Google reader set to abuse more of your Attention Data

Cross Post from the Engagd Blog:


The recent leak of Google's plans for its Google Reader product are interesting. Particularly the following point:

Very soon, Google Reader will recommend feeds to the user, based on previous subscriptions and other Google activity.

Every day, more and more applications - particularly Google Apps - are starting to use and abuse your Attention Data.

This is a growing concern that I have been tracking for some time.

From that previous post:

Are you so willing to give up your rights so easily? You are, in effect, saying that you are happy for Google to absorb all your personal data - your digital identity (incidentally your digital identity is quickly becoming a large proportion of your overall identity) - and you're going to TRUST them to be completely benevolent about it? Forever?

You want no leverage? None? You don't want any accountability? Ownership? Mobility? Economy? Transparency? Because while I love Google as much as the next person - they are not transparent. And they do not respect your Attention rights.

This brings me to my next point. Economy implies that something (property) has value (in this case your Attention Data and Attention Profile). It also implies that you can transfer your property (and its value). You can sell it and leveraged and do all sorts of fancy things. It also requires multiple participants in an ecosystem.

So to dig deeper into Sam's original question "Is Google Building the Attention Economy?" the answer is no.

Google is not building the Attention Economy. They are using their huge surface area to try to grab as much of your Attention Data as possible to target and sell ads on TV, Radio, Web and Print. They are increasingly becoming an 'Attention Aware Advertising Company'.

Another key question now is, if you have an application that displays RSS/ATOM, do you have a Personal Relevancy/Attention Data strategy? If not, your software will quickly become obsolete.

Join the APML workgroup and add Engagd functionality to your feed reader today (as others are) to make sure your feed reading efforts remain relevant (pun intended).

Data Portability, User Rights and Best Practices

Following on from yesterday's post about the User Bill of Rights...

All the issues are converging. The commentators are pushing for their rights. The innovators are building the pieces (Microformats, APML, OpenID etc). All that's left is for the aggitators to force the issue.

Chris Messina is my hero. Read his latest post about the bill of rights and the issue of user ownership and control of their user data.

He writes:

In any case, if we’re to make progress on this topic, we also have to understand a) why this kind of portability hasn’t been embraced heretofore and b) how it has been hindered.

[...]

I alluded to this earlier, but according to danah boyd, there’s a lot of people who seem really to not mind leaving their profiles (and “internet friends”) behind when they jump sites or — heck — forget their passwords and have to start all over. Is the problem as bad as we, the prolific social networkers with “inhibited manifest destinies”, seem to think it is? Or is this just a problem with the early adopters who have thousands of friends that they seem to think to want to cart around everywhere while they increasingly find themselves with ever-diminishing amounts of time to even “play” social network anymore?

Ah, humbug.

Social Bill of Rights - Media 2.0 Best Practices

A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web Authored by Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington has just been announced. Read it here.

It is an evolution of ongoing discussions that have been happening around the web for some time now and it's a welcome encapsulation.

I would agree with some of the commenters, however, that the scope needs to be a little broader.

I proposed something similar to the Media 2.0 Workgroup back on March 13 2007. Here is the email.

To: media2@faradaymedia.com
Date: Mar 13, 2007 2:31 PM
Subject: A project for the Media 2.0 Workgroup. Please send your thoughts

I'd like to propose a project for us all... something that will benefit the community and get a good discussion going. I look forward to your feedback!

This idea has come about due to a number of contributing factors. Many of you have expressed a desire to launch a project to focus our energy on something practical and useful to the community and through a series of discussions with Marianne, Jeremiah, Daniela and Ben here is my take on a great project we can take on together.

Media 2.0 Best Practices

Goal

To give emerging media platforms and participants an evolving set of 'Best Practices' to help encourage (or at least help define) open, democratic and transparent interaction. Further, to help participants who wish to engage with those platforms to know, at a glance, which aspects of the best practices they can reasonably expect to be applied to their experience there.

What's it look like?

I think that this could take the form of a Wiki and a Creative Commons style opt in process whereby we collectively define a set of 'pillars' and social media platforms can ascribe to the pillars they choose.

I think that the workgroup should be responsible for writing the initial version of this Wiki and then moderating it once it becomes public.

