Facebook Proposed Principles are pandering

Facebook asks its users to discuss its Proposed Principles. I’m unhappy with the way those are expressed, and here is a more complete reply then the one I left on the over-crowded comments thread.

Data cannot be owned: it has an author, and this author has inalienable rights; re-affirming that is useless without specifying who is the author of each aspect of a collective work; an author can license of cede his rights to copy his work — but once again, those century old principles demand a consensus on what to do in case of a disagreement, or when one author\’s opinion cannot be found.

For instance, Facebook hasn’t clearly stated in there the most frequent source of problem: who owns a photo, and who owns the information that Dave is on the photo? The owner of the camera, the person who took the picture (indistinguishable, I agree) or the person on the photos, or the person tagging it? Because, as far as I can tell, by “owner”, Facebook doesn’t mean the person being photographed — and that isn’t made clear at all by their wording. Actually, article 9.3 of the Statement of Rights seems to demand an explicit authorisation — but nothing about what to do when the two disagree; a blog post has, however, and it didn’t match those drapes.

The real issue is actually that last one: the author’s opinion. “Works” produced on Facebook are usually crumbles, impossible to rate outside of the peer-produced context and in general uninteresting and utterly exhausting to sort; more then the big principles, the implementation of tools to sort them, from “phatic and empty praises of yet another uninteresting photo” to “cryptic acronym, meant as an inside joke”. With that, one can expect to have a little more feed-back from disgruntled users, and a easier management of the process surrounding the departure of a user. Without it, those are not only worthless, they are unmanageable, tedious, scary in their size and diversity. Far more then actual consequences of the misuse of those sets, users fear the sets themselves, and have less ideas about what those can look like then whether they can be actually be misused (Hint: No one is going to refuse you an interview because you wrote “You Go Grrl!” below the photos of your high school best friend a few years back.)

Any ‘reappropriation’ is toothless without control, and there is no effective control if the options are: keep them all, erase them all, remove those one by one (but try to find them first). I do not want rights to erase those over effective, intelligent control and information, no more then I want the right to vote over proper information about the candidates and the ability to publicly question them on matters that I care, and keep them on the record. What was obvious to the wall-paper readers of the French and the American Revolution is closed and controlled by Facebook. I want to be able to go to the contents at any day of my NewsFeed faster then anyone can access old photo with my comments on them; nowadays, I’ll have to click until I collapse to reach anything six month old and I can’t even search my recommended links.

At no point Facebook seems to encourage the export of all the contribution of one user (at least, those that make sense decontextualised, and have been produced by a unique user: status, posted notes & shared links, photos as uploaded, list of applications installed) to another similar service that he himself chooses to use, with the information that he encoded in Facebook. This would appear to be the minimum, basic feature for an “Open Web”, and has no legal implications, no other consequence then allowing competitive innovation to foster Facebook into better products.

In the second article, Facebook encourages any communication between consenting parties: “any” raises many now common issues; in the current order of inappropriateness: discrimination, hate-speech (incl. racism & anti-semitism), encouragement to violent or terrorist action, methods and tools for such action, pornographic content involving minor; one might want to add blasphemy and sedition, for good measure. Facebook cannot state it protects this under any circumstances because some of this would be illegal in all countries where the service operates. It might want to re-affirm under what principles it would give way to an investigation, and what measures are acceptable to be taken, but protecting anything, facing any suspicion, is not what a majority of the population would agree. It is arguable that —for the worst aspects— if a judge has enough evidence to investigate, this should be enough to prosecute, and the proof of communication doesn’t had much to the file; I personally wouldn’t go that far. But the best part is in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities article 3 & 5, that basically can be read to exclude all forms of communications.

In the first and third one, Facebook claims for the right to connect, and the free flow; as far as I can tell, most of the issues raised where not “How can I click on that obvious button [You are too annoying to be my friend anymore]?” but: Your photo or your writings are offending me. Truth be told, many actually wonder about whether their unfriending should be visible, and we agree that it should not.

