J’aime Ohm won the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon as a solo hacker with a personal safety iPhone app.  WiseDame’s tag line is “making safe living easier, one application release at a time”. It takes basic safety practices – letting friends or family know what time you expect to be home,  leaving a note about your plans for the day – and makes them better, faster, and easier.  Brilliant.

And a great case study in agile software engineering, too. J’aime started with an idea for a product she wanted and a set of use cases based her own experience. Next she talked with a bunch of potential early adopters who were variants on a target persona (”women who go out”) and had enough information to build a prototype. Which she did, and iterated rapidly continuing to get feedback, all in less than 24 hours.

— me in Now *that’s* what I call disruptive, October 2010

What a difference a year makes!  Last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco took place in the aftermath of the the Arrington Kerfuffle and Angelgate, and wound up with AOL acquiring TechCrunch.  This year, it’s in the midst of an ugly breakup, involving “tense severance negotations” between AOL and former editor Michael Arrington.   Pass the popcorn!

Continue Reading »

At last year’s Blue Hat conference, I gave a short talk on What Diaspora* can learn from Microsoft.   Now, I’d like to do the same kind of analysis with Google+.

Ten weeks into the G+ experiment, what are the key learnings for a privacy-friendly distributed social network.  Here’s a few early thoughts.

• Diaspora’s on the right track.  Google+’s “circle” concept and page layout look like they’re based on Diaspora’s work — and imitation is the sincerest form of flatter.
• Diaspora’s current functionally + longer posts + easy link sharing + video = enough to get people excited
• The estimated 40% of people online who prefer “screen names” or pseudonyms are a really good target audience right now.   Geek Feminism’s excellent list of Who Is Harmed By a “Real Names” policy could be the basis of a great go-to-market plan for Diaspora
• Gender is a text field, but corporations run by cis guys still don’t see it that way

Your thoughts welcome, either about these ideas or new ones!
jon

After last Saturday’s inflection point, the week was filled with writing, outlining, and business modeling.  Oh and Google+ of course.   Anxiously masculinity under threat, structural oppression, and nymwars … no shortage of interesting topics!  In a depressing kind of way, that is.

So once again I was ready for the weekend.  Friday night, we dropped by Gibbous, DJ Anomaly’s bi-weekly, for a couple hours.  Saturday was burn night on the playa; here in the Seattle area, it was Intention, again with DJ Anomaly.  And then Sunday, while the Temple of Transition burned in Black Rock Desert, I was back at The Atrium one more time for Transition.

It was a sparse crowd and the DJs were okay but nothing out of the ordinary.  D stayed home writing and I wound up running into a friend I used to hang out with a lot a few years ago.  After we exchanged hellos and caught up on what was happening, she told me that she was thinking of buying a new Android phone but was concerned about Google tracking her.   From there we drifted to a discussion of Google+ and pseudonymity.

The two of us first met online, at a social network site where almost everybody used pseudonyms.  I spent most of my online time there for a couple years, back before Facebook and Twitter.  The discussions were great, the people were interesting, and over the years many of us wound up meeting and often becoming friends in real life.   Long-awaited first meetings, dancing at Bar Sinister, zooming through the streets of DC at 3 a.m. on the back of a scooter … you don’t need to know somebody’s “real name” for any of this.

Continue Reading »

Google Plus launched a “suggested users” list yesterday. I’m not on it, and I bet you aren’t either, particularly if you’re an educator — because, well, there aren’t any educators on the list.

— Audrey Watters, Personal Learning Networks and the Google+ “Suggested Users” list

The Google Suggested User List reads like the typical San Francisco Bay Area tech firm’s view of the World: most of the “interesting and famous people” are white, and if they’re black, they’re male rappers or athletes. Hello, Snoop Dog, Chamillionaire, 50 Cent, Dwight Howard, and Floyd Mayweather!