Some topics off the top of my head:

1. Ethics

a. Disclosure (sidebar vs inside the content)

2. Participation:

a. Allow comments

b. Moderation

c. Allow Trackbacks

3. Syndication

a. Allow RSS

b. Full feeds

c. Creative Commons

4. Marketing

a. Spam Vs. Contribution

b. Pinko Marketing

5. Privacy

6. Ownership

a. Export of Participant Created content and metadata via open standards

7. Revenue

a. Revenue share with participants

8. DRM

Can you think of any more?

We can then provide a Badge that site operators can add to their site (much like the CC badge) that indicates their level of (optional) commitment to each pillar.

I think we are collectively uniquely placed to do such a thing.

What is everyone's thoughts?

Cheers,

Chris

Whatever shape or form the rights take, however, I'd like to re-dedicate ourselves (Faraday Media and its products) to enabling user control of their personal information.

We are, of course doing this with APML (Attention Profiling Markup Language) and Engagd.com - the first open-standards based Attention Platform.

Ross Mayfield is asking for Particls

Ross Mayfield, Co-founder and CEO of SocialText, is asking for:

"There is a new kind of aggregator, for more real time attention, that needs to be build to work across status services. I'm not sure if it will be built into existing news aggregators, if existing status clients will evolve into them, or it will be something new. I just know it is coming. It will leverage status service providers and Lifestreaming you find in services like Dandelife and Jaiku."

He just described Particls.

An always-on flowing river of updates in a neat little sidebar - powered by RSS.

Emerging Social Fatigue

My friend Marianne Richmond has pointed me to a great video by Jeffrey Sass and a post by Jeff Pulver.

The video is a great little parody of the information and social deluge we are all experiencing trying to keep up with the million social graphs and applications we are participating in.

Jeff writes:

As real-time social media continues to evolve, I will know where my friends are, what they're facing, if and when they need help, when they have discovered something interesting and many other things they care to share at any moment. The people in my social media communications circle represent a group of people I feel much closer to than some other people whom I've known for a long time but never really have gotten to know. Sort of the difference between a well developed character in a novel as compared to someone whose character never gets really developed.

The parody video is supposed to highlight, however, the lack of scalability for all these social interactions. The mainstream will never participate in all these platforms at the same time. They will likely choose a few key apps and stick to them.

The key, however, is to make sure that our Social Graph is portable and our AttentStreams are syndicated.

As Jeff writes:

Over time this experience will only get better as the current high "signal to noise ratio" problems that many of us experience get solved with the advent of widely available social media filtering tools which will be able to be applied against the people/topics that matter the most to us.

A filtered stream of notifications is exactly what we need. Thank heavens for my Particls sidebar.

Facebook is using your data to target ads at you

According to the Wall Street Journal online Facebook is designing an ad system to use their extensive knowledge of its users to target advertising to them.

This move is hardly unexpected. Chances are many sites across many usage models are considering and implementing the same thing.

The WSJ writes:

Next year, Facebook hopes to expand on the service, one person says, using algorithms to learn how receptive a person might be to an ad based on readily available information about activities and interests of not just a user but also his friends -- even if the user hasn't explicitly expressed interest in a given topic. Facebook could then target ads accordingly.

The question, however, is how long users are going to accept having their information harvested and leveraged in this way - the very heart of the Attention Economy - without demanding portability and transparency.

The WSJ article continues:

While Facebook plans to protect its users' privacy and possibly give them an option to keep certain information completely private, some Facebook users might rebel against the use of their personal information for the company's gain.

And the perceptions that targeted ads create can be as much of a problem as the reality. "Most people don't realize how targeting works; it becomes so good that even though it's anonymous, you feel like they know you," says Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Publicis Groupe-owned consulting firm Denuo Group. However, he says Facebook needs to be careful in implementing any targeted ad system, lest loyal users "find it creepy."

This is key. Maintaining privacy is just a subset of giving users control. Control must include portability and transparency.

Using export/import formats like APML would soften the impact of privacy/control concerns. The problem is that walled gardens like Facebook (and yes - it is a walled garden) think that they need to lock users in in order to maintain their unique value.

The truth is, however, that unless Facebook begins to adopt more standards and open up its platform for export, it will be usurped by the first medium-scale network to do so. Don't believe me? Remember that little network Facebook that blew Myspace & Linkedin up by opening up just a little?

Let's hope that Facebook considers taking some measures before rolling out their new ad system.