The fourth article legitimize the presence of commercial entity: I agree, but I know people who vehemently disagree with that, who didn’t object to that wording, because it apparently wasn’t clear enough. Without controversial examples of what each article implies, this set of value cannot be criticized. What is really surprising is that I can’t read this: “Every Person (. . .) should have representation and access to distribution and information within the Facebook Service,” without noticing that the “within” is ambiguous; should the Person too be within? Does someone has to be a member for his interest to be respected? Do you have to subscribe to control the photos associated to you?

“[. . .] programmatic interfaces for sharing and accessing the information available to them.”

No: I want programmatic interfaces to control the information related to me — that right doesn’t allow me to manage the NewsFeed as I deem fit, and that is far more important problem to be opened then any other.

Most of the articles that I don’t mention are corny, toothless and pandering in the sense that they acknowledge previous mistakes, and state the obvious: that Facebook blew it, and the users had to right to be upset — but they don’t correspond to an actual decision.

Finally, the last article completely neglects that to be available, you need to offer a service that is acceptable abroad: ethnocentric much? Well, does that mean no breast-feeding, no ‘sedition’, no blasphemy? What happens if A is an American with strong opinions about his civil liberty, B is his friend, living abroad, and C is a friend of B, that would not stand one of the above: should A’s photos showing her breasts (resp. a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad, or the tank on June 10th on Tian An Men) be invisible to C? Once again, contradictions with the Rights and Responsibilities, 4.3 specifically, is amusing.

I’m happy to have principles, I’d prefer to have clear, explicit, sour consequence of what each of those rights imply; I want ‘morally unlucky’ situations. “Vote for everyone” includes murderers, mentally ill people and fascists: that’s where the debate should be, not in Rosyfluffyland.

PS: I guess a post on the contradictions and ‘ellipses’ in the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities is coming, too.

A great interview with Bernie Hogan

I’ve been in Oxford for three weeks now, and I am surronded with great people; walking around the town every morning is great too — but it’s even better while listening to what really made this town proud: lectures.  Understanding what someone has to contribute while passing in front of his or her College is a nice combination, and a great victory of technology over academic busy schedule.

If you too want to enjoy the soft-spoken, and brilliantly articulate tone I came to appreciate, listen to Oxford Internet Institute podcast (iTunes link).

• The first show is an introduction by Pr. Bill Dutton, the head of the OII; I beleive I’ve already mentioned it on this blog (or at least I should): it covers the importance of Internet for society for scholars to whom time taught to down-play the hype and understand the long term.
• The second was a real discovery for me: Dr. Bernard Hogan, a recent addition to the OII, explains the mechanism at play around social networks. Most of my research is based on those results, and I could not explain them better then Bernie himself.

Looking forward to far more recordings of this quality and insight,

The case of micro-payments

Freakonomics tried to summarize the controversy around micro-payments, and my my current co-cubicle Alejandro tried yet another comment.  Both are rather extensive, but I’m unhappy with either take, so I’ll try mine.

News is a hard to define concept, invented when capital-based factories emerged, and first financial markets then unions took opportunity of cheap pulp-based paper.  Whether starlettes’ gaffes or the potitics behind the latest Nobel prize are newsworthy is a constant debate with some of my friends — so let me focus on one assumption that we can all agree on; news making including three steps: gathering, edition and distribution.

The first step was the most affected by digitalisation, be it through spontaneous distributed testomony or thanks to the use of search engine by journalists; experts would be le least affected part of that first step, mostly by lack of OpenAccess.  Many applaud and professional are horrified to see hordes steping on reporters’ toes, but the truth is: Amateurs, Temps, Freelance, Passers-by has always been intensively used by cash-strapped papers.

What those don’t always do too well is editing: cheking quotes, making sure every point of view has a saying, identifying facts from opinion. This is the heart of the problem because, to be consistent, writing has to be done by one individual, but comments allowed distributed inputs. It’s the journalist added value, and has to be sold.  My take would be that a vast majority of journalist are not worth their salt on that level, blogs and comment reveled that and this explains most of the crisis — but a minority do great job, and need to be paid. By setting up a church-like incentive structure, Wikpedia managed to harvest that work for free, from a thousand or so individuals — not enough to have a decent WikiNews. There is no more juju left and we need to find money in the remaining pocket.

The last part is the one at stake in the micropayments debate: distribution.  This one justifies pooling journalists by entire, generalits, reputable papers — but, beyond the fact that most remaining local titles are now in a monopoly position, distributon networks were often shared: the NMPP in France is one extreme, but representative example; why the newsboy’s job was done by teenagers? Because it was so labor-intensive it wouldn’t be worth it otherwise.  The recent ability to print for free on-line doesn’t resolve the problem that ads won’t suffice to pay the two previous steps: a collection agency would neither be new, nor be impratical.

Few (except maybe Dave Winer) ask: Should we save newpapers? I don’t care for institutions that made some believe that being literate and having strong prejudice (a.k.a. “an angle”) made you the beacon of democracy and give you a free pass on slander, idiocy, stalking, irrelevance and trespassing.  But I do appreciate any structure that will encourage readers to look beyond their usual cup of warm political homophily to reinvigorate their narrow views — what a common agency could do.  There is no price for BBC’s recent reporting on Iran: humane, rich, multi-faceted; and there are no words harsh enough against the xenophobic talking-heads that made that report necessary.

I know having an agency is bad competition, and won’t foster new standards, impair generativity. . .  But newspapers are dying (as I said: I don’t care) and serious investiate reporting isn’t too well (that’s bad) and not even Google can resolve it — so, if the solution is a syndicate-controlled iTunes, that’s an acceptable second best over Perez Hilton.

Can this agency be open and shared? Yes: search engines are well identified industrial complex and letting them access to a syndicated news database is fairly feasible; Google has principles and won’t let it? Well, they don’t refer ads do they? And that is going the be the only difference anyway.  Individual commentators, wealthy patrons or news-gathering sites like Digg would have to pay to link to an ad-free version for their readers.  Based on their business model, they could agree to a threshold beyond which they don’t cover their viewers — and those remaining are shown ads.

What ads show next to a war report, anyway?  Blankets for the needy?  We’ll need more integration with e-merchants and social-networks for better targetted offers — once again, this demands control, i.e. an well designed interface, i.e. a powerfull, common agency.  What if one viewer is not identified? Let’s encourage as many people to use an integrated solution for its benefits first, and see who’s left with the current solution.

Van Alstyne argues that “News is not like an iTunes song; it’s perishable.” Well, the majority of iTunes market, hits songs, are as perishable if not more then news — and Apps from the iPhone even more.  And perishable goods is hardly an issue to sell, really.  Arguing for subscribers-only graphics is also quite feasible: better understanding is a great added value, and search engines rarely use it.

More generally I agree paywalls are bad — because they are inconvenient. But you shouldn’t abandon a needed idea because it’s inconvenient: if you can’t change you wheel, would you ride on a flat tire? You have to use proper tools, make the idea convenient and design it well; sell what people are consuming, instead of complaining that uses won’t ice-cream if you don’t provide them spoons: if news is a social contruct, then sell not the right to read it, but the right to clip it, quote it, send it. I will cost me a fortune (I send a lot of clips) but I don’t care: I’m in charge of keeping my social network vivid, aren’t I?  At least, I’m the one that can put a price on that effort. And I’ll be the one who can follow international news for free when I have convinced them to use the service too.

Should we consider a per-unit of a flat-rate? I’m assuming risk-phobia and bundled-goods indicate that the best solution is an intelligent combination, like the London Oyster card: you have credit, and the cheapest solution between a-piece and all-you-can-eat plans is withdraw after you’ve watched it.  I know Oyster is a privacy nightware: once again — don’t confuse a good idea with a terrible design.

Finally, some have argued for badges to put on one’s blog to show one’s support for a free press; not a bad idea — except outside of the UK, people rarely buy lapel-pins for prestige; blogs are tedious to maintain, too.  Offering one’s friends a page where to read what articles you enjoyed, and offering them the right to read the story in full, on a convenient format. . . That is a real social gift.  Of course, you‘d be able to pool those together; but that is only if you have several friends.

What if companies pay for our news and offer a free take on world view to anyone?  They already do: it’s called advertizing, and it is as bad as it sounds.  I’m simply encouraging to give that ability to anyone.

Back to Oxford

After spending the time of my life last Summer at the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) with the Summer Doctoral Program (SDP), I’m now back — thanks to the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) Exchange program. That’s a lot of acronym to cover a very dynamic network of people who make fantastic, inter-disciplinary research around the Internet.

If you happen to read that blog and are around don’t hesitate to drop me a line: I’ll be around until March 9th.  — And as they say in infomercials: act now! It’s only been twenty-four hours, and my productivity has rocketted up; it’s definitely better then the miracle I was expecting.  Nobody knows why, but simply being in this town is a cure against acedia.

Facebook census

Facebook new focus-group/polling is very promissing, albeit most relevant aspects have been described only vaguely so far — and offers a great business mode; however, it doesn’t resolve users’ main concern: is it safe to have so much information centralized?

Lost in links, style and references

I’ve been lost in too many things —and silent too long because of it— not to include a quick update about my blogging life:

• I still beleive regularly commenting on papers and conference would be the best thing to do on this blog, and plan to do it again as soon as today, most likely Arun Sundararajan or Matt Jackson.
• Blogging as increasingly been compared to discussion (if you exclude the professional head recently discussed) and I needed a place where I felt less compelled by following a proper format; I stumbled on a friend’s Tumble page, and I started one myself. It is incoherent to have comments here and not there, but I’d rather have your opinions on things I deem more though-through; in addition, I can show a more personal side there. Write to me if you like or disagree on what I post.
• I started to think about plans after my PhD, and considered starting a company, or at least leverage what I know to work around the recently emerged platforms. The most successful so far seems to be the iPhone, and I tried to be part of a collective blog about Apps; I have a hard time adapting to a different style, and it might take more time then I though to set foot in the professional sphere.

Two great lectures on Community communications

Two really interesting talks on Video Lectures on how to understand community behaviour : both are long and fairly technical, but worth it.

The Structure of Information Pathways in a Social Communication Network
Jon Kleinberg from Cornell offers in half an hour a very interesting suggestion to look at regular communications. Why it is important? Well, he doesn’t gives too much in front of a fairly technical audience but —as proven by Twitter— accounts of “what are you doing” by the hour can let people share a familiarity that lead to trust, tacit information and encourage cooperation.

Influence and Correlation in Social Networks
Mohammad Mahdian from Yahoo! Research explains in one hour how to sort influence, mimetism and common context.

Two good reasons to subsribe to Video Lectures.

I should be back soon with a presentation on all these recent discoveries on community management.

Update: if you do not have one hour to grant to Mohammad, his co-author Aris has a shorter presentation of the same work. And yes, the video stream is a bit dodgy, I don’t know why.

Influence and Correlation in Social Networks

Social Media reference on my twin blog

A colleague asked me references on Social Media; instead of an e-mail, I decided to write a long blog post, in French, on my twin blog. If you trust automated translators or consider yourself a leading figure around buzz, have a story worthy of her considerate attention, don’t hesitate to check it out.

Network externalities

An old wound came up while reading the last post Nick Carr’s excellent blog: the distinction between the different type of network externalities is not very well know.  The idea is not well known enough to be recognized by search engines, so why would I need some subtleties?  Because they can help understand whether a company simply has a large market share, or whether they are blatantly cornering a market, if not several.

The post is a reply to Tim O’Reilly’s latest on Web 2.0: are they network effects for such services?  Certainly — provided we make the difference between networks and clubs, and neighbourhoods, and adoption costs and technological learning-by-doing.

The first cases considered for this issues were Nuclear power and Solar panels, by W. Brian Arthur and Typewriters, by Paul A David, who both warned against possible lock-in. Nuclear or technologies are typical learning-by-doing: the more we develop on technological path, the harder to switch to another option. That is why the choice between heavy- vs. light-water nuclear power-plants and crystalline vs. amorphous silicium solar-panels appeared as a damning alternative. There is little social interaction between the two option, or mimetism: simply an industrial complex learning how to do one versus the other. Keyboard layouts is a different story: Qwerty was learnt by typing, but the role of more experienced typists onto less experienced one, and the influence of language (keyboards are still different depending on local diacritics) cannot be neglected.

