Tag Archives: sharing

Fish Roasts Human: Don’t Read It, Share It

Common_goldfish2

Interestingly enough, though perhaps not surprisingly, people on social media share news stories rather than read them. At first glance this seems rather perplexing: after all, why would you tweet or re-tweet or like or share a news item before actually reading and understanding it?

Arnaud Legout co-author of a recent study, out of Columbia University and the French National Institute (Inria), tells us that “People form an opinion based on a summary, or summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.” More confusingly, he adds, “Our results show that sharing content and actually reading it are poorly correlated.”

Please take 8 seconds or more to mull over this last statement again:

Our results show that sharing content and actually reading it are poorly correlated.

Without doubt our new technological platforms and social media have upended traditional journalism. But, in light of this unnerving finding I have to wonder if this means the eventual and complete collapse of deep analytical, investigative journalism and the replacement of thoughtful reflection with “NationalEnquirerThink”.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into the findings, but it does seem that it is more important for social media users to bond with and seek affirmation from their followers than it is to be personally informed.

With average human attention span now down to 8 seconds I think our literary and contemplative future now seems to belong safely in the fins of our cousin, the goldfish (attention span, 9 seconds).

Learn more about Arnaud Legout’s disturbing study here.

Image: Common Goldfish. Courtesy: Wikipedia. Public Domain.

Life and Death: Sharing Startups

The great cycle of re-invention spawned by the Internet and mobile technologies continues apace. This time it’s the entrepreneurial businesses laying the foundation for the sharing economy — whether that be beds, room, clothes, tuition, bicycles or cars. A few succeed to become great new businesses; most fail.

From the WSJ:

A few high-profile “sharing-economy” startups are gaining quick traction with users, including those that let consumers rent apartments and homes like Airbnb Inc., or get car rides, such as Uber Technologies Inc.

Both Airbnb and Uber are valued in the billions of dollars, a sign that investors believe the segment is hot—and a big reason why more entrepreneurs are embracing the business model.

At MassChallenge, a Boston-based program to help early-stage entrepreneurs, about 9% of participants in 2013 were starting companies to connect consumers or businesses with products and services that would otherwise go unused. That compares with about 5% in 2010, for instance.

“We’re bullish on the sharing economy, and we’ll definitely make more investments in it,” said Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator in Mountain View, Calif., and one of Airbnb’s first investors.

Yet at least a few dozen sharing-economy startups have failed since 2012, including BlackJet, a Florida-based service that touted itself as the “Uber for jet travel,” and Tutorspree, a New York service dubbed the “Airbnb for tutors.” Most ran out of money, following struggles that ranged from difficulties building a critical mass of supply and demand, to higher-than-expected operating costs.

“We ended up being unable to consistently produce a level of demand on par with what we needed to scale rapidly,” said Aaron Harris, co-founder of Tutorspree, which launched in January 2011 and shuttered in August 2013.

“If you have to reacquire the customer every six months, they’ll forget you,” said Howard Morgan, co-founder of First Round Capital, which was an investor in BlackJet. “A private jet ride isn’t something you do every day. If you’re very wealthy, you have your own plane.” By comparison, he added that he recently used Uber’s ride-sharing service three times in one day.

Consider carpooling startup Ridejoy, for example. During its first year in 2011, its user base was growing by about 30% a month, with more than 25,000 riders and drivers signed up, and an estimated 10,000 rides completed, said Kalvin Wang, one of its three founders. But by the spring of 2013, Ridejoy, which had raised $1.3 million from early-stage investors like Freestyle Capital, was facing ferocious competition from free alternatives, such as carpooling forums on college websites.

Also, some riders could—and did—begin to sidestep the middleman. Many skipped paying its 10% transaction fee by handing their drivers cash instead of paying by credit card on Ridejoy’s website or mobile app. Others just didn’t get it, and even 25,000 users wasn’t sufficient to sustain the business. “You never really have enough inventory,” said Mr. Wang.

After it folded in the summer of 2013, Ridejoy returned about half of its funding to investors, according to Mr. Wang. Alexis Ohanian, an entrepreneur in Brooklyn, N.Y., who was an investor in Ridejoy, said it “could just be the timing or execution that was off.” He cited the success so far of Lyft Inc., the two-year-old San Francisco company that is valued at more than $700 million and offers a short-distance ride-sharing service. “It turned out the short rides are what the market really wanted,” Mr. Ohanian said.