From Interruption to Engagement

This is a great little article about moving from 'Trade'marks to 'Love'marks. Brands that create compelling products that don't necessarily help users know more - but rather feel more. The best part is as follows:

"The Attention Economy has become the Attraction Economy. We’ve gone from Interruption to Engagement; Reactive to Interactive; Return on Investment to Return on Involvement; Heavy Users to Inspirational Consumers; Big Promises to Intimate Gestures; and from Consumers to People. "

APML Conversation heats up

The APML conversation is heating up. The launch of Engagd.com has kicked it into high gear and bloggers are catching onto the idea of creating APML files to make their Attention Profiles portable.

Chris Abraham has posted a piece over on Marketing Conversations. He writes...

An APML is meta-meta. It doesn't care too much about your subscriptions (the Particls software allows you to import an OPML file to start) but it does care about how you interact with the blogosphere implicitly. It is a little like OPML + eHarmony.

Over time, your APML might mirror your true love interests and tastes. Your APML might know you better than your spouse! Than your very own sweet mother, even. To say nothing of yourself. You can become your very own market researcher, your own auto-pollster. Potentially, suggested Chris, people can meet and greet based on their APML.

...a great attention driven reader should make you feel like you need a tinfoil hat to protect you from its accurate mind reading powers. If folks can figure out how to truly leverage the APML, then this might just well become a reality.

Janet Johnson has responded to Chris' post with her own "I'm taking my Attention with me..." write-up. She writes:

I've often wished I could use my "Janet, we have book recommendations for you here…" information from Amazon elsewhere online. Apparently, (with thanks to
the heads up from the folks over at Marketing Conversation) now I can.

The Faraday Media team are happy to see that references to APML, Engagd and Particls are a daily occurrence now. We are glad that our work, and the work of the APML Workgroup is striking a cord with the community.

Social Network Portability - Continued

Mashable and Dave Winer are also talking about Social Network Portability and unlocking data silos.

Dave says:

Then vendors who have been on the right side of this issue will be the heroes.

It happened with copy protection, a similar issue to data lock-in. One vendor with a very popular product took the lead in challenging the more established companies. Borland, with Sidekick, was the product that broke the dam. Users wised up and refused to buy products that were copy protected. It could happen again.

I am so glad this issue is finally getting some traction. As I have said many times on this blog - while Facebook has gone some way to letting apps in, they are still far from allowing data and users out.

As reported, some very smart people are working on the problem. And of course there is APML.

Social Network Portability

I have just posted two posts on the new Engagd blog about Social Network Portability and Digging Deeper into Attention Data Remixing.

Worth a read for those interested in the technical aspects of Attention and Data portability.

Opening up Attention Silos

Alex Iskold over on Read/Write web writes once again about the Attention Economy. He eloquently describes the state of proprietary Attention silos and the need for open standards and APIs for capturing and remixing Attention Data and profiles.

He rightly points out that APML could be a key driver to bringing about a more open and transparent ecosystem.

The APML Workgroup is still growing and the first round of APML supported apps are now well underway starting with Particls, then with Engagd and with Dandelife, Cluztr and iStalkr (using the Engagd API).

Read his post to learn more.

Announcing: The new Particls Sidebar

Announcing the all new Particls Sidebar.



The new Particls Sidebar is your personalized, streaming view of everything that matters to you online.

It's real-time. It's animated. It's social. It's always there, keeping you informed.

It can also be set to "Auto-hide" so that it takes up less space while keeping users informed.

It is now the default output adapter for Particls. It joins the Ticker (now disabled by default) and Popup Alerts as part of the bundled set of adapters.

Nick Hodge, a Professional Geek at Microsoft says "I think Particls just changed my life. I've replaced my Microsoft Windows Vista Sidebar with this new version of Particls. Having Particls watch the web for me keeps me on-the-ball, more than caffeine. Well, almost."

Experience your news, alerts and updates like never before. Subscribe to your feeds, type in your interests and watch them stream in like a slick river of news.

Got a better idea? Write your own output adapter. Particls is the best Alerts and Attention Management Platform around.

Coverage

Coverage has already started...

• Mashable
• Techcrunch
• Nick Hodge

More chatter about Particls

A whole set of blog posts have sprung up last couple of days about the need for a tool like Particls.

Alex Iskold on RWW writes:

"We need a tool, an assistant, that understands our processes, understands what we are doing, when we change tasks and when we finish them. It needs to be with us everywhere - on and off line and on the go. As much as possible, this tool needs to help us juggle our tasks and restore the context, recall and store information and make our life easier for us. This is not Artificial Intelligence, this is basically a glue for all the things that we are trying to juggle and ways we are trying to juggle them."

In response a number of others have chimed in:

• A rash of good writing
• Moving toward machine processing---the certain destiny of web evolution
• Continuous Partial Attention

This is exactly the goal of Particls. We are not quite there yet - but it's certainly a worthy goal.

Steve Rubel says we are all monkeys

Steve Rubel is calling us all Monkeys on Treadmills.

He writes:

"Lately I have been thinking a lot about channels. Every day it seems there's a hot new Web 2.0 site that captures our attention.

We're a million monkeys running on treadmills, chasing the latest banana. Myself included! The breathing apparatus in the photo above reminds me of my Google Reader stream!

...

Surely, channels are where the action is at. However, it's important to remember they are just that - and they change. Circa 1998, perhaps when many of you were 10, The Globe.com, GeoCities and Tripod were all the rage. They faded from our horizon over time. The same thing will happen to many of today's hot sites. In fact, I advise marketers not to invest too much time in creating "a Facebook strategy" as much as they don't have "an NBC strategy" or "a New York Times strategy." Instead, I encourage them to people watch, learn and then plan based on their audience and the big picture."

It's funny that as soon as MySpace has lost the spotlight and people have given up developing stuff for it in a mad rush to Facebook that Steve/Edelman (who consult to Myspace) have started to downplay the importance of any given platform or ecosystem.

I don't disagree with the basic premise that Facebook is just a tool and tools come and go, but calling everyone monkeys and downplaying the Facebook strategy is a little hypocritical.

I've made my dislike of Myspace clear. Not only does it foster a lot of garbage interactions, it does business through FUD and tries to choke off the air supply of developers/companies who are trying to add value.

This is all changing now of course. Facebook's platform strategy has forced a change in direction for Youtube. The only question now is why their advisors didn't suggest doing it earlier. And why are they downplaying it now. Or if they did, why didn't they listen.

Facebook's platform play is a better approach - but it is still not really open. However even their small glimmer of openess was enough to attract massive attention.

As I've written before, Rupert Murdoch (The man in charge at Fox, Owners of Myspace) will have to learn that 'the Network' is the Internet, not the Fox Network.

Michael Arrington doesn't get Personal Relevancy

Mark Lewis has written a piece over on Cnet about the need to flip the information delivery model. He writes:

"Web 2.0 flips the information delivery model upside down--it's now about global access, and information at your fingertips, aggregated from sources that you don't even necessarily know about, or care where they exist. Based on a set of search criteria, information in all its rich forms--media, video, audio, images, documents, text--all will be assembled together in context and delivered to users and applications for real-time experience."

That's a very poetic way of saying that in an age of hyper-choice, the most important challenge is to move beyond 'What's popular' toward what's 'Personally Relevant'.

I happen to also agree with Mark's suggested implementation - Source agnostic aggregation filtered by persistent search (and Attention Profiling) and delivered in real-time.

We call it Particls.

With the announcement of Streamy and Thoof, however, Michael Arrington over on Techcrunch has declared that Personalized news is pointless and will never work.

He's felt that way for a long time. I know... because he told me so while we were playing poker. A number of other people have suggested the same thing to me as well.

However, there are two things those people don't understand.

1. Particls is not about Personalized News, it is about Personalized Alerting. We use the personalization part to rank content and determine how urgent the alert is for each user on an individualized basis.
   
   Thoof, Streamy and others are doing a very different (and worthwhile) job - and they are all potential partners of ours. We wish them the best of luck.
   
   
2. Just because something has not worked before does not mean it is not worth doing again and again until it's done right. There is a place for popular, social news experiences (as Digg's popularity has proved) and there is a place for targeted, personal and solitary news experiences (as Digg's trolls and pop-culture content has proved).

Analogies and Metaphors: Marc Canter's vision of the open social network

I have been reading a lot of Marc Canter's thoughts on open social networks recently - they mirror my own when thinking about the current rush to Facebook and the recent huge funding round for Ning.

I have also been thinking about Analogies and Metaphors and how they help clarify, crystallize and convey ideas so elegantly sometimes. Sometimes you can summarize lots of concepts very simply with a well thought out analogy. So I have decided to try to use them more.

So here is my first attempt (be gentle)...

Facebook (and other social networks) are like shopping centers. Independent business owners set up shop and sell you their products and services while the shopping center itself attracts the foot traffic.

However these shopping centers are not like real shopping centers. They let invite people in and you can form friendships while you are there, but they won't let you leave together. They remember every purchase you make, but they wont give you a receipt. They sell you plenty of stuff, but those things don't have any value as soon as you leave. These shopping centers want to lock the doors and trap you inside - they don't want you to go home.

