mobile geo social

Some user generated content (UGC) is genuine, honest, credible, reputable, trustworthy, valuable, quality information. But some is rubbish (let’s call that UGR), including deliberately misleading propaganda, biased blog comments, bogus product reviews, spam, veiled advertising, and bad poetry (or is it just my blog that attracts poetry bots?)

Google’s PageRank algorithm does a good job of measuring the quality of a simple web page, based on the number of incoming links to that page, and recursively weighted on the quality of those linking pages. However, web2.0 has given us blogs, wikis, forums, media sharing, customer product reviews and ratings, social bookmarking, and more recently aggregation of all of the above; resulting in web pages that contain an increasingly complex array of UGC and UGR, making it increasingly difficult for algorithms, and site visitors and site owners to filter the signal from the noise, the UGC from the UGR.

So I wanted to write a post about some of the emerging technology innovations attempting to solve this problem. Readers are kindly asked to add a comment at the bottom of the post. All comments will be shown, even bad poetry, for purposes of research and experimentation.

Measuring quality is relatively easy for eBay. Its Feedback Ratings provide an excellent indicator of trustworthiness, because online auctions involve measurable user actions such as ‘Was the product description accurate?’ and ‘Did the buyer pay up?’ Such actions speak louder than the mere words of a blog comment or product review.

Amazon now owns a valuable database of customer product reviews to help people through their purchasing decisions. Innovation by Amazon in this area has included the ability to provide feedback on the usefulness of other users’ comments, and a Reviewer Rank algorithm which provides a measure of reviewer quality (interestingly, this algorithm was recently improved to include some PageRank-like recursiveness).

In a past life I had the pleasure of working for Lonely Planet, a travel publisher whose credibility and quality has been built upon the independence of its authors and their unbiased travel reviews. Lonely Planet and its peers have long struggled with the opportunity to harvest UGC from loyal and passionate travelers, because it is just so difficult to measure the independence and quality of contributing users.

TripAdvisor was allowed to emerge as a disruptive force in the market for travel advice, allowing anybody to review any hotel or restaurant. That created a lot of quality content for a while, but ever since hotel owners found out about TripAdvisor and began to review their own hotels, it’s been difficult to tell the UGC and UGR apart. TripAdvisor still desperately needs a reliable measure of user generated quality to restore its credibility.

Perhaps social networking can help TripAdvisor; being able to filter your travel advice to that written only by your friends would eliminate biased reviews (unless you are friends with a bunch of hotel owners, in which case you’re probably going to stay in their hotel anyway). But until the internet settles on a standard for social data portability, not many of us will have enough online friends who have traveled enough and generated enough online travel content for such a social filter to work reliably, even allowing for recursive algorithms.

If it’s just travel advice and inspiration you’re looking for, you could wait for Lonely Planet’s upcoming blog syndication feature, which promises a novel solution to the problem.

But more generally, I think we all need a universal reputation system, one which aggregates lots of measures of quality from lots of different sites. Imagine if you could easily see a summary of my quality metrics from eBay and Amazon and Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers and GetSatisfaction, perhaps even my Bugzilla and Basecamp metrics too; would that be enough for you to trust my travel advice and any other content that I generate?

Site visitors would benefit from increased visibility of users who generate content. Genuine contributors would be encouraged by being able to build a universal reputation for quality UGC, and discouraged from the risk of creating UGR. And site owners would benefit from data to filter out the UGC from the UGR.

A universal reputation system could also help to eliminate online vote rigging, astro-turfing (all those reviews of iPhone apps posted by the developers themselves), and space-faking (setting up false identities on social networking sites).

Who are the players?

	SezWho provides a plugin for blog commentary which presents a useful summary of UGC history for each contributor, and allows customizable 5-point rating scales for site owners.
	Intense Debate has a great interface design. It’s recently been acquired by Automattic, the owners of the Wordpress blogging platform, which will provide some valuable distribution, perhaps critical mass. But will the other blogging platforms want to adopt or integrate with a standard controlled by a competitor?
	Google Friend Connect allows any site to embed a comments or ratings gadget onto any page. The universal view of previous UGC is not there yet, however this will become powerful when integrated fully with Google’s other stuff; Blogger and SearchWiki and the Social Graph API and YouTube (arguably the site most in need of a UGR filter!)
	Disqus is getting lots of press for its prompt Facebook Connect integration which takes the hassle out of commenting. Video comments can by posted, powered by Seesmic. Readers can nudge comments up and down the list by voting on them. Try it out below.

If you have a view on who will win the race to become the universal reputation system, please comment below. Are there any other players that I have missed out? (Yes I know that is exposing me to some comments on the quality of this post!)

Also here’s some further questions to inspire some commentary:

• Should we settle on a word for what is being measured here? Quality, importance, value, trust, reputation, credibility, honesty, transparency? Or will the winner of the race provide a web2.0 brand name to describe this concept of a universal measure of user generated content?
• Is it even possible to determine an objective universal score? The success of PageRank would suggest yes. Or is quality in the eye of the beholder? Is one person’s signal another person’s noise?
• Would a universal metric destroy the democratic level playing field that is UGC / UGR?
• What are the consequences of such a universal reputation system being gamed?
• How likely are eBay and Amazon to open up their reputation data? What are the privacy implications?

Thoughts please. Don’t be shy!

In 2006, a certain old-media tycoon reportedly asked Mark Zuckerberg, the 20-something founder of Facebook, “how can I build a social network like Facebook?”

Zuckerberg replied “You can’t!”

What Zuckerberg meant was that Facebook hadn’t set out to ‘build’ a social network. His billion dollar insight was that Facebook would instead provide online social tools to help existing friends and existing social groups to communicate easily, share photos, stalk, and poke each other.

Then in 2007, Facebook opened its app platform for third party developers to add additional social stuff to keep users on the site. Soon we were all happily throwing sheep at each other and spamming our friends with app invites.

App fatigue arrived in 2008. A redesign of the Facebook site removed some of the weeds, but the metrics spoke loudly, or rather their unit of measurement did; popular apps began to be listed according to ‘monthly active users’ rather than ‘daily active users’.

Slide, RockYou and iLike had been quick enough to make some money, however there was a long tail of apps without enough active users to generate a decent return on investment. The app gold rush was over.

It become apparent that there was less value in creating new social activities inside of a social site such as Facebook, and more value in socializing, or adding social data and context to, the existing sites that people are already using out there in the big wide web.

In other words, social data portability has arrived, and extends Zuckerberg’s earlier “You can’t!” insight; you can’t ‘build’ the platform because the web is the platform.

We are told that data portability is for people who want more control over their data and do not want to be locked in to any particular social network. In 2008, Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect and MySpaceID have emerged as the big solutions from those wanting to port your social data, and profitably.

Facebook makes money from people viewing and clicking on ads on their website. Facebook Connect therefore allows you to export your Facebook profile and friend list to external sites, but really is intended to increase activity back on the Facebook website, by importing social information from those connected external sites back into your Facebook Feed for your friends to see. MySpaceID ditto.

Google however makes money from people clicking on ads anywhere, so Google Friend Connect can afford to remain socially agnostic, allowing users to identify themselves and their friends according to any network they belong to, and feed their external site activity into the social sites of their choice.

Being socially agnostic is more useful to more users in theory, but not yet in practice for Google Friend Connect. Even though it would be technically simple for Google to access your profile and friend lists using the Facebook Platform, what happened when Google submitted its Friend Connect app to Facebook for approval earlier in 2008?

Zuckerberg replied “You can’t!”, then added some fud about privacy.

This week however Google was able to make some progress on the theory of Friend Connect by launching an integration with Twitter. It’s now possible for you to use your Twitter identity and friends list on external sites powered by Friend Connect, which significantly increases the chances of spotting someone you know on those sites.

What’s interesting about this recent development to me is the apparent haste, including Google asking for my Twitter username and password directly, rather than waiting for Twitter to complete its long-awaited OAuth implementation. I’ve also seen more than the usual number of server errors and teething problems in this latest build of Friend Connect.

Maybe this is an indication that OAuth will be coming soon from Twitter, which would be fantastic.

Or maybe this is an indication that Twitter will be coming soon from Google; some visibility into Twitter data would be useful for Google in working out an acquisition price.

Or maybe this haste reveals how social data is such a hugely valuable chunk of information for Google to organize, and monetize, if ways can be found to use external social data to improve ad targetting without abusing the privacy of users and the privacy policies of their social networks.

In any event, there are interesting times ahead for social data portability. Users stand to benefit from a richer, more social, internet experience, as long as their privacy is not abused. And stay tuned on the social data portability battle between Facebook and Google and MySpace: who will work out how to best monetize external social data in 2009?

Google today launched a rather massive change to its core search product.

SearchWiki adds some innocuous buttons to your search results page, enabling Digg -style voting and Friendfeed -style commenting on each result.

I think this feature might prove valuable for some users, at least the bad spellers among us and those who prefer to repeatedly type the same search term into Google rather than use bookmarks or their memory.

However this feature becomes massively valuable for Google if enough people bother to vote for their favourite sites and add comments. Harnessing the collective wisdom of all those users is a great way for Google to improve upon its not-so-secret-anymore search algorithm.

Currently your own SearchWiki wisdom impacts only your own search results, nobody else’s. But the words chosen to explain SearchWiki do leave the door open for Google to evolve into a social search engine; “Customize your search results with your rankings, deletions, and notes — plus, see how other people using Google have tailored their searches.”

Personally, I’m not sure how much I want strangers (or bots) to influence (or game) my search results.

But I might want my friends and social networks to influence some of my search results.

If only Google could somehow identify all my friends in all my social networks, and keep track of their searching activity. Wait a minute…

SearchWiki + OpenSocial = mainstream social search.

The web is the their platform.

I’m a big fan of Hypertext Transfer Protocol. I am particularly fond of HTTP status codes and the meanings they convey with such concise and precise brevity. I just don’t GET why they are not used more often in natural language, and so this POST contains some examples of how we can start to use HTTP status codes in everyday dialogue.

Rita, trying to wrestle Bob’s attention away from his laptop: “Hey! Bob…?”

Bob, calmly, with Keanu Reeves curling fingers gesture: “100…”

Rita: “… will you put the bins out please?”

Bob, with a shrug of the shoulders: “202?”

Rita, with a roll of the eyes: “406!”

Bob, putting on shoes: “200 200 200 … It’s raining. Where’s my hoody?”

Rita, matter-of-fact: “302. Charity shop.”

Bob, slowly, to himself: “4 … 0 … 9″

Rita: “… and while you’re up, can you pop down to Woolies and pick up some bread and milk …”

Bob: “503″

Rita: “… and a pack of cheese sticks for Jack’s packed lunch. And nappies. And some of those stuffed jalapeño peppers ….”

Bob: “408″

Teapot: “418″

Bob, to the teapot: “Oh don’t YOU start.” (ref)

Rita: “Seriously; I NEED some jalapeños!“

Bob, smiling: “402″

Rita, blushing: “403 …”

Bob, tasting victory: “…”

Rita, faking defeat: “… 200″

Bob: “200″

I’ve just finished Neal Stephenson’s latest epic novel “Anathem”. It might be described as a philosophical techno-adventure comedy with aliens. Highly recommended. Here’s the widget of the book of Stephenson’s exceptional mind…

It’s fascinating to trace one of the founding ideas of Anathem back to some sketches that Stepehenson made for the Long Now Clock in 01999. Here’s hoping it doesn’t take Stephenson too long to follow up with a prequel or sequel or paraquel.

p.s. Hidden in the widget above is a link to the full text of Cryptonomicon, essential techno-adventure comedy for anyone involved in a technology start-up.

We’re going to DEMOfall ‘08, how exciting! Stand 61.

Recently I was contacted by Gerard Sweeney over at World of Spectrum, the consummate digital museum of all things related to the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

Gerard was asking if the details on the WoS database about MegaFruit were accurate, including the adverts scanned from Computer & Video Games magazines of 1984 (the year, not the novel).

Such diligence beyond the norm deserves a mention, so @WoS big respect for keeping the ZX torch alight.

While we’re on the topic, here’s Facebook Megafruit and Bebo MegaFruit.

Here’s a video interview recorded a few months ago with Sally and Steve from LaVolta, and brought to you by Viocorp.

If I look younger, it’s because it was pre-Xumii!

http://play.viostream.com/?play=7EF806B6-EDE1-441D-967B-0D8D20550D22

Thanks to the wonderful MoFuse I have been able to launch two mobile websites while sitting in bed tonight; iphone.hitching.net if you are one of the 1,000,000 people who bought a shiny new iPhone 3G over the weekend, and m.hitching.net if you are still waiting in line.

Clicking on those links from your web browser will launch a handy emulator if you want to pretend that you have an iPhone 3G.

MoFuse also makes it easy to migrate your audience from web to mobile; here’s the SMS widget (US cellphones only) and QR code:

Today Xumii moved out of stealth mode and into public beta, with integration to Facebook, Windows Live Messenger, Google Chat, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM and Flickr on over 100 different devices.

qik is live video streaming from your mobile phone; perhaps the next killer mobile app? Certainly the data charges would be near fatal in Australia, at 3Mb per minute for a 320 x 240 x 15 fps stream.

Here’s looking forward to mobile data plans that encourage mobile user generated content rather than mobile user generated discontent, and here’s Jack & Luke streaming via N95:

Xumii is unveiled today at the Under the Radar conference in Mountain View. “Take all your contacts from your social networks with you — on your phone!”

Here’s Jennifer on stage: