AlexSchleber’s Quick Hits Business Mindhacks

Alex Schleber 8.18.09 / 8pm

Obviously a lot of thought went into this post, well done for bringing it all together.

Here a few caveats that I developed recently because I tended to disagree with Scoble on his mass unfollow:

1) The "follow as endorsement" issue I consider a bit of a red herring, precisely because the Twitter UI (or any other for that matter), is very limited in allowing for discovering anyone’s followers/following in a meaningful way. Even if someone has the patience to click “next” a dozen or so times, that means you’ll at most discover someone’s most recent “acquisitions” in either rubrique (assuming numbers above 500 or so).

Or, if you are savvy and know how to cue up one’s following/followers from the beginning, the same issue still applies: Those peeps in the middle are nearly undiscoverable without dogged effort. Also, since Twitter natively doesn’t allow for mass subscribes e.g. off of a user’s following list, it really doesn’t matter much who’s in those lists, most people will never know..

(The only current "follower mining" tool that goes in the right direction is @dacort’s excellent http://TweepSearch.com, but it too has its limitations, and there is really no way that the guy could mine all of Twitter’s data to do a job that Twitter should be doing itself, e.g. on the Bio indexing/search.)

2) I have for many months argued that the “reading every Tweet of one’s following inbound stream” is impossible, and have therefore called it the “following myth”. Above a certain number of active Twitter users, the only sane thing to do is to archive and then search/filter ad hoc as needed. “Just in time” information rather than “just in case” information, as Tim Ferriss might say.

FriendFeed has been a reasonably good tool for doing so, although the recent Facebook acquisition throws up a lot of questions, as in, will my “Twitter archive” within FF be safe for the long haul? Where to go in case FF is shut down?

Add to that the fact that FriendFeed made it tricky to import any of one’s Twitter “following” not already present on FF, and it has been less than ideal, but the grouping functionality and sophisticated search capabilities have still made it worth it.

Twitter itself is currently a black hole when it comes to its data stream (Twitter Search reaches back only about 7 days), and of course has NEVER allowed one to search only one’s “with friends” RSS stream natively. Big omission, because there IS a difference between searching it and the Twitter “fire hose” (whenever Twitter Search is actually working that is…):

Whoever I have followed either manually (or, slightly less so, automatically on their follow, if at least somewhat moderated later on by unfollowing/blocking of the worst of spam or inanity; anyone who follows for reasons other than spam has expressed at least a minimum of interest) creates a group that is still a filter of sorts from the din of the Twitter firehose. So it matters if I can search what these people said as opposed to everyone else.

3) The first two points are why I think that Scoble (and others before him) have needlessly executed these mass-unfollows, which took away an inbound stream for them that would be very difficult to recreate. Needlessly also because Scoble was already filtering through FF, Tweetdeck, etc. and could have had (and did have) additional smaller/more focused Twitter accounts, asf.

While that massive stream admittedly is somewhat useless in the Twitter Web UI itself, it does however allow for large scale import into FriendFeed (however imperfectly), from where it can all become manageable/useful again, once split up into a number of groups by interest or topic.

And the full stream coming into your FriendFeed from Twitter is useful in that you can search/filter it as well, and use it as a convenient base from which to discover more of your “following”/friends interests to sort them into your groups.

FriendFeed compared to Tweetdeck et al. has the benefit of persistence of both your groups, and of the steadily growing tweet archives building up for everyone you’ve imported. It’s all there for you, ready to be mined when you need it. Unlike Twitter, FF search reaches back ALL THE WAY. So you can look up what all the people you follow said about e.g. #140conf a few months ago, asf.

Once you look at it like that, you understand that there is a benefit of having as large as possible of an inbound stream of voices. All you need are better search/sort/filter technologies. As I said elsewhere a few weeks ago, “the answer to (social media) technology overwhelm is not retrenchment, it’s better technology.”

My BOLD highlights and a few small expansions added later.

... Not every problem or challenge is quite so discrete, though. Most important challenges in life manifest themselves as large, insurmountable amorphous blobs of potential failure. This is true of software development, career management, and even lifestyle and health.

A complex and bug-riddled system needs to be overhauled. Your career is stagnating by the minute. You are steadily letting your sedentary computer-programming desk-bound lifestyle turn your body into mush. All of these problems are much bigger and harder to just fix than a bug. They’re all complex, hard to measure, and comprised of many different small solutions–some of which will fail to work!

Because of this complexity, we easily become demotivated by the bigger issues and turn our attention instead to things that are easier to measure and easier to quickly fix. This is why we procrastinate. And the procrastination generates guilt, which makes us feel bad and therefore procrastinate some more.

I’ve struggled with getting and staying in shape for as long as I can remember. Indeed, when you’re miserably out of shape, “just get in shape” isn’t a concept you can even grasp much less do something concrete about. And to make it harder, if you do something toward improving it, you can’t tell immediately or even after a week that anything has changed

... When you’re trying to become more respected in your workplace or be healthier, the individual improvements you make each day often won’t lead directly to tangible results. [...] So, for most of the big, difficult goals you’re striving for, it’s important to think not about getting closer each day to the goal, but rather, to think about doing better in your efforts toward that goal than yesterday.

I can’t, for example, guarantee that I’ll be less fat today than yesterday, but I can control whether I do more today to lose weight. And if I do, I have a right to feel good about what I’ve done. This consistent, measurable improvement in my actions frees me from the cycle of guilt and procrastination that most of us are ultimately defeated by when we try to do Big Important Things.

You also need to be happy with small amounts of “better.”[...] Small improvements also decrease the cost of failure. If you miss a day, you have a new baseline for tomorrow.

My BOLD highlights.

This guest post on Tim's blog was written by a key Ruby-on-Rails developer Chad Fowler. Very much enjoy his down to earth description of these complex psychological issues. I think he is on to something here... I am still digesting it myself.

4. Being a horrible hypocrite by banning other browsers on the iPhone

...

The irony of this is not lost on anyone who had a computer before they had an Internet connection. Apple was more than willing to pile on after Microsoft's disasterous inclusion of Internet Explorer with Windows. In fact, what Apple is doing is 100x worse than what Microsoft did. You see, Microsoft simply included their browser in Windows, still allowing other browsers to be installed. In Apple's case, they are not only bundling their browser with the iPhone, but they are BLOCKING other browsers from being installed.
Simple solution and opportunity: Don't be a control freak and hypocrite. Allow people to pick their browser; the competition to make a better browser will increase the overall use of iPhones and mobile data services.

5. Blocking the Google Voice Application on the iPhone

Apple took Google's innovative and absurdly priced phone offering, Google Voice, out of the App Store and is currently being investigated by the FCC for this action. This point is similar to the browser issue, in that Apple wants to own almost every extension of the iPhone platform. How long before Apple decides to ban a Twitter client in favor of an Apple Twitter-like product? Seems crazy, I know, but by following Apple's logic you should not be able to use Firefox or Google Chrome on your desktop.

Simple solution and opportunity: Let people have three or four phone services coming in to their iPhones and perhaps charge a modest licensing fee for those types of service. Or, just simply stop being jerks and let the free market decide how to use the data services they've BOUGHT AND PAID FOR. That's the joke of this: you're paying for the data services that Apple is blocking. You pay for the bandwidth and Apple doesn't let you use it because, you know, they know better than you how you should consume your data minutes.

My BOLD highlights.

As a frequent critic of Microsoft's monopolistic behaviors, which I view mostly as mistakes that we're all paying for, both as MSFT customers (of which I have been one for many years, so don't call me an Apple fanboy...), and as Internet users in a more general sense (ridiculous IE6 backwards compatibility issues for all Web/blog designers anyone?), it is only fair to examine Apple's recent behaviors as well.

Well argued post by Jason, hopefully posts like this create enough debate to head off Apple from going any further off the deep end.

Which lead to a bit of musing about the question of whether all large/successful companies (in this case a post-1997 resurgent Apple riding the wave of their iPod and iPhone dominance) are more or less "doomed" to live out "The Powerbroker" archetype, becoming paranoid/controlling, throwing their proverbial weight around, and beginning to bully all and sundry.

Maybe I have been a little too harsh in judging Microsoft in the past, maybe these developments are psychologically almost unavoidable...?!?

Alex Schleber 08.02.09 at 7:26 pm @alexschleber

I think this “cure” is a bit radical… unnecessarily so.

You mention Tweetdeck, and I agree it is far from ideal as far as keeping a decent overview of what is going on with people you follow. Main reasons: 1) Tweetdeck has persistence issues (a big problem combined with the Adobe Air memory hogging) as well as 2) issues with the API limit, and worst of all 3) the entire multi-column UI metaphor makes for a very noisy, unfocused, frantic experience.

Before I forget, 4) filters (search) on Tweetdeck groups are rudimentary.

Enter FriendFeed, which rather nicely solves just about all of these issues at once. By creating tightly focused groups (called “friend lists” on FriendFeed) around your favorite topics, you can follow a good number of people in each without all of the overwhelm.

Currently I have about 1,000 out of 3,000 Twitter friends imported on FF, I am working on a sort-of promo to get the majority of the rest to join me there as well. There really is no reason not to, FF offers great ways to deepen the conversation in ways that just aren’t possible on Twitter, all while still tying in Twitter in a number of ways that create nice feedback loops and effects.

For those 1k, I can do some pretty sophisticated searches over the entire “Twitter friends” feed, with the archive going all the way back, not just 7 days like on Twitter Search (if you’re lucky). Very useful to add people into your groups by keyword, asf.

BTW, FriendFeed is by no means perfect, but with a little effort it can be used in very powerful ways. And the design team is pretty good about listening to the user community about suggestions. Personally I would like to see them make FF even more Twitter-friendly, so it can be a full featured Web based client surpassing Tweetdeck and Seesmic.

Again, I’d say the solution to overwhelm by technology is better technology, not retrenchment..

By all means click though and read the original article, definitely issues worth thinking/talking about. The issues are real enough, but there have to be solutions better than the one suggested.

Your thoughts?

Chapter one was inception up until the launch of Google.

Chapter two was Google’s rise and Yahoo’s death.

Chapter three will be the two-horse race of Microsoft and Google, with the inevitable emergence of a third and fourth player.

That’s the silver lining for startups in all of this. As Google and Microsoft lock into a dog fight for revenue and market share, leaving the Yahoo carcass on the side of the road, the bevy of crafty startups will get their chance to take the third, fourth and fifth positions in this very important race.

The lesson for all startups–and BDC’s (big dumb companies)–is that innovation is all you have. Once you stop innovating you lose your talent and you lose the race. Never. Stop. Innovating. Never. Never. Never.

My BOLD highlights.

Read the last paragraph again. Then read it several more times. Innovation is ALL you have indeed. All else is a trap. You may not realize it for a while, maybe even years, but there is no doubt that it's a trap.

Just ask the music industry, and the newspaper industry. And very soon the movie industry and the publishing industry...

Denial is not just a river in Egypt as I like to say.

Now going back to Hacker Croll and his list of Twitter employees and other information. Twitter just happens to be one of a number of a new breed of companies where almost the entire business exists online. Each of these employees, as part of their work, share data with other employees - be it through a feature of a particular application or simply through email. As these users become interwoven, it adds a whole new attack vector whereby the weak point in the chain is no longer just the weakest application - it is the weakest application used by the weakest user.

For an attacker such as Hacker Croll looking to exploit the combination of bad user habit, poorly implemented features and users mixing their personal and business data - his chances of success just got exponentially greater. Companies that are heavily web based rely largely on users being able to manage themselves - the odds are not only stacked against Twitter, they are stacked against most companies adopting this model.