One drawback is that because much of the revenue a sharing business generates goes directly back to the suppliers—of bedrooms, parking spots, vehicles or other “shared” assets—the underlying business may be continuously strapped for cash.

Read the entire article here.

Pre-Twittersphere Infectious Information

While our 21st century always-on media and information sharing circus pervades every nook and cranny of our daily lives, it is useful to note that pre-Twittersphere, ideas and information did get shared. Yes, useful news and even trivial memes did go viral back in the 18oos.

From Wired:

The story had everything — exotic locale, breathtaking engineering, Napoleon Bonaparte. No wonder the account of a lamplit flat-bottom boat journey through the Paris sewer
went viral after it was published — on May 23, 1860.

At least 15 American newspapers reprinted it, exposing tens of thousands of readers to the dank wonders of the French city’s “splendid system of sewerage.”

Twitter is faster and HuffPo more sophisticated, but the parasitic dynamics of networked media were fully functional in the 19th century. For proof, look no further than the Infectious Texts project, a collaboration of humanities scholars and computer scientists.

The project expects to launch by the end of the month. When it does, researchers and the public will be able to comb through widely reprinted texts identified by mining 41,829 issues of 132 newspapers from the Library of Congress. While this first stage focuses on texts from before the Civil War, the project eventually will include the later 19th century and expand to include magazines and other publications, says Ryan Cordell, an assistant professor of English at Northeastern University and a leader of the project.

Some of the stories were printed in 50 or more newspapers, each with thousands to tens of thousands of subscribers. The most popular of them most likely were read by hundreds of thousands of people, Cordell says. Most have been completely forgotten. “Almost none of those are texts that scholars have studied, or even knew existed,” he said.

The tech may have been less sophisticated, but some barriers to virality were low in the 1800s. Before modern copyright laws there were no legal or even cultural barriers to borrowing content, Cordell says. Newspapers borrowed freely. Large papers often had an “exchange editor” whose job it was to read through other papers and clip out interesting pieces. “They were sort of like BuzzFeed employees,” Cordell said.

Clips got sorted into drawers according to length; when the paper needed, say, a 3-inch piece to fill a gap, they’d pluck out a story of the appropriate length and publish it, often verbatim.

Fast forward a century and a half and many of these newspapers have been scanned and digitized. Northeastern computer scientist David Smith developed an algorithm that mines
this vast trove of text for reprinted items by hunting for clusters of five words that appear in the same sequence in multiple publications (Google uses a similar concept for its Ngram viewer).

The project is sponsored by the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern and the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Cordell says the main goal is to build a resource for other scholars, but he’s already capitalizing on it for his own research, using modern mapping and network analysis tools to explore how things went viral back then.

Counting page views from two centuries ago is anything but an exact science, but Cordell has used Census records to estimate how many people were living within a certain distance of where a particular piece was published and combined that with newspaper circulation data to estimate what fraction of the population would have seen it (a quarter to a third, for the most infectious texts, he says).

He’s also interested in mapping how the growth of the transcontinental railroad — and later the telegraph and wire services — changed the way information moved across the country. The animation below shows the spread of a single viral text, a poem by the Scottish poet Charles MacKay, overlaid on the developing railroad system. The one at the very bottom depicts how newspapers grew with the country from the colonial era to modern times, often expanding into a territory before the political boundaries had been drawn.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Courtesy of Ryan Cordell / Infectious texts project. Thicker lines indicate more content-sharing between 19th century newspapers.

You Are What You Share

The old maxim used to go something like, “you are what you eat”. Well, in the early 21st century it has been usurped by, “you are what you share online (knowingly or not)”.

[div class=attrib]From the Wall Street Journal:[end-div]

Not so long ago, there was a familiar product called software. It was sold in stores, in shrink-wrapped boxes. When you bought it, all that you gave away was your credit card number or a stack of bills.

Now there are “apps”—stylish, discrete chunks of software that live online or in your smartphone. To “buy” an app, all you have to do is click a button. Sometimes they cost a few dollars, but many apps are free, at least in monetary terms. You often pay in another way. Apps are gateways, and when you buy an app, there is a strong chance that you are supplying its developers with one of the most coveted commodities in today’s economy: personal data.