Then came social interactions: by considering you preferred not the technology that you were experienced to develop, but the standards used by the people you worked with, David and H. Peyton Young suggested to consider local interactions.  With this simple, realistic constraint, several, local monopolies were possible, provided the relationship lattice was dense enough.  Although the basic idea is simple, heavy-duty theoretical physicists are developing fascinating models and simulations based on ‘real’ complex networks.

The big change, and the best way to understand Google’s business model, came with Two-sided market; the theory can lead to rather impressive mathematical contraptions, but the idea is simple: you have two type of users, and one type wants the others to be present. Job-market or match-makers are obvious cases; credit-card companies need to convince both holders and merchants to carry their tech; journals and search engines have advertisers and readers/users to bring together. With this setting, a company can ‘corner’ a market by offering one side the service as cheap as possible, forcing the other side to use its particular service and .

So to summarize: with uniform interaction between the users, a monopoly is likely; with local interaction, local monopolies can happen (although local can be quite wide); with several sides, the cost to carry several system is important — but as always, a general monopoly can pretty much prove to a lock-in. Compatibility is tricky because, first the largest player won’t implement it, and secondly, it can ease the transition to monopoly anyway (see the counter-intuitive results of that oddly realistic case about IMs)

A combination of these two can be found in eBay, for instance, where both what you are looking for, what service are using your relatives and friends influence you decision to take part — and the two types of users is desicive: buyers encourage sellers and respectively.

Finally, the most complex interactions come from real businesses: the best framework for that is most likely helpful for Web 2.0 was suggested by [full disclosure] my advisor Éric Brousseau and Thierry Pénard. The Economics of Digital Business Models details how companies have to balance between three activities: describing sides and matching them (Monster.com); combining modular elements together to make a functioning service (Windows includes pilots; a car has tires, windshields not made by the company); collecting information help offer a better service (Amazon’s “Other people who bought this book also liked. . .”). This demands to combine Network externalities, Transaction costs, Differentiation, Economies of scale, Incentives and Quality management.

All the aspects mentionned in the comments of Nick Carr’s post are relevant: having users’ click patterns helps Google harvest more information about what are great sites; word-of-mouth builds up anticipation in the same company’s favor; good coders emulation can lock great architecture to its services. . . It is neither obvious nor necessary that the Mountain View monster eats us all — however, many mechanisms are at play, and even the most attentive Open-Source contributor should be careful not to crush emerging ideas.

The aspect that is important is that there is room for improvement to complement all the services of the company — and the possibility to leverage that initial foothold.  Do you want examples?  I’m interested in complex graph clustering; many coders are trying to find how to lump you in teams, based, e.g. on your e-mails.  Recent progress are impressive.  By offering to small companies that use Google Mail (Pro, Yahoo! Mail or another OpenStack supporter) the possibility to share their relations through OAuth and see how interactions appear to be structured (inside and outside the company, as it seems there is a difference). The same is of course possible based on other Google data sources, like Scholar or Blogger. Based on that expertise, the same company could offer more relevant project management software, and leverage Google work.

PS: I should comment the Huberman’s paper that I blogged about recently on Wednesday morning at 9:30 during the W2S workgroup at La Cantine in Paris.

Groups for Twitter

Trying to comment on a post about having co-workers adopt Twitter I just had a very simple idea for implementing groups on Twitter: what about giving groups a name, like each user has one. Direct messages to that account would be seen by all members of that group; I’m not sure it would make sense to have @group appear on the Replies folder of the members, or that it is easy to implement — but now that Twitter doesn’t send SMS in countries where it’s a financial trap, this could make sense.

Companies could have their name be a group of PR or Social media people, people could use it to hide context-dependant messages; groups that need their intimacy could hide under a private account, etc. That could also probably resolve many multi-user account issue.

This would change only the direct message functionality, and hardly so: simply duplicate messages sent to groups; I can’t imagine storing membership be an issue, especially of groups size is limited at first. The feature that many would ask, and that might be harder to implement is to have a group make a post in a collective name: maybe only post by member to the group would qualify for group emitted post (for public groups).

What do you think?