Unfortunately for Twitter, Hacker Croll found such a weak point. An employee who has online habits that are probably no different than those of 98% of other web users. It began with the personal Gmail account of this employee. As with most other web applications, the personal edition of Gmail has a password recovery feature that presents a user with a number of challenges to prove their identity so that their password can be reset. It likely wasn’t the first account from a Twitter employee that Hacker Croll had attempted to access - but in the case of this particular account he discovered a kink in the armor that gave him the big first step.

On requesting to recover the password, Gmail informed him that an email had been sent to the user’s secondary email account. In an effort to balance usability with security, Gmail offered a hint as to which account the email to reset the password was being sent to, in case the user required a gentle reminder. In this case the obfuscated pointer to the location of the secondary email account was ******@h******.com. The natural best guess was that the secondary email account was hosted at hotmail.com.

At Hotmail, Hacker Croll again attempted the password recovery procedure - making an educated guess of what the username would be based on what he already knew. This is the point where the chain of trust broke down, as the attacker discovered that the account specified as a secondary for Gmail, and hosted at Hotmail was no longer active.

This is due to a policy at Hotmail where old and dormant accounts are removed and recycled. He registered the account, re-requested the password recovery feature at Gmail and within a few moments had access to the personal Gmail account of a Twitter employee. The first domino had fallen.

...

Giving the user an option to guess the name of a pet in lieu of actually knowing a password is just dramatically shortening the odds for the attacker. The service is essentially telling the attacker: “we understand that guessing passwords is hard, so let us help you narrow it down from potentially millions of combinations to around a dozen, or even better, if you know how to Google, just one”.

The problem is not the concept of having an additional authorization token, such as mothers maiden name, that can be used to authenticate in addition to a password, the problem arises when it is relied on alone, when the answer is stored in the clear in account settings, and when users end up using the same question and answer combination on all of their accounts.

From this point, with a single personal account as a starting point, the intrusion spread like a virus - infecting a number of accounts on a number of different services both inside and outside of Twitter. Once Hacker Croll had access to the employee’s Twitter email account hosted by Google, he was able to download attachments to email that included lots of sensitive information, including more passwords and usernames. He quickly took over the accounts of at least three senior execs, including Evan Williams and Biz Stone. ...

My BOLD highlights.

If you have time at all, by all means click through and read the entire article, not only is it entertaining in its own right, but this is really critical information to understand how hackers think, and how to protect yourself from these exploits.

In fact, I think this article should become required reading for anyone using the internet, i.e. nearly everyone, to wake them up to these realities.

Side note: I've been leery of the "secondary account" and "Secret question" issue for years. What I didn't know was that Hotmail.com was reissuing dormant accounts after some time, which is a major breach in my view. I don't believe Google lets you reuse a Gmail address that was previously used by someone else.

Fascinating though that each company's and user's individual failings ultimately allow for this kind of major breach. In a way, it's the Law of Compounding in action: Small actions over time can compound into big "results", because they act as multipliers on each other...

If designed poorly, the system can contribute to the unnatural production of skewed data by users. If the system involves some sort of filter for authority or popularity, they are subject to power law effects (Technorati calls their metric “authority” but inbound link counts from blogs are not authority, they’re just a measure of popularity).

What’s a power law effect? It’s when a system drives activity to reinforce unnaturally the behavior that caused something to be there in the first place. For example, if one of the metrics of a filter counts the number of people clicking on a top search, then the more clicks, the longer the item will stay at the top of the list of searches, even if naturally it would have fallen off the list earlier. Conversely if a metric for a filter involves a spontaneous act, driven by imagination, like writing a tweet, then exposing those items at the top of the filter might be less likely to drive up activity.

However, if you show the results to the users, upon seeing a popular topic, they might begin tweeting about that topic without having thought of it before seeing the popular topic. In other words, by revealing the metrics you focus on, you can push users to change their behavior. By driving behavior, power-law distributions keep things with some power at the top because they are at the top or can drive them higher. It becomes a loop. And because no distinction is made between the quality or strength of a unit or what that unit might mean to a group of users in a topic area, straight number counts just aren’t very smart.

For example, if we made a system that counted Om Malik’s inbound links and called it authority, no matter the topic, I think Om would agree that even he wouldn’t have great authority and insight on the subjects of say, modern dance or metal working, if he happened to mention those words in a blog post. But on broadband issues, he is most definitely an authority.

But Technorati, OneRiot, and other services that take a metric count and apply it for all topics, all circumstances, all search result matches, without context, randomize the quality of the information the user sees. They may provide a filter across the whole web, but they don’t give us any real help in judging what is useful or not. It’s why topic communities are helpful, and once you find a good editorial filter, driven by the human touch, you glom onto it for dear life because it’s such a time and energy saver.

My BOLD highlights. Created extra paragraphs/whitespace for readability (sheesh, when will writers learn to get this right for Web readership?)

...Not long ago millions waited through entire newscasts just to learn who won a game or what tomorrow's weather would be. This was ideal for advertisers: They had a captive audience.

Now we're swimming in information. We can call up nearly every bit of news, music, and entertainment we want on demand. In fact, there's so much of it that we need filters to block the boring or irrelevant stuff and help us find the bits we need or desire. This has created what many call the "Attention Economy." Says Bernardo A. Huberman, director of the Information Dynamics Laboratory at Hewlett-Packard: "The value of most information has collapsed to zero. The only scarce resource is attention." So how do we figure out where to direct it?

The easiest way is to get tips from friends. They're our trusted sources. At least a few of them know us better than any algorithm ever could. Little surprise, then, that the companies most eager to command our attention are studying which friends we listen to. Online friendship is a hot focus for Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. They joust to hire leading sociologists, anthropologists, and microeconomists from MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley. Microsoft just established a research division focused on social sciences in Cambridge, Mass.

Statistically, friends tend to behave alike. A couple of years ago researchers at Yahoo found that if someone clicked on an online ad, the people on his or her instant chat buddy list, when served the same ad, were three to four times more likely than average to click on it. It makes sense. Friends share interests.

My BOLD highlights.

The courses of study/job descriptions mentioned in the 3rd paragraph should give you an idea where to put your focus, or at least what to recommend to your or someone else's kids for a college major or specialization in case they aren't sure what to pursue...

Never underestimate the power of first-mover advantage, especially when being one of the first movers gets you bought by Google. Back in August, 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger. LiveJournal had launched six months before and Open Diary in October of the previous year. But it was Pyra Labs which was acquired by Google in February, 2003, and the rest was history.

Now, nearly ten years later, Blogger is still the dominant hosted blogging platform. In May, 52 million individual people from the U.S. visited a Blogger blog, almost twice as many as the 28 million who visited a blog hosted by Wordpress.com (comScore). Six Apart properties, including Typepad.com, attracted 14 million.

Interesting data, and a good reminder of "Positioning 101" issues like Category Leadership, etc. you'd want to read in your Ries & Trout (Immutable Laws of Marketing, etc.).

More importantly, I believe this highlights the issue of blogging and Content Managment Systems in general at this point: There is no real category killer out there, each system has its drawbacks.

Some have Search Engine Optimization pluses (Blogger, Wordpress.com), but functionality minuses. Some have innovative ideas (Tumblr, Posterous), but aren't progressing fast enough from here, probably due to too small teams and/or too little funding.

I myself am most familiar with Wordpress.org (self-hosted WP), which brings with it a host of issues from the frequent forced-upgrade cycles, asf. which can make it a "full-time tech" proposition. And integrations and tweeks for SEO and Internet Marketing (IM) purposes (Autoresponder management, shopping carts, affiliate programs, membership sites, etc.) are just about all still custom propositions as well.

Most problems begin with the fact that despite progress with APIs, etc. nearly all systems and services start from scratch, reinventing many, many wheels, and end up being relatively hard to extend without significant technical expertise.