— Zennie Abraham, Google+ Suggested Users List is Overwhelmingly White

A couple of weeks go, Google community manager Natalie Villalobos asked for feedback on why people’s friends weren’t staying on G+.   One of the things that came up was that it was often very hard for new users to find people the thought would be interesting to follow and engage with.  There are a lot of creative ways to approach this, for example Ardith Goodwin’s suggestion of a welcoming committee.  Instead, Google+’s decided to take the same approach that worked out spectacularly badly for Twitter two years ago.  Will they fare better?

The early returns aren’t encouraging.  Dave, Robert,  and others immediately criticized the idea of a “suggested users” list and Bradley’s outreach to the Twitter elite.  After Bradley responded in Dave’s comments, and then  shared more details Saturday morning,  Robert asked to be removed from the list.  Bradley responded again in Robert’s comments.  And the discussion rages on.

Continue Reading »

Google+’s naming policy isn’t failing because it’s poorly implemented, or because Google’s enforcement team is stupid. It’s failing because what they’re trying to do is (1) impossible, and (2) antisocial.

— Bob Blakley, Google+ Can Be a Social Network Or The Name Police — Not Both, Gartner Blog Network

I wonder what folks at Google thought of Chairman Eric Schmidt’s description of Google+ as an “identity service” which requires people real names? So friendly! So out of sync with what they’ve been telling the media! So … creepy!

It’s hard to see this going over well in the rest of the world, where everybody is sooo eager to share their personal information with a US company so that it’s subject to the PATRIOT Act. And here in the US, Gartner is only the latest to point out how destructive this is for Google+.

Despite its imperfections Google+ was on track for being a grand slam, taking a big chunk of audience from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and yes even Quora.* And now? The joy of the brilliantly-executed launch has dissipated. Passionate early supporters are now so anti-Google that they’re switching to Duck Duck Go and even Bing.

“Data-driven”?

“Operational excellence”?

How embarrassing.

Anxious masculinity under threat

Basically, any situation in which a group of less privileged people makes critiques or observations of the dominant group in a way that threatens to upset the dominance of that group, to change the established order somehow, or to at least make the established order seem less virtuous, normal, and inevitable, is a situation in which the tone argument gets pulled out.

— Sheila Marie on “the tone argument”

Continue Reading »

We’re heading into the last few days of public voting for SXSW 2012 proposals. Votes and comments count for about 30% of the decision-making process, and so advocating for the panels you want to see is important.  The deadline is Friday, September 2.   So please vote, comment, and share this link with your friends!

There are quite a few interesting panels on privacy.  Here’s a selective list.  To start with, a few on pseudonymity — ripped from today’s nymwars headlines!

• In Defense of Pseudonymity, with me and Deborah Pierce of PrivacyActivism
• Multiple Persona Disorder: Fables, Fails, and Futures, organized by Joseph Boyle, featuring the legendary maymay
• How to be Yourself when Everybody is Faking It, with an all-star cast including Gabriella Coleman, Liz Henry, and Zeynep Tufecki
• Obama and NSTIC: All Your IDs are Belong to Us, with Identity Woman and Aaron Titus of the Liberty Foundation
• Debate: Should Social Sites Allow Anonymous Users?, with EFF’s Legal Director, Cindy Cohn will debate another Colette Vogele

There’s another nymwars panel that doesn’t make my short list: Identity on the Web: Are Handles Dead? by two people from Google.   Unsurprisingly, most of the comments it’s getting so far are negative.

Continue Reading »

“When a corporation acquires great power, the use — or misuse — of that power is everything. Will it be used for the greater good, or for selfish and destructive means? Now this is a question we must all ask ourselves. Why? Because we are Google.”

—Evolution (nymwars remix), Skyloops, remixed by anonymous

It was another week of nymwars, uncertainty, booking train tickets instead of flying, and helping friends deal with difficult emotional situations. Good thing I was inoculated! And a good thing too that DJ Anomaly’s residency at the Atrium continued with Darkness Friday night followed by Inflection on Saturday.

The crowd and music were great both nights, and the food just keeps getting better and better. Jupiter is still bright, and with clear skies and a new moon the viewing was great. The energy was somewhat relaxed, for lack of a better word … a lot of people stayed home preparing for Burning Man, so it wasn’t real crowded on the dance floor. But everybody there seemed to be having a good time. Including me!