Some of the most widely used apps on Facebook—the games, quizzes and sharing services that define the social-networking site and give it such appeal—are gathering volumes of personal information.

A Wall Street Journal examination of 100 of the most popular Facebook apps found that some seek the email addresses, current location and sexual preference, among other details, not only of app users but also of their Facebook friends. One Yahoo service powered by Facebook requests access to a person’s religious and political leanings as a condition for using it. The popular Skype service for making online phone calls seeks the Facebook photos and birthdays of its users and their friends.

Yahoo and Skype say that they seek the information to customize their services for users and that they are committed to protecting privacy. “Data that is shared with Yahoo is managed carefully,” a Yahoo spokeswoman said.

The Journal also tested its own app, “WSJ Social,” which seeks data about users’ basic profile information and email and requests the ability to post an update when a user reads an article. A Journal spokeswoman says that the company asks only for information required to make the app work.

This appetite for personal data reflects a fundamental truth about Facebook and, by extension, the Internet economy as a whole: Facebook provides a free service that users pay for, in effect, by providing details about their lives, friendships, interests and activities. Facebook, in turn, uses that trove of information to attract advertisers, app makers and other business opportunities.

Up until a few years ago, such vast and easily accessible repositories of personal information were all but nonexistent. Their advent is driving a profound debate over the definition of privacy in an era when most people now carry information-transmitting devices with them all the time.

Capitalizing on personal data is a lucrative enterprise. Facebook is in the midst of planning for an initial public offering of its stock in May that could value the young company at more than $100 billion on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Facebook requires apps to ask permission before accessing a user’s personal details. However, a user’s friends aren’t notified if information about them is used by a friend’s app. An examination of the apps’ activities also suggests that Facebook occasionally isn’t enforcing its own rules on data privacy.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Facebook is watching and selling you. Courtesy of Daily Mail.[end-div]

The Adaptive Soundscape: Musak and the Social Network DJ

Recollect the piped “musak” that once played, and still plays, in many hotel elevators and public waiting rooms. Remember the perfectly designed mood music in restaurants and museums. Now, re-imagine the ambient soundscape dynamically customized for a space based on the music preferences of the people inhabiting that space. Well, there is a growing list of apps for that.

[div class=attrib]From Wired:[end-div]

This idea of having environments automatically reflect the predilections of those who inhabit them seems like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s already established fact, though not many people likely realize it yet.

Let me explain. You know how most of the music services we listen to these days “scrobble” what we hear to Facebook and/or Last.fm? Well, outside developers can access that information — with your permission, of course — in order to shape their software around your taste.

At the moment, most developers of Facebook-connected apps we’ve spoken with are able to mine your Likes (when you “like” something on Facebook) and profile information (when you add a band, book, movie, etc. as a favorite thing within your Facebook profile).

However, as we recently confirmed with a Facebook software developer (who was not speaking for Facebook at the time but as an independent developer in his free time), third-party software developers can also access your listening data — each song you’ve played in any Facebook-connected music service and possibly what your friends listened to as well. Video plays and news article reads are also counted, if those sources are connected to Facebook.

Don’t freak out — you have to give these apps permission to harvest this data. But once you do, they can start building their service using information about what you listened to in another service.

Right now, this is starting to happen in the world of software (if I listen to “We Ah Wi” by Javelin on MOG, Spotify can find out if I give them permission to do so). Soon, due to mobile devices’ locational awareness — also opt-in — these preferences will leech into the physical world.

I’m talking about the kids who used to sit around on the quad listening to that station. The more interesting option for mainstream users is music selections that automatically shift in response to the people in the room. The new DJs? Well, they will simply be the social butterflies who are most permissive with their personal information.

Here are some more apps for real-world locations that can adapt music based on the preferences of these social butterflies:

Crowdjuke: Winner of an MTV O Music Award for “best music hack,” this web app pulls the preferences of people who have RSVPed to an event and creates the perfect playlist for that group. Attendees can also add specific tracks using a mobile app or even text messaging from a “dumb” phone.

Automatic DJ: Talk about science fiction; this one lets people DJ a party merely by having their picture taken at it.

AudioVroom: This iPhone app (also with a new web version) makes a playlist that reflects two users’ tastes when they meet in real life. There’s no venue-specific version of this, but there could be (see also: Myxer).

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Elevator Music. A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong; Revised and Expanded Edition. Courtesy of the University of Michigan Press.[end-div]