They don't want you to go to that little corner store. If you do, you can't take any of your friends with you. Once you go into these shopping centers and spend time with your friends, form great friendships and 'buy' stuff, they think they own you, your stuff and your relationships.

Facebook should be more like real shopping centers. They are nice to visit. You can take your friends in, you can leave with your relationships intact and your purchases in hand.

Do you have a better Analogy (wouldn't be hard)? Post it in the comments...

Brand Monitoring with Particls

The issue of Brand Monitoring is one of those things that is super important, but super hard to get a grasp on. There are tools that measure influence like BuzzLogic and others that let you search for blog posts like Google Blogsearch and Technorati, but a tool that monitors the conversation and alerts you in real-time seems to be hard to come by.

Recently, more and more people are talking about Yahoo! Pipes for brand monitoring. It's not a bad idea. Pipes is a great tool for assembling complicated RSS pipelines and could, with quite a bit of work and understanding, be used to get a pretty good brand monitor going.

Or you could use Particls. Particls is like a Yahoo Pipe dedicated to monitoring topics of interest. Your brand is definitely of interest. So is your high profile/visible staff, and your competitors, and their products, and your suppliers, and their brands.

You want to know everything about everything related to your business so you can react quickly and decisively.

Manufacturers, VCs, Lawyers, Retailers, Startups - you name it. Brand and Business Monitoring is critical.

So don't just think of Particls as your solution for the latest Paris Hilton news - it can also get you the latest M&A news - right along side Flickr photos from your kids.

We actually use Particls to monitor news and chatter about Particls. Many people are actually surprised at how quickly we respond to blog posts and tweets as a result.

The Facebook AttentStream

The image below is a screenshot of my facebook News Feed. It is basically my Facebook AttentStream. Mix in posts from your RSS reading list and the LifeStream of your friends who don't live on FaceBook and you're done.

The Facebook News Feed, to me, is one of their most impressive innovations. Among many things it encourages viral swarming of friends to given activities, applications and groups. I wish more applications provided one.

The goal of Particls: To provide an interface into which the status changes of your friends co-exist with the news headlines you care about in a unified, ranked and filtered river of news.

All we need now is an RSS feed of your Facebook News Feed.

Increasing 'Time Spent' and site revenue with Particls

A post on slashdot covers the Buzzmetrics/Neilson news that:

"...news that one of the largest Net measurement companies, Nielsen/NetRatings, is about to abandon page views as its primary metric for comparing sites. Instead the
company will use total time spent on a site. The article notes, "This is likely to affect Google's ranking because while users visit the site often, they don't usually spend much time there."

Pageviews have been barely useful for quite some time now. As a result, many (including myself with a proposal for AttentStreams and AudientStreams) have called for a change in standard measurements. Compete.com has even moved to their definition of 'Attention'.

While Time Spent is a little more useful, it is not perfect. For example it does not factor out people who leave pages open in tabs and does not indicate a level of actual interactivity with the page/content/service.

Interestingly though, Particls (the application not the website) has an enormous time-spent value. We average more than 7 hours per user per day of time spent because the application is designed to persist in front of users all day (in the form of a news ticker - and soon - some other interesting presentation styles).

As a result, our publisher partners who distribute white label versions of Particls are experiencing huge jumps in their overall time-spent engaged with their brand, content and advertising.

Learn more about the white label partner program here: www.particls.com/intouch

Google video - where to next?

Jeremiah Owyang (Fellow Media 2.0 Workgroup Member) has a great post about his predictions for the future direction of Google Video.

For me, and from the perspective of an aggregator, it still surprises me that Google does many of the things it does. There are plenty of obvious reasons for any company to buy YouTube, but Google started its life doing things differently. I am not clear why they are letting themselves become so distracted.

Buying YouTube will never be a bad idea. It has awesome potential in almost every way. Traffic, branding, buzz, revenue, partnerships, distribution. You name it. It's hard to say no to that sort of revenue potential.

What it doesn't have, however, is the key ingredient that made google a killer. Open Search. Searching YouTube brings back YouTube results.

Google was an aggregator, their goal was to 'get you off the site as quickly as possible'. Yet they are increasingly building or buying destination sites/applications.

While I agree with Jeremiah's assessment of their strategy - it seems to me counter productive to a long term strategy as a benign aggregator of the worlds information.

If you want to organize the world's information, it is, in my assessment, best to avoid conflicts of interest.