D tells me I was fairly quiet both evenings, lost in my thoughts … stop me if you’ve heard this before: dancing to psytrance, fighting for civil liberties. Back in June 2010 the Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights phrased it as “the right to self-identify”. The right isn’t widely recognized yet, but we’re doing a better and better job fighting for it. Who knows how it’ll work out, but Eric Schmidt’s dream of Google+ as a government-friendly identity system (and perhaps a job in the next administration) has met with almost universal opposition in the tech press and more and more people are aware of the threat and looking for ways to respond. That’s a good thing.

Alas, as a result of all this, looking at my goals for the year, I haven’t made a lot of visible progress over the last few months. And in the process I’ve been spending most of my online time in an environment that’s hostile, sexist, and overwhelmingly male. Drat. I hate it when that happens.

Oh well, it is what it is.  And more positively there’s plenty of encouraging stuff as well. So, while things are dark in a lot of ways right now, as I let myself get lost with the music and the vibe take, I found myself thinking that perhaps the nymwars and the rest of summer 2011 also mark an inflection point.

And when I woke up late on Sunday morning, an inflection point still seemed like a good idea to me.   I heart psytrance.

Ever since it launched, Ive spent most of my online time on Google+, and so far am very impressed from both the software engineering and business strategy perspectives. I think it’s on track to be a big success, so expect me to be talking about it a lot.

— me, in A work in progress, July 16

Google+’s first few weeks were incredibly exciting. It was social network magic, an updated version of my best experiences at places like Usenet, ezboard, tribe and free-association.  My stream was filled with visually gorgeous photos and art, great discussions, and interesting new people.  It’s got incredible potential from an activism perspective.*  Professionally, while it discombobulated the plans for my nascent startup qweries, it also presents huge opportunities. Exciting!!!

And then the nymwars started.

Privileged much?

“I am a pseudonymous user in many, many [online] services. I appreciate the ability to go incognito and anonymous at times”

— Google VP Bradley “Bro” Horowitz**, quoted in Juan Carlos Perez’ Google Feels the Pain of Users Who Can’t Get on Google+, PC World

Bro’s boss, Vivek “Vicki” Gundotra, doesn’t go by his real name on Google+, so presumably also appreciates the value of pseudonymity.  But you wouldn’t guess it from their actions.

Continue Reading »

Once again it had been a long week. Friday afternoon we went out to happy hour, then took a nap and danced for a few hours at Gibbous. And lucky us: Saturday night, DJ Anomaly was back at the Atrium for Inoculation. w00t!

Like a snake that simply uncoils itself form its own not, passion returns to its natural state independent of any external antidotes.  It is self-liberated.  It is already in the nature of transcendence. — Dzogchen Ponlop, from Four Great Modes of Liberation, in Mind Beyond Death

It was pretty darn transcendent at Inoculation.  The place looked amazing, there was a seemingly endless supply of strawberries and watermelon, and it was DJ Anomaly’s best set yet.  By 3 a.m. we could see the waning gibbous moon over the dance floor — and Jupiter too, unusually bright!

Today’s been a lazy day after, sleeping late enjoying the sun and taking it easy.  Who knows how long it’ll last, but for now I feel totally inoculated.  I heart psytrance.

cross-posted on Google+ and Dreamwidth
Check out the previous posts in the series: A Work in Progress, Why it matters, and #nymwars!

Here’s a good example of how Google+ is already influencing search results. I’ve got screenshots below for two searches on nymwars, one when I’m logged into G+ and the other when I’m not logged in.

A couple things to notice here:

• s.e. smith’s excellent Where Identity and Capitalism Collide on Tiger Beatdown is on the list when I’m logged in, presumably because I’ve circled s.e. on G+ and several other people I followed also shared or reshared the post. Go s.e.! It’s a very good example of the potential advantages bloggers (and businesses, once they’re allowed on) can get from being part of G+
• Skud’s nymwars strategy discussion only shows up indirectly — the version reshared by Crystal Rehula. This is kind of weird, because Skud’s post has 123 shares, and I’m following her as well as Crystal. So it’s a great example of how Google+’s naming policy penalizes people like Skud whose names they don’t like.

Sure you can read Skud elsewhere if you can find her. But what if she doesn’t show up in search?

And it’s not just Skud. After looking at Geek Feminism’s Who is harmed by a real names policy? and My Name is Me, whenever somebody says something like “no reason G+ needs to be for everyone” what I hear is “no reason G+ needs to be for women, LGBTQs, people with disabilities, activists, whistleblowers, teachers, etc. etc.” Because, y’know, why would anybody want those people in our search results?

It seems so obvious to me. I wonder why Robert, Joseph, Bradley, and Vic can’t see it?

jon

Update, August 18: in the excellent G+ discussion, Fedor Pikus discussed the various “signals” that feed into Google search, and highlighted that right now G+ is only a very small component. And sure enough, today s.e. smith’s post is high on the list whether or not I’m logged in. But Skud’s still rendered invisible.

Continue Reading »

How time flies when you’re having fun! After another quick trip to the Bay Area for some wine tasting in Sonoma, we’re back in Seattle for the full moon, meteor showers, and back-to-back DJ Anomaly shows at The Atrium. w00t!

Professionally, once again a lot’s happened since my last post on The Union of Bliss and Emptiness.  The underling ideas behind qweries still make sense, but with Google+ (and the upcoming Google Questions) it really doesn’t seem like now’s the best time to be writing a bunch of software.  Then again, in chaos is opportunity.  So Kathy Gill and I came up with an interesting ebook idea — with Google+ as the first target!  And we were just starting to get some momentum when the nymwars hit.

One thing that helps reassure me I’m on the right side in this war: during my six weeks on Google+ I’ve met literally hundreds of new and interesting people.  While the general environment is overwhelmingly male, with plenty of sexism and bigotry, my own circles are filled with a remarkably diverse group of great conversationalists (along with the occasional troll).  One of my new year’s resolutions is “spend more time on diversity-friendly social networks, and less in sexist, racist, and elitist environments”, and the last few weeks have really reminded me of how important that is.   So I’m going to renew my Dreamwidth subscription and start looking at Disapsora.

Alas, Google’s certainly giving the impression that they don’t want G+ to be that kind of place.  Their latest statements on the naming policy imply that they’re going to try to tough it out knowing full well that what they’re doing is harmful to women, lgbtq’s, activists, people with disabilities, and a lot of other groups — including many of my friends, who are unsurprisingly leaving or cutting way back on their posting.  I’m still optimistic that Google will come to their senses at some point … but when?  And until they do, how much time and energy do I want to be investing in their new world order?  Tricky questions …

Exciting times, to be sure, but somewhat stressful.  And with stresses in my personal life too … well, let’s just say I’m ready to dance.   Fortunately there’s an embarassment of riches tonight in the Seattle: Lara and Muschi at Inertia Labs’ 13th anniversary, and DJ Anomaly at the Atrium, following up last nights Perseids party with Assimilation.  Lots to look forward to!  I heart psytrance.

Keep the pseudonyms and lose the assholes.

— Kathy Sierra

The battle over whether Google gets to police what names people can call themselves rages on.  Ten days after Google VP Bradley Horowitz promised process changes, accounts still keep getting deleted without notice.  And while Facebook Director of Products Blake Ross got his account reactivated almost immediately, Skud’s account remains suspended (two weeks and counting) even after changing the name on her profile to Kirrily “Skud” Robert.

WTF?

Is Google listening?

Pseudonyms are not in themselves harmful. Yes, they can be used for harm, as when people use them for anonymous, slanderous attacks, trolling, etc., but in the vast majority of cases there is no harm done. Importantly, they can serve to protect vulnerable groups.

— Caterina Fake, Anonymity and Pseudonyms in Social Software

Continue Reading »