasons:
1. For those of us who live in rural areas where cellular tower infrastructure is typically much more widely spaced (and often in the 850MHz band vs. the 1900 MHz band for broader coverage at lower densities), the inherent accuracy of locations reported by mobile devices is much lower. For example, at locations near to me, it is not uncommon to have the phone’s margin of error be as much as 4500 m to 6000 m. Although FourSquare doesn’t divulge their required closeness, I think it may be something like 500 m. With that in mind, it is almost by definition that most rural “check ins” will be, starting this week, flagged as ineligible. And, that’s the behaviour I’m seeing. Of course, in many instances GPS lowers this error, but it is surprising how many locations don’t have great GPS reception, such as indoors or in an automobile.
2. By changing the rules of the game on the fly, FourSquare has penalized those checking into locations that weren’t located that accurately in the first place – whether because of the reasons in #1 or because people weren’t told they had to define the location within a certain minimum delta of the actual location. For example, I suspect that people actually defined the location as they were walking toward the actual location, knowing that FourSquare didn’t care where the real actual location physically was. I find this behaviour in about 30-50% of the check ins I’m doing since the change.

FourSquare was an experiment for me, but given these new rules which appear to not have been well thought out for large swathes of geography, I’m considering shutting down my personal FourSquare use.. For something that still provides no direct utility, I really don’t want to have to go back to re-enter all locations information from scratch.

21 Mar 2009

Meeting Productivity: Central Planning Versus the Market

The 20th Century was defined by an ill-fated search for a better world, inspired by late 19th Century, Victorian thinking. The irony, then, is that the 20th Century turned out to be probably the most destructive in human history, based on often misguided applications of powerful new technologies.

If you define a utopian society as one where governments plan to have zero unemployment, stable economic growth and high personal well being, how have we done in planning for this world? Up to now, in a word, wretchedly.

A personal defining moment was when I journeyed behind the Berlin Wall to East Berlin in 1989. This was just before the Soviet Bloc, along with its vassal state the German Democratic Republic, spectacularly imploded on 9 November, 1989. While I had previously sympathized with the notion that a socialist government could plan to make the world a better place, the dismal comparison of the East and West that I saw then graphically disabused me, forever, of that notion. East Berlin was a drab, grey, unpainted city in which even the prominent public buildings still had 45 year old bullet holes from World War II.

Communism, coupled with its less extreme relation socialism, and fascism were the defining, centrally planned ideologies of the 20th Century. Then, everything was planned and and organized from the top down, from prime time television, to the Stalinist 5 year plan to the Nazi Thousand Year Reich. With that hopeless track record, will we ever figure out how to move closer to a utopian reality?

Today I will explore some of the innovations in our understanding that might lead to that end.The book Infotopia, by Cass R. Sunstein is a truly outstanding study of the power of democracy in decision making for our internet age. Rather counterintuitively, this insightful book presents a well-researched argument that in group decision making, Deliberation (or central planning) almost always produces inferior results to Democracy (the wisdom of many people, driven by markets, to reach the truth).

Some key insights are:

The Condorcet Jury Theorem, which says “that the probability of a correct answer by a majority of the group increases toward 100 per cent as the size of the group increases.”
Two key sources of failure by Deliberating groups are informational influences and social pressures, which might be paraphrased as browbeating and peer pressure, which among other things, tend to amplify, rather than remove, errors.
Polarization is a particular risk of digital media in which political (or other) views tend to be reinforced by people filtering out any information which contradicts their existing world view. Thus, rather than reaching consensus, digital technologies can make the right wingers more right wing and left wingers more left wing, leaving little middle ground.
Prediction Markets are a new paradigm which harness price signals of the market to help in decision making, based on the insight that people tend to make better decisions when price signals are involved.
The Web 2.0 trends of Wikis, Blog, and Open Source Software all provide great evidence for this new paradigm of the wisdom of the crowd which Sunstein has so ably analyzed.

This book should be mandatory reading for politicians, business leaders and anyone wanting to shape the world of the 21st Century. From how to conduct better meetings to how to make the world a better place, Infotopia provides a solid foundation of how to harness better decision making for the future.

6 Mar 2009

Fail To Understand the Net Generation at Your Peril

The Net Generation (born 1977 to 1997), also known as Generation Y or the Millennials, is an ill understood lot. Don Tapscott, noted thought leader on digital technologies, is a real cheerleader for them in his recent book Grown Up Digital.

However, while some of his examples may represent the bleeding edge thought leaders of this generation, almost everything he says is well reasoned and researched. I would suggest this book is a must read for the rest of us who will watch this demographically dynamic generation increasingly dominate all aspects of our society, including business, culture, education, politics and entertainment. Many of us are looking at this generation from the perspective of the previously dominant demographic group known as Baby Boomers or Boomers (born 1946-1964), also known as the TV Generation. I would note that already, the Net Generation outnumbers the Boomers.

Perhaps the defining characteristic of this group is that they are the first generation to have been immersed from birth in digital technologies, such as the internet, computers and online media. Because of this, they are sometimes labelled “digitals“, with others who find these technologies more challenging to even baffling being called “analogues”. The Digitals don’t even think about technology, it is just part of the landscape for them. Analogues, by contrast, either avoid it like latter day Luddites or struggle to keep up with the Net Geners.

I’m part of an interesting hybrid group of people who were born analogue but has adopted many of the digitals characteristics. In essence, people like me might be described as a digital immigrant. Consider my digital pedigree:

I first used computers at age 14, after being invited with a set of Math Contest winners to the University of Waterloo where I had the pleasure of using APL an early math-based timesharing system running on an IBM 360/44 . It is notable that, rather than learning the standard Fortran and programming on punch cards, I started programming using an IBM 2741, which is like an online IBM Selectric typewriter (typeball and all) connected via modem, with acoustic coupler, at 134.5 baud. Prior to this, I had read about computers and thought about them abstractly, but the plain truth is that computers were only accessible to a very small, privileged elite.
Recently, a friend sent me the directory listing of an old backup tape for the Honeywell 6050 TSS system which reminded me that I first used email in 1975. Yes, we even had mailbox and mbox files way back then. Of course, the email system only connected the almost 1000 users of this computer, yet barely two years later my friend Bill Pase then working at IP Sharp Associates, connected me into a truly global email system run by that pioneering firm. This is primarily of interest because many people I talk to assume that email began in the late 1990’s.
Around 1990, while CEO at MKS, I remember being at an X/Open meeting in Rome (where ironically, I ran into the self same Don Tapscott at the Capella Sistina of all places) we were working to develop many of the standards that would shape our modern, connected digital world. I vividly recall after hours discussions with other attendees about my misgivings about how an always-on, multi-media world would impact our overall quality of life. As you can imagine, Rome was a fantastic place to have that debate. Even more important, what was esoteric futuristic thinking 20 years ago has largely come true, for better or worse.

So, like Don Tapscott, having grown up with a constant backdrop of technology and really having been part of making this cultural form, I too am a cheerleader for this emergent generation. However, many others, the most famous being Mark Bauerlein, take a much dimmer view of this generation. His book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30) might well be the NetGen equivalent to Reefer Madness for the boomers. For me, this shows that many people totally misunderstand this talented generation. Sure, this generation has its flaws like any other, but like Don Tapscott, I’m pretty optimistic about it.

To give a taste of how fundamental, not to mention transformational, the Net Generation culture is, I list the 8 norms that Don Tapscott found and validated through his research. I would suggest that the following norms need to be underestand by the rest of society so that the generations can build bridges based on the strengths of each constituency. The alternative is to create a new generation gap based on misunderstandings, a neo-Luddite situation if you will.

Here are Don Tapscott’s 8 norms for the Net Generation:

Freedom: this generation demands the freedom to choose at work, in education and the marketplace. And, for them, freedom is so ingrained that it is not an option.
Cutomization: Growing up with computers and software, has made this the mashup generation. Everything from products to lifestyles can be customized. This generation is the living proof of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail phenomenon.
Scrutiny: Living in the epicentre of the blogosphere, twitterverse, SPAM and nonstop marketing, high levels of filtering and scrutiny are the only defence of a generation which has made separating the signal from the noise an artform.
Integrity: The laser beam clarity and transparency of an always-on, Google-indexed world has heightened this generation’s radar for anything that fails to ring true. When there is no place to hide, a lack of integrity becomes glaringly obvious with often severe consequences for people or companies who fail to understand this new reality.
Collaboration: A generation that grew up on group work and online games, now has adopted global collaboration and teamwork like never before. The Net Generation’s digital connectivity likely are another nail in the coffin for command and control organizational design not to mention one-way traditional education models.
Entertainment: Net Geners expect work to be fun and the line between work and play is much more blurry for this generation. This means that some of the pioneering approaches at the Googleplex, may well become mainstream in the coming years.
Speed: Among fellow computer geeks, many used to pride themselves on speed and belittle the slower blink rate of the old fashioned world. Net Geners have taken this to extreme in their always-on, instantaneous world, expecting immediate feedback on everything they do. This could well be one of the biggest intergenerational challenges.
Innovation: This is a generation of early adopters, living on the bleeding edge. Not content to have products and ideas pushed to them like 20th Century consumers, they push collaborative, user-generated approaches to even the products they consume.

In business, government or ordinary society, I think we ignore this tidal wave of new thinking totally at our own peril. The first step is to understand this generation. Then, and only then, can our generation harness the incredible energy, idealism, passion and drive to help us all build a better future.

Jim Balsillie Speaks to Laurier Students

17 Jan 2009

Choices, Choices – Sorting Out Social Media

“Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.” – Elbert Hubbard

Being an inveterate early adopter, and loving the fusion of new research and web reach coming from the innovation in social media (see Science Fairs, Social Media & Fads – The New Science for the 21st Century), I decided to seek help of the blogosphere to sort out the social media wheat from the chaff.

Mark Evans recent tweet about Tumblr, made me try out yet another social media property. It could be interesting, but only time will tell.

And yet, with so many out there, I never know which are going to have personal value to me and, even more important, have staying power in a very crowded market. One thing is clear, especially in these lean times for tech financing, and that is that there will be long term consolidation. Therefore, I’d like to seek your help in predicting the ultimate winners and losers, and so . . .

PLEASE CAST YOUR VOTE:

[poll id=”3″]

[poll id=”2″]

9 Apr 2008

Science Fairs, Social Media & Fads – The New Science for the 21st Century

Last week, my son Devin Howard (a Grade 12 student, pictured above) won a Gold Medal at Waterloo-Wellington Science and Engineering Fair, enabling him to go on to the Canada-Wide Science Fair, run by Youth Science Foundation, in May at the University of Ottawa.

His topic, for which he developed a computer model written in multi-agent, graphical modelling and simulation language called NetLogo, was to study the propagation of ideas such as fads or partisan political persuasion using some of the latest social graph theories. Last summer, at the acclaimed Shad Valley program at University of Calgary, he became interested in the topic of emergence. For those who are not familiar with this fascinating field, emergence can be defined as as “… the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.”

From that springboard, he became interested in the way fads and other changes propagate through society, especially illustrated by recent books like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. (An interesting footnote is that Gladwell, now based in New York City, grew up right around the corner in the small community of Elmira). Gladwell, a journalist by trade with a similar modus operandi to Don Tapscott, has done much to popularize a whole new area of science.

Devin’s project aimed to show how fads, political influence, religions and even diseases spread through society. Au courant terms such as tipping, connectors and mavens all arise from this new science which shows how a few key people can take a simple, and seemingly inconsequential idea or trend and turn it into a mass movement. As story-telling narrative it’s intoxicating, as a science it may well be one of the most exciting subject areas of this new century. And, beyond being a very proud father, I was struck by how much the area Devin chose to study sits right in the epicentre of our investment thesis at Verdexus.

Now, let’s drill a bit deeper to understand why this is so important. Malcolm Gladwell is a (very persuasive) popularizer of complicated and transformational ideas. By contrast, Duncan Watts, associate professor of Sociology at Columbia University and author of the 2003 book Six Degrees, is one of the academic pioneers who managed to fuse existing work in graph theory, psychology, sociology and physics into a new science of connectedness.

This new Science of Networks (covering social, biological and technological networks) is truly a post-millennial creation. In an age when we’ve moved beyond mere specialization, whole new research disciplines are synthesized from a set of discrete subject areas. Such fusion of formerly disparate knowlecdge areas is a key example of the Knowledge Integration referred to in Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat.

I can’t do justice to this field here, but to give a flavour, some key recent breakthroughs are:

Duncan Watts shows that the connectedness of most social networks isn’t a Nomal Distribution as might be intuitively supposed, but instead is a Scale-Free Network exhibiting a Power-Law Distribution. The significance of this is that a few key Connectors can make (or break) the ability of the network to take over. Watts points to the Matthew Effect in which “well-connected nodes are more likely to attract new links, while poorly connected nodes are disproportionately likely to remain poor.”
Furthermore, Watts describes Affiliation Networks, or “networks of overlapping cliques”. They are the new social networking version of clubs, but in scientific terms are Bipartite Networks, which are really fused version of networks of Actors and Groups.
lastly, the concept of Social Currency has really re-defined the notion of brand in this new science.

As I mentioned, I’m just skimming the surface, but the net takeaway that really excites me, is how new some of this fundamental science is. Although the origins of the field may go back 50 or 100 years, many key findings are still a mere 6 or 8 years old. Furthermore, my sense is that this field is just beginning.

To put this into context, I started working with one of the first peer-to-peer, social networked contact systems with Ottawa-based GoodContacts (now acquired by Reunion) back in 2001 and a full 18 months before Plaxo was launched. When later social networks like LinkedIn came along, I remember asking why we hadn’t taken that approach. But, the truth was, that much of the enabling science hadn’t yet been formalized.

With that in mind, in this day of Facebook, Social Branding, Twitter, and the new social conferencing from iotum, I suspect that we are just in an early generation (Beta test?) of the Social Networking Revolution. Therefore, for human interactions with friends, sales, politics, and entertainment, stay tuned for Social 2.0 and beyond. Remember, social networking is not just a fad of college students and teenagers, but a fundamentally different way to optimizing human and social